Comments on: You’re Absolutely Wrong and I Agree With You

By: CDB

CDB — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 15:36:15 +0000

What I want to know is when someone will take on the question of why it took a ton of FOIA requests and finally a hacker to get released what should have been publicly available information which was stored on a publicly funded server and used to back very public conclusions of publicly funded studies with heavy implications for public policy that were performed by publicly funded so called scientists.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 14:41:49 +0000

One way to perhaps fix this broken cycle is to require all source data and code to be available online prior to publication and to allow numerous experts (with both favorable and unfavorable views of the conclusions) the chance to scrutinize each paper prior to publication. Then you can require the authors to take the reviewers’ comments into consideration as they rewrite their submission.

Where I come from, we call this “peer-review”… works pretty well!

By: Another Guy namded Dan

Another Guy namded Dan — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 01:54:40 +0000

Hopefully someone smarter than I will read this, but I wonder if as a government employee Dr. Mann is subject to the qui tam provisions of the False Claims Act. It seems to me that conspiring to suppress results that may put your research findings in jeopardy is as grave as manipulating data or falsifying data in a research program funded by the United States government.

I just wonder what would happen to a pharmaceutical company that “invented” “new” “statistical” “techniques” in support of research into a new cough medicine the way Mann has played with the data in his climate studies. This seems to be on the order of “We’ll truncate out all the data on the patients that didn’t get better, then come up with ways to make the ones that did get better look sicker than they really were.”

By: Fred from Canuckistan . . .

Fred from Canuckistan . . . — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 22:14:16 +0000

Monckton weighs in . . .

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/viscount-monckton-on-global-warminggate-they-are-criminals-pjm-exclusive/

By: mbabbitt

mbabbitt — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 20:46:55 +0000

What I got from reading the emails is that the public face of “consensus” is just that, a facade. The reality is that this consensus is a work in progress, a continuous hunkering down, a keeping out and disparaging of anything or anyone who dares speaks apostasy. This so-called group of scientists make up a true cabal of manipulators and have just been exposed as such. The effects their so-called consensus is a full attack on modern life and a propping up of massively financed ponzi schemes designed to fend off that which does not exist to any extent they have proposed. Since they sold their scientific souls for ideology and or money, I consider them evil. The waste of resources and loss of other opportunities that this garbage has already wrought on the world mind is truly staggering. And they are only getting started. That’s what is really frightening and why they must be stopped. Hopefully, this exposure will be the straw that breaks their grip on the world.

By: oliver

oliver — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 20:08:49 +0000

It is certainly important to understand the world around us. To ‘pure’ scientists, the knowledge itself is a worthy end goal. To policy makers, there must often be a business case – in other words, the knowledge must be actionable, or at least have the promise of being actionable. In order to be considered actionable, there must generally be concensus. So any appearance of non-concensus must be filtered out (partially or completely) before it reaches the policymakers, or funds will likely not be allocated.

The problem is especially apparent in the climate modeling community – supercomputers are expensive to set up and run. The catastrophic warming scenarios motivate the need for action (and ongoing research), accompanying need for concensus.

So what’s broken is the underlying scientific grant process – it tends to reward concensus-based science. A contributing factor may be a lack of funding for basic research – that is, research that is not necessarily actionable and doesn’t have a preconceived outcome.

By: Sean

Sean — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 19:35:35 +0000

Looking for motivation? … follow the money. Who stands to benefit most from cap and trade or other emission trading schemes? I suspect it is the traders. It seems no matter what befalls the markets and the economy, bonuses of the traders continue to rise. C&T and ETS are nothing more than on opportunity to pay a commision for the privledge of exhaling.

By: Fred from Canuckistan . . .

Fred from Canuckistan . . . — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 19:32:04 +0000

Now that’s a “scientific consensus” I can agree with