So, apparently there's some kind of climate thing going on...
Just kidding. The much ballyhooed hacked emails from Britain's University of East Anglia, which is a leading world research center on climate, are indeed an outrage, if maybe not exactly for the reasons that American conservatives portray them. The scandal doesn't undo the growing pool of evidence -- most of it developed elsewhere -- that the planet continues to experience warmer temperatures and a loss of polar ice, but the secrecy, trash-talking and unnecessary throwing away of raw data has indeed undermined a generation of scientific research, and made addressing the issue of greenhouse gases more problematic than ever.
The coverup is always worse than the crime, and in this case there may have been only the coverup, which in a way makes the actions of the scientists here even more ridiculous and unpardonable. The key word here is transparency, and this Financial Times article nails it pretty well:
The malice, mischief and Machiavellian manoeuvrings revealed in the illegally hacked megabytes of emails from the University of East Anglia’s prestigious Climate Research Unit, for example, offers a useful paradigm of contemporary scientific conflict. Science may be objective; scientists emphatically are not. This episode illustrates what too many universities, professional societies, and research funders have irresponsibly allowed their scientists to become. Shame on them all.
The source of that shame is a toxic mix of institutional laziness and complacency. Too many scientists in academia, industry and government are allowed to get away with concealing or withholding vital information about their data, research methodologies and results. That is unacceptable and must change.
It's sad to see this, because the lack of transparency has also been one of my biggest complaints in pushing for changes in the way that we journalists do our own business. Both climate-change research and news reporting are highly contentious areas in the 21st Century, and people develop a circle-the-wagons mentality, but that is very, very wrong. There's nothing that screams out more to be open and transparent, with data to be shared by all, than critical scientific research, especially in a Computer Age where transparency is here at the push of a button. So shame on you is right, East Anglia scientists.
Shame on you because your paranoia, etc., has now drowned out stories like this one that I think people need to hear:
The permanent Arctic sea ice that is home to the world's polar bears and usually survives the summer has all but disappeared, a Canadian researcher said Friday.
University of Manitoba Arctic researcher David Barber said experts around the world believed the ice was recovering because satellite images showed it expanding, but the thick, multiyear frozen sheets have been replaced by thin ice that cannot support the weight of a polar bear.
So let's get it all out there -- all your raw data and all your emails, etc., for the whole world to see, online -- and lets get climate-change believers and climate-change skeptics talking to each other for a change, and let's hash this thing out. Because regardless of whether global warming is the greatest threat of the 21st Century or something akin to a hoax, the regular folks of the world need answers, and we need them yesterday.
P.S. When was computer hacking decriminalized?
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Will, you refuse to believe that you're being sold the 'climate change' noise by government and business types who want power and profit at your expense by selling you something that's 'good' for you. Try and aim a small beam of your skepticism at your own belief system.- Comment removed.
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How is President Obama going to go to Copenhagen, and try to "hide the decline" in his aproval rating?— Mr. Smith- Comment removed.
But swifty if was for cricket , I mean cricket ! *LOL* , now if was to watch United I could understand or England play rugby. Actually Will I agree with you , what you didnt point out is Anglia University is the worlds leading proponent of global warming , and the fact they destroyed all the data thats show how they have arrived at some of their conclusions is nothing short of deliberate sabotage , they ensured nobody can look at their early work or even point out the flaws of which we all know are there . As the co-founder of greenpeace said global warming became an industry , a very rich industry and its in their best interests to continue to promote the sky is falling . At least in Britain the media are starting to ask questions about this whole thing , more than can be said for the MSM here .— PAEnglish
Wow! I thought that this whole "climategate" thing was pretty funny, with over the top lunatics claiming that throwing out records in the '80s amounts to "deliberate sabotage" to prevent people from accessing data that still exists at the original source. But now that I see that Mark Steyn has weighed in, I'm convinced that it's true - there really is a international conspiracy among tens of thousands of scientists, hundreds of prestigious journals, and scores of governments. I mean, who knows more about climate science than Mark Steyn? LOL!— Talking point sleuth- Complex computer modeling of multifactorial systems is a booger, no doubt about it. Responses to variables tend to be nonlinear, and it's damned difficult to determine WHICH variables are truly significant. So the scientists who stumbled into the anthropogenic (man-made) global warming hypothesis more than 20 years ago made a bunch of mistakes. They worked from unreliable (horribly corrupted) data, concentrated on inadequate and non-representative data sources, failed to consider critically important factors (like the role of that big ball of thermonuclear fire 93,000,000 miles away), ran their information through kludged and worthless computer programs, came up with a Chicken Little surmise, and - whoops! - got rewarded for it by professional liars like Al Gore. So ever since then they've been covering-up for themselves like cats stuffed full of Ex-Lax, refusing to release either their data or their computer codes, stonewalling FOIA demands, conspiring to delete data and e-mails to eliminate evidence, hijacking peer review throughout the literature, blackmailing editors, and generally behaving more like politicians (who lie for a living) than scientists (who have to tell the truth). And all because of a string of really stupid mistakes for which they got a toxic dose of praise and prestige more than two decades ago.— Tucci
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"get climate-change believers and climate-change skeptics talking to each other" What? I thought the debate was over, and we conservatives were just "deniers" who hated science. Now we've got to talk? I don't think so. The true deniers and enemies of science have been revealed, and it's all about politics and control. The agenda is dead.— jmc- I'll give Will credit for mentioning it but to say most newspapers and segments of the media have not taken great pains to bury this is would be an obvious lie an even bigger threat to our freedom.— tr88
- Swifty, past that Rajendra Pachauri is director general for India's Energy and resources Institute. He constatly asks developed countries to sign off on cripplign their economy, while saying that India will hold out. He's an economist and has a stake in this. If the US and Britian restrict their usage, his country will benefit greatly. If he truly beleived in climate change, he'd be asking all countries to do the same.— RG
Will Bunch, a senior writer at the Philadelphia Daily News, blogs about his obsessions, including national and local politics and world affairs, the media, pop music, the Philadelphia Phillies, soccer and other sports, not necessarily in that order.
E-mail Will by clicking here.
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