Enough is enough - the CRU

JBowers
9 Mar 2010, 8:56PM

George Woodwell, Director Emeritus, Senior Scientist, Woods Hole Research Center, says enough is enough.

"The response to the [email] vandals is to bury them with the data and experience of a century of scholarly research and analysis. The information that is important in making the decisions as to how to manage our world is unequivocal and must be advanced, not as questions at the edge of scientific knowledge where scientist like to dwell, but as the facts that they are, facts as immutable as the law of gravity. The climatic disruption is not a theory open to a belief system any more than the solar system is a theory, or gravity, or the oceanic tides, or evolution. This approach is uncompromising, partisan in the sense of selected for the purpose. It is not a lecture to undergraduates; nor is it ecology 101. It is a clear statement of what is required for government to do its job in protecting the public welfare. The scientific community has a firm responsibility in this realm now. This is not the time to wring our hands over the challenges to hyper-scientific objectivity, the purity of scholars, and to tie ourselves in knots with apologies for alleged errors of trifling import.

The fact is that we, humans, have changed the composition of the atmosphere with respect to heat-trapping gases enough to start the progression of global climate, not into a new steady state, but into an open-ended warming that is pulling the environment out from under this civilization. If one wonders where that process leads, one need not look far around the world to find dysfunctional landscapes. Have a quick look at New Orleans, the Gulf Coast, or Haiti before the earthquake. All have fallen far below any point where internal resources can be used to restore a nation with a functional political system, a vital economy, and a functional environment. They have fallen into an abyss, beyond rescue without massive outside aid that will, first, restore a functional landscape to produce, for instance, a water supply, and stable agriculture, and a fishery. Something to build an economy around, and to support a government.

The challenge is complicated, the most complicated international environmental issue the world has ever faced. The scientific community has done brilliantly with the IPCC, by nature a conservative apparatus. It is time now, thirty years after the problem was recognized as threatening this civilization, for the scientific community to come forth with clear instructions, relentlessly repeated and amplified, as to how to restore a functional habitat for humanity. It can be done, but the scientific community has a big responsibility not now widely recognized or accepted."