Implications of Climategate

In mathematics a statement A is said to imply a statement B, if there is a proof of B with A as hypothesis, which means that B is true whenever A is true. A proof is a chain of implications using rules of logic leading from A to B.

What is then the implication of A = Climategate? We know that A is true: the emails were real emails sent by real people. The evidence of manipulation of data and the referee process underlying the IPCC AR4 is overwhelming. A is true. Climategate happened.

What has been the implication of A? Well, the observable effect of A after one year of

action is B = collapse of climate science and politics. It is now natural to ask if this was

inevitable, or if the collapse could have been prevented by governmental whitewash supported by scientific societies denying the truth of A.

No, the collapse of IPCC science and politics which we are observing is a logical necessity, because science and in particular climate science follows the logic of mathematics, which is the same logic as used in legal processes. If A = person X was found with a smoking gun in hand and B = person Y was lying shot dead in front of X, then X will be sentenced for murder (unless X is whitewashed). To manipulate scientific data is the same as killing science, and this is outside the law of science. And climate politics based on unlawful science cannot be enforced in a democratic society.

The net result is that UN climate politics is in free fall because the scientific basis has disappeared. It may well be that the upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference Cancun - COP 16 will be the last. For COP15 in Copenhagen A was still untrue, but for COP16 A is true and that changes everything. If X murdered Y that changes everything.

Climategate has not only changed climate politics, but also the practice of the scientific method: The open free Blogosphere has taken the initiative from closed autocratic scientific societies and journals, simply by using the scientific method of combining facts with logic. The implications of this shift of priority of interpretation is potentially far-reaching, which I will report on as it unfolds.

Part of the process is the Blogosphere book Slaying the Sky Dragon: Death of the Greenhouse Gas Theory appearing later this week.