Categories
science

Climategate

Wow… all I can say is, wow. For those of you living in a cave or getting your news from TV, climategate has really rattled the global warming orthodoxy around the world. What is climategate? A whole slew of emails and code were either leaked or hacked from CRU, one of the most influential data centers in the world when it comes to global warming data.

The emails are an embarrassment. In them we read about people conspiring to keep dissenting views from being accepted into reputable journals, gnashing of teeth over why they can’t explain the lack of warming, and possibly the effort to delete information that had been requested through freedom of information requests.

As damaging as the emails are, the more serious bits of the release consist of the code used to make the final temperature results used by the the IPCC and many others for policy considerations. At best, the code looks manipulative, at worst, it looks fraudulent. It is littered with comments by programmers that essentially say that the adjustments being made are totally artificial. We’ll see what happens as the code is examined more closely. The head of the CRU has already stepped down while this is being investigated and the UK MET office (closely attached to the CRU) has announced that it will release all the data and redo the calculations for the last 160 years. If they had done that 6 months ago there wouldn’t be such a scandal now.

Those of you that have read my blog for a while know about my skepticism about anthropological global warming. All of that has been based around the sloppy statistical methods and data secrecy involved with the most prominent global warming folks. If nothing else, I hope that these documents will show that this “settled” science seems to rest on some pretty shaky ground. If you don’t believe me, surely you can trust John Stewart, right?

And here’s something from that hotbed of right wing conspiracies, the CBC…

If you’d like to read what has been published, you can find it here.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.