I won’t bore you by recounting the various, glaring missteps the climate change science community has made recently. I think those discrepancies have been broadly covered, dismissed by the believers and slavered over by the uber-skeptics. Indeed the pundit shit flinging merrily continues unabated months after the breaking of “Climategate,” especially excited by a series of winter storms that put snow on the grounds of 49 American states on the same day.

I will say that the clannish, arrogant nature of the scientists engaged in monitoring and explaining climatology to the world has been their undoing. Proclamations of fact in a science heavily reliant on hypothetical, seemingly malleable computer simulated projections along with a lack of transparency, a rather unscientific element of advocacy and the poisonous nature of their handling of skeptics have lent the concept of climate change an identity more closely related to religious orthodoxy than actual science. The message came to be more important than the method.

It was on the matter of method that the Institute of Physics in the UK addressed the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee’s inquiry. I believe this is the first time a scientific organization has weighed in in such a critical fashion. A snippet:

1. The Institute is concerned that, unless the disclosed e-mails are proved to be forgeries or adaptations, worrying implications arise for the integrity of scientific research in this field and for the credibility of the scientific method as practised in this context.

2. The CRU e-mails as published on the internet provide prima facie evidence of determined and co-ordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law. The principle that scientists should be willing to expose their ideas and results to independent testing and replication by others, which requires the open exchange of data, procedures and materials, is vital. The lack of compliance has been confirmed by the findings of the Information Commissioner. This extends well beyond the CRU itself – most of the e-mails were exchanged with researchers in a number of other international institutions who are also involved in the formulation of the IPCC’s conclusions on climate change.

I’ve chosen the first two statements purposefully so as to avoid “cherry picking.” There are additional observations a bit more damning of the CRU’s methods and I’d encourage a full read of the statement. It’ll be interesting to watch where both the science (assuming it’s reformed accordingly) and the politics regarding climate change head in the near future. It’ll also be interesting to see, if transparency and independent review are allowed, how long the current consensus holds together.

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

From an alleged email taken by a hacker who’d breached Britain’s climate research unit network and made off with a miriad of emailings and documents. A more extensive account of the less than flattering communications is here. I very much doubt that this is the death knell of the climate change machine but it’s certainly going to raise quite a few eyebrows. Bearing in mind that the above and other quotations are of limited context, it looks as though much of the scientific effort going into climate change is tainted by subjective motivation.

I’m no scientist but it seems to me that an analytical conclusion based on data that is either “inadequate” or that maintains a glaring, inexplicable aberration (that “lack of warming” bit) is questionable at best. This, in and of itself, doesn’t boot the current supposed scientific “consensus” out the door but it does, in my mind, lend some weight to the more thoughtful skeptics out there.

Shrinking glaciers are not only heating up relations in the Arctic, with countries competing for control over maritime passageways or undersea natural resources, these victims of global warming are also kindling tension on land by forcing Europe to redraw its borders. The line of demarcation between Italy and Switzerland has been defined by the ridge crest of glaciers in the Alps by convention since 1941. This crest is changing, requiring a new criterion for demarcation.

Luckily this is not likely to cause conflict — diplomatic or otherwise — between these two European countries. However, one might not be so confidant that a peaceful resolution lies under the ice for less friendly nations. The border between Pakistan and China is already a vague, frozen zone. What about the snowy boundaries of Kashmir or Nepal? Fortunately we have GPS technology which can solidify border agreements between nations without relying on “patriotic rocks”. Countries whose borders may be afflicted by the effects of climate change should deploy these solutions soon in joint operations with their neighbours. There is likely to be a bit of cheating if any new resources are found under the ice. Thus, for the sake of peaceful co-existence, GPS demarcation should be established where current borders lie.

[Diagram from Wikipedia]