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Friday, November 25, 2011

Climategate 2.0

Over at Watts Up With That we have a short discussion of the "Climategate" EMails, Version 2.0.  On the one hand you have the admission that the "Data" isn't available.  This is, of course, ridiculous from a scientific point of view.  If the dog ate your homework you are back at Square One.  There is no way to grade your homework and thus no credibility.  Mr David Palmer, Freedom of Information Officer for the CRU, wrote, at the time:
My head is beginning to spin here but I read this as meaning that he wants the raw station data; we don’t know which data belongs to which station, correct?
Yes, it does sound like Mr Palmer believes someone has his hand in the cookie jar.

The author of the Blog Post, Mr Willis Eschenbach, puts his finger on the larger issue, the issue that creates libertarian urges in the People:
My conclusion after all this time is that Phil [Jones] truly didn’t get it.  He actually didn’t understand.  He was not the owner of private data.  He was the curator of public data. He didn’t understand that FOI requests are legal documents.  Throughout the whole episode he treated them as some kind of optional request to grant or not as he saw fit.  In this he was aided and abetted by David Palmer.
A serious problem with the whole climate change issue is scientists trying to act like politicians.

Last evening I was in a discussion of this issue and a PhD in Marine Biology made the point that some impacts of "global warming" can be quickly reversed.  That was interesting.  The flip side was the mention of the question of how we reverse greenhouse gases with China and India still trying to grow to where Western economies are now.  We talked soft coal, hard coal, gas and nuclear power and no one had a nervous breakdown.  There are hard problems out there and we need new engineering solutions and a realization that tradeoffs will be required.

Regards  —  Cliff

2 comments:

JoeS said...

"A serious problem with the whole climate change issue is scientists trying to act like politicians."

A more serious problem, I would offer, is politicians trying to act like scientists.

Anonymous said...

Amen to that!!! The fact is that eco scientists, even the ones with open scientific minds, are a long way from defining outcomes...end states. They create models based on data and then try to predict what the models can simulate. In the end, we just don't know if this or that will do this or that....only that under some circumstances it might. All of the chicken little behavior about the melting ice shelves are, one, exaggerated it seems, and two, apparently cyclical.

Interesting too that in spite of the shrill warnings from American academia and elite intelligentsia, the government attempt to block harmful emissions emanating from the mid west from drifting over the northeast....so it is.....ipso facto.....okay to burn coal in the midwest.....but BAD for us to do it in the NE. Well....what else are they going to burn there??? Corn stalks?? Pictures of Obama?