The science is settled
1. The Institute is concerned that, unless the disclosed e-mails are proved to be forgeries or adaptations, worrying implications arise for the integrity of scientific research in this field and for the credibility of the scientific method as practised in this context.
2. The CRU e-mails as published on the internet provide prima facie evidence of determined and co-ordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law. The principle that scientists should be willing to expose their ideas and results to independent testing and replication by others, which requires the open exchange of data, procedures and materials, is vital. The lack of compliance has been confirmed by the findings of the Information Commissioner. This extends well beyond the CRU itself – most of the e-mails were exchanged with researchers in a number of other international institutions who are also involved in the formulation of the IPCC’s conclusions on climate change.
February 27th, 2010 at 9:22 pm
Yer missing the point. All that matters is that there’s a consensus among science-guys. How that consensus came about is details.
February 27th, 2010 at 11:28 pm
They weren’t scientists and they weren’t doing science. They were performance artists doing one-off, impossible to duplicate, pseudo-scientific, art projects in support of global socialism.
February 28th, 2010 at 2:11 am
It was the suspension of scientific method. And that is the more important issue. The con of Global Warming would have been busted at some point. It was a Ponzi scheme. This entire nightmare may affect new theories and discoveries. It could slow down new treatments and new drugs.
Again idiot narcissist hippies are at the source of the problem. Those who participated should lose tenure. Al Gore and the IPCC should have to surrender their false awards. Jones and Mann should pay the heaviest price.
But the Ponzi scheme lives. That is how deep this is.
February 28th, 2010 at 2:02 pm
On the other side of the pond we have this idiot.
Harvard, Oscar, Nobel Peace Prize, and a honorary Doctorate from UT. Yet still the dumbest human on this planet. But people still believe. How does that work? Not even B.T. Barnum was this good.
February 28th, 2010 at 9:48 pm
But… but… but… there is absolutely no evidence that any of the AGW-supporting data has been tampered with!
None!
Anywhere!
Nothing!
[/cough]
March 1st, 2010 at 10:53 am
On the news this morning, they carried a bit about how the UK military is now officially and openly shredding all UFO related reports after 30 days.
Why?
Because the constant FOIA requests from idiots trying to prove conspiracies have created such a time wasting problem. FOIA requests really can present a time consuming bureaucratic nightmare that does interfere with doing what you’re supposed to be doing.
So I think we can officially dispense with the idea that every FOIA request is meritorious, and that it’s all that far fetched to see how people interested in an agenda and political hackery could use them to interfere with good people’s good work.
Nope. There isn’t. And there certainly wasn’t any presented in that link either.
Unless “opinions” are now “evidence”. Dennis Hennigan would love that to be the standard for “evidence” I’d think.
March 1st, 2010 at 11:17 am
On the news this morning, they carried a bit about how the UK military is now officially and openly shredding all UFO related reports after 30 days.
Two things.
1) No one in the gov’t is claiming UFO reports are the basis for “science” and basing multi-trillion dollar policies on the basis thereof.
2) That is now their declared standard operating procedure. And they do it for all records. What climategate showed was that these “scientists” were keeping the records that supported their thesis and destroyed those that were inconvenient.
In what universe is that considered ethical?
March 1st, 2010 at 11:40 am
And that’s relevant how? A spurious FOIA is a spurious FOIA–and regardless of the field of inquiry, if someone wants to use FOIA laws to harass you and tie you up, it’s not all that hard to do and does happen.
Not sure what trillion dollar policies you’re referring to.
As for point 2, that’s decidedly not what was shown to be happening, and no matter how many times you repeat that falsehood, it doesn’t become any truer. Document your case if you can.
March 1st, 2010 at 11:41 am
Uhm. Not sure if I should just do a facepalm and move on; or point out that’s why everyone is having the global warming argument anyway.
March 1st, 2010 at 12:02 pm
Not sure if I should facepalm either…I thought the point was obvious, but let’s review. The linchpin of the climate-not-a-gate conspiracy scuttlebutt is that these sciencey dudes were surreptitiously circumventing and stonewalling FOIA requests for data (the funny part being that even if Horner and McIntyre, the hacks making the requests actually got the data…they don’t have the training, knowledge, or background to do anything with it anyway…making my point all the more obvious). If you actually bother to read what the scientists were complaining about and discussing, it’s that the response to FOIA requests is cumbersome, time consuming, takes great care and legal wrangling to make sure you do it right, and generally prevents you from doing what you’re supposed to be doing.
For the shortbus crowd: the point I was making was that the UK military folks found responding to spurious FOIA requests, despite having huge admin staffs and budgets, to be an incredible burden. By the standard you climate denialists seem to want to hold people to, that must mean the UK military is hiding a UFO conspiracy when they destroy reports to head off all those silly FOIA requests from nutjobs.
If their equivalent of the Pentagon found all those stupid FOIA requests a cumbersome problem, it’s not hard to see how a research scientist working with no staff on a not all that great university salary would also find endless, obviously stupid FOIA requests a problem that keeps him from doing his job as well.
March 1st, 2010 at 12:03 pm
IOW…there’s nothing in those emails that suggests a smoking “if we don’t hide the data our scheme will be found out” gun exists.
I really think you guys just read what you see on Sean Hannity’s blog and don’t bother processing it even a little.
March 1st, 2010 at 12:05 pm
Wrong. Enough disagree to make it an issue. And it will be for a while. Deal with it. Saying it again only louder isn’t convincing.
March 1st, 2010 at 12:07 pm
Exactly. If it was a meaningless curiosity like crop circles no one would care.
We’d only care if we were using those crop circles as evidence we need to overhaul the global economy to prepare for the coming Goa’uld invasion.
A spurious FOIA is a spurious FOIA
Of course, when you define anything that’s inconvenient to be spurious it makes it that much easier to justify.
If my employer handled data like these “scientists” did, the .gov would shut our doors and fine us into bankruptcy for risking significantly less than $1b. And I highly doubt you’d stand there defending us because maintaining the data is just too darn time consuming.
March 1st, 2010 at 12:18 pm
By the standard you climate denialists seem to want to hold people to, that must mean the UK military is hiding a UFO conspiracy when they destroy reports to head off all those silly FOIA requests from nutjobs.
Again, if the UK military were claiming that the evidence is irrefutable that UFO’s exist and that we need to revamp the entire global economy to prepare for the coming invasion, and *then* they were to destroy all the data except for the “value added” data which “proves” their claims, then yes, that would be highly suspicious.
Since no one is making any claims from these reports at all and the military openly says “we ain’t keeping it because we don’t use it” it’s a completely different animal.
March 1st, 2010 at 12:20 pm
About what? This part?
You appear to be addressing a point I wasn’t making. Not sure what you’re talking about here. If you have a point you can actually articulate clearly, be happy to address it.
Ah, this must be the trillion dollar policy you were speaking of. Not sure what this overhaul consists of.
If you actually read what scientists are saying, an overwhelming portion of the problem comes from deforestation in the tropical regions and not using nuclear power but rather coal and oil to power the grid.
Not sure how that’s going to destroy the economy, sounds like a wonderful opportunity for more jobs, conservation, and new technology that’s cleaner and doesn’t require as much business with people that want to live in caves and kill you. Failing to see the problem…
When you boil it down, denialist objections end up being “geeze I don’t wanna give up my car and my lifestyle”. If we quit chopping down the rainforests and built a few nuke plants…it wouldn’t matter what car you drove or how many diesel powered boats you fart around in.
Horner and McIntyre’s requests are spurious by definition. They don’t have the skills, training, knowledge, or even interest in deciphering the data they’re looking for, and their previous forays into same were laughable. They freely admit they’re on a political mission, not a scientific one.
March 1st, 2010 at 12:34 pm
FOIA requests sucking up to much of your time is an _easy_ problem to solve. Put ALL of you data on a web site. Produce a generic response letter stating that the answer to _all_ FOIA requests may be found on said web site. Use said generic response letter as the response to FOIA requests.
March 1st, 2010 at 12:45 pm
Not sure what this overhaul consists of.
Then you really haven’t been paying attention.
If we quit chopping down the rainforests and built a few nuke plants…it wouldn’t matter what car you drove or how many diesel powered boats you fart around in.
We can’t do a damn thing about rainforest destruction since we don’t have any, and getting conservatives to embrace nuclear is like convincing Bill Clinton that sex is fun. It’s your side that standing in the way of nuclear power.
And if it were that simple, why Kyoto, Cap & Trade, etc?
Oh, that’s right, we need a bogeyman to justify all the new gov’t regulation of businesses. All for the common good, of course.
March 1st, 2010 at 1:44 pm
Bob–point taken. Which is why apparently about 98% of the relevant data NASA GISSTEMP and HadCRU use for calculations is readily available if you’re interested to anyone with a library card or an Intarweb connection (see: Gore, Things for which you should be thankful to Al). What’s particularly interesting about Horner’s FOIA requests is they’re not for data at all! They’re for emails and access to internal discussions…basically he’s fishing for stuff similar to what the CRU hacker found, but he’s not dumb enough to risk being a criminal hacker and he’s trying to use FOIA to leverage out the smoking gun he couldn’t find in the Climate-not-a-gate emails. The small portion considered proprietary is closely held, but it’s held but govts and not by scientists, so that’s a different animal.
FTR, pointing out that you have other means of getting the info is a perfectly legal response to FOIA requests, no matter how much M&M and Horner pretend it isn’t. There’s no “there” there. There just isn’t.
I’ve been paying attention to the blustery nonsense from people like you who, when pressed for specifics about how conservation, new energy technologies, and less foreign oil equals “OMGOMGMGMAARRRGHHHH!11!!!We’re alllll gonna dieeeeee”, tend to not have much to offer. And I’m the alarmist? Fucking please.
And herein lies the crux of the issue. The reason otherwise smart people stick their heads in the sand and exhibit worse denialism than the people who think OJ was framed is that the mere existence of this problem necessarily entails that their political worldview has a fatal, irrecoverable flaw in it: namely that sometimes things happen outside our borders that effect all of us, and thus the isolationist viewpoint just doesn’t work or have all the answers. IOW…the problem necessarily will require multinational, non-statist intervention and actual cooperation and being nice to other people…and if you’re a neocon stooge that’s really painful to hear. Mostly because it means you’ll have to admit your worldview is stupid.
As for nuclear power, not sure whose side you think is mine, but very few people actually legitimately concerned about AGW are actively involved in the anti-nukes effort. It’s largely like the Brady Campaign, and gets way more attention than it deserves, but in this case mostly because people like you get to pretend it’s more significant than it really is in the name of scoring what you think are a couple of cool debate tacticool points.
And actually…it often is the drill-and-smog coalition that is what stands in the way of nuclear.
March 1st, 2010 at 4:30 pm
I’ve been paying attention to the blustery nonsense from people like you who, when pressed for specifics about how conservation
There are plenty of good reasons for conservation without the nonsense of AGW.
new energy technologies,
Non of which are practically feasible. Solar? Puhleeze. You’d need to cover your entire roof just to run half your house on it and it’d still cost you over $50 grand to do it with a time to break even longer than the life expectancy of the house. This is where the economy wrecking comes in. The broken window fallacy is a fallacy for a reason. Not all spending is equal.
and less foreign oil
All for less foriegn oil. Drill baby, drill.
equals “OMGOMGMGMAARRRGHHHH!11!!!We’re alllll gonna dieeeeee”,
From the side (that would be the progressive side, btw) that attributes everything bad to global warming (heat waves, blizzards, hurricanes, earthquakes, acne, to West Nile) this is particularly funny.
and if you’re a neocon stooge that’s really painful to hear.
Not a neo-con, not an isolationist. I’m all for cooperation and negotiation, but taxing carbon emmissions on power plants in PA does nothing to prevent Brazil from razing the Amazon.
March 1st, 2010 at 9:44 pm
“1. The Institute is concerned that, unless the disclosed e-mails are proved to be forgeries or adaptations, worrying implications arise for the integrity of scientific research in this field and for the credibility of the scientific method as practiced in this context.”
Translation from I’m-more-sophisticated-than-you speak to English; “If these e-mails are real, we’re fucked.”
They’re fucked. But this is no stain on the scientific community, or on science, whatsoever. This was never science. So we’re in the clear.
This is a stain on fraud, not science. Yeah; fraud and government corruption can be really, really destructive, so we’d best be more attentive in the future. For one thing, the whole notion of “government funded research” has to be re-thought. Probably banned. What the fuck, anyway– you want to research something, you’ll find a way to pay for it. If not, you’re probably too stupid or unimaginative to do good research, QED.
March 1st, 2010 at 11:30 pm
Wow, Uncle spells it out to PGP. I thought I would never see that. And in typical PGP style, PGP maintains the Al Gore tude. He just says more profoundly, “The science is settled”.
God I love that. Just deny it like all hell. Deny it like a Bill Clinton with lipstick on his collar, “It’s that damn dry cleaner Hillary, they mixed up the shirts again. How damn incompetent can they be? How many times has this happened? They just can’t get good help. It’s the education system, you know.”
March 2nd, 2010 at 12:05 am
You just go on telling yourself that, even in the face of enough evidence to float the QEII.
But, hey, what with your ceaseless spouting of “STOP DENYING IT!” I guess we should not be surprised at you having that particular problem, eh?
March 2nd, 2010 at 4:07 am
Just walk away from the narcississtic idiot. Shake your head and mutter, “What a stupid bastard”.
He may have believed at some time in what he is saying, but he is not stupid enough to still believe it in the face of all the evidence. Now he just lies and lies and call names and lies some more. Because, as a Narcissus, he cannot be wrong,that would destroy his fantasy of being perfect and certainly superior to everybody else.
For us it is a matter of truth. For him it is a matter of survival. He is fighting for his life. He is never going admit the truth he knows. To do so would destroy his fantasy of himself as a truly superior and more caring being. And without his fantasy he can’t survive, he simply isn’t strong enough.
Quit engaging him, it’s a waste of time. A man fighting for his life is very apt to cheat and lie. That is understandable. What is beyond comprehension is how shallow the risk that causes some weaklings to cheat and lie when the only risk is admitting fact.