Political Movement, Not Scientific Issue

It is sad that global warming scientist Michael Manning chose to place an op-ed column in the WaPo, defending himself against charges by skeptics in the so-called 'Climategate' scandel.  Even worse is that instead of responding to other scientists, he responded to charges by Sarah Palin, of all people. 

This demonstrates to me the political nature of his advocacy, i.e. that he is more concerned about the political effectiveness of his reputation than the scientific case he is trying to make.  If the issue was science and his scientific reputation, he would 'case less' what Sarah Palin claims.

I cannot condone some things that colleagues of mine wrote or requested in the e-mails recently stolen from a climate research unit at a British university. But the messages do not undermine the scientific case that human-caused climate change is real.

The hacked e-mails have been mined for words and phrases that can be distorted to misrepresent what the scientists were discussing. In a Dec. 9 op-ed, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin argued that "The e-mails reveal that leading climate 'experts' . . . manipulated data to 'hide the decline' in global temperatures." Yet the e-mail she cites was written in 1999, just after the warmest year ever recorded (1998) to that date. It could not possibly have referred to the claim that global temperatures have declined over this decade -- a claim that is false (the current decade, as has been recently reported, will go down as the warmest on record).