Climate Change Update: Despite Rick Perry, consensus on climate change keeps strengthening - Ezra Klein - The Washington Post

Despite Rick Perry, consensus on climate change keeps strengthening - Ezra Klein - The Washington Post: American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting, UC Santa Barbara’s William Freudenberg gave a presentation in which he revealed that “new scientific findings [since the IPCC] are found to be more than twenty times as likely to indicate that global climate disruption is ‘worse than previously expected,’ rather than ‘not as bad as previously expected.’ ”

Granted, it’s always possible that what’s going on here is that, as Perry has charged, “there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects.” Though that theory’s looking weaker by the day, too: The National Science Foundation, for instance, just wrapped up its inquiry into Penn State climatologist Michael Mann, one of the central figures in the Climategate flap. Fox News had earlier trumpeted the NSF inquiry as the “final say” on Mann’s research. And what did the NSF conclude? “Finding no research misconduct or other matter raised by the various regulations and laws discussed above, this case is closed.”