Climategate Thread (split topic)

[tater]

Originally Posted by Tribesman

Ah yes "climategate", despite the media frenzy and the conspiracy theories that story turned out to be 99.9% total rubbish.

It was never independently investigated. Setting a few of your own folks to self-investigate is BS. Read the emails (I have). They are: 1. admitted to be 100% real bythe authors of said emails. 2. Paint a picture of collusion to disallow any alternate narratives in the literature. 3. clearly demonstrate massive QC problems with the code they use ("spaghetti" does't even begin to describe it, the SH analogy would be that midway through some torpedo runs you'd have to exit the game, then enter a value for a hit or miss (whatever you prefer!) in a text file, then reload the game (only for some date ranges, attacks made before some day in 42 might be fine, then all around, say, Midway, they don;t work at all...)

"Climategate" says nothing about the veracity of the science (though "use our model, except for a bunch of important time frames where we will insert better data "by hand"" is pretty damning (it's right in the remarks for the code they used, after all). It does paint a terrible picture of how science is being done where VAST amounts of taxpayer money is on the line. No honest science person can think it looked good (it's certainly not how they taught us the "system" worked in astrophysics).

So it's not 99% rubbish in the least, it's signal-heavy unless you have an agenda. (it takes an agenda not to read their own words at face value—the emails are an observational fact, after all).

My suggestion would be not to base your opinion on "climategate" on what a few loons on the anti-AGW side say about it (loons who don't understand the science in the first place), nor from loons who support it but can't do the math, themselves (being able to "do the math" is critical to even claiming a semi-informed opinion—if you can't read a real astrophysics paper (and understand it), for example, then your opinion on cosmology or astrophysics is... not very valuable. The problem was never one of discounting the science (there is SOME of that here and there, actually, where they discuss attacking GOOD counter arguments by not letting them get published, mind you), but of the WAY the science was being done. Anyone who cares about the scientific method should want transparent science where methods and data sets are 100% available so it can be replicated—that's the POINT, after all.

That the NYT would attempt to prop up the Obama admin is unsurprising, I'll chalk it up to them caring more about domestic politics than the US in that case. But their hypocrisy remains—they refused to publish the emails because they were "private." These cables also has a presumption of private correspondence. Publish both, or none, but don't defend NOT publishing one, then publish another that should have the same protection.


PS—that asshat Assange claims to have been the climategate news breaker, even though it was on other sites first, so this is slightly related. It's all about Assange... (least to him).