I'll say it one more (or perhaps another hundred) time(s): the reason I never "bought" into the Global Weather Change Emergency Everyone-to-get-from-Street scenario is primarily simple.

There was never any "pros and cons" list. To put it another way, everyone promoting the Crisis presents GW as a 100% Bad Thing Certainty, with no discussion of possible positive outcomes.

I once taught summer school geometry to a pack of lazy kids who thought (wrongly) that I was there to grab a paycheck and pass them just for going to school in summer. Come the final exam, and I am grading them and I notice: about 5 of the students have answers that are identical, DOWN TO THE SHAPE OF THE ARROWS INDICATING PARTS OF TRIANGLES, etc. And, all of their answers are correct! Glory be!

I fail all 5 for cheating. And everyone wonders how I figured it out.

Turns out someone had pilfered the school's teacher textbook and circulated the answer sections. Go figure.

All I thought was: bad cheaters, like bad cheaters everywhere (e.g., Las Vegas), try and win every point all the time.

I just never thought I'd be thinking that while watching people involved in federal/world governance. Go figure.

OTOH, if a list of pros & cons every *does* emerge, I reserve the right to ... oh f- it.

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"Don't confuse political savvy with competence or principles." -- RobbL, 2009

I don't have the time or the energy to delve into this mess too deeply, but I didn't want to make two quick points.

1) I find it really funny that the hypertext "fact" leads to the UK Telegraph site. (I thought we distrusted the MSM here?)

2) I don't think a programmer complaining about what sounds like atrocious database design is the best evidence to present in the argument against the veracity of the CC's scientists results/methods. Did Jim choose this quote because other blogs are presenting the more damning evidence? These snippets could have come from any DBA taking over a legacy system and trying to migrate it to newer technology. I myself have uttered some of those phrases myself when I migrated our data from Quickbooks to our new ERP database. Giving what I've observed in the business world, I can only have nightmares imagining what must exist in the academic world with regards to computer systems and databases (outside of CS and EE departments of course).

I love the fresh smell of watergate in the morning.

And K, you have to do better than "the MSM can't be trusted."

Heh. You misunderstand. I wasn't trying to debunk the entirety of Dr. Zaius post based on a single hyperlink. I was simply pointing out the humorous irony of the particular word he chose ("fact") for a link to a MSM source. To spell it out for you, the implication is that the Telegraph is a source of facts. While I haven't heard the Telegraph bashed around here as much as, for example, the NY Times, I'm guessing that most contributors on this site don't take everything they print at face value.

1) I find it really funny that the hypertext "fact" leads to the UK Telegraph site. (I thought we distrusted the MSM here?)

You might be making noise near my cage, but I'm hardly rattled. Seriously, this is your lead-off argument? That because I tend to criticize the MSM around here, I'm a hypocrite (or its ironic, or something) because I cited the Telegraph? Since the British press covered this story extensively and for days before the American MSM even got a whiff of it, I consider that rather appropriate. I also have 12 links in my first two graphs to coverage at both MSM outlets, as well as new media outlets. As Ben would attest, that's a lot for my lazy ass.

You must have missed, though, that the citation that prompted my post in the first place was from the Toronto Sun, and it is raw fact — excerpts of original-source email messages.

2) I don't think a programmer complaining about what sounds like atrocious database design is the best evidence to present in the argument against the veracity of the CC's scientists results/methods.

You seem to be missing the point, and as a computer geek yourself, you should know better. As has been pointed out to people smarter on such things than I am (too lazy to find a link, but its out there), one of the really fraudulent aspects of this hoax is how the programs to crunch the raw data was either so poorly designed to be useless, or it was written to ensure the outcomes the Global Warmists wanted. It's probably a little of both.

Besides, as Rick pointed out, we can't even check their data anymore, because they destroyed it. When the Global Warmists — who want to completely reorder society and run our lives (carbon credit cards are being proposed in Britain), and cost the world economy untold trillions — they'd need to do a whole lot better than this. It's incredibly damning to say "the dog ate my data," but don't worry, you can trust us — especially in light of what Climategate has revealed: A conspiracy to rig the "peer review" system and blackball anyone who dares to question their conclusions.

That's not science. That's politics — and fraud.

People get lost, IMO. Okay, so we have some missing (a la Nixonian dialogue) patches of data, and "models" that seem to be constructed, modified and patched to produce a foregone conclusion, rather than more "neutral" results -- I stand with those who aren't surprised by this revelation because the interpretations gave away the game before the game was revealed as rigged. Global Warming -- errr -- Climate Change has been flogged as the EOTWAWKI on all fronts, with zero possible, positive outcomes.

To paraphrase Mr. Capote, "that's not science; that's typing."

One (me) wonders if all the kerfuffle over the now-possibly-revealed shenanigans comes too late to stop the "WE HAVE TO ACT NOW" juggernaut that wishes to impose unelected, unaccountable world governance upon the economy.

I'd be happy if it hasn't come to late, but I fear it has.

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"Don't confuse political savvy with competence or principles." -- RobbL, 2009

George Monbiot wrote today in the Guardian:

I believe that all supporting data, codes and programmes should be made available as soon as an article is published in a peer-reviewed journal. That anyone should have to lodge a freedom of information request to obtain them is wrong. That the request should be turned down is worse. That a scientist suggests deleting material that might be covered by that request is unjustifiable. Everyone who values the scientific process should demand complete transparency, across all branches of science.

The second observation is the tendency of those who don’t give a fig about science to maximise their importance. The denial industry, which has no interest in establishing the truth about global warming, insists that these emails (which concern three or four scientists and just one or two lines of evidence) destroy the entire canon of climate science.

Even if you were to exclude every line of evidence which could possibly be disputed - the proxy records, the computer models, the complex science of clouds and ocean currents - the evidence for manmade global warming would still be unequivocal. You can see it in the measured temperature record, which goes back to 1850; in the shrinkage of glaciers and the thinning of sea ice; in the responses of wild animals and plants and the rapidly changing crop zones.

Tip o' the Hat: Thom Yorke

Now, I'm not sure I agree with Monbiot that "[t]he evidence for manmade global warming remains as strong as the evidence linking smoking to lung cancer or HIV to AIDS", but I do think that those who don't agree with the AGW theory are making a mountain out of a molehill. Because there are a handful of bad scientists, and one model and set of extrapolated data with serious questions, they want us to throw out the data and conclusions of every scientist studying the issue (except their own, of course). It would be as if we discovered that some of the physicists at the LHC were doing bad science, and concluded that we should disregard the entire Theory of Quantum Mechanics.