5th review of illegaly obtained CRU emails show?

faethor said:
No wrong doing on the part of scientists.
Click to expand...

I'm not surprised - and I'm not even being sarcastic.

When the story first broke I was quite angry with the first few snippets that were released. I expected that we would learn more over time and get a glimpse at how a fraud had been committed. What happened instead was that the first few nuggets that were disclosed were repeated endlessly and nothing new came out. Considering the number of emails released, this seemed odd. I tried reading a fair bunch of the emails and I know the anti-anthro-warmers must have scoured them - but there just wasn't anything else in there - and it turned out that when you look again at what WAS in there it turned into not much of a big deal anyway.

It quickly became apparent that there was a lot of smoke but no fire, no matter how much people fanned it.
 
But, but, but..... it's the biggest scam in human history, dontcha know?
 
Robert said:
But, but, but..... it's the biggest scam in human history, dontcha know?
Click to expand...
And that's the hardpart of any conspiracy. Often the person that embraces a conspiracy theory throws out logic and reason. Instead they accept gut reaction. I suspect the anti-GW crowd see this as clear indication of government manipulation of climate science.
 
faethor said:
And that's the hardpart of any conspiracy. Often the person that embraces a conspiracy theory throws out logic and reason. Instead they accept gut reaction. I suspect the anti-GW crowd see this as clear indication of government manipulation of climate science.
Click to expand...

I hate how "conspiracy theory" has come to mean paranoid delusion. Partly, I think, there has been a long PR push linking suspicion of authority to psychiatric conditions, and partly there is a natural hookiness to the meme because everybody likes to feel better about themselves and their beliefs by ridiculing other people's beliefs.

By lumping people with concerns in with the clinically insane you harden their positions. By giving people the easy unthinking beating stick of ready made ridicule you make it easy for the average Joe to ignore things of real concern. If you step back you can see this everywhere. If you look at the "evolution debates" you see the technique of ridicule is used by the creationists to dismiss the evolutionists and vice versa. The outcome is that while the creationists mischaracterize evolution to ridicule it and "evos" just ridicule creation to its face, no minds are changed.

The idea that thousands of scientists around the world are faking their results is not tenable. However, the conspiracy proposed by the (PR company?) people that brought forward the emails was much more reasonable. Their proposal had it that all the data was being massaged between the fundamental researchers and the data users. That is to say that a choke point was identified, a point at which it would become feasible for a small number of people to control the discourse.

However, the choke point wasn't nearly as comprehensive as it had been portrayed nor was the "discovered irregularities" as damning as they should have been.

If there was nothing more to go on than two competing hearsay stories of who said what to whom there would be more room for debate but the very fundamental (and easily verified with cheap equipment) fact that CO2 is good at trapping infrared and the other fact that CO2 is increasing (and that we know the processes by which humans make it and can therefore calculate that we are the biggest contributer) makes the case for warming without having to count tree rings or watch glaciers. The energy accounting tells the story.

However, that says nothing about whether conspiracies exist.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top