James Inhoffe, the Oklahoma senator and compulsive denier, claims the Climatic Research Unit e-mails show that the science behind climate change “has been pretty well debunked.”
He’s wrong.
As Politifacts put it, “what we do know is that these e-mails clearly demonstrate some petty professional backstabbing and a degree of skepticism within the CRU circle about opinions that do not match their own. They also raise the question of whether researchers fudged, manipulated or tossed out data that contradicted proof of global warming, but until CRU completes its own investigation, it’s impossible for us to make a call on this point one way or another.”
Further:
However, we can say this with certainty: The e-mails do not prove that global warming is a hoax. In fact, there’s overwhelming evidence that temperatures have been rising and are continuing to rise. Just take a recent report issued by the United States Global Research Program, an arm of the government that, since 1989, has been coordinating and integrating federal research on changes in the global environment and their implications for society. The report states that “global warming is unequivocal and primarily human-induced. … Warming over this century is projected to be considerably greater than over the last century. The global average temperature since 1900 has risen by about 1.5ºF. By 2100, it is projected to rise another 2 to 11.5ºF.”
Read the full fact-checking report at Politifacts.
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