*Worth Study: *Steven Hayward's discussion
<http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/017/300ubchn.asp>
of what we have learned --- so far --- from the Climatic Research Unit
files.
Sample:
In mid-November a large cache of emails and technical documents from
the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in
Britain were made available on a number of Internet file-servers for
download by the public--either the work of a hacker or a leak from a
whistleblower on the inside. The emails--more than 1,000 of
them--reveal a small cabal of scientists who, in the words of MIT's
Michael Schrage, engaged in "malice, mischief and Machiavellian
maneuverings."
. . .
As tempting as it is to indulge in /Schadenfreude/ over the richly
deserved travails of a gang that has heaped endless calumny on
dissenting scientists (NASA's James Hansen, for instance, compared
MIT's Richard Lindzen to a tobacco-industry scientist, and Al Gore
and countless -others liken skeptics to "Holocaust deniers"), the
meaning of the CRU documents should not be misconstrued. The emails
do not in and of themselves reveal that catastrophic climate change
scenarios are a hoax or without any foundation. What they reveal is
something problematic for the scientific community as a whole,
namely, the tendency of scientists to cross the line from being
disinterested investigators after the truth to advocates for a
preconceived conclusion about the issues at hand. In the
understatement of the year, CRU's Phil Jones, one of the principal
figures in the controversy, admitted the emails "do not read well."
Jones is the author of the most widely cited leaked e-missive,
telling colleagues in 1999 that he had used "Mike's Nature
[magazine] trick" to "hide the decline" that inconveniently shows up
after 1960 in one set of temperature records. But he insists that
the full context of CRU's work shows this to have been just a
misleading figure of speech. Reading through the entire archive of
emails, however, provides no such reassurance; to the contrary,
dozens of other messages, while less blatant than "hide the
decline," expose scandalously unprofessional behavior. There were
ongoing efforts to rig and manipulate the peer-review process that
is critical to vetting manuscripts submitted for publication in
scientific journals. Data that should have been made available for
inspection by other scientists and outside critics were released
only grudgingly, if at all. Perhaps more significant, the email
archive also reveals that even inside this small circle of climate
scientists--otherwise allied in an effort to whip up a frenzy of
international political action to combat global warming--there was
considerable disagreement, confusion, doubt, and at times acrimony
over the results of their work. In other words, there is far less
unanimity or consensus among climate insiders than we have been led
to believe.
I have one or two quibbles with the article --- you may have noticed,
for instance, that he gets CRU's full name slightly wrong --- but the
article is still by far the best that I have seen on this subject.
In a way, it is reassuring to learn that there were more doubts, and
less unanimity, in this group than "we have been led to believe". For
years, I have been dismayed by their apparent certainty, because I could
not understand how they could be so certain about such complex, and only
partially verified, computer models. (And in recent years, given the
decade-long pause in temperature increases, I have begun to wonder
whether the models had something crucial wrong or missing.)
The CRU scientists, and their allies, haven't been honest with the
public, but they aren't complete fools.
- 1:15 PM, 7 December 2009 [link]
<http://www.seanet.com/%7Ejimxc/Politics/December2009_1.html#jrm8181>
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