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Sometimes Wrong but rarely in doubt!

24 November 2009

Climate Gate

I've been avidly following the news on the data, documents and e-mails that have been leaked onto the internet from the Climatic Research Unit.  The silence of the mainstream media is deafening.  While the blogsphere is on fire with due to the explosive nature of the documents the mainstream media is fiddling away talking about the a recall of two million cribs most of which have likely been discarded.

Skeptics have certainly gotten a lot of bad press over the last few years and as one of them I enjoyed more than my share of raised eyebrows bitter arguments and the rough side of many warmists tongues for questioning the veracity of Global Warming...pardon me... climate change dogma. 

The only impact of the release of the data as far as I can see is that any papers by any of the scientists involved is tainted as are any citations of paper by these activist scientists.
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1 comment:

  1. Lux Mentis25 November, 2009

    I don't think crappy things a scientist does in matters beyond the immediate frame of an academic paper he is working on *necessarily* invalidates any such academic paper. I think that's problematic as a viewpoint. The paper itself either stands up well enough or does not, based on the data, methodology and presentation.

    On the other hand, bad papers used as citations and key data in other papers will tend to make them suspect. That much I agree with you on.

    Also, crappy conduct by these scheming busybodies masquerading as scientists is grotesque and unconscionable. They need booted out of their academic positions and censured by the scientific community. They may have done some good research, but their conduct is unbecoming and biased.

    One last thing: I begin to wonder if we should just not fund specific science at all. That is to say, funding should go into a pool and be partitioned out to bright/interesting/proven scientists (yes, the devil would lie in how you select them) and then let them research whatever they wanted. They might be shown a list of key challenges as a spur to the imagination but that's all.

    I only say this because only when we don't care what the outcome of science is (dispassionate) can we really stand much change of getting good, pure science with unbiased conclusions. When we tie people's livelihood and funding and professional progress into particular areas of effort, rather than general science, we tend to end up producing results that conform to a certain orthodoxy.

    Economics and politics always muddy the water when it comes to science. We need to find ways to minimize that.

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