Thursday 24 March 2011

Climategate really is the greatest scientific scandal of all time

Shortly after the Climategate scandal broke and I'd had a chance to go through the documents released I described it as the greatest scientific scandal of all time.

Worse than Piltdown Man (which was a corker) or Hwang to name just a couple of famous ones.

The Climate Taliban have been in denial about what Climategate means and the defensive lines seems to be that, yes, mistakes were made but it doesn't undermine the overall scientific support for the climate change thesis.

The scientist at the centre of Climategate is Phil Jones. He had such credibility within the climate community that he was a contributing author to Chapter 12, Detection of Climate Change and Attribution of Causes, of the Third Assessment Report (2001) and a Coordinating Lead Author of Chapter 3, Observations: Surface and Atmospheric Climate Change, of the Fourth Assessment Report (2007).

In this latter role Jones wielded a lot of power and had the ability to control the direction of the report.

So his credibility matters. A lot.

Now it has come out that not only did his climate group at the University of East Anglia 'hide the decline' in the post 1960 'spaghetti graph' of temperature that is pervasive throughout climate literature but they also manipulated the starting point of the series in order to eradicate an inconvenient result - in pink below - as demonstrated by the one man climate science truth finder, Steve McIntyre:



How amazing is that?

What sort of scientist goes to work knowing that what they're putting forward is a complete fraud?

If Phil Jones can't be honest with what his own team is putting forward then how can we trust anything he's allowed into the Fourth Assessment Report?

More importantly, how could it survive peer review? Aren't we repeatedly told that peer review in climate science is beyond reproach? If that's really the case then why do so many critical errors and fabrications continue to be discovered? It's as if the peer review process is either a sham or is carried out be people who accept the science and don't look too hard.

I have a theory that climate science has attracted a large number of mediocre scientists over the years simply because there's a lot of funding to be had and, critically, there's no demand to prove what they're doing is true. How else can climate models have a zero percent prediction rate yet the people who create them are held in high regard within the climate community? There is so little scientific skill that scientists simply trust each other's work.

The worst part is that the mainstream media will completely ignore yet another piece of proof that climate science is a corrupt, inaccurate discipline that has been taken over by scientific hacks seeking money and prestige, and environmental activists wanting to use it for political advantage.

(Nothing Follows)


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