Climategate
Ξ March 2nd, 2010 | → Comments Off | ∇ Intellectual, Politics |
I didn’t really intend to do two Global Warming posts in a row, but after talking to some friends that said they were completely ignorant of Climategate, I thought I’d post about it. A few months ago, hackers broke into and stole the e-mail records of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. This is one of the most influential Global Warming research outfits in the world. They were heavily influential on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that proclaimed the Global Warming situation dire.
It turns out that they have been engaged in some very shady things – blocking research critical of their findings, “losing” raw data so their findings couldn’t be checked, circumventing Freedom of Information Requests. Eventually, the head of the CRU had to step down. Yesterday, he was questioned by the British Parliament. The Guardian (which isn’t exactly a right-wing, global warming denier outfit) has a rather unflattering writeup. A few quick highlights:
But for the first time he did concede publicly that when he tried to repeat the 1990 study in 2008, he came up with radically different findings. Or, as he put it, “a slightly different conclusion”. Fully 40% of warming there in the past 60 years was due to urban influences. “It’s something we need to consider,” he said.
Also:
[T]he committee will be hard pressed to ignore the issue after the intervention of no less a body than the Institute of Physics. In 13 coruscating paragraphs of written evidence to MPs, it spoke of “prima facie evidence of determined and coordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law”, “manipulation of the publication and peer review system”, and “intolerance to challenge … which is vital to the integrity of the scientific process.” Ouch.
Ouch indeed.
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