Kinder: Climate Change A "Massive Fraud"

This may be one of those crazy tweets Peter Kinder wishes he hadn't published when he decides that he no longer needs to pander to the extreme base of his party, and decides it's time to look like a reasonable person again. Regurgitating Re-tweeting a message from Ed Martin yesterday morning, Kinder wrote:

The massive fraud exposed RT: @Ed4Congress Emails suggest that UK Scientists fudged data on global warming http://bit.ly/6pOEkL

Martin had linked to a blog post by a conservative writer for the British newspaper Telegraph about emails released by a hacker allegedly from a UK climate research center.  According to the writer -- and presumably Martin and Kinder who were happy to share it -- the released emails are evidence of a "massive fraud" to convince people that the earth is getting warmer, and that humans have something to do with it.

You can read about what's in the emails here, here, here, here and here.  Basically, conservatives are alleging that scientific data was "fudged" by the UK scientists who had their emails hacked, and this means that global warming is a fraud.  

What's incredible about Kinder's allegation of "massive fraud" is that it completely ignores the fact that the climate scientists are nearly unanimous in their conclusion that the world is getting warmer, and that humans are a big part of the problem.  Regardless of what the emails say (and there's zero chance that right-wingers would distort or cherry-pick language from said emails, right?), they really don't impact the scientific consensus about our changing climate one way or another.

In response to the excitement on the right, Brad Johnson writes at The Wonk Room:

Evidently due to this e-mail conspiracy, Arctic sea ice is at historically low levels, Australia is on fire, the northern United Kingdom is underwater, and the world’s glaciers are disappearing. Oh yeah, and it’s the hottest decade in history.

And FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver writes:

But let's be clear: Jones is talking to his colleagues about making a prettier picture out of his data, and not about manipulating the data itself. Again, I'm not trying to excuse what he did -- we make a lot of charts here and 538 and make every effort to ensure that they fairly and accurately reflect the underlying data (in addition to being aesthetically appealing.) I wish everybody would abide by that standard.

Still: I don't know how you get from some scientist having sexed up a graph in East Anglia ten years ago to The Final Nail In The Coffin of Anthropogenic Global Warming. Anyone who comes to that connection has more screws loose than the Space Shuttle Challenger. And yet that's literally what some of these bloggers are saying!

Incidentally, 2009 is shaping up to be the 5th warmist year on record, according to the conspiracists at NASA.

And consider this new article from the Associated Press, published today:

Since the 1997 international accord to fight global warming, climate change has worsened and accelerated — beyond some of the grimmest of warnings made back then.

As the world has talked for a dozen years about what to do next, new ship passages opened through the once frozen summer sea ice of the Arctic. In Greenland and Antarctica, ice sheets have lost trillions of tons of ice. Mountain glaciers in Europe, South America, Asia and Africa are shrinking faster than before.

And it's not just the frozen parts of the world that have felt the heat in the dozen years leading up to next month's climate summit in Copenhagen:

_The world's oceans have risen by about an inch and a half.

_Droughts and wildfires have turned more severe worldwide, from the U.S. West to Australia to the Sahel desert of North Africa.

_Species now in trouble because of changing climate include, not just the lumbering polar bear which has become a symbol of global warming, but also fragile butterflies, colorful frogs and entire stands of North American pine forests.

_Temperatures over the past 12 years are 0.4 of a degree warmer than the dozen years leading up to 1997...

The changes in the last 12 years that have the scientists most alarmed are happening in the Arctic with melting summer sea ice and around the world with the loss of key land-based ice masses. It's all happening far faster than predicted.

Of course, there's almost nothing that can be done to convince people who are so inclined to look at the bigger picture. They'll point to seemingly cool local trends as evidence that there is nothing to worry about, ignoring the larger trends:

Of course, the fact that I point to the scientific consensus and data is probably just more evidence that I've been duped by "the massive fraud." 

I mean, when has Peter Kinder ever been wrong about the facts in his tweets?