ClimateGate
By Kevin Drum
Mother Jones
Mon November 30, 2009
As near as I can tell, ClimateGate is almost entirely a tempest in a teacup. Among the stash of emails recently hacked from computers at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, one mentioned a "trick" for producing a nice looking graph, but the word "trick" was plainly used in the sense of "technique," not chicanery. There's nothing questionable there. Another bunch of emails shows that when scientists are communicating privately they can be as catty and nasty as anyone else. It's good gossip fodder, but nothing more. Another set of emails deals with outraged reaction to a particular journal article, but this isn't news. It was an entirely public incident when it happened a few years ago, and half the board of the journal resigned in protest. The emailers were determined not to have shoddy science published in peer-reviewed journals, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Then there are some emails about which research should and shouldn't be included in the next IPCC report, which, again, is entirely normal. Every scientist who worked on the IPCC report surely had opinions about which research was on point and which was shoddy. Finally, there's the revelation that CRU has destroyed some raw temperature data, but this happened back in the 1980s, before global warming was even on anyone's radar screen, and was obviously motivated by space considerations (they were paper records), not any kind of coverup. What's more, the raw data is still available from the original sources that provided it to CRU anyway.
Unfortunately, there are also a couple of messages that suggest an effort to destroy emails that might have been subject to a Freedom of Information request. That's a genuine problem, though it's not clear to me just how big a problem it is.
(More here.)
Mother Jones
Mon November 30, 2009
As near as I can tell, ClimateGate is almost entirely a tempest in a teacup. Among the stash of emails recently hacked from computers at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, one mentioned a "trick" for producing a nice looking graph, but the word "trick" was plainly used in the sense of "technique," not chicanery. There's nothing questionable there. Another bunch of emails shows that when scientists are communicating privately they can be as catty and nasty as anyone else. It's good gossip fodder, but nothing more. Another set of emails deals with outraged reaction to a particular journal article, but this isn't news. It was an entirely public incident when it happened a few years ago, and half the board of the journal resigned in protest. The emailers were determined not to have shoddy science published in peer-reviewed journals, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Then there are some emails about which research should and shouldn't be included in the next IPCC report, which, again, is entirely normal. Every scientist who worked on the IPCC report surely had opinions about which research was on point and which was shoddy. Finally, there's the revelation that CRU has destroyed some raw temperature data, but this happened back in the 1980s, before global warming was even on anyone's radar screen, and was obviously motivated by space considerations (they were paper records), not any kind of coverup. What's more, the raw data is still available from the original sources that provided it to CRU anyway.
Unfortunately, there are also a couple of messages that suggest an effort to destroy emails that might have been subject to a Freedom of Information request. That's a genuine problem, though it's not clear to me just how big a problem it is.
(More here.)
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