Dec
Nature’s “Climate Change in 2009″ recap brushes off Climategate
Nature magazine published its year end, top ten climate change topics in it’s story, Climate science in 2009. Way, way, way down the list is “Climategate.”
It made the list, but don’t worry readers, author Kurt Kleiner reports that it was just a bit of an embarrassment, and they “show sincere researchers struggling to do good work in a highly politicized environment — and sometimes losing their tempers. ‘Science doesn’t work because we’re all nice, ‘NASA climatologist Gavin Schmidt told the New York Times. ‘Newton may have been an ass, but the theory of gravity still works’.”
For climate science, the year 2009 brought significant discoveries and startling controversies. Kurt Kleiner reports.
10. Climategate causes more confusion
Just ahead of the December UN negotiations on a climate deal, thousands of e-mails and documents were stolen from a server at the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Centre in the UK and posted on the internet. Predictably dubbed ‘Climategate’, the incident caused delight among climate change deniers and major embarrassment for some climate scientists — especially the centre’s director, Phil Jones.
The e-mails show researchers speaking privately to one another, and it’s not always pretty. They bad-mouth colleagues and critics (“The kindest interpretation is that he is a complete idiot …,” says one about another climate scientist). They discuss how to avoid releasing raw data to critics. They worry that certain journals are becoming too sympathetic to the other side.
Of most concern are e-mails that suggest researchers were massaging their results. In a 1999 e-mail, Jones says that he used a “trick” to “hide the decline” in one set of data in a chart. In another e-mail, Jones says he will keep two papers out of the IPCC report “even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!” The “trick” seems to have referred to a statistical method to make up for defects in one set of suspect data, and the two papers were in fact discussed in the IPCC report.
What the e-mails do not show, however, is a grand conspiracy to concoct global warming. Instead, they show sincere researchers struggling to do good work in a highly politicized environment — and sometimes losing their tempers. “Science doesn’t work because we’re all nice,” NASA climatologist Gavin Schmidt told the New York Times. “Newton may have been an ass, but the theory of gravity still works.”
They forgot #11. We learned that Al Gore really doesn’t know shit.
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So Nature Magazine has decided to go with science of lies.
Will we be able to believe anything it reports anymore?
Tainted by political science.