Comments on The Curious Wavefunction: The damning global warming emails; when science be...

Any writer -- scientific or otherwise -- has a re...

2009-12-16T05:56:43.121-08:00

Any writer -- scientific or otherwise -- has a responsibility to summarize and clarify the data. Otherwise, we'd just publish the raw data.

One of the challenges in writing a scientific paper is that data are complicated, and the complicated bits take many more words to describe than the simple parts. One can easily end up with a paper showing a big effect (First-born children are three feet taller than only children!) but spend half the paper dealing with some complicated tidbit (unless they were born on a Thursday before 10am...except that's really due to three subjects who were measured by a nurse who we think was drunk). The problem is that the more words you spend on something, the more more important it seems.

There is always the risk that the complications you choose to excise turn out to have been important, but that has to be balanced against the risk that if you include those complications, nobody will understand the paper (also bad). But this is not an avoidable problem.

I'm not saying that's what the scientists in the emails were doing, but it's worth thinking about.

That any such "un-truthery" had to be used at all ...

2009-12-09T13:00:20.200-08:00

That any such "un-truthery" had to be used at all speaks to me profoundly. If they (CRU) knew they were right and had the data, then why the games? As you kept saying, this is an extremely complex system and somehow they never found any data that contradicted themselves. I never find that in simpler systems so I am really distrustful all their efforts.

I'm reminded of Feynmann's quote, that it's easy to fool people, and the easiest person to fool is yourself. The train got launched, they started riding it and then by the time they might have wanted to stop it, it was too late. They can't go back now and reexamine their data; they are all-in.

From my planner for today there is an excellent, t...

2009-12-04T19:40:33.176-08:00

From my planner for today there is an excellent, timely quote from Ghandi: "Truth never damages a cause that is just".

The entire global warming story has long since gone beyond science as we know and practice it and has lived in the realm of policy, where everyone is out there trying to cut the best deal they can. It's interesting that the name ExxonMobil" has become an invective by the AGW Alarmists, but look at the position the company tries to take, at least publically. Truth is most businesses, esp. large businesses, try to go with the political flow of the day.

The time when the science really could have be openly debated was short circuited, most certainly deliberately, by those that wanted this to become policy.

I am new to this blog and very happy to have stumbled across it!

pharmaguy

Quite true. The example of nuclear weapons is an e...

2009-12-03T05:25:03.321-08:00

Quite true. The example of nuclear weapons is an especially cogent one, where political pressures and world events led Truman to announce a crash program for the hydrogen bomb even when evidence for its very existence was slim. On the other hand, looking back, one can discern a sense of inevitability in what happened, and this is what I fear about climate change.

I completely agree that science progresses in a co...

2009-12-02T08:51:33.280-08:00

I completely agree that science progresses in a cocoon separate from the practical world. This gives it ample freedom to progress in an unbiased and objective manner. And that whenever this insulating wall breaks down, we land in messy situations like this.

But I want to point out that there have been a few other previous instances of political priorities impugning the scientific process. There was the field of nuclear weapons where secrecy and national imperatives guided scientific reporting ( and of course, you are much more of an expert in this than me :) ), then there was the period in 1960s (?) when big science and tobacco funded science clashed over the health effects of cigarettes. Even right now, with the Obama administration making green science a national priority, the scientists in the National labs and the people writing their funding proposals have a strong motivation to fuzzify their science.

Perhaps, like the Hipocrates oath, we should have a similar explicit set of core principles that every scientist vows to uphold.