http://blog.heritage.org/2009/12/01...e-says-climate-change-is-happening/White House Balks at ClimateGate, Says Climate Change is Happening
When asked about ClimateGate, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs dismissed its importance, emphasizing that “climate change is happening.”
Of course climate change is happening. Soon we’ll be calling press conferences to declare, “The earth is moving” or “It’s going to get dark tonight.” The reality is the climate has been changing ever since there was a climate, and part of that change was a cooling period as recent as the 1940s to the 1970s giving rise to fears of a coming ice age. When Gibbs spouts this rhetoric, he’s clearly referring to human-induced warming, but since when has climate change become synonymous with manmade global warming? And what does it take for a scientific consensus to stop being one?
In fact, the phrase “climate change” is one of climatologist Roy Spencer’s major irritations about the whole climate change debate. He writes, “Thirty years ago, the term “climate change” would have meant natural climate change, which is what climate scientists mostly studied before that time. Today, it has come to mean human-caused climate change. The public, and especially the media, now think that “climate change” implies WE are responsible for it. Mother Nature, not Al Gore, invented real climate change.”
http://www.masterresource.org/2009/...tegate-misconstrue-the-real-debate/Apologist Responses to Climategate Misconstrue the Real Debate (Quantitative, not Qualitative)
But even if the IPCC’s iconic statement were correct, it still would not be cause for alarm….The potential (and only the potential) for alarm enters with the issue of climate sensitivity—which refers to the change that a doubling of CO2 will produce in [global mean temperatures]. –Richard Lindzen, Wall Street Journal, November 30, 2009
Defenders of the IPCC position on climate science have adopted different strategies in dealing with the scandal of the CRU emails and computer code. Some authoritative voices, notably Judy Curry, have engaged in dialog with skeptics and have reassured PhD students that the “tribalism” revealed in the CRU emails has no place in science.
On the other hand, another very common reaction has been to mock the “deniers” for taking certain phrases out of context. This circle-the-wagons strategy tries to convince the public that the CRU episode has absolutely no bearing on the actual science, and that at worst it reveals petty personality flaws. This spin is epitomized in sarcastic pieces which take on the voice of the “deniers” and claim that the laws of physics are all a socialist hoax too.