Things That Happened When I Wasn’t Blogging – Part 1

While I was out, it seems we found out the science on Global Warming is a lot less settled than Al Gore would like us to believe.  At the risk of being called the moral equivalent of a Holocaust denier, I can’t say that this particularly surprises me.  When we talk about climate scientists (the people who tell us how settled the science is) we are talking about a small close-knit group of people who suffer from twin problems; an honest belief that global warming is a dire threat and it is morally impermissible to contradict it, and the fact that supporting global warming offers rewards in terms of grants and influence on public policy.

The denial now is occurring on the side of the global warming advocates who insist that there is no conspiracy, and that these are truly good scientists, and we should be really concerned about the idea that these hackers who stole these e-mails are disrupting scientific research.   To which I say; we have evidence of manipulation of the peer review process, the deleting of  raw data to avoid releasing the information to FOIA requests (or to other scientists attempting to duplicate results; it’s settled, you know) , the deliberate manipulation of data to force computer models to fit forgone conclusions, computer modeling software that is filled with buggy spaghetti code you wouldn’t trust to balance your checkbook, and an attempt to hide the fact that temperatures are actually declining at the moment.  It also seems more likely that we are dealing with a whisleblower upset about the stonewalling of FOIA requests than some hacker.  Frankly, it’s not just bad science these guys were engaged in at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, it was anti-science.  The “research” they did is toxic to the very idea of science.

Really, the only real defense in the end is going to be the claim that this bogus research was all confined to CRU in East Anglia.  Good luck with that.