Diary: The Great E-Mail Hack

The climate change community is abuzz over the now confirmed hacking of thousands of e-mails from the servers at The Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, a leading climate research center and strong proponent of anthropogenic global warming.

Make no mistake about it, the content of some of these e-mails is troubling, especially to those whose image of science and scientists was molded by high school science teachers preaching the sanctity of the scientific method.

The real world is quite a bit messier, as these e-mails reveal. Scientists are driven by the same needs for recognition, for money to fund research, for score settling as anyone else is. Like any other profession, there are supposed to be standards, and like any other profession those standards are not always met.

That said, none of this has anything to do with what is happening in the natural world, the one that actually matters. Do you think the jellyfish are expanding their territory because someone gave them their marching orders in an e-mail? Have CO2 levels risen because scientists hid data? Are the glaciers melting because of all the hot air in the blogosphere. (Well ... maybe. God knows there is enough.)

I got interested in climate change not because I read a lot of studies but because after 60 plus years of living it was obvious that the seasons were changing, that the winters were milder, that the kudzu was on the move. The scientific consensus - which is much broader and deeper than just a few scientists at East Anglia - merely confirmed my gut feeling.

To paraphrase Bob Dylan, you don't need a weatherman (or the CRU) to know which way the wind is blowing.

This essay first appeared in PlanetRestart.org