Quick open letter to the climate change deniers and trolls of the world.
Seriously, time to step up your "game". Your tactics and your posts are epic fail on many measures, and show an inherent ignorance of the scientific method and science in general.
You come to us, bringing a few out-of-context emails and some shaky data. You bring your editorials and your rants, relying on the opinions of a few people who would like nothing better than to hide their heads in the sand and to make this whole climate change thing just go away by ignoring it or by denigrating the scientists or the scientific method.
You claim to have "evidence", yet when it comes time to put your money where your mouth is, you just don't do it. I could use some easy money for my future descendants, so I'm willing to make the bets. In addition, I challenge you to actually read the papers - to evaluate the data yourself. Read the IPCC reports. Don't just accept what others tell you. Realclimate.org has the links to many of the papers. The supporting information for many journals - Science, Nature, and others - is freely available information online. Having looked at several sets of data myself, I know that alternative graphs / etc are often in there, and it shows that scientists do consider alternative viewpoints / interpretations. Real climate and others also have links to the raw data, so don't try to claim the data isn't available - it is. Check the data. Debate the processing of the data to remove measurement bias. You know, practice actual science, instead of yelling at the scientists from the side.
And, get the story straight. The "hidden" data was hidden in plain sight. These scientists have been debating all of these points - in the open literature - for years. So when a few emails get leaked, it's not really revealing anything "new" or any big ol' conspiracy. It's actually just showing again what all the "players" actually knew - the scientists are trying their best to get things right, and they are rather passionate about it. And, honestly, do you think that this could all be made up? What's the motivation? What's the driving force? If this was all made up, who's making the money? Who's getting the glory? Michael Mann is a prominent GW scientist, and I pay close attention to things, yet until this week I didn't know his name off the top of my head. So clearly he's in this for the "truth" instead of for the "glory".
Along those lines, if you think a conspiracy is happening, here's an easy way to check. Graduate students in a typical lab aren't paid much at all. So, if these labs were making all this shit up, someone...at some point...would have become a whistleblower. Either that, or they're getting paid enough to be quiet. So, go check at Penn State to see how Mann's graduate students are living. If they're driving Porsche's and living in mansions, then maybe something's amiss. But if they're driving used Toyotas and living in 1 bedroom apartments, then it's all for real. It's an easy check. Go try it.
Also, just because someone is revealed to be a jerk or a tool doesn't make them wrong. Maybe it's just me, actually being in science and knowing what the typical professor is like. I'm used to my professors being dicks, but that doesn't make them wrong.
So, seriously, time to step up your game and time to bring more to the table climate change deniers. Right now you're trying to have a few feathers outweigh an anvil worth of evidence. If you're right and we're wrong, time to go out and find an anvil. I'll give you a few hints: it's not the Soon 2003 paper, nor is it any Christopher Monkton evidence. And relying on a George Will or Michelle Malkin opinion won't get you anywhere either. And, if you think the underlying chemistry is "wrong", let me know which part is "wrong", and I'll either submit your name for a Nobel Prize or I'll tear the argument apart :D.
I'm ready to rumble...are you, deniers?