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:
: It is behind a pay wall, but if you are
: fortunate enough to have a subscription to
: The Australian , Matt Ridley’s article,
: Climate change: Politics and science are a
: toxic combination , is well worth reading.
:
: Only if you can handle the truth, of course.
:
: It commences: Back in December, some
: American scientists began copying government
: climate data onto independent servers in
: what press reports described as an attempt
: to safeguard it from political interference
: by the Trump administration. There is to be
: a March for Science in April whose
: organisers say: “It is time for people who
: support scientific research and
: evidence-based policies to take a public
: stand and be counted.”
:
: Well, today they have a chance to do just
: that, but against their own colleagues who
: stand accused of doing what they claim the
: Trump team has done. Devastating new
: testimony from John Bates, a whistleblowing
: senior scientist at America’s main climate
: agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
: Administration, alleges that scientists
: themselves have been indulging in
: alternative facts, fake news and
: policy-based evidence.
:
: Bates’s essay on the Climate Etc. website
: (and David Rose’s story in The Mail on
: Sunday) documents allegations of scientific
: misconduct as serious as that of the
: anti-vaccine campaign of Andrew Wakefield.
: Bates’s boss, Tom Karl, a close ally of
: former US president Barack Obama’s science
: adviser, John Holdren, published a paper in
: 2015, deliberately timed to influence the
: Paris climate jamboree. The paper was widely
: hailed in the media as disproving the
: politically inconvenient 18-year pause in
: global warming, whose existence had been
: conceded by the Intergovernmental Panel on
: Climate Change two years earlier.
:
: Bates says Karl based the “pausebuster”
: paper on a flawed land-surface data set that
: had not been verified or properly archived;
: and on a sea-surface set that corrected
: reliable data from buoys with unreliable
: data from ship intakes, which resulted in a
: slightly enhanced warming trend. Science
: magazine is considering retracting the
: paper. A key congressional committee says
: the allegations confirm some of its
: suspicions.
:
: Bates is no “denier”; he was awarded a gold
: medal by the US government in 2014 for his
: climate-data work. Having now retired he
: writes of “flagrant manipulation of
: scientific integrity guidelines and
: scientific publication standards”, of a
: “rush to time the publication of the paper
: to influence national and international
: deliberations on climate policy” and
: concludes: “So, in every aspect of the
: preparation and release of the data sets
: leading into (the report), we find Tom
: Karl’s thumb on the scale pushing for, and
: often insisting on, decisions that maximise
: warming and minimise documentation.”
:
: This is more than just a routine scientific
: scandal. First, it comes as scientists have
: been accusing US President Donald Trump and
: other politicians of politicising science.
: Second, it potentially contaminates any
: claim that climate science has been
: producing unbiased results. Third, it
: embarrasses science journalists who have
: been chronicling the growing evidence of
: scientific misconduct in medicine,
: toxicology and psychology, but ignored the
: same about climate science because they
: approve of the cause, a habit known as
: noble-cause corruption. Unfortunately, that
: is about as much of this excellent article I
: can reproduce, but it once more points out
: the fact, that KRudd’s “greatest moral issue
: of our time”, or some such, is a very
: serious moral issue alright, but not for the
: reasons he had in mind. AGW is one of the
: greatest attempted deceptions of all time.
:
: As is often the case, reader comments on the
: article are very insightful. Here are a few:
: Lorette18 MINUTES AGO
: Climate scientists made the mistake to
: proclaim that climate change and global
: warming was settled science. It is not!.
: If you cannot develop models that accurately
: predict the future then you still only have
: a hypothesis.
: It seems that some scientist and most
: politicians truly believe that it is
: settled science and if they get data sets
: that don't fit the theory, then they must
: bend the facts. The only outcome then is a
: discrediting of of all scientist, and
: themselves in particular. But by this stage
: the politicians are too invested to admit
: that they might have made a mistake.
:
: Tamas37 MINUTES AGO
: I always wondered what it would have been
: like to live behind the iron curtain; the
: lies, falsehoods and proclamations of
: success when failure was so obvious. And a
: political system that was wholly invested in
: such and absurd idea. But now I know, thanks
: to the climate caper.
:
: Graeme1 HOUR AGO
: It seems that some of the temperature
: 'readings' from central Africa came from
: places with no weather stations, in other
: words were just made up. It has been the
: case for years that the believers in CO2
: causes warming have been 'adjusting' the
: data to match their beliefs.
: If in business you adjust the figures to
: claim your concern is making bigger profits
: then one day it collapses and you are
: prosecuted for fraud. The Climate
: 'Scientists' are lucky that many of them
: have reached the end of their careers
: without that ending.
:
:
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