Cooling the Cockles
Even though the major networks have done a rather conspicuous job of not covering the story, if John Stewart has his teeth around Climategate then I can safely assume that most of you have heard of it by now. In a nutshell, it seems as though those wacky cut-ups at East Anglia University in Great Britain–which happens to be the one-stop shop for global warming information–was caught fudging its data, thanks to some leaked e-mails that illustrated the shenanigans in rather graphic detail. We also found out that the source code used to create their climate models is hopelessly buggy–not that it makes much of a difference, as the University somehow deleted most of the raw data used to track temperature changes over the last 150 years.
In military parlance, this is what’s known as a Charlie Foxtrot.
It’s also what happens when science intersects with politics: what’s supposed to be a dispassionate collection and analysis of hard numbers instead turns into some ham-handed manipulation of statistics designed to create a panic about something which may or may not be real. Call me old-fashioned, but I always thought that science was about what you could prove. That’s the reason that peer review journals exist: to present data and findings so that other scientists can reproduce the results under the same conditions. In that respect, science invites skepticism. More than that, science thrives on it. Without others doing their best to poke holes in your theory, you could easily work off assumptions that are dead wrong.
Unless you work at East Anglia. Apparently those guys are all avid readers of Science Made Stupid (which has a disturbingly prescient breakdown of the modern scientific method)–that, or most of them got their degrees from the Bernie Madoff School of Climate Studies (Motto: “As long as people keep buying in, what’s the big deal?”). Problem is, eventually you have to square what you’re selling with what people can see with their own eyes–namely, that there ain’t been a lot of warming for the last ten years or so. Talk about your inconvenient truths.
So what’s the bottom line? Well, honest enviornmentalists should be pissed for one. I don’t know about you, but if mankind really is causing the planet to roast, I’d like to know about it. Thanks to the East Anglia’s data massage parlor, though, we may never find out–because now they’ve cast doubt over the entire study, not to mention a scientific community that was so anxious to hop on the climate change bandwagon that they didn’t bother to ask the tough questions. Trust us, they said. We’re scientists. We don’t have an agenda. As it turns out, they don’t have much of a basis for their climate models, either. That’s a hell of a thing to take on faith, guys–particularly when you’re talking about remaking the entire world economy to combat CO2 emissions. After this episode, don’t be surprised if people won’t just take your word for it.
Even if there is a consensus.
Posted on December 3, 2009
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