The mainstream media is studiously avoiding this topic. But the scientists aren’t.
I belong to the climate-research infantry, publishing a few papers per year, reviewing a few manuscript per year and participating in a few research projects. I do not form part of important committees, nor I pursue a public awareness of my activities. My very minor task in the public arena was to participate as a contributing author in the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC.
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I may confirm what has been written in other places: research in some areas of climate science has been and is full of machination, conspiracies, and collusion, as any reader can interpret from the CRU-files. They depict a realistic, I would say even harmless, picture of what the real research in the area of the climate of the past millennium has been in the last years. The scientific debate has been in many instances hijacked to advance other agendas.These words do not mean that I think anthropogenic climate change is a hoax. On the contrary, it is a question which we have to be very well aware of. But I am also aware that in this thick atmosphere -and I am not speaking of greenhouse gases now- editors, reviewers and authors of alternative studies, analysis, interpretations,even based on the same data we have at our disposal, have been bullied and subtly blackmailed. In this atmosphere, Ph D students are often tempted to tweak their data so as to fit the ‘politically correct picture’. Some, or many issues, about climate change are still not well known. Policy makers should be aware of the attempts to hide these uncertainties under a unified picture. I had the ‘pleasure’ to experience all this in my area of research.
That some climatologists fudged the numbers does not invalidate the science of climatology, or science in general… just as the Piltdown Man hoax did not – despite the most fervent hopes of the worst of the creationists – invalidate the science of evolution. But both incidents made their fields look bad. And while Piltdown was a hoax by a very small number of people, and had little to no political policy implications, the CRU incident has *extreme* policy implications. Trillions of dollars and literally millions of lives are at stake… if Obama signs away what little remains of the American economy based on science that has been as fraudulently – or, charitably, as incompetantly – mangled as the science of anthropogenic global warming seems to be, it will be one of the darkest days in American history.
7 Responses to “Climatologists begin eating their own”
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I’ve been going through the emails, and frankly some of the things I’ve found were outrageous. No idea who leaked the data (or for all we know, blew the whistle) but… God bless him and never let them find him. 🙂
“Why I think that Michael Mann, Phil Jones and Stefan Rahmstorf should be barred from the IPCC process”
Wrong premise, the IPCC should be banned, and all participants incarcerated until their level of guilt can be ascertained.
Why is any of this surprising? Researchers study and report what is acceptable to the powers that be in their organization. That’s one of the basic facts of academic life. When I was married to a chemist doing cancer research, she told me that one of the researchers she knew had fudged his genetics data by painting the fur on the lab rats. When I was a history student, I caught hell for suggesting that my thesis be on the economic advantages of slavery in colonial America. (My second idea, a working full-sized replica of a 1893 submarine, was received with fear instead of anger.)
Of course, the funny thing is that Stephan Rahmstorf has nothing to do with any of the leaked emails – apparently the chap in your link has an axe to grind though:
http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2009/11/zorita_goes_for_the_jugular.php
>apparently the chap in your link has an axe to grind
Virtually everyone has an axe to grind in this story. That’s what’s making “Climate Change” such terrible science.
If AGW really is the planet threatening boogeyman its proponants claim it is, then there should be a complete overhaul of the science, starting back at first principles with open-source codes. Not the secretive, poorly-coded, cherry-picked-data nonsense that it’s been to date.
If you want a complete overhaul of the science from first principles then you’d need to start with thermodynamics and radiative physics – not coding.
As for coding, the code behind the recent hoo-ha has been analysed and found to be completley normal:
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/12/quote_mining_code.php?utm_source=mostactive&utm_medium=link
>If you want a complete overhaul of the science from first principles
It’d be nice if they’d start with a complete overhaul of the over-politicized funding system in place for climate research.
>As for coding, the code behind the recent hoo-ha has been analysed and found to be completley normal:
Wow. One blogger upends the whole arguement! Wait… wasn’t that *your* line?
I’ve read quite a number of computer programmers and climate scientists who’ve gone through the code and found it to be bullcrap.
And I remain amused at how you seem to excuse lawbreaking by those baboons. If nothing else, they should be under investigation for moneylaundering. Or is illegality excusable when the lawbreakers are so Very Very Important to The Cause?