Classical Values :: Fraud for a worthy cause?

December 13, 2009

Fraud for a worthy cause?

It's a complicated read, but "The Smoking Gun At Darwin Zero" by Willis Eschenbach (which Jerry Pournelle calls a must-read) explains in detail why Climategate is about a lot more than the scientific bitch fight that the AGW advocates and their media allies are allies would have people believe. You should read it all, as it's carefully researched and extremely damning.

Excerpt:

the clumsy fingerprints of someone messing with the data Egyptian style [...] are indisputable evidence that the "homogenized" data has been changed to fit someone's preconceptions about whether the earth is warming.

One thing is clear from this. People who say that "Climategate was only about scientists behaving badly, but the data is OK" are wrong. At least one part of the data is bad, too. The Smoking Gun for that statement is at Darwin Zero.

So once again, I'm left with an unsolved mystery. How and why did the GHCN "adjust" Darwin's historical temperature to show radical warming? Why did they adjust it stepwise? Do Phil Jones and the CRU folks use the "adjusted" or the raw GHCN dataset? My guess is the adjusted one since it shows warming, but of course we still don't know ... because despite all of this, the CRU still hasn't released the list of data that they actually use, just the station list.

(HT Glenn Reynolds for the Pournelle link.)

I have a question. What kind of "scientists" refuse to allow scrutiny of data which lies at the very heart of the international juggernaut intent on placing the entire world economy in shackles and ultimately controlling nearly every person on this planet?

I used the quotes because I don't think con artists deserve to be called scientists.

Fraud at such a level makes favorite villains like Ken Lay and Bernie Madoff look like pikers.

The difference of course, is that while Lay and Madoff engaged in fraud to commit economic damage for personal gain, the "scientist" con artists believed in a higher cause, and were motivated by that same perverse sort of altruism that characterizes dishonest fanatics like Communists or Islamists.

Does that altruistic motivation make them better? Or does it make them worse?

I suppose it depends on your view of their cause.

posted by Eric on 12.13.09 at 01:10 PM

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://classicalvalues.com/cgi-bin/pings.cgi/9146

Comments

Some of the followers might be true believers, but most of the front people aren't motivated by any desire to save the Earth from global worming.
There are a few different types.

Hate-people types whose solution to every problem is to reduce man's impact on the Earth (preferably to zero, as in, we're outta here).
Green groups are in there.

Commies and other totalitarians who want power and money.
Politicians in other words.

Slimy con artists who want money and power.
Gore and the UN for instance.

Once it becomes apparent to these anti-science iceholes that the Earth is cooling, they're going to start bleating about the coming ice age and how it's all our fault.
The solution to that "problem" will be remarkably similar to the ones they're doing to stop the Earth from getting hotter than the Sun.

Veeshir · December 13, 2009 01:57 PM

"the 'scientist' con artists believed in a higher cause"

Don't forget that they see themselves as part of the ruling elite which will be exempt from most of the hardships that their radical policies will cause: Ordinary people will become much poorer, but the scientific priesthood *needs* all those perks in order to do their jobs--and, as Servants of Humanity, they are entitled.

pst314 · December 13, 2009 04:04 PM

Climategate got me interested in looking at the data. According to various web sources, the NOAA maintained Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN) data is as good as any and perhaps better than most. It's on the web and I downloaded all of it. I wrote a short program to sort it out by year, and then used Excel to plot the yearly average temperature going back to 1701. The raw temperature data from file v2.mean shows a rather steady climb in temperature maybe 9 degrees C in the 1700's to mayby 14 and a skosh today. Temperature data from file v2.mean_adj shows pure trash from 1701 to 1838 and a fairly flat temperature curve from 1838 to the present. According to the readme, v2.mean_adj was computed from v2.mean but they don't say just what "adjustments" were applied. If you believe in the adjusted data, gobal warming isn't happening. If you believe in the raw data, then we have about 5 degrees C over three centuries. Plots of the data are on my blog at www.newsnorthwoods.blogspot.com

David Starr · December 13, 2009 04:05 PM

"What kind of "scientists" refuse to allow scrutiny of data which lies at the very heart of the international juggernaut intent on placing the entire world economy in shackles and ultimately controlling nearly every person on this planet?"

A POLITICAL scientist, my friend, a political scientist.

Rhodium Heart · December 13, 2009 04:50 PM

Politically active scientists expect the respect for their work that scientists of 50 years ago took for granted.

They're not educated enough to understand that their political activity has disqualified them from that level of respect.

Politically motivated science is not to be trusted. Period. Too bad for the few honest researchers.

If the profession voluntarily exited from government subsidy, it would have a chance of regaining the people's trust.

But they're not educated enough to know that they are too corrupt to recognize such a solution to their problems.

Scientists, uneducated? Yes, indeed. Many of them are profoundly ignorant.

Brett · December 14, 2009 08:08 AM