So the big to-do today on this Friday before a weekend is that some hacker managed to access the confidential email of the Hadley CRU and posted 'em online. The Hadley CRU, by the way, is the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit- and quotes taken from those emails would seem to indicate that Hadley CRU fudged climate data, among other… uh, indiscretions.
First, I pit the scientists at the CRU for any impropriety. Dammit, people, we rely on your data, don’t fuck it up. This shit’s serious. Those quotes, those emails, will now make it that much harder for good science to be done. Way to go, assholes.
Second, I pit the hacker who grabbed the data. Through your actions, the CRU has been tried and found guilty, all without a day in court, based on out-of-context emails. This is kind of a lukewarm Pitting, though, because if the analysis of the emails is correct, you’ve done us all a favor. But if it’s not… you’ve kinda fucked us all.
Third, I pit the “denier” camp who will now crow about their victory over the “warmers”… without even a thought as to whether a few bad apples can spoil the whole bunch. It’s supposed to be about the science, remember?
Basically, I don’t know who I Pit the most, or how I should feel about it. All I know is that the whole situation leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and I feel sorry for the legitimate researchers who will now be suspect.
Oh my God, intention was right after all!!! I, I, I… just… don’t know what to say. That’s the last time I trust those damn professional scientists! They all have a conflict of interest.
I should add that Delingpole has utterly no clue about what he is talking about. The MWP part makes no sense. The author is asking one of his collaborators to extend timeframe of a plot to 2000 years instead of 1000. The MWP began in ~800. The phrase “contain the MWP” means that a timeframe of 2000 years contains the whole thing, whereas the timeframe of 1000 years previous does not contain the whole thing.
The same goes for the Jones email. The words ‘trick’ and ‘hidden’ are perhaps poorly chosen, but he is clearly referring to plotting reconstructed data alongside instrumental data to provide context. This is not fudging data. I am just going to go ahead and quote the aforementioned Real Climate commentary on this
Ya know, that’s kind of the way I feel. Maybe it is, as you say “bushwah”. On the chance that it isn’t, what’s going to happen. The day that the chickens come home to roost the deniers are going to say, “Oops, guess we were wrong, you guys were right, now it’s too late, guess we should have done something earlier.”
(Anybody remember Katrina? Leading up to it there was only an x% chance that a Cat5 storm would hit New Orleans. No need to prepare for such an low percentage eventuality. Right!)
Like you say, if nothing else we all become more energy self-sufficient and we live in a cleaner world. What’s so bad about upgrading your environment?
I completely agree with that. However, good luck explaining that to someone on the fence who has just read about the “Nature Trick”. That’s what pisses me off about it the most- it may not *be *bad, but it certainly *looks *bad. It’s like ACORN all over again.
The blog linked in the OP and the RealClimate “explanation” are just about the worst possible jobs of shilling/spinning for their respective positions I’ve ever seen.
Is there some sensible commentary on this somewhere?
My main comfort is the thought/hope that stuff like this won’t do a significant amount of mind-changing; most of those who’ll even hear of it at all, especially with the negative spin, are those who believe it’s all a hoax in the first place.
Wife is distantly related to Robert Millikan. To quote Richard Feynman, "We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It’s a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It’s interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan’s, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
“Why didn’t they discover the new number was higher right away? It’s a thing that scientists are ashamed of - this history - because it’s apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan’s, they thought something must be wrong - and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan’s value they didn’t look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We’ve learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don’t have that kind of a disease.”
Wife, on the other hand, says that the difference between a middling career and a Nobel Prize is knowing what data to throw out. But Millikan and Feynman both got theirs while she answers the phone.
A rather apt analogy, actually. In both cases we see a small group of self-proclaimed independent thinkers pretending to have discovered the truth about an alleged major organizational cover-up, and using unsubstantiated legends, isolated facts cherry-picked out of context, and a lot of sensationalist rhetoric to make it sound like they’ve got something.
The chief difference between Dan Brown and the climate change “skeptics” is that Dan Brown openly admits that his stories are fictional.
All of them? You out your mind? Where do we put them all? Better to summon the “skeptics”, we can fit them all in the Holiday Inn out on the Interstate.
I’ll reserve full comment until we can get some confirmation. It sure looks bad, especially:
If that is an accurate, unedited quote it’s… well it leaves me speechless. This isn’t the sort of thing that can be be made to look better or worse based on context, unless the context is a joke/parody. If it’s serious then this someone has just admitted that there is no way that skeptics will ever be allowed to publish in legitimate peer reviewed journals and that the proponents should use tactics to prevent them being published.
And yet the alarmist camp is the one that is constantly telling us that it’s not all about the science. That the single most important thing is the consensus.
And that is why this looks so bad and has the potential to be so harmful. It appears that any consensus has not been reached on the basis of science, but rather on the basis of secret agreements between alarmists, including those in the the editorial boards of journals.
IOW their is no scientific consensus because the science on one side has been deliberately suppressed.
But as I say, at this stage we lack the evidence to say whether that is the case.
How do you feel about all those legitimate researchers whose research was (allegedly) rejected for publication because of this? Haven’t they been hurt more than anyone?