I don't think most scientists appreciate what has hit them. This isn't only about the credibility of global warming.
Of course, the fact that "science czar" Carol Browner was an English major may explain her postmodern approach to science.
I don't think most scientists appreciate what has hit them. This isn't only about the credibility of global warming.
I just left a comment to another post about "cherry picking" and "quote mining". Linking to an article that happens to agree with you does not make it, or you, right. There are very many, extremely good, analyses and comments on this business that do not come to anything like the conclusion you present here.
ReplyDeleteI do not necessarily agree with the view in this article or any other I link to, Maxine. I linked to this simply because it is representative of a great number of articles on the subject I have lately seen and I thought it was among the more interesting. As you already know I have linked to the Nature editorial on the subject, so that visitors to this blog can see another side to the story. Also, my principal interest in this is, and always has been, the nature of the discourse involved. In any form of discourse, the mere appearance of impropriety or dishonesty can have a devastating effect. I think anyone should be suspicious whenever anyone suggests that a given issue has been settled and there is no ground for debate. When there is no room for debate, debate stops. Which is why there are no gravity doubters. But when there is room for debate, complete transparency is called for, as well as civility. Both seem to have been missing in recent climate discussions, and anyone who has listened to James Hansen rant, knows that the absence has not been confined to those who have doubts about AGW.
ReplyDeleteMr. Wilson, insofar as I'm aware, the anthropogenic (human-induced) global warming hypothesis began to be treated in the sciences generally as untenable when the chief proponents - like Dr. Mann - first began to refuse access to their raw data and to the nuts-and-bolts computer code used to devise their climatological models.
ReplyDeleteThe consensus in all scientific disciplines is that no matter how good you might be, you can always make mistakes. You want error-checking.
Exchanges between a paper's authors and the peer review officers can be wonderfully productive. The quality of what eventually sees publication is commonly much enhanced - so much so that I sometimes think that some peer review officers ought to be named as participants in the production of the final work.
But we now know for certain that there was no real peer review in the climatology literature.
The conduct of Dr. Mann, Prof. Jones, and the rest of the CRU correspondents over the past decade and more had been sufficient indication that their data and/or their methodologies were faulty, and they had reason to fear honest examination.
Turns out those data and methodologies were purposefully and mendaciously bogus.
To the extent that reliable climate data are available (and there are corrupting factors affecting the various databases which may be beyond correction in order to provide baselines and trend lines of any validity) and we are now able to "look under the hood" of the computer modeling programs employed by the CRU correspondents, it appears that "global warming" is simply not happening.
Nor has it ever been anthropogenic.
This is, in short, not only a "non-problem" but non-existent.
AGW - or "climate change" - is demonstrated now, by way of the contents of the "FOIA.zip" archive, to be a complete fraud.
Most of us in the sciences really thought that it was a fraud all along. The effects of human-produced greenhouse gases - particularly CO2 - was overstated by at least three or four orders of magnitude, and Dr. Mann et alia utterly refused to factor in the long-known variations in solar energy output.
That last pretty much blew the "Hockey Team" off the ice for most of us. Intrinsically wonky surface station data plus studied ignorance of that big ball of fire in the sky....
Tsk.
Charitably, let's say that a series of errors made by Dr. Mann and Prof. Jones and Dr. Trenberth and their colleagues many decades ago got them prestige, power, and pelf, and they spent the years after making those errors hacking, clawing, and covering-up like so many cats overdosed on castor oil.
Foul, sad, and stinking it may be, but fatal to science?
Not at all.