Saturday, February 6, 2010

Climate Scientists Eat Their Own: Climategate

This SHOULD make the world wake up and take notice. Science is not the be-all-end-all of modern life. Science itself is benign--a wonderful thing. But people who do science bring their own buried biases, ideologies, and beliefs, which, left without the supervision of ethical restraint, affords the opportunity for science to run amok and become something that wasn't intended. Politics--whatever the ideology--masquerading as science is NOT SCIENCE. Very simple. Just check out Carl Sagan's views on this very subject in his Baloney Detection Kit.

Scientists sometimes like to portray what they do as divorced from the everyday jealousies, rivalries and tribalism of human relationships. What makes science special is that data and results that can be replicated are what matters and the scientific truth will out in the end.

But a close reading of the emails hacked from the University of East Anglia in November exposes the real process of everyday science in lurid detail.

Many of the emails reveal strenuous efforts by the mainstream climate scientists to do what outside observers would regard as censoring their critics. And the correspondence raises awkward questions about the effectiveness of peer review – the supposed gold standard of scientific merit – and the operation of the UN's top climate body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

[From Climate change emails between scientists reveal flaws in peer review | Fred Pearce | Environment | guardian.co.uk ]