As the organizers of the IPCC's Copenhagen summit learned, it is hard to promote global warming in the middle of a blizzard. The popularly accepted theory of man-made global warming has been blasted by the cold winds of this winter. While it was easy to promote the theory in the increasingly warm 1990s and early 2000s, the cooler weather over the last 3 years has increased popular skepticism.

At the same time, the scientists promoting the theory have had the very integrity of their methods and findings successfully challenged. Within a few months, "Climategate" rocked the influential University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich, England. The IPCC had to recently confess to misreporting the glacial meltdown in the Himalayas. Now an even broader integrity challenge is being launched on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the United States' official weather organization.

Of course attacks on global warming science are nothing new. Science is by its very nature is contentious.

One faction comes up with a hypothesis.
Critics counter with an opposing theory, an antithesis.
Eventually opposing scientists test the material and come up with a synthesis, a mingling of the correct information from both sides.

Unfortunately, the science of climate change has been so politicized that no one is attempting to merge their data to find the bigger truth. Instead, the global warming crowd calls their critics "flat-earthers" and they are denounced as "fear-mongers" in return.

These recent attacks, however, are much more fundamental. Instead of attacking the motives or characters of global warming scientists, the criticism has focused on the integrity of their scientific methods and their data collection systems. Here is a summary.

Evelyn Browning Garriss then provides an extensive summary, certainly worth reading, as is her conclusion, from which I have reproduced the opening:

What do these in-house scandals mean to the public?

What they fundamentally mean is that one of the great advances science has made over the last 50 years, the ability to detect changing weather and climate patterns and warn people ahead of time, is being undermined by scientific corruption, political agendas and abysmal maintenance.

Natural disasters kill people. Just ask Haiti, New Orleans, and Bangladesh. With our huge weather data bases, satellites and computer models, we have been able to issue more and more warnings. The Indian government can prepare for good or bad monsoons. Mountainous Peru can prepare for El Niños.

The US can evacuate for hurricanes.

What we are seeing is that once public policy and money is determined by scientific findings, some are trying to distort the findings in order to obtain the policies they want. Others gain money by merely churning out findings with computer models rather than allotting their budget to acquiring and maintaining the integrity of their data.

As John P. Costella pointed out in his recent essay "Why Climategate Is So Distressing to Scientists," in a judicial procedure, if the evidence is tainted or illegally obtained, the whole case is thrown out. Even if a crime has been committed and the defendant is guilty, if the evidence has been tampered with or is a fabrication, the case is null and void.

David Fuller's view This would be a pseudoscientific farce if the subject were less serious. I regard some climate change as inevitable because it has always been an important part of our planet's history. As to the main causes of whatever climate change we have experienced over the last century, I remain an interested agnostic. However I am sceptical regarding the accuracy of any long-term forecasts, as they are no more than trend extrapolations.

Nevertheless we cannot afford to take the risk that climate change is manmade. We have a responsibility to clean up the planet and to plan for climate change, while hoping that it does not seriously alter Earth as we know it. Inevitably, the cleanup is expensive but it should also produce benefits, some of which will be unexpected.