You may have missed it, because I certainly did, but last week the University of East Anglia climate scientists at the heart of the climategate emails scandal were completely exonerated of any wrongdoing by an independent inquiry panel chosen by the Royal Society.
The inquiry panel concluded: "We saw no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit and had it been there we believe that it is likely that we would have detected it. Rather we found a small group of dedicated if slightly disorganised researchers who were ill-prepared for being the focus of public attention."
See here for the inquiry panel's full conclusions.
It would be nice to think that this would shut the sceptics up, especially Nigel Lawson, and that the media, especially the BBC, would now get over their obsession with the idea that there's some sort of scientific debate about whether climate change is happening and whether it's manmade.
If 99.9% of pilots told you not to fly in a particular plane because of the risk of a crash, what would you do? So why would you do something different when 99.9% of the world's climate scientists are saying that the planet is heating up because man is burning so much carbon, and that climate change has at least the potential to make earth uninhabitable for most living species including human beings? Why are we so unwilling to use the precautionary principle when it comes to climate change?
No comments:
Post a Comment