Smoking gun emails prove climate skeptics were right?

A reader sent me links to these articles:

Guardian: Climate sceptics claim leaked emails are evidence of collusion among scientists

From WSJ blog:

Some of the old emails from scientists made public apparently make references to things like “hid[ing] the decline,” referring to global temperature series and different ways to slice and dice climate data.

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Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of 'Anthropogenic Global Warming'?

If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka Hadley CRU) and released 61 megabites of confidential files onto the internet.

Comments

[tommy]

According to Hot Air and other sources, East Anglia has admitted the emails are real. I've been reading excerpts of the emails all over the blogs this morning....a few damning tidbits here, a few more there. This is dynamite!

[tommy]

Climate Audit was so crowded this morning, I could barely get on.

[John Smith]

I think a lot of the climate debate misses the point. I don't even think whether anthropogenic global warming exists or not is the real matter, in practical terms. It's the way that some use the idea of climate change to propose drastic measures to 'combat' it - governments are doing just that - without adequate evidence that doing so is the right thing. Not only are their methods potentially useless, but stopping global warming itself might even be fairly pointless. Believing in global warming is one thing... believing the government should get to spend trillions on stifling freedoms and putting costs on civilians to "combat climate change" is another.

I wonder simply compensating people affected badly by global warming (like those losing land in Bangladesh, for example) would cost a tiny fraction compared to trying to stop it. Even if it was, political interests would prevent this... as anything that gives governments more power is going to be the way of the future.

Plus it all shifts the focus away from hazardous pollution and more towards things like "carbon".

[Basil Ransom]

I've noticed there's been less talk of global warming, and Google Trends confirms this: Global warming talk peaked in early 2007, and has gone down significantly since. We're at about 40% of the peak. If you look at the US only, the decline is slightly more prominent. Google News data shows the same trend, of a peak in 2007 followed by quick then steady decline.

Surprisingly, even "going green" has dipped in popularity, although it's peak was in 2008, not 2007. My bet is that the financial crisis is temporarily damping environmentalist fervor, and it'll pick up again, but global warming talk will continue declining.

The problem with global warming is that it requires evidence. Environmentalists probably realized that it's too risky to base their entire movement off something falsifiable, lest it prove false. It's like staking the validity of Christianity on the scientific conjectures in the bible. 'Gaianism' is a much more solid founding, and taps into the human psyche much better.

Source: http://www.google.com/trends?q=global+warming

http://www.google.com/trends?q=global+warming&ctab=0&geo=us&date=all&sort=0

http://news.google.com/archivesearch?pz=1&cf=all&ned=us&hl=en&q=global+warming&cf=all&sugg=d&sa=N&lnav=d0&as_ldate=2005&as_hdate=2009&ldrange=1989,2007

[JGP]

John Smith has it right. even if AGW were real (I'm a skeptic) the state would be powerless to stop. Just look at how well they solved the problem of poverty!

[bellisaurius]

I could care less about the global warming part. There is an underlying issue that will keep the non-carbon companies OK: Oil will eventually get more expensive, and other energy sources will look better. It's still worthwhile to invest in some of the companies.