It never pays to withhold information. The University of East Anglia has rightfully been sharply criticised by the Science and Technology Committee of Britain’s House of Commons for doing so.
As The Economist points out today, the criticisms of the first of three different reports on the “climategate” e-mails expected over the next few months over prima facie evidence that the Freedom of Information Act had been breached “were aimed more at the university authorities than at the scientists. The university, it found, had supported the scientists in non-disclosure, rather than helping them follow the act’s procedures”:
“If a small number of FOIA requests had been dealt with properly early on, it seems possible that the large number of requests last year (over 100) might have been averted, or could, perhaps, have been rejected as vexatious … The MPs’ most striking prescription is that climate science should hold itself, and be held to, a higher standard than heretofore when it comes to openness and transparency.”
By not offering that transparency, the University of East Anglia has ensured that headlines such as this one in The Daily Mail appears:
“Climategate university condemned for ‘unacceptable culture of secrecy”
And this BUT gets buried in the third paragraph down:
“But it cleared researchers at the university’s Climatic Research Unit of wrongdoing and said there was no evidence they manipulated data to strengthen a case for man-made global warming.”
For a brief moment, scientists such as those from East Anglia had the world’s ear. That moment has passed. Now, as their research is exonerated, no one’s listening.
Quick, someone forward this information to Frank Campbell:
“But it cleared researchers at the university’s Climatic Research Unit of wrongdoing and said there was no evidence they manipulated data to strengthen a case for man-made global warming.”
…before it’s too late!
Hey Crikey, this is how you do it …..
Posted by Doug Disney at 9:31 am
March 31, 2010 Alternet.com
Science wins, nobody seems to notice…
Anthropogenic climate change is not an April Fool’s joke. I know it’s a day early, but I hope that lying asshat George Will and the rest of the idiot flat-earthiers in the climate change denial crowd feel foolish. That might be the case if they were capable of exhibiting human emotions like shame. But since we know they’ll never admit to being wrong, or ever acknowledge that they deliberately ginned-up the faux controversy for purely political purposes. All of us in the reality based community should take this opportunity to point at these fuckwitt liars and laugh.
There was truly no there, there…Phil Jones the director of the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University was exonerated by an inquiry conducted by the British House of Commons. End of story. The science stands. There was no dishonesty found on the part of the researchers, and all the analyses are “consistent and verifiable”. Here is a direct quote from the report: “Even if the data that CRU used were not publicly available—which they mostly are—or the methods not published—which they have been—its published results would still be credible: the results from CRU agree with those drawn from other international data sets; in other words, the analyses have been repeated and the conclusions have been verified.”
Science wins again! Will you even see this story on Faux News? I found the story buried on page ten of my morning paper. When searching the intertubes, I found the story in only a few obscure places, mostly on climate science related sites. Even on the supposedly loony liberal sites like the Huffington Post, the headline was way down on the page and read, ‘Climategate Probe Largely Clears Scientists’ Largely clears? Did we read the same report? You would think the verification of the science and the exoneration of the scientists involved would garner as many headlines as the non-existent scandal did before the Copenhagen climate conference…
“Now, as their research is exonerated, no one’s listening.”
A whiny, plaintive note. Do you really think the fading of the climate cult is down to climategate? It was just one recent accelerant. The process has been going on for about four years. The failure was (note past tense) political and economic, as well as problems with “the science”.
As you well know, resistance (sane and insane) to the cult existed largely in the blogosphere until just a few months ago, apart from some Murdoch fumeroles. To express the slightest doubt about AGW was to incur ridicule and abuse. No respectable person dared put their head above the parapet.
Crikey’s tribalism and lack of basic journalistic scepticism on AGW governs its assessment of the Commons committee report. Only denialist bolttrolls believed that computer modellers cooked the books. What is starkly evident from the emails is a culture of exclusion, of which denial of data to others is but one part. The small clique of computer modellers sought by every means possible over two decades to establish their hypothesis as the ruling orthodoxy. This involved vilification of opposition scientists, fights for control over journals, denigration of uncooperative journals, corruption of the peer review process, acquisition of large research grants then dispensed to loyal followers, a prolonged propaganda campaign designed to cement the AGW hypothesis politically outside the world of science, frequent exaggeration of the likely effects of GW, and much more.
The Triumph of the Modellers was to enlist social democracy worldwide to the cult by means of fear, a bogus appeal to the sanctity of “science” (as if these infinitely variable ‘scenarios’ are science at all) and conflation of many sensible/progressive policies with the credo of the cult: hyperconsumption, “pollution”, etc. An egregious blurring of the good with the mad. It sucked in many people. It’s now over, apart from expensive empty gestures.
So when Crikey blames apathy or a gutless media, just remember that you, the cultists, held the whip hand for years and achieved absolutely nothing. Except the empowering of the feral Right and neglect of the environment.
Look at Bob Carr’s piece today in Crikey: Neither AGW nor GW get a mention in his prognostications about Australia’s next 40 years. But bugger me, didn’t Prof. Kevin Anderson say 90% of us would be dead by mid-century? That’s why no one’s listening, Crikey. The mainstream just doesn’t believe it any more.
well where’s the fun for the carbon lobby in admitting we was wrong
FFS Frank I can’t deal with this great wall of ignorance from you anymore. This is about the tenth time on Crikey you have called the CRU people modellers whereas they are paleoclimatologists. Climate modellers use differential equations and supercomputers to compare present climate with future predictions, paleoclimatologists use dated climate proxies like tree rings and statistics to compare present climate with past climates. The fact that you are either unaware or unwilling to understand this simple difference illustrates James Lovelock’s point beautifully. Happy Easter.