Sunday, November 22, 2009

Destroying the Science in Order to Save It

The recent data dump of hacked emails and documents of a leading global warming center appears to be pretty damning (with the caveat, if they are authentic):

•First, a real attempt by a small group of scientists to subvert the peer-review process and suppress dissenting voices. (For another look at this, by a respected climate scientist who was one of the targets, see these posts on Roger Pielke Sr.’s blog.) This is at best massively unethical.

•Second, a willingness to manipulate the data to make a political case. This is certainly misconduct and possibly scientific fraud. This, if it proves true, should make these scientists subject to strong disciplinary action, even termination of their tenured positions.

•Third, what gives every appearance of an actual conspiracy to prevent data from being released as required by the Freedom of Information Acts in the US and UK. If this is proven true, that is a federal crime.


The global warmers try to act is if anyone who is a "scientist" is pure of political motive and that we should adopt policies advocated by scientists following the results of the science. But clearly the romantic notion of data-driven pure scientists is ridiculous--scientists are people and they have biases. That's why their research is supposed to be checked by other scientists with different biases. But the global warming science hasn't been opened for review and checking to see if results can be duplicated.

I wonder if other climate change data will be hacked and released.

And I wonder if other climate change organizations will decide that they can't risk the world seeing their internal conversations that bolster the three tentative conclusions of the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit information.

UPDATE: And let me ask, as I like to when told we have to spend untold trillions of dollars to halt the increase in temperatures from today, how is that we are so lucky to live exactly at the moment of the perfect global temperature?

Sure, I understand that we've adapted to the current temperature, broadly speaking. But if we really can't adapt to higher temperatures, and must fight to keep temperatures from going up, why not damn the torpedoes and try to achieve the optimum temperature? What if the best temperature is a couple degrees warmer? Or a couple degrees cooler?

I mean, if we're going to wreck our economy to try and hold the planetary thermostat at a particular point, why not wreck our economy trying to achieve the best temperature?