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The "Deniergate" article by New Scientist article is so full of errors and ad hominems, that it reads as a parody of climategate. If I didn't know better, I would think it was SNL making fun of Copenhagen hacks. Just for fun, here's my cursory list of self-parody.
First paragraph:
"Climategate has put scientists on trial in the court of public opinion. If you believe climate sceptics, a huge body of evidence should be thrown out on basis of alleged misconduct of a few despite [switch on italics] nothing revealed that undermined the science."
- the "trick" recounted in the e-mails was about failing to get tree-ring proxies to correlate with real measured temperatures (which are adjusted themselves), so the tree-ring data was spiked with measured temperatures, so that the proxies would work better. See American Think for the full explanation. The proxy data does not agree with other method for 50 years and even show a marked decline. Huh...just the last 50 years. Imagine that. A science problem or politics?
- the huge body of evidence turns out to be a figment. What is huge, is the number of computer simulations. But computer simulations are not and never will be "evidence", and anyone thinking otherwise should ponder the fate of the first launches of Ariane 501, Pegasus XL, and the computer simulated re-entry of the Columbia Space Shuttle.
- the alleged misconduct is self-evident, not alleged. If Berlusconi has blood dripping off his nose, I don't call it an alleged assault, it is self-evidently assault.
- when receiving a declaration of war, one doesn't say, "it is merely the statement of a single alleged president". Rather, one evaluates the significance of the statement by the significance of the people
producing it. The "few" who are incriminated in climategate turn out to be at the center of a paleoclimate group that includes all the "important" people on 5 continents, all linked by co-authorship of
numerous journal articles and cross-refereeing. This is no renegade group. The cross-linking is particularly obvious in the similar way that the data has been altered by all the groups! When the Encyclopedia
Brittanica wanted to prove plagiarism from competing encyclopedias, they put in erroneous entries which were subsequently copied by competitors. Likewise, all the paleoclimate modellers/data-set providers have the same errors as revealed in the CRUtape letters.
- in a very recent trick to hide the decline GISS just all of a sudden dropped off the temperature record for all ground stations for the period 1880-1900. So what was in fact a falling trend line from 1880 to 2000 is now a rising trend line from 1900 - 2000.
- interesting how they start by contrasting "scientists" with "skeptics". They're ALL scientists! The only difference is that there is a disagreement on how to interpret the raw data (assuming you're allowed access, that is, since many skeptical scientists have in fact been denied to certain datasets and then there are claims that the original data was "lost"). Also, to be fair in article written by skeptical scientists those who support the CO2 interpretation are labeled as "alarmists" which is also unfair.
- anyone who has ever, ever looked at data, knows that the emails are incriminating proof of potentially criminal treatment of data.
Now the second paragraph:
"if we judge the behavior of CRU, we should judge behavior of skeptics..."
Whoa. No one is suggesting that the CRUtape letters arise from some ethical shortcomings of the scientists. Rather, they are taken as proof of inethical behavior. Let me say this again. The letters are the
inethical actions, which imply the authors have some ethical issues, which is quite different than saying that the letters imply inethical authors who might have done some inethical actions. By supposing that
the letters are merely impolite, allows this news article to make a completely unfair comparison to skeptical commentators on the letters, as if they are equally valid. It is a blatant form of ad hominem, where
factual criticisms are treated as expressions of feeling.
At the same time, it should be pointed out that those people who stole the emails also committed inethical behavior.
The third paragraph is amazingly accurate.
The fourth is a winner, though. The claim is made that the graphs do not display what they say they display since there was a "pattern of strange errors". (After reading the Climategate emails this appears as pure Freudian projection.) This is exceedingly odd, since paragraph 3 said they were published and not retracted. So whatever the errors, they cannot be in the original paper.
Paragraph 5 tells us Laut found some mistakes in the graph. End of topic.
Well, that is curious. Just because Laut found some mistakes the entire paper is wrong? Isn't this the reverse of the argument in paragraph 1? What kind of mistakes were they? I downloaded the paper and read it. They had mishandled the last two points on their plot so that it gave the "hockey stick" look that Mann etc, al had found. When the mistake was corrected, the last two points no longer had the Mann increase. But now we know that the increase was faked! Therefore the mistake Laut found made it agree better with the skeptical scientists that the temperature increase was artificial! If anything, this lends even more credence to the skeptical argument. No wonder this news article says no more about the "error".
Paragraph 7-10 gets even funnier. Because a television show misread a graph from the "discredited" paper, the paper must be wrong as well as the show. As it turns out, the misread graph is irrelevant to the point of both the show and the paper. So if a paper isn't infallible, it can't be trusted? Sounds almost like a religious standard.
The sections on the Oregon Petition and Peer Review reeks of snobbery. While it's apparent that some of the signatures have been faked (it's an open petition) there are plenty of scientists with differing opinions, like Willie Soon who is not just a "skeptic" but an astrophysicist. They end by saying, "The accompanying article has acquired an aura of respectability, having finally been published in a journal, albeit not one specialising in climatology." Then they make a big deal about how someone made a mistake in labeling an article written by Lord Mockton as "peer reviewed" (it was not). The interesting thing about ClimateGate is that it showed how these scientists were trying their hardest to prevent ANY dissent in ANY scientific journal.
The section on No Logo is pretty bold considering they KNOW that there has been a cooling trend since 2001. They are correct to say that "no conclusions can be drawn from such a short time span". The hilarious thing is that they criticize the logo for errors in representing a temperature graph. Guess what the errors were? The graph showed certains years being warmer than they really were. Nice spin on that one New Scientist.
The section on David Bellamy may be correct since I don't have time right now to research that particular claim by New Scientist.
I agree with New Scientist that Astroturfing is unacceptable. Unfortunately, they fail to recognize that this technique is employed all the time by organizations that agree with them...
With Cosmic Correlations scientist Henrik Svensmark, a physicist at the Danish National Space Center in Copenhagen, is criticized for his research in which he claims cosmic rays have a major effect on the Earth's climate. New Scientist says "the fit of Svensmark's graph depends on a "correction" of satellite data, and the satellite scientists say this is not justified. "It's dubious manipulation of data in order to suit his hypothesis," says Joanna Haigh...Svensmark does not accept this."
It's funny that should decry the correction of data. Read this section from American Thinker:
Anthony Watts has surveyed over 75% of the 1,200-plus U.S. weather stations from which national temperatures are accumulated. Most of those were found to be inaccurate by more than 2°C, largely due to being located within ten meters of an artificial heating source. In fact, less than 10% met strict placement guidelines set forth by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Not to worry -- NOAA claims it has methods to “adjust” for such bias, including the use of “smoothing” adjustments to “homogenize” station data to that of surrounding stations.
Unpublished computer programs artificially adjusting the data -- what could possibly go wrong with that?
Would you be shocked to learn that at ICCC 3, Watts told us he had calculated such adjustments to raw temperature data between 1940 and 1999 to be 0.5°F to the positive? That accounts for almost one half of the 1.2°F warming over the last century.
I've posted other articles on ICE discussing such smoking guns where the raw data has been adjusted to the point of absurdity where the raw data shows a definite cooling trend and the adjusted data is sharply warming.
Well, I could go on, but if this is the form of argument employed by supporters of the CO2 interpretation, then the skeptical scientists have nothing to fear. What they do have to fear is persecution, especially if they are Christians. I know someone working within NASA's JPL and Political Correctness is in full gear there. Darwin fish and anti-Bush cartoons can be found posted on office doors in full view. Posting a non-PC item is likely to get you shunned. Jokes about Palin are likely to get a chuckle. Al Gore is a hero. (BTW, I'm not a fan of either and prefer other political persons.)
Unfortunately, most Christians hide their beliefs in this environment. They have semi-secret Bible studies on lab among themselves but there is no evangelism or outreach. Years ago, one Bible study tried to get their meetings published in the JPL newsletter. They got delays and delays. Then JPL changed the rules so that those could be denied but the gay-lesbian support group could still advertise their meetings.
Worse, the religion of environtmentalism is gaining fevor lately. I won't say who or where, but a scientist was asked in an interview last month whether he "believed in global warming". He was fired just for saying he did not support the CO2 interpretation. Fired! To make matters worse, this scientist was doing no work that directly or even indirectly affected climatology. He was not actively researching anything that pertains to the climate nor was he active in politics or in publicly making his stance known. He was just stating his personal opinion when asked.
What has Science come to?
Han Clinto of CDN made this good point:
Sadly, we're looking to enact policy on this stuff pretty quickly, and so the back-and-forth process is about to be "frozen" in the conclusion of law. There is some incredibly restrictive and broad-sweeping legislation on the table that people want to sign into law, based on current conclusions about Global Warming research. If science ever developed to the point where we better understood global warming and cooling (such as to explain the current 10+ year global cooling phase that the earth has been in), and if Global Warming legislation no longer made sense -- that stuff is still signed into law, and it's not exactly easy to change.
For a historical example of this, we're still being hampered by the Carter administration signing into law restrictions on nuclear recycling, because the half-baked science of the day thought that recycling spent nuclear fuel into more usable nuclear fuel would result in proliferation of weapons-grade plutonium. We've now long-since known that this isn't the case, but Carter's restrictions against nuclear recycling are still in place today, even though science has long-since moved on.
Sweeping restrictions and costs like Cap and Trade, or Kyoto, or other such things are not cheap, and we cement them into law at our risk. As far as I know, such legislative policies provide no provision for the case to relax the laws in the event that scientific conclusions are changed. Not that they can't be overturned, but as anyone seeking to reform any outdated policies (such as nukes, or Social Security, or welfare, or any other badly-broken system) in the US knows, even though it's possible to change such legislation, it's often prohibitively difficult, and we must weigh that.
....
Why do we need Fusion? Fission is plenty good enough. It's reliable, cheap, clean, safe, and if we reversed the asinine Carter laws so that we can recycle nuclear fuel, we'd have enough nuclear fuel to outlast the sun. Right now, we're only allowed to burn nuclear fuel once, and once it's no longer quite as "hot", we have to pay lots of money to bury it in the ground, or we can sell it to a country that isn't so backwards in their nuclear laws (like France) where they power their country with our "waste". Current fission reactors in the States are like a cookstove that only uses flaming logs to cook food, and once the logs reduce down to coals, they remove those hot coals from the oven. "Hot coals are dangerous -- they can burn you!" people warn. Yes, but if it's hot enough to burn you, it's hot enough to create electricity from it -- you just need a different kind of oven, and you can operate off of coals that will last much longer than the open flame.
Fusion is a myth. Fission is a reality. It's now. It's clean, it's reliable, it's safe, it's feasible, and it makes sense. We need to reverse these asinine laws based on outdated science and start promoting nuclear recycling -- and we need it yesterday.
-- Special thanks to a friend who wrote a good half of the entire article
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