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Barking Mad
Nov. 24th, 2009 04:40 pmYou may have heard that a hacker broke into an email server at the Hadley Climate Research Unit in England and distributed 62 MB of emails and attachments. These emails purport to prove that anthropomorphic global warming (AGW) is a hoax.
To say that The Usual Suspects have gone hog-wild screaming "I told you so" and "file criminal charges" is actually an understatement. Rand himself attempted to argue that, until you actually saw Earth from orbit, you couldn't "prove" it was round, therefore any proof not by direct observation is flawed.
I am not amused.
The released letters don't prove much - some discussion of problems with tree-ring data, snark and bile directed at notable climate research critics, and the occasional beg for money by a researcher. To put it in perspective, this fellow takes a collection of snippets from Issac Newton's letters to (sarcastically) argue that calculus and Newtonian physics is false. In a severe lack of irony, several commenter then argue that "Newtonian physics is wrong - see Einstein." Well, yeah - for certain rather exceptional cases.
One of the "smoking guns" pointed to is an email talking about "tricks to suppress tree-ring data." Although probably a bad choice of words, this fellow points out that the issue with tree-ring data not correlating well with temperature in the immediate past was discussed publicly in textbooks going back to 1998. The gun may be smoking, but it's been so for a long time indeed.
What I find amazing is the extremely legalistic, almost magical thinking, going on with these critics. "Well, if he say X but it's really X+.00001, he's wrong and it's a fraud!" I'm sorry, but even scientists are humans, and make approximations.
I'm also sorry, but part of science is that it's additive. Einstein didn't replace Newton - he added to Newton. If Einstein's theories didn't produce the same observable results as Newton's, we'd never have heard of him or his theory. Even Kepler didn't replace Aristotle - his findings put the planets in the same place as before.
Fortunately, at the moment The Usual Suspects are in the minority, and their very vehemence tends to keep them there.
To say that The Usual Suspects have gone hog-wild screaming "I told you so" and "file criminal charges" is actually an understatement. Rand himself attempted to argue that, until you actually saw Earth from orbit, you couldn't "prove" it was round, therefore any proof not by direct observation is flawed.
I am not amused.
The released letters don't prove much - some discussion of problems with tree-ring data, snark and bile directed at notable climate research critics, and the occasional beg for money by a researcher. To put it in perspective, this fellow takes a collection of snippets from Issac Newton's letters to (sarcastically) argue that calculus and Newtonian physics is false. In a severe lack of irony, several commenter then argue that "Newtonian physics is wrong - see Einstein." Well, yeah - for certain rather exceptional cases.
One of the "smoking guns" pointed to is an email talking about "tricks to suppress tree-ring data." Although probably a bad choice of words, this fellow points out that the issue with tree-ring data not correlating well with temperature in the immediate past was discussed publicly in textbooks going back to 1998. The gun may be smoking, but it's been so for a long time indeed.
What I find amazing is the extremely legalistic, almost magical thinking, going on with these critics. "Well, if he say X but it's really X+.00001, he's wrong and it's a fraud!" I'm sorry, but even scientists are humans, and make approximations.
I'm also sorry, but part of science is that it's additive. Einstein didn't replace Newton - he added to Newton. If Einstein's theories didn't produce the same observable results as Newton's, we'd never have heard of him or his theory. Even Kepler didn't replace Aristotle - his findings put the planets in the same place as before.
Fortunately, at the moment The Usual Suspects are in the minority, and their very vehemence tends to keep them there.
