Warming, like it or not

The New York Times has yet another editorial insisting that the Earth continues to get warmer; Rico says he will ignore the snow outside his door and say they're probably right:

Disclosures of isolated errors and exaggerations in the 2007 report from the United Nations panel on climate change do not undermine its main finding: that the planet has been warming gradually for more than a century, and that human activity is largely responsible. But the misstatements have handed climate skeptics a public relations boost.
That’s not good news at a time when world leaders need to make tough decisions to control greenhouse gas emissions and when public confidence in the science is essential. Given the stakes, the panel cannot allow more missteps and, at the very least, must tighten procedures and make its deliberations more transparent.
The panel’s chairman, Rajendra K. Pachauri, an Indian engineer, is also under fire for taking consulting fees from business interests. Mr. Pachauri says he does not profit personally and channels the fees to a nonprofit research center he runs in New Delhi. Yet as the person most responsible for the panel’s integrity, he cannot afford even the appearance of a conflict of interest.
All this follows last November’s uproar over leaked e-mail messages that, while they had nothing to do with the panel’s reports, portrayed climate scientists as thin-skinned and fully capable of stifling competing views.
The controversy over the 2007 report has been stoked by charges of poor sourcing and alarmist forecasts, prominently a prediction— in a 938-page working paper— that the Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035. This was clearly an exaggeration, though it was not included in the final report. An overblown warning of crop failures in North Africa did make it into the final report.
Set against the bulk of the panel’s work— for which it received a Nobel Prize in 2008— these errors seem small, the result of sloppiness, not deliberate misrepresentation. But they are still costly.
In a recent editorial in the journal Nature, Ralph Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences, wrote that while the scientific understanding of climate change remains “undiminished,” the “perceived misbehavior of even a few scientists can diminish the credibility of science as a whole.” Dr. Cicerone is right on all counts: given the complexity and urgency of climate change— and its vulnerability to political posturing— scientists engaged in the issue must avoid personal agendas and be intellectually vigilant and above reproach.