an example of the BS. oh, BTW, they admit deleting thousands of other emails. So if these were safe to keep, what was deleted?
For climatologists, the search for an irrefutable "sign" of anthropogenic warming has assumed an almost Biblical intensity. The leading figures of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), claim that, in all probability, they have seen it. Last summer [ed: 1996], the IPCC's scientific working group, chaired by former UK Meteorological Office boss Sir John Houghton, concluded that "the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate". But it is like the "balance of evidence" suggesting BSE causes CJD. The judgment is far from "beyond reasonable doubt". The case remains "not proven".
Many researchers most intimately involved in the search are still far from sure how the probabilities balance. And some of the sharpest concerns are coming from the places where the original early warnings of global warming emerged in the mid-1980s. Places such as Briffa's base at the Climatic Research Unit in Norwich, and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California.
Few investigators doubt that the world has warmed recently. Nor that the enhanced "greenhouse effect" of pollution from gases such as carbon dioxide, will warm the planet. But in the past five years, climate researchers have growing increasingly aware of how little they really know about the natural variability from which they must pick out the "signal" of human influence.
