Fear of climate

I'm not a climate change denier.  It's clear to even a casual observer that we are seeing extreme weather conditions more frequently than we used to, more destructive storms, and erosion of the polar icecaps.  All of that said, however, I am still very far from being convinced that these changes are anthropogenic -- caused by man.

Here is a link to an article in today's Toronto Star by Tim Harper, the paper's national affairs columnist.  His main purpose is to castigate the Harper government for its disdain for environmental issues, which is fair enough:  Canada's track record on such issues, especially those related to energy, is notably poor.  What's interesting, though, is to look at some of the recent events that Harper cites as evidence of climate change.  Here's an example:

Texas is in the middle of a drought which began in 2010, the third-worst in the history of the state...

Third worst, is it? So there have been two previous, more severe droughts that could not be attributed to man-made warming.  What exactly caused those, and on what basis is Tim Harper sure that the same factor or factors have not caused the present situation? Climate is in a constant state of flux, with changes taking place over periods of several decades, then suddenly going into reverse.  One can only imagine what today's climate alarmists might have said during the "little Ice Age" that gripped the planet from the mid-16th to the mid-19th century.

Tim Harper is mostly out to score political points, but over at Slate we have one righteously angry scientist, Phil Plait.  (Sounds like he should be doing a cooking column, but let's stick with the serious matters at hand).  I'll let you judge his evidence for yourself, and just skip to the final paragraph, where we learn that:
There is no scientific controversy over this. Climate change denial is purely, 100 percent made-up political and corporate-sponsored crap.

Well, actually, no to that, and for a reason that Plait alludes to a few paragraphs earlier: I’ll note that climate change deniers are still going on about climate scientists manipulating data.

Yes, well, the reason the deniers are able to do that is because it happened.  Researchers at the University of East Anglia in the UK, one of the major centres of climate research, published a major study some years ago, based on extremely long time series data,  that reached the conclusion, then still controversial, that man and his activities were the most probable cause of climate change.  And then....they destroyed all of the raw (and completely irreplaceable) data.  That's not exactly common scientific practice, so it's hardly surprising that more than a few people might suspect that the researchers didn't want anyone examining their methods and conclusions too closely.

I posted something on this blog once about a letter sent to a UK newspaper by an exasperated reader who was fed up with climate alarmists attributing all kinds of weather to climate change.  Would it be possible, he wondered,  for the alarmists to save everyone some time and trouble by listing any weather conditions that they would not regard as proof of climate change?  There was no answer, but the question still bears asking, when the Toronto Star's Tim Harper can write a paragraph like this and expect to be taken seriously:

A New York Times roundup published Friday pointed out China is enduring its coldest winter in three decades, Brazil is in the grips of record heat and parts of eastern Russia saw temperatures drop to -50C.