It's truly tragic that climate change deniers who stole some e-mails from scientists at the University of East Anglia have used cherry-picked portions of those e-mails to try to turn the public against the urgency of climate change.
The science behind the climate change argument is overwhelming and comes from scientists and agencies all over the world, including NASA and NOAA, not just scientists working at the University of East Anglia. We also know that many scientists working on climate change have experienced break-ins and computer hacking by deniers who want to prove that our planet is not really warming, when of course it is.
The glaciers are melting at a rapid rate. Ice in the Arctic is melting much faster than originally feared. The sea levels are rising and coastal erosion is occurring. We have floods in some places and droughts in others, along with hurricanes that are worsening in severity. The data about the warming of the planet is not in any serious doubt amongst scientists. However, it's easy to convince some people who doesn't really understand the science to begin with that a couple of lines in an e-mail blow all the science gathered over the decades completely out of the water.
Here's a link to an article in Scientific American magazine about the current controversy:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=scientists-respond-to-climategate-controversy
Let's put it this way -- if we decide the science about climate change is wrong and we do nothing to address the threat, we will continue to have erosion of our land masses, sea levels will continue to rise, we will continue to have droughts that shrink our water supply (Google this concerning southern California or Las Vegas, for instance), wars will erupt to protect eroding crop lands, the glaciers will completely disappear, population masses will have to be shifted (see the link to the article below from geology.com about how climate change is helping erode the Alaska coastline), and our air quality will continue to suffer, which has caused an increase in lung-related problems, particularly childhood asthma.
http://geology.com/usgs/alaska-coastal-erosion/
Regardless of whether you think the science about climate change is correct, what's the worst that can happen by keeping more toxic gases out of the air, cleaning up the oceans and using fewer pollutants? We get cleaner, healthier air, water and land, that's what happens. We get a healthier population. What's the downside here?
That should be simple enough for everybody to understand. Too bad some people don't.
