So I am very disturbed that the world’s societies would ever consider acting on any such predictions even absent the self-serving manipulations now being exposed.

BTW, I do not believe that all of these people are diabolically attempting to rip off the rest of us. I think for the most part they feel personally convinced about global warming but inadequately armed to convince anyone else or to fend off external challenges to inadequate modeling and uncooperative data. So they get secretive and “creative” since they “know” what is good for the rest of us.

What I find crucial problem is the revelation that the guys were unable to reproduce their own results, let alone other were able to do it, see the programmer’s notes. Such results are not scientific by definition of “science” and anything based on these results should be considered unproved. What I do not understand is how much of the GW is based on these papers.

Mark, this would be a lot more convincing if it were recognizable as the way peer review is actually done. I don’t know of any peer reviewed journal or conference that uses only one reviewer, and the reasons are always written out in detail, even if you don’t know who wrote them. In fact, peer review was invented to eliminate this problem: the mysterious Editor who rejects things for good or bad reasons.

Imperfect? You bet — this will probably be the textbook example of the imperfections for years to come. But, as Churchill said about democracy, it’s a horrible system but still 8 times better than our other choices.

You know, there are a lot of people you’d get on with over on Ian’s thread.

17 degrees, 17 seconds, who cares?

The point was that the same scientific experts; geniuses if you will that finally confirmed Einstein was correct are the empirical wizards that turned around and swallowed the phony global warming crap hook, line and sinker.

Then to put the cherry on top this Climategate mess is being referred as a violation of the Social Contract of Science which will put an end to the entire farce not because it is a scam; a lie from day one, but because the compromised e-mail messages reveals stuff that socially offends the consensus of a bunch of research fellows..

Where does this endless, unbearable junk come from..?

From: “Michael E. Mann”
To: Tim Osborn , Keith Briffa
Subject: update
Date: Thu, 09 Feb 2006 16:51:53 -0500
Reply-to: mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Cc: Gavin Schmidt

guys, I see that Science has already gone online w/ the new issue, so we
put up the RC post. By now, you’ve probably read that nasty McIntyre
thing. Apparently, he violated the embargo on his website (I don’t go
there personally, but so I’m informed).

Anyway, I wanted you guys to know that you’re free to use RC in any way
you think would be helpful. Gavin and I are going to be careful about
what comments we screen through, and we’ll be very careful to answer any
questions that come up to any extent we can. On the other hand, you
might want to visit the thread and post replies yourself. We can hold
comments up in the queue and contact you about whether or not you think
they should be screened through or not, and if so, any comments you’d
like us to include.
You’re also welcome to do a followup guest post, etc. think of RC as a
resource that is at your disposal to combat any disinformation put
forward by the McIntyres of the world. Just let us know. We’ll use our
best discretion to make sure the skeptics dont’get to use the RC
comments as a megaphone…
mike

–
Michael E. Mann
Associate Professor
Director, Earth System Science Center (ESSC)

Department of Meteorology Phone: (814) 863-4075
503 Walker Building FAX: (814) 865-3663
The Pennsylvania State University email: mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
University Park, PA 16802-5013

http://www.met.psu.edu/dept/faculty/mann.htm

This is huge, here is an “independent non-profit” publication offering to shut out any dissent from the established “consensus”.

In the aftermath of the English Civil War, as people were groping for new forms of political order, Robert Boyle built an air-pump to do exper­iments. Does the story of Roundheads and Restoration have something to do with the origins of experimental sci­ence? Schaffer and Shapin believed it does.

The new approaches taken in Leviathan and the Air-Pump have been enormously influential on historical studies of science. Shapin and Schaffer found a moment of scientific revolution and showed how key scientific givens–facts, interpretations, experiment, truth–were fundamental to a new political order. Shapin and Schaffer were also innovative in their ethnographic approach. Attempting to understand the work habits, rituals, and social structures of a remote, unfamiliar group, they argued that politics were tied up in what scientists did, rather than what they said.

And, as Bruno Latour in his book We Have Never Been Modern writes:

Far from “situating Boyle’s scientific works in their social context” or showing how politics “presses in upon” scientific doctrines, they [Shapin and Schaffer] examine how Boyle and Hobbes fought to invent a science, a context, and a demarcation between the two. They are not prepared to explain the content by the context, since neither existed in this new way before Boyle and Hobbes reached their respective goals and settled their differences.

Boyle did not seek these gentlemen’s opinion, but rather their observation of a phenomenon produced artificially in the closed and protected space of a laboratory. Ironically, the key question of the constructivists – are facts thoroughly construced in the laboratory? – is precisely the question that Boyle raised and resolved. Yes, the facts are indeed constructed in the new installation of the laboratory and through the artificial intermediary of the air pump….But are facts that have been constructed by man artifactual for that reason? No: for Boyle, just like Hobbes, extends God’s “constructivism” to man. God knows things because He creates them. We know the nature of the facts because we have developed them in circumstances that are under our complete control. Our weakness becomes a strength, provided that we limit knowledge to the instrumentalized nature of the facts and leave aside the interpretation of causes. ONce again, Boyle turns a flaw – we produce only matters of fact that are created in laboratories and have only local value – into a decisive advantage: these facts will never be modified, whatever may happen elsewhere in theory, metaphysics, religion, politics or logic.

So you see, science, as a human practise, cannot be understood absent certain understandings of the role of an honorable “gentlemen” observer/fact recorder. But the “peer” is a necessary but not sufficient part of explaining the overall scientific process. A genealogy of “peer review” would have to start at least here though of course our understanding of the “gentleman” goes far back into the history of aristocratic values and their social roles. Anyway, consider that there is a fundamental difference between science and other forms of human-focussed knowledge in that anyone who has a great revelation into human nature can be, say, an artist or religious leader and make a genuine contribution. If those of us without scientific credentials or at least some serious amount of formal education, have a genuine revelation in the natre of physics or chemistry, there is really little we can do with it. No one will listen to us, because we will not know how to represent our little revelation in a way that makes it presentable to those in the field. We won’t know how to relate it to the established understandings and limits of present-day science. Science is ineviatbly a guilded discipline and has to have the honour code appropriate to such. Of course, this has to adapt to new technology and the increasing demands for tranparency and it has to know that it cannot have the final word on how we interpret the causes or socio-political-religious implications of its facts. But if science begins with facts, we need to be able to trust the integrity of those few with the resources and training to create them in the first place.

I chose the blogging name “truepeers” because it is inherently paradoxical; you can’t specify exactly what is a true peer. But, at the same time, you can’t engage in this world, or any human world, without adopting, as a base assumption, some form of the paradox. Which reminds me of something a friend writes (http://gablog.cdh.ucla.edu/) :

Perhaps the assumption that certain moral and ethical dispositions (certain patterns in the relations between ostensives, imperatives and declaratives) are required for a healthy political economy would help account for and benefit from exploring the one time and place in history, so far as I know, that genuinely approximated a free market: the 19th century Anglosphere, the U.S. and Great Britain (and Canada?) in particular. One of the greatest accomplishments of early modern bourgeois culture was the conversion of aristocratic into republican values, as notions like “nobility” and “virtue” came to be attached to action and character as opposed to being markers of social class. The “gentleman” and the “lady” were critical results of this process, and these figures eased the transition from status to individuality, maintaining their currency until very recently—only the cultural revolution of the 60s decisively dealt them their death blow (how long before the terms no longer even grace our public restrooms?). The gentleman and the lady domesticated ancient notions of “honor,” directing them away from violence perpetuated in the name of tribal and patriarchal prerogatives and protection towards a harmonious balance between public and private life, centered on the division of sexual roles in the nuclear family. My point here is not that we can revive ladies and gentlemen, but simply that no account of free market economics would be complete without them— without the assumptions of upward mobility and generational transmission through discipline and effort, including female responsibility for sexual deferral and “manly” self-reliance, implicit in these “categories,” the daunting rigors of Victorian laissez-faire economics would be unthinkable. An originary political economy today, then, would likewise have to study the novel forms of individuality and family life emergent today. An unsentimental and disinterested observation of today’s children and youth—if we can impose upon ourselves the discipline restraining us from either marveling at their supposedly splendid new qualities or flunking them due to their deviation from a more familiar model—would certainly be a good place to start, especially given the almost absolute independence and simulated internal coherence accredited to the world of teenagers in particular by the contemporary market. Maybe the representation of children holds at least one key towards unlocking today’s political economy.

Their conclusions might be right or might not be, but their science they muster in support of those vehemently-held convictions is shot through with corruption.

And their journalistic mouthpieces — the BBC’s Black as mentioned above, and the NYT’s Andrew Revkin, a veritable Jayson Blair of science reporting — are exposed as participants in the fraud.

I don’t see a way back to credibility for the scientists, apart from eating a little crow and releasing their data sets (as they should have done years ago) — if the data actually exists in an incorrupt state, which it may not.

I don’t see any path to credibility for the journalists at all, but in their profession, unlike science, it doesn’t matter: no one has ever been hired by the BBC, the NYT, or the North Korean Ministry of Propaganda to engage in skeptical enquiry.