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They may have apologized for the inaccuracy, yes, but the article claims that the inaccuracy was included on purpose for political reasons. This is a claim that

They may have apologized for the inaccuracy, yes, but the article claims that the inaccuracy was included on purpose for political reasons. This is a claim that, at best, is completely unverifiable since the only citation for it comes from one Daily Mail article of a scientist who claims he was misquoted (http://scienceblogs.com/islandofdoubt/2010/01/daily_mail_invents_a_climate_c.php http://scienceblogs.com/islandofdoubt/2010/01/daily_mail_inv...). This weak and debunked claim is then used to lead into more debunked claims about how the "Climategate" e-mails are representative of some deep crisis of credibility-- they aren't. There lots of good resources on why they aren't, including another link from Island of Doubt (http://scienceblogs.com/islandofdoubt/2009/12/the_climategate_virus_spreads.php http://scienceblogs.com/islandofdoubt/2009/12/the_climategat...).

TomOfTTB 17y ago
I think you're making my point in that unverifiable does not equal debunked. The heads of the IPCC have apologized but in that apology they are saying that the people who put that sentence in did so without doing proper due diligence which to me translates to "They knew this claim might not be true and put it in anyway" The article might take a leap by attributing their motives to politics (as opposed to say laziness) but since no one knows what the motivations were exactly you can't say any claim has been debunked. As for Climategate and Global Warming in general your position that not accepting man made Global Warming is some how denialism or uninformed is just as ignorant as those who claim it's absolutely wrong. People like Richard Lindzen (Professor of Meteorology at MIT) have documented political pressure put on scientists to conform so that does exist and it does cause many to doubt the credibility of the research.
- cgranade 17y ago
  The specific claim that the original author made in attributing an error to political motives was, in fact, debunked, as the entire claim rests on a single he-said-she-said between a scientist and a journalist, the latter of whom has made a career out of exaggerating and inventing errors in climate change science in order to sell papers. True, it is not a complete and unambiguous debunking in that there still exists some slight bit of wiggle room, but that's not my point at all-- if the author had really cared about representing the subject matter in a way that reflects reality, she would have made a much weaker claim, or at the very least, she would have acknowledged how incredibly poorly supported her claim really was. As for political pressure in climate research, well, that's a rather extraordinary claim, given that there has been documented rather a lot of political pressure in the opposite direction, such as the governor of the state of Alaska telling the researchers at the largest university in the state that they needed to work to prove environmentalists wrong. No doubt one can always find small and local examples of individual PIs acting inappropriately-- that happens in all fields-- but to show that there is widespread political pressure to produce positive AGW studies would take quite a bit of evidence. To me, this argument holds about as much water as the creationist argument that they're being censored. If there's a widespread rejection of papers documenting anti-AGW studies, it may in fact be because they fail to reflect reality.

TomOfTTB 17y ago

I think you're making my point in that unverifiable does not equal debunked. The heads of the IPCC have apologized but in that apology they are saying that the people who put that sentence in did so without doing proper due diligence which to me translates to "They knew this claim might not be true and put it in anyway" The article might take a leap by attributing their motives to politics (as opposed to say laziness) but since no one knows what the motivations were exactly you can't say any claim has been debunked. As for Climategate and Global Warming in general your position that not accepting man made Global Warming is some how denialism or uninformed is just as ignorant as those who claim it's absolutely wrong. People like Richard Lindzen (Professor of Meteorology at MIT) have documented political pressure put on scientists to conform so that does exist and it does cause many to doubt the credibility of the research.

cgranade 17y ago
The specific claim that the original author made in attributing an error to political motives was, in fact, debunked, as the entire claim rests on a single he-said-she-said between a scientist and a journalist, the latter of whom has made a career out of exaggerating and inventing errors in climate change science in order to sell papers. True, it is not a complete and unambiguous debunking in that there still exists some slight bit of wiggle room, but that's not my point at all-- if the author had really cared about representing the subject matter in a way that reflects reality, she would have made a much weaker claim, or at the very least, she would have acknowledged how incredibly poorly supported her claim really was. As for political pressure in climate research, well, that's a rather extraordinary claim, given that there has been documented rather a lot of political pressure in the opposite direction, such as the governor of the state of Alaska telling the researchers at the largest university in the state that they needed to work to prove environmentalists wrong. No doubt one can always find small and local examples of individual PIs acting inappropriately-- that happens in all fields-- but to show that there is widespread political pressure to produce positive AGW studies would take quite a bit of evidence. To me, this argument holds about as much water as the creationist argument that they're being censored. If there's a widespread rejection of papers documenting anti-AGW studies, it may in fact be because they fail to reflect reality.