[...and maybe climate realists have brain problems, and maybe they believe the Grand Canyon was caused by Noah's Flood!] : NPR
Mr. REVKIN: Well, you know, for those who are dead set to oppose any restrictions on greenhouse gases, Climategate will never be over. They're going to keep - that reverberating echo chamber of the blogosphere will keep asserting that this episode fundamentally eroded understanding, you know, the idea that we have a clear picture of a human warming climate. And that's all -that's not going to change, just because there are people who are immune to evidence.
In many corners of polarized discourse these days, people pick the evidence that suits - or sometimes manufacture evidence that suits an agenda. Unfortunately, there were enough snippets within this body of stuff, you know, several megabytes of emails and other things, to provide conspiracy theorists with lots of fare(ph) for a long time to come.
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Jim: My question is, has the hockey, the so-called hockey stick graph, has that been discredited?
Mr. REVKIN: ...the main thrust of that work has been repeatedly replicated by other groups of scientists.
So the idea that we're in a period of unusual warming in the last 50 years has not been erased.
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FLATOW: And, you know, people, I think naysayers, they have a left brain -what they call a left brain, right brain problem, you know? The political side of their mind is now clashing with the logical side. You know, they could see you up in the North Pole pictures of you showing there's no ice anymore up there in the summertime and say, wait a minute, but my political side says that shouldn't happen.
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FLATOW: Yeah. I've always thought that to be true, you know? If you believe that the Grand Canyon was caused by Noah's flood, not much anybody's going to tell you, you turn you around? You'll find the data.
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"...Climategate will never be over. They're going to keep - that reverberating echo chamber of the blogosphere will keep asserting that this episode fundamentally eroded understanding, you know, the idea that we have a clear picture of a human warming climate. And that's all -that's not going to change, just because there are people who are immune to evidence."
On the one hand there are Warming Believers immune to the evidence too - some who have state-funded microphones and a national audience to promulgate their ignorance of the evidence and bigotry against substantive scientific criticism.
On the other hand, there are established climate research scientists formerly convinced of man-made global warming who find climategate disturbing, posing a real challenge to doing sound science.
One is UC-Berkeley physicist and climate scientists Richard Muller, who served on another unsound-science controversy, the famous NAS Hockey Stick panel in 2006. Muller, a MacArthur Grant winner now with Lawrence Livermore Labs, had this to say about climategate scandal to me in an email:
"I found the climategate emails to be extremely disturbing. They do throw doubt on all the work published by the Hadley CRU team, and those who worked with them. I am equally disturbed by their blatant manipulations of the peer-review system.
"Also disturbing are the revelations of the various investigations into the procedures of the IPCC. I had not previously been aware of their extensive use of grey literature, or the apparent fact that authors of sections had the right to overrule referee demands.
"I am now engaged in a scientific re-evaluation of the thermometer data. This is a major project, and we plan to derive a new estimate for temperature change in the past 100 years. I have no idea what the answer will be, because so much of the past work is now tainted. But our work will be transparent and public and we will encourage others to check and duplicate our work." (Personal communication, June 18, 2010.)
Clearly, the last paragraph indicates that climate scientists have seen their credibility impugned, and their data and results scientifically damaged. Thus climategate has taught them lessons about their conduct and standards of evidence they would not have learned without the scandal.
Interestingly, neither Flato nor Revkin have learned how practicing climate scientists are reacting to climategate with reforms aimed to meet their critics challenges. Instead they persist in the True Belief that there's nothing wrong with climate science as practiced before the scandal. If so, why would Prof. Muller be so concerned? And so eager to meet new standards of transparency? Obviously, transparency of data, methods, and official conduct need reform, just as skeptics have long claimed.
From of Muller's perspective, who is the unlearned, marginalized crank now? And they call themselves “jounralists?”
"Also disturbing are the revelations of the various investigations into the procedures of the IPCC. I had not previously been aware of their extensive use of grey literature, or the apparent fact that authors of sections had the right to overrule referee demands.
"I am now engaged in a scientific re-evaluation of the thermometer data. This is a major project, and we plan to derive a new estimate for temperature change in the past 100 years. I have no idea what the answer will be, because so much of the past work is now tainted. But our work will be transparent and public and we will encourage others to check and duplicate our work." (Personal communication, June 18, 2010.)
Clearly, the last paragraph indicates that climate scientists have seen their credibility impugned, and their data and results scientifically damaged. Thus climategate has taught them lessons about their conduct and standards of evidence they would not have learned without the scandal.
Interestingly, neither Flato nor Revkin have learned how practicing climate scientists are reacting to climategate with reforms aimed to meet their critics challenges. Instead they persist in the True Belief that there's nothing wrong with climate science as practiced before the scandal. If so, why would Prof. Muller be so concerned? And so eager to meet new standards of transparency? Obviously, problems with transparency of data, methods, and official conduct need reform, just as skeptics have long claimed.
From of Muller's perspective, who is the unlearned, marginalized crank now? And they call themselves “journalists?”
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