Climategate Thread (split topic)

[tater]

Originally Posted by Tribesman

So you have a pile of different investigations at several levels through differnt groups and on both a governmental and non governmental basis and all find that it was nothing really.
Yet that doesn't fit with your view so there must be something wrong with the investigations
I see why you have the proiblem, it was an investigation of scientific methodology by scientists, to fit your criteria for an "independant" investigation in would have to be people who don't know science investigating science on the basis of a framework established by some crazy media reports made from just a few selected words.

The investigations never even talked to McIntyre. they were whitewashes. It was pretty much open and shut unethical behavior that paints the climate science community in a bad light---even those who are NOT unethical (hence the problem with these guys and why they should have been hammered). Again, this is not about science, but method, and appearance. When your work is the reason de être for massive government programs, even the appearance of impropriety is a serious issue.

They did not make available data and code required by the journals they published in. They intentionally dragged their feet on FOIA requests (in their defense in the "investigations" they claimed they were buried in requests, but in fact it was a handful over several years). The one guy said in an email he'd destroy the data and say he lost it instead of fufilling his legal FOIA obligations.

To not have a problem with this is to not care about how science is done. I'm trained in astrophysics, and have many friends who are active research scientists. The most common reaction to this by them is "how could they set important work back with this kind of nonsense behavior?" Of course my friends are in HARD sciences where most of climate models would be considered not nearly good enough (climate science is inaccurate even by astronomy standards, and in astronomy hitting an order of magnitude is getting pretty good results ).

As I said, separate what model you think best describes the global climate from the process. I think that the basic premise of human being affecting the climate is not unreasonable. I think that the current models are sloppy at best, however—with very important code being written in effect by amateurs who happened to take a FORTRAN class in grad school. It's actually kind of stunning how awful their code is given the truly vast amounts spent in the last decade on climate science. The trouble with science is that you need to "show the work" and it needs to be reproducible. Having guys work to hide the work is counter to this. People at large seem to forget that "peer review" is only the beginning, not the end. Being published doesn't make it true, it just makes it ready to be tested (and the peers miss serious math issues—even previously published in climate journals—even now (a fairly recent Nature cover on Antarctica, for example has the warming all wrong due to a statistical artifact (was really WARMER in some western areas than shown, but colder inland).

Anyway, openness and transparency is GOOD in science.