This is pretty incredible. (For greater detail, I strongly recommend going here.)
Perhaps related, and equally ridiculous, is that the CRU apparently no longer even has their original raw data for independent experts to check. They threw it all out when they moved buildings in the 1980s and only kept their edited/modified data...Which if the above is an indication of how they work, isn't really surprising.
But it's ok. Because we're all set to impose trillions of dollars worth of damage to the global economies to fix a problem whose existence is based to a non-insignificant degree on the "scientific" work of people at the CRU that disproportionately shaped IPCC reports used by government and issue activists to convince the world of the problem...
So why would we need anything other than their word that their conclusions are based on actual...you know...science.
The bullish case for Brazil
10 hours ago
But I've started to wonder if politics can completely steer clear of science. Have you ever heard of Thomas Kuhn? Richard Rorty made good use of his work (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions) to argue that far from revealing an objective reality, science actually consisted more of paradigm shifts that radically changed its vocabulary and accepted practices at different moments in history.
ReplyDeleteThe Wikipedia page mentions some examples of this rather complicated, abstract point. Perhaps we're at a similar moment here, where there's a vigorous debate about what should be accepted as scientific method and not.
But to the particular problem you raise in this post, Esquire: I'm not certain that the CRU emails reveal as vast a conspiracy as you imply. (Before these e-mails leaked, I hadn't even heard of the CRU -- is it really as important as people make it out? Is the entire climate science field dependent on these folks in Wales or wherever-they-are?)
This is the Real Climate response to HARRY Read Me Txt issue:
ReplyDeleteHARRY_read_me.txt. This is a 4 year-long work log of Ian (Harry) Harris who was working to upgrade the documentation, metadata and databases associated with the legacy CRU TS 2.1 product, which is not the same as the HadCRUT data (see Mitchell and Jones, 2003 for details). The CSU TS 3.0 is available now (via ClimateExplorer for instance), and so presumably the database problems got fixed. Anyone who has ever worked on constructing a database from dozens of individual, sometimes contradictory and inconsistently formatted datasets will share his evident frustration with how tedious that can be.
See: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack-context/
If I'm not mistaken, the CSU TS 3.0 is based on the prior incarnations of the data that Mr. Harris was trying to reverse engineer (because the original data was missing/corrupted, etc.). I'll see if I can track down analysis explaining their relationship.
ReplyDeleteIf that's the case, the idea that "presumably the database problems got fixed" doesn't cut it when that data is central to numerous reports and studies that are being used as justification for some of the most draconian global economic and social policies in human history.
As to your first post...East Anglia and the CRU are widely considered by people who deal with this stuff to be among the "headquarter" organizations for scientists who advocate anthro-based GW theories. It's not some minor, insignificant body. (That's why they were exchanging emails with major GW-scientists from all over the world).