Climategate Thread (split topic)

[tater]

Originally Posted by Tribesman

Tater, was "climategate" anything like the huge groundbreakng scandal it was portrayed as in the media when it broke?
No, so it was indeed 99.9% bollox

It was not played up much at all by the media, IMO. Least not here.

It WAS a groundbreaking scandal, so if people failed to see it that way, then it was a failure of the news media. Read the emails, not the press. Read the code comments, and notes by the real programmer they finally hired to try and make sense of their (abysmal) code.

Knowing that literally trillions of dollars are on the line WRT policy initiatives largely based on the science of these very people, and it damn well should have be a scandal.

There was no "smoking gun." Anyone they get to say stuff like that is too partisan. It paints a terrible picture of the way climate studies get published (when a researcher can pressure a colleague to not publish (as an editor) papers that are contrary because they are below them at some institution).

Tax dollars fund their research, and trillions are at stake, nothing less than 100% transparency is acceptable.

What is clear is that they really do cherry pick data, too. Their work is sloppy, and their model is clearly broken. That doesn't mean AGW is wrong, it just means that some primary names in the field are not good scientists. From a public policy standpoint, that does mean they are not worth listening to right now, IMO. Policy and science are not the same. When a check needs to be written, I expect a reasonable cost-benefit analysis. That's not too much to ask. That means good, predictive models of what happens with different policies in place. The idea that it's better to do something, anything, rather than nothing is wrong depending on the cost. because "something" has a cost. Without good models, how can we know if a given policy will even have any measurable effect? Even bothering with a policy that does not fix the problem is pointless and wasteful, better to spend later on mitigation.

Trouble is the huge influx of cash into climate science has had a negative effect. It's a huge cash-cow. The more hype, the more cash available. They get huge grants, but don't hire a real programmer? Where's all the money going? (airfares to climate summits in scientific centers like Bali?) I saw this happen in the 80s with friends who worked as scientists/engineers at the labs (Sandia, Phillips (AF weapons lab), and Los Alamos). SDI money was everywhere, so almost every project ended up SDI related. Before med school my wife was a PhD research scientist in biology (human). AIDS money was everywhere, people stopped doing other work cause getting funded in AIDS was so much easier than clawing out a grant for something less hip like, say, cancer (except some cancers where they were interested in retroviruses as causes, or for treatment). A current buddy is an entomologist, and he said he can get a grant easier if his study of termites includes some nod to how "climate change" affects them.