People who go around calling other people “lord” tend to put you in a bad light in the American-speaking world, but we tend to be tolerant of such behavior when it comes from our well-meaning, but provincial cousins in Europe.

Or to put it another way…chill out, dude.

Your point about the journal “co-opted by skeptics” would be a good one — except that scientists are supposed to be skeptics, and the people involved, like Hans von Storch and Roger Pielke Sr, are respected scientists themselves. Pielke in particular was excommunicated from the clique for the crime of believing, and publishing, analyses that show CO2 not having the dominant role it’s given in in-group publications.

That RealClimate edits its comments is not an issue. That RealClimate claims to be a scientific forum, but covertly offers its pages for advocacy, is.

Your point asserting that asking for data via FOI is equivalent to theft neglects two points (among many). First, the data is generated through government funding and is therefore not the property of the researchers, but public domain. This is part of standard grant agreements. it’s also supposed to be available to others for replication, as is expected from the standpoint of science and as is part of the “data archiving policy” of all journals of which I’m aware. And in any case, the Freedom of Information Act is the law; if Jones et al don’t like it, they’re welcome to try to change it, but they’re not free to violate it.

#208 John: You’re overstating most all of that. Everyone knows the Sun has a really major role on climate — take it away and things would get cold real fast. And dark. But or all of that, it’s not the only thing that has a role: the climate is a complex mechanism, near equilibrium and with a whole bunch of interactions that maintain that near-equilibrium. We know that the equilibrium has warmed a little in the last 400 years. The AGW folks hypothesize it’s because of changes caused by the CO2 level. Whether or not that’s true, it can’t simply be dismissed by an “everyone knows” — just as it’s not proven by a “consensus”.

#202 Patrick: while there are certainly comments here that I find discomfiting, I suspect fretting about vivid American idiom in what is, after all, an open and informal forum, just puts you in a bad light by making you look like a pedantic prat.

NOW! How do all you Climate Change believers explain this?

John c’,)

Charges that a blog edits it’s comments are troubling, but come on, it is a blog. wtf. No one should use a blog for scientific information.

One thing I must point out, is that the “data” being hidden or deleted is code for running a model. Scientists often guard their work jealously. It is there intellectual property, it is the result of their expertise, and it has significant economic value. Asking for their model code through FOI is equivalent to asking Coke for their recipe, or getting the manuscript of the new harry potter novel before it is published. It is theft.

Also, for actual data (i.e. measurements), these come at a cost, and often data is sold to recoup these costs. To get it for free, again, is theft.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_e-mail_hacking_incident
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Jones_(climatologist)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_E._Mann
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_controversy