Climategate - the festering sore

Notwithstanding the MSM's reluctance to report on this, the Climategate problems continue to fester. The key players implicated have yet to be properly investigated and cleared. The science continues to be called into question.

Most recently, the IPCC report, supposedly peer reviewed, have been caught red-handed making grandiose claims about glacial melting based on nothing than a conjecture. Increasingly, the data and most importantly, the conclusions arising appear corrupted and biased towards portraying an alarming rate of global warming attributed almost solely to CO2.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has also been accused of cherry picking the data in favour of global warming.

A systematic review of the Climategate emails by the Science and Public Policy Institute, can be found here.

Sadly, the case of anthropogenic global warming has been called seriously into question. It is not even certain now how much global warming is occurring. This is not to say that there is no global warming, but just that the entire science has been called into question, and consequently the conclusions cannot be assumed to be 'settled' in any way.

It has become quite clear to this simple mind that there is not the 'scientific consensus' about AGW as has often been claimed. Go blame it on the 'climatologists' for this mess.

Procrustes and the climate

In Greek mythology, Procrustes was a not so nice guy who prey on tourist passing through his territory. He had an iron bed (actually 2...) where he made his 'guests' lie in. He would essentially work on each guest to make them fit the bed. If the legs were too long, he would just amputate them...etc...

In science, this is called committing a Procrustean crime. Wikipedia explains a Procrustean solution as being:
"the undesirable practice of tailoring data to fit its container or some other preconceived stricture. A common example from the business world is embodied in the notion that no résumé should exceed one page in length.

In statistics, instead of finding the best fit line to a scatter plot of data, first choose the line you want, then select only the data that fits it, disregarding data that does not, so to "prove" some point you are making. Its a form of deception that rhetoricians make so to forward their own interests at the expense of others. The unique goal of the Procrustean solution is not win-win, but rather that Procrustes wins AND the other loses. In this case, the defeat of the opponent justifies the deceptive means."

Sound familiar? Seems to me that this was what the climate scientists were doing. They had a model of global that they knew had to be right. Just too bad that some of the data didn't quite fit in with the model. So they just did what Procrustes did.

Interestingly there is actually a Procrustes analysis of climate data. Even though the context is a little different. :)

There is a nice simple write up about theoretical thinking here.... something even I can understand; even though the climate scientists seem to have difficulty with these concepts.

"The second reason you can't prove a theory true is that there is never just one theory that fits the facts. A theory is really just a narrative. A tale that explains. But stories can be told very differently. In a sense, there are always an infinite number of theories that fit the facts."

But for climate science, we are told repeatedly that the science is settled. Theory proven.

Procrustes would have been proud.