SHOCK! Stanford Academic Finds Reason to Like the Police!

During a press conference at the Copenhagen climate summit, Stanford Professor Stephen Schneider ducked questions about Climategate. He was asked what he thought about e-mails urging the deletion of e-mails and of climate data gathered with public funds.  Schneider said he wouldn’t comment on the e-mails.  His reason?  “I don’t know what he asked, what he said” and “Private communications that people have between each other certainly are not public documents.”

The rest of the world knows the contents of the Climategate e-mails, so it’s pretty unbelievable that Professor Schneider is unfamiliar with them.  You’d think someone attending the climate summit would be familiar with recent news in the climate change debate, especially if that person has recently published an article in National Geographic titled “Climate as a Contact Sport: Inside the Battle to Save the Earth’s Climate.”

It’s almost as though if there was someone to ask for an opinion about Climategate and a time to ask it, it would be Professor Schneider during a press conference at an international climate summit.  But unfortunately, Professor Schneider has already learned the best tactic for avoiding tough questions:

Don’t educate yourself on the underlying issues.  Then you don’t have to form an opinion!  Sweet.

He also has found the second best way to deal with tough questions:

Take away the cameras of the people asking.

After the main Q&A of the press conference, reported Phelim McAleer tried to ask some follow-up questions.  Schneider’s staff responded by sending over the UN police who ordered the cameras turned off.  Whaaat?

If Schneider had a legitimate reason for not answering questions (he had somewhere else to be, he thought McAleer was being a jackass, whatever) he could have just said so and let the cameras roll.  It’s pretty prickish to ask that the media not film a press conference.

It’s incidents like this that fuel skepticism about climate change.  Remember McAleer’s questions to Al Gore about a British court ruling on nine substantial falsehoods in An Inconvenient Truth? Gore’s response to whether he has done anything to address the errors?  Make jokes about polar bears and remind people that he got some stuff right.

…At Least I Got Chicken.

As reported by the New York Post, the two week long climate summit in Denmark will bring together 15,000 people from 192 nations and produce more than 40,000 tons of carbon emissions.  That’s more carbon than 60 of the smallest countries produce in a year — combined.  Of course, that number is a little hard to grasp when you consider tiny places like the Vatican, and countries where the main occupation is sustenance farming.

So, instead let’s compare them to one of the biggest consumers: Americans.  We produce roughly 19.5 tons per person each year.  So, this summit in two weeks produces as much carbon as 2,000 Americans in one year.  When you consider that the summit has 15,000 people from around the globe, it doesn’t sound too terrible.

But, when you consider that the summit could have been organized using just G-Chat video and the Obama girls as tech support, this is pretty retarded.  Maybe even a wiki for meeting minutes?

Also, what does a ton of carbon emissions look like?  I’m sure gasses can be weighed somehow, but since I haven’t seen it done on MythBusters, I have no idea how it works.  But, I do know that every day 2 million people in just the United States manage to go online and organize in dynamic caucuses through a program known as World of Warcraft, and they don’t have to triple their carbon emissions to do it.

Interpreting Climategate

This is pretty basic, so I’ll keep it short.  Climategate is about the processes of collecting and interpreting data and critiquing those methods.  It does not go to the substance of the question of anthropomorphic global climate change.  It speaks only to the processes we use to answer that question.  Discrediting evidence of a theory is not the same as providing evidence that the theory is false.

I can tell you that I ate chicken for dinner.  If you then hack my e-mails and discover that I had chicken McNuggets, you didn’t prove the I didn’t eat chicken.  All you’ve done is show that we don’t know what I ate, which is different from disproving my chicken-eating theory.  Maybe I did, maybe not.  Only Ronald knows.

But, for mass media (and its consumers) it would seem some issues aren’t just black and white, they’re binary.