2009-11-26 10:09:55 by abowman in Ravings of a Lunatic (no comments) permalink
That’s a damning headline If I’ve ever read one. Below are selected quotes.
On collaboration (in the negative sense):
Yet even a partial review of the emails is highly illuminating. In them, scientists appear to urge each other to present a “unified” view on the theory of man-made climate change while discussing the importance of the “common cause”; to advise each other on how to smooth over data so as not to compromise the favored hypothesis; to discuss ways to keep opposing views out of leading journals; and to give tips on how to “hide the decline” of temperature in certain inconvenient data.
On the types of personalities of the scientists:
Some of those mentioned in the emails have responded to our requests for comment by saying they must first chat with their lawyers. Others have offered legal threats and personal invective. Still others have said nothing at all. Those who have responded have insisted that the emails reveal nothing more than trivial data discrepancies and procedural debates.
On the right to know why we are spending lots of money:
Yet all of these nonresponses manage to underscore what may be the most revealing truth: That these scientists feel the public doesn’t have a right to know the basis for their climate-change predictions, even as their governments prepare staggeringly expensive legislation in response to them.
Frankly, I’m not surprised that these documents exist. I think that calling it a conspiracy among climate researchers–in the sense of a centrally managed organization with hidden goals–might be implying more organization than is there, or implying a more pervasive and broader organization. But that doesn’t change the fact that frequently an informal organization that looks like a conspiracy can emerge merely because a lot of people share the same opinion about something and share information. Compare Apartheid to racism–Apartheid was a centralized government policy where racism is a distributed belief held and shared voluntarily (!) by individuals. The end effect is similar even though the organization is different.
And the conclusion:
However, we do now have hundreds of emails that give every appearance of testifying to concerted and coordinated efforts by leading climatologists to fit the data to their conclusions while attempting to silence and discredit their critics. In the department of inconvenient truths, this one surely deserves a closer look by the media, the U.S. Congress and other investigative bodies.
Many organizations have been built around the issues of global warming with some accepting the scientific conclusions as gospel and others not. All of these organizations are about to undergo a shift in power and influence as a result of the information revealed about how climate science is conducted. It’s time for the researchers to open up.
As I said before, I want to see all of the climate models, analysis and data voluntarily released to the public. I want an open source system created to process the existing data, collect and verify new data and do the analysis from the first data point on to current data. I believe that we would benefit from access to this information and I also believe that the climate researchers would benefit from having all of the extra eyes looking at what they are doing. After all, some programmers have already voluntarily examined and found errors in the model code.