It's all about where you draw the line

Bore Patch blog has an excellent post up: Should You Be a Global Warming Skeptic?. He details the problems with the AGW theory, much of it known even before the revelations of the “Climategate” leak.

Read the whole thing, really, but I especially want to point out this paragraph, which is a pointed response to any argument that “the science is settled”:

I thought there was a consensus that Global Warming is occurring? The “science is settled”, isn’t it?

Actually, there’s never been a consensus. We’ll come back to this later, but the most interesting thing about this argument is that it’s not a scientific argument. Science simply doesn’t care about consensus, it cares about data and reproduceability of results. If your data is solid, and other people can get the same results, it simply doesn’t matter if you run with the crowd or not.

Simply put, if science depended on consensus, we would never get anywhere — as any fundamentally new theory pretty much depends on throwing an old theory out. Reputable scientists in modern times never argue that something is “settled”. I mean gravity isn’t “settled” science for Chrissakes — do you really think that the climate is settled science, when we can’t even predict next week’s weather?

If you’re hearing “the science is settled”, what you’re hearing is politics, not science. It’s smoke and mirrors. It a different way of saying “We have a vested interest in people believing us, so everyone who doesn’t agree with us should just shut their mouths.” Specifically, it’s an Appeal to Popularity fallacy — an attempt to shame critics into silence — and it is shameful coming from people who claim to be scientists. Don’t let them get away with it.

A lot has been written about the revelations found within the documents leaked from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, which are the scientists behind virtually all of the core Global Warming theory; but I think a “Climategate” article by Christopher Booker at the London Telegraph sums it up the best:

There are three threads in particular in the leaked documents which have sent a shock wave through informed observers across the world. Perhaps the most obvious… is the highly disturbing series of emails which show how Dr Jones and his colleagues have for years been discussing the devious tactics whereby they could avoid releasing their data to outsiders under freedom of information laws.

They have come up with every possible excuse for concealing the background data on which their findings and temperature records were based.

This in itself has become a major scandal, not least Dr Jones’s refusal to release the basic data from which the CRU derives its hugely influential temperature record, which culminated last summer in his startling claim that much of the data from all over the world had simply got “lost”. Most incriminating of all are the emails in which scientists are advised to delete large chunks of data, which, when this is done after receipt of a freedom of information request, is a criminal offence.

…The second and most shocking revelation of the leaked documents is how they show the scientists trying to manipulate data through their tortuous computer programmes, always to point in only the one desired direction ? to lower past temperatures and to “adjust” recent temperatures upwards, in order to convey the impression of an accelerated warming….

What is tragically evident from the Harry Read Me file is the picture it gives of the CRU scientists hopelessly at sea with the complex computer programmes they had devised to contort their data in the approved direction, more than once expressing their own desperation at how difficult it was to get the desired results.

The third shocking revelation of these documents is the ruthless way in which these academics have been determined to silence any expert questioning of the findings they have arrived at by such dubious methods ? not just by refusing to disclose their basic data but by discrediting and freezing out any scientific journal which dares to publish their critics’ work. It seems they are prepared to stop at nothing to stifle scientific debate in this way, not least by ensuring that no dissenting research should find its way into the pages of IPCC reports.

(That’s an excerpt — you can read the whole thing here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/6679082/Climate-change-this-is-the-worst-scientific-scandal-of-our-generation.html)

This all goes hand in hand with the political drumbeat that “the science is settled”. In other words, “Shut up!” — the first and last resort of liars everywhere.

Booker calls this “the worst scientific scandal of our generation”, but to me it goes further than that. When you look at the trillions of dollars that countries all over the world are preparing to spend to combat something that these scientists invented from whole cloth, this is the single biggest fraud in history. Forget losing their jobs — these men should be in prison.