Politicized ends-justify-the-means “science” includes cutting corners, hiding data, splicing-and-dicing–and cancelling those with different theories and findings. All came to light in the Climategate saga.
Yesterday’s post examined the fire behind the smoke that many had noticed for years. Today’s post resurrects Fred Pearce’s “‘Climategate’ was PR disaster that could bring healthy reform of peer review,” which was published in The Guardian (UK) in February 2010.
From The Guardian
In a unique experiment, The Guardian published online the full manuscript of its major investigation into the climate science emails stolen from the University of East Anglia, which revealed apparent attempts to cover up flawed data; moves to prevent access to climate data; and to keep research from climate sceptics out of the scientific literature.
As well as including new information about the emails, we allowed web users to annotate the manuscript to help us in our aim of creating the definitive account of the controversy.…
Continue Reading“There is no doubt that these emails are embarrassing and a public-relations disaster for science.” – Andrew Dessler, “Climate E-Mails Cloud the Debate,” December 10, 2009.
It has been 11 years since the intellectual scandal erupted called Climategate. Each anniversary inspires recollections and regurgitation of salient quotations. These quotations speak for themselves; attempts of climate alarmists to parse the words and meaning distracts from what was said in real-time private conversations.
And the scandal got worse after the fact when, according to Paul Stephens, “virtually the entire climate science community tried to pretend that nothing was wrong.”
Fred Pearce’s The Climate Files: The Battle for the Truth About Global Warming (2010) was a mainstream look at the scandal. Michael Mann is the bad actor, despite his I-am-the-victim take in his account, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars (2012).…
Continue Reading“Scientists try to discover the truth through observation and open inquiry; thugs try to impose their version of the truth through force and intimidation. As Roger Pielke learned, thuggery works.”
There’s an old trope among lawyers: if the law is on your side, pound the law; if the facts are on your side, pound the facts; if neither the law nor the facts are on your side, pound the table. For thugs, the third option is to pound your opponent.
Today, thugs have taken over much of our politics, many of our universities, and much of our science. Their response to dissent is not to assemble facts and logic to support their claims but to slander, intimidate, and muzzle the opposition.
Canadian investigative journalist, Donna Laframboise, has documented one such case in her paper, The Hounding of Roger Pielke Jr.…
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