Saturday, November 28, 2009
"Climategate" Observations
Having spent several hours over the last week or so reading about, and excerpts from, the disclosed emails and other documents from East Anglia University Climate Research Unit's archives, I have come to believe beyond doubt two things:
1. "Peer review" doesn't mean squat when the author of the paper being reviewed and the reviewers are all members of the same club, especially when they act in concert to prevent "heretical" work from being published.
2. It is impossible to adequately critique a scientific theory that purports to interpret real-world data unless both the data and the methods used to analyze it are made publicly available to the science community at large, and any scientist or group of scientists who insist on secrecy about their data and methods after publication are probably not being honest.
It appears to me that the CRU group and their intellectual allies have about the same attitude towards real science that the Catholic Church did in the time of Galileo. The Church suppressed knowledge that it regarded as a threat to revealed truth as the Church understood it, and these climate guys were (and probably still are) doing the same thing.
I remain an agnostic about anthropogenic global warming, and this disclosure of shoddy practice doesn't make it any more likely that I will wind up in the pro-AGW camp. I am certain that the world should not be spending any money in an attempt to slow, stop or reverse any measured global warming until more honest research is done in the full light of day. If anything is to be done at this point, it should be to fund that research through some governing body that has no axe to grind (if such an entity can be found or created) and to devise ways to improve the lot of those most likely to be affected by climate change. Above all, the science must be separated from politics.
1. "Peer review" doesn't mean squat when the author of the paper being reviewed and the reviewers are all members of the same club, especially when they act in concert to prevent "heretical" work from being published.
2. It is impossible to adequately critique a scientific theory that purports to interpret real-world data unless both the data and the methods used to analyze it are made publicly available to the science community at large, and any scientist or group of scientists who insist on secrecy about their data and methods after publication are probably not being honest.
It appears to me that the CRU group and their intellectual allies have about the same attitude towards real science that the Catholic Church did in the time of Galileo. The Church suppressed knowledge that it regarded as a threat to revealed truth as the Church understood it, and these climate guys were (and probably still are) doing the same thing.
I remain an agnostic about anthropogenic global warming, and this disclosure of shoddy practice doesn't make it any more likely that I will wind up in the pro-AGW camp. I am certain that the world should not be spending any money in an attempt to slow, stop or reverse any measured global warming until more honest research is done in the full light of day. If anything is to be done at this point, it should be to fund that research through some governing body that has no axe to grind (if such an entity can be found or created) and to devise ways to improve the lot of those most likely to be affected by climate change. Above all, the science must be separated from politics.
Labels: Environmentalism, Global warming, Science
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