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Five Strikes. Is Climategate Out?
The New York Times editorial, "A Climate Change Corrective," does a nice job of summing up the latest. Here's an excerpt:
Perhaps now we can put the manufactured controversy known as Climategate behind us and turn to the task of actually doing something about global warming. On Wednesday, a panel in Britain concluded that scientists whose e-mail had been hacked late last year had not, as critics alleged, distorted scientific evidence to prove that global warming was occurring and that human beings were primarily responsible.The website for the investigation is The Independent Climate Change Email Review, where you can download the report (PDF).
It was the fifth such review of hundreds of e-mail exchanges among some of the world’s most prominent climatologists. Some of the e-mail messages, purloined last November, were mean-spirited, others were dismissive of contrarian views, and others revealed a timid reluctance to share data. Climate skeptics pounced on them as evidence of a conspiracy to manipulate research to support predetermined ideas about global warming.
The panel found no such conspiracy. It complained mildly about one poorly explained temperature chart discussed in the e-mail, but otherwise found no reason to dispute the scientists’ “rigor and honesty.” Two earlier panels convened by Britain’s Royal Society and the House of Commons reached essentially the same verdict. And this month, a second panel at Penn State University exonerated Michael Mann, a prominent climatologist and faculty member, of scientific wrongdoing.
Reactions are predictably polarized. To those who believed the fraud claims, but change their mind as a result of these investigations, I say: Be more careful about who you listen to next time.
6 comments:
The real scandal is not how opportunistic some of these scientists have been from time of time, but how shallow the evidence is for anthropogenic global warming in the first place. The various inquiries didn't address the latter question in the slightest.
Mark,
I don't think anyone was expecting these investigations to validate the conclusions. That is what peer review is for, and yes that was done and anyone believing in the scientific process can accept the conclusions as being valid. The investigations concluded that there was no breech in the scientific process to reach those conclusions. No deceptions, false data etc... There are several points of protocol that can be improved, but nothing to indicate the study was deceptive. I think that extra scrutiny in and of itself is a powerful statement in support of anthropogenic global warming. Either that or this is evidence of an ever increasing web of conspiracy. Which do you think is more likely?
Jared*,
I tip my hat to you. Your willingness to fight this stuff out in some of the most ideologically-driven places deserves an award,
Many thanks, Chris!
Unfortunately, as far as lay people are concerned, no. Many people who don't understand science are convinced that there is no climate change caused by humans. Regardless of what scientists say or do, those folks won't be convinced, because their opinions are emotionally driven, not factually driven.
So, the models and the data are now fully laid out and available to everyone and the missing data has been restored?
That is a relief. I'm surprised there has not been more press on the missing data points now being available.
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