Classical Values :: ClimateGate

November 28, 2009

ClimateGate

My two cents as a professional programmer: it's pretty clear from the code comments that the CRU dataset is both junky and deliberately manipulated to produce a warming trend. This is devastating to the credibility of the entire field, because CRU is the most widely cited dataset in climate science, and GCMs are modelled against it. Worst of all, the damage can never be repaired, because CRU has lost their raw data and after this no one is going to trust their "value-added data," especially when they've been caught deleting data that was, shall we say, inconvenient.

It's interesting how this meme is evolving. Megan McArdle, a self-described "confirmed believer" in AGW, has said her basis for belief comes from the claims of consensus among scientists, and I think that's true for a lot of intelligent people. It's a fair cop -- after all, you can't spend your whole life personally verifying every scientific claim. We all have to rely on what amounts to a priori knowledge to a large extent.

Of course, we generally assume pretty strictly in the cases of scientists that our a priori knowledge is a fair representation of their a posteriori knowledge: we reason we can trust their claims because they are objective scientists whose work is carefully reviewed by other objective scientists.

That's why this is so damaging: the consensus is increasingly being shown to be politicially driven by activists who put their agenda ahead of their science. When your primary epistemological basis for costly political action is a consensus of experts, it's problematic when your experts have a clear political slant that compromises their objectivity (or in the case of James "Coal trains are Auschwitz! War crimes trials for skeptics!" Hansen, a fervent crusade that involves getting arrested outside coal plants). It's even more problematic when your experts are exposed conspiring to silence dissenting opinions.

I was mostly convinced of AGW in 1998, when I didn't know much about it beyond MSM coverage and temps were clearly going way up. After a graduate degree in Information Systems, I was considerably more skeptical they could actually predict anything accurately out to 2100 when so many variables were involved. Of course, all that was before bristlecones, Yamal, inverted datasets, a decade of flat temps, and now this...

posted by Dave on 11.28.09 at 09:06 AM

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Comments

I'm an early denier. During the first Clinton-Gore campaign in 1992, at a McKeesport PA rally that Clinton, but not Gore, attended, I held aloft a cardboard sign that read "GLOBAL WARMING IS A FRAUD" one one side, and "SO IS AL GORE" on the other.

DFG · November 28, 2009 12:00 PM

My immediate, reactive "denial" was philosophical, for lack of a better word.

The idea that there was a meaningfully measurable or closely trackable "Global" anything seemed like a fundamental misassumption (or highly error-prone math, at least) that needed a lot of explaining. It never got much.

The assumption's only function, since they weren't showing their work, was to put an occult glaze of lay-inaccessible priestly secret over a mundane apocalyptic prophecy, with all the standard Puritan mend-ye trappings. That meant it was a lie, not a mistake. No prophecy is honest, even if it's right.

Actually, there's no overclass shibboleth that's provable. If it were, anyone could say it and mean it; it wouldn't properly exclude. An effort of will (to lie or falsify), or a willed suppression of will (as in the "confirmed believer"), has to be shown.

guy on internet · November 28, 2009 12:54 PM

The problem for science is where are the predicitons. If there are no predictions, there is no science. The current temperatures are unexpected given their models. Therefore their science is wrong.

For real science it is pretty easy to find experimental verification. If you are interested in the experimental verifications of Einstein's relativity theory it is very easy to find. It is real science. This nonsense is not.

rick · November 28, 2009 01:18 PM

I've been skeptical for a long time because they've always ignored the Sun.
That, and we are really using a tiny portion of the planet, it seems hubris to think that we could affect the whole planet so extensively.
Also because the planet has heated and cooled for all of recorded history, but now it's all our fault.
And of course,because I remember the dreaded Ice Age that was around the corner in the 70s and 80s.

It just seemed ridiculous on its face.

Veeshir · November 28, 2009 01:22 PM

Government funded "science" (AKA BS) will always do whatever it takes to maintain and grow the funding.
If the temperature increased at the rate the funding increased (over the past ten years) the arctic would now be the new tropics.

Hugh · November 28, 2009 03:24 PM

I once studied geology. My first reaction when this talk of warming started was 'Er, Holocene climate optimum? The world handled that just fine, and now a similar warming is a total catastrophe?'. I wasn't sceptical of the warming (not much, although I'm also old enough to remember the ice age is coming -stories), I just couldn't figure why it all of a sudden was supposed to be so bad. But then came that consensus, and the witch hunts for the dissenting scientists, and the whole thing started to smell more of politics, ideology and the search for funding and maintenance of careers than of real science.

MM · November 29, 2009 01:17 AM