Hacked E-Mail Data Prompts Calls for Changes in Climate Research

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Now the shoe is on the other foot. After this whole Climategate mess, the die-hard defenders of the AGW alarmism status-quo are the ones in denial now:

[RQUOTER]Climategate: Who are the 'Deniers' Now?

A couple of years ago, supporters of global warming theory began referring to skeptics as “deniers” — implying that anyone who doubted climate change should be lumped with Holocaust deniers. Now the shoe is on the other foot, thanks to the eye-popping e-mail dump that hit the Internet recently and quickly became known as “Climategate.” The response of much of the global-warming “community” has been … denial.

A New York Times story on the Copenhagen climate summit declared, “In Face of Skeptics, Experts Affirm Climate Peril.” The U.S. negotiator at Copenhagen, Jonathan Pershing, said the hacked e-mails have “no fundamental bearing” on the summit. Al Gore waved off the controversy as so much “sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency went right ahead with its “endangerment finding,” laying the basis for the regulatory equivalent of a tax on greenhouse gases.

....

Perhaps the most damning item in the hacked material is a document filled with the notes of programmer Ian “Harry” Harris, who tried to put the CRU’s computer files and raw data — temperature readings from 1901 to 2006 — in some sort of order. “It’s botch after botch,” he wrote. “… this should have all been rewritten from scratch a year ago. … As far as I can see, this renders the [weather] station counts totally meaningless. … What the hell is supposed to happen here? Oh yeah — there is no ‘supposed.’ I can make it up. So I have.”

Last week, Australian Willis Eschenbach found evidence that scientists played games when homogenizing some of the raw data from Australia: They appear to have fiddled with readings to show warmer temperature trends than the data would justify. “People who say that ‘Climategate was only about scientists behaving badly, but the data is OK’ are wrong,” Eschenbach wrote. “At least one part of the data is bad, too.”

Clive Crook, who blogs at The Atlantic, initially dismissed Climategate but reconsidered: “The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering. … this scandal is not at the margins of the politicized IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] process. ... It goes to the core of that process.” It’s not clear yet where all of this will lead, but as the blogger Richard Fernandez aptly put it, “The smoke of doubt has entered the temple.” At the very least, it’s time for AGW hard-liners to climb down from their pulpits and stop treating every dissent as evidence of evil.[/RQUOTER]

And of course, that includes the AGW hard-liners here on this board.

 

If this information was obtained illegally, or to put it another way, if it was stolen, the perpetrators of this act are criminals and should be prosecuted accordingly. I have read a lot of articles and comments on this topic, and I have not encountered even one person who believes otherwise.

So, now that that question is answered and resolved, we can return to the topic of this thread, which is the obvious need for reform in the conduct of climate science.

 

The cat is out of the bag. There will be no return to the previous mind-set of "we are the experts, just trust us" on this issue. At least not for most people.

If there are still some people who want to stick their heads in the sand, effectively turning their brains off and blindly deferring to these so-called "experts," that is up to those people.

However, these people remind me of a memorable quote by P.T. Barnum:

"There is a sucker born every minute."

This branch of science needs to be brought to heel, and held accountable with the same safeguards and under the same scrutiny as every other branch of hard science. The days of indulgence and foolish conduct are over for the field of climate science. The time for reform has come.

 

It is not an either/or proposition.

It is time for everyone to turn their brains on and pay attention to what is happening with this issue.

It is not desirable to make decisions based on who is right, but rather based on what is right. On this issue, like pretty much all others, people will be right on some points and wrong on others. It is foolish to assume, especially in a field of science, that any one person or group of people are always going to be right about their findings and conclusions. It is essential to the scientific process that propostions that are labeled as scientific undergo a scrutiny that is rigorous and transparent. Shutting out so-called 'skeptics' from this process undermines the credibility of the scientists whose work is being coddled in this way, and also their findings, quite significantly.

On a more personal basis, developing an understanding of this matter (or any other) by an all or nothing approach, based solely on a one-sided presentation delivered by an agenda driven group who has demonstrated a remarkable dedication to shutting out any input on the topic that contradicts their own, is not a very intelligent approach to developing a true understanding of a topic.

It is time to open the doors and allow the debate to begin in earnest. The AGW alarmism crowd has dominated the scientific review processes and the journal publication processes in the field of climate science for quite a long time now. They have refused to release their underlying data and the parameters used in developing the forecasts upon which so much of their prognostications are based. As shown by the Climategate emails, these 'scientists' have manipulated data to fit the conclusions they support, and have even deleted raw data that underlies their findings.

It is important that we be able to have confidence in climate science as a truly open and thorough scientific enterprise. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

Unless the AGW alarmists are afraid that they might be found out as frauds, why not open this up and let everyone take a look? If they really are the trustworthy experts that the AGW alarmism crowd makes them out to be, then what do they have to be afraid of?

 

I use the term AGW alarmism to distinguish the AGW alarmists from others, such as myself, who are inclined to believe that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) exists, but probably to such a small degree that it is not particularly worthy of note.

Before anyone starts on the pollution thing, I am in favor of cleaning up the environment and doing a lot more to reduce pollution. But it also does not follow for pollution that we need massive government involvement lead by huge bureaucracies funded by enormous tax increases. To the extent that is what the left proposes as a solution for reducing pollution, I will be against that as well.