Ciência enganosa

Leaked climate-change e-mails

Climategate, part two

Nov 24th 2011, 8:55 by H.G.

CLIMATE sceptics are jubilant. In a reprise of the run-up to the Copenhagen climate-change summit in 2009, a fresh batch of possibly compromising e-mails has been released on the eve of the latest round of UN climate talks in Durban, South Africa. "All your favorite Climategate characters are here," gloats one, "once again caught red-handed in a series of emails exaggerating the extent of Anthropogenic Global Warming, while privately admitting to one another that the evidence is nowhere near as a strong as they'd like it to be."
The latest hacked snippets from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit resemble the earlier ones. They apparently discuss not putting in too much "optimistic stuff" about the extent of man-made global warming. One e-mail appears to show the government's interest in a strong line on climate change.
Mais 
Leia também:

Good news at last?

The climate may not be as sensitive to carbon dioxide as previously believed

Nov 26th 2011 | from the print edition

CLIMATE science is famously complicated, but one useful number to keep in mind is “climate sensitivity”. This measures the amount of warming that can eventually be expected to follow a doubling in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its most recent summary of the science behind its predictions, published in 2007, estimated that, in present conditions, a doubling of CO2 would cause warming of about 3°C, with uncertainty of about a degree and a half in either direction. But it also says there is a small probability that the true number is much higher. Some recent studies have suggested that it could be as high as 10°C.
If that were true, disaster beckons. But a paper published in this week’s Science, by Andreas Schmittner of Oregon State University, suggests it is not. In Dr Schmittner’s analysis, the climate is less sensitive to carbon dioxide than was feared.
Mais