Scientists have put out the myth that they are not subject to normal human failings, and that myth is wrong. The warmists have also tried to convince people that “peer reviewed” means correct and not “peer reviewed” means pseudo-science, when in fact peer review is primarily a way of ensuring the quality of papers, and does not guarantee the quality of the science.

Too many scientists, in other words, are trying to convince others that they are right, just because they are scientists, when it is the method, often only over a long period of meandering and false directions, that converges on truth.

Your distinction makes a mockery of the self-correcting character of science. It amounts to saying that agreeing with me is “advancing scientific understanding” while disagreeing is simply “discrediting”. The whole point of science is that it’s subject to “discrediting”. One makes one’s data available to everyone, for the purpose of their trying to find fault. That’s the way science works. If it doesn’t work that way it’s not science, and it doesn’t work. If one is involved in scientific work and won’t make one’s data and methodology freely available, then what one’s doing, scientific or not, isn’t ‘science’, it’s private commercial or political development. Disputants should be judged on the value of their disputes, not a subjective estimate of their ‘expected’ worth in advance. Jones, et al. very clearly wandered off the tracks and ended up engaged in some activity distinctly NOT science, but more like political or ideological advocacy.

It would also appear to me that Phil Jones must have known only too well how shaky his data and methods were. If his science had been robust he would have had no problem at all with sceptics trying to pick fault with it because he would have known that it would stand up to their best efforts.

Jones et. al. have done lasting harm to science as a field of human inquiry, but they have performed one useful service in that they have settled the issue about “settled science”.