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Please. This is not a "smoking gun." It's another comment that looks bad to the layman, but may well be legitimate science. I don't know because I'm not a clima

Please. This is not a "smoking gun." It's another comment that looks bad to the layman, but may well be legitimate science. I don't know because I'm not a climate scientist. And you don't know because you're not a climate scientist.

nestlequ1k 17y ago
Haha. Don't criticize the scientists cause "they are so much smarter than us!!"
- pyre 17y ago
  How about something more along the lines of, "I think that we should trust a doctor to evaluate another doctor's performance rather than <random assembly line worker without a highschool education>?" I mean have you seen some of the arguments against things like evolution by 'lay people?' The correct course of action here is to get them to produce an explanation, then evaluate whether it's reasonable or not. Edit: Maybe I should mention that there are plenty of things a doctor could do wrong that anyone could be able to call him/her out on, but there are many things where the subtleties may confuse.
  - byrneseyeview 17y ago
    Would you trust an astrologer to validate another astrologer's data?
    - youngian 17y ago
      Do you seriously place as little faith in climate scientists as you would in an astrologer? Obviously it's not as mature a field as, say, medicine, but refusing to believe that any of the results are at all valid is just being wilfully ignorant.
      - byrneseyeview 17y ago
        No, but it should illustrate the point. If the only people who can validate the work of an X are fellow X's, then X's are either specialists or frauds.
        azgolfer 17y ago
        Science is the organized skepticism in the reliability of expert opinion - Richard Feynman
        pyre 17y ago
        The idea isn't that only a doctor can evaluate a doctor's performance, but that you need a doctor to explain why the other doctor may have done what he did. Without this expert opinion, no conclusions that you can try to draw from it as a non-doctor hold any weight. i.e. Get some climate scientists to weight in on this and evaluate what they have to say on it rather than just looking at some of the evidence on your own and drawing your own conclusions. I'm not saying to have a climate scientist give you a 'yes/no' answer to "Is this a fruad?" and then blindly trust their answer. I'm saying that someone in the field of climatology should be able to explain some of this away in a reasoned and understandable manner with facts that can be verified if this isn't some sort of fraud. Declaring something a fraud by looking at snippets of emails and comments from source files out of context is not the way of rational debate. I highly doubt that you or many of the people rushing to label this as "100% of everything said about Global Warming since the beginning of time is now false" have done more than read snippets from blog posts.
thras 17y ago
You know, 20 years ago, the place of "climate scientists" in the scientific hierarchy was (justifiably) about the same as the placement of dentists in the medical hierarchy. The physics behind global warming makes a lot of sense. The warming models aren't pure physics, however, and require feedback effects. Now, are the models right about 6 degrees of warming in the next century? I don't have a clue because the historical climate reconstructions are so shitily done. I have no idea if the temperature anomaly over the last 30 years exceeds historical bounds for standard deviation. I have no idea what the magnitude of the Medieval Warm Period was. This is an important question. A trillion dollar question. We need to throw the hopped-up climate scientists out, fools who were lucky to be in the field when it became important, and get some real intelligence working on this problem. Cause this ain't it.
- youngian 17y ago
  Fair enough. I'm certainly willing to believe there are some hack scientists in the field. And even if they were all unimpeachable, there's the simple truth that we are very far from understanding the intricacies of the weather. So sure, it's possible that we're wrong about global warming. And it's definitely possible that we're wrong about certain weather patterns being related to global warming, even if we're right about the long-term effects. I'm just sick of people using their ignorance as a weapon.
- pyre 17y ago
  I think the real problem is the people that want to use this as a 'smoking gun' to prove that they were 'right all along' that Global Warming is some sort of conspiracy to harm the auto industry by a bunch of 'hippy liberals' and that 'American industry' should keep on pouring out the pollution (of any kind) as long as it's able to make money because that's the 'American Way' that we use out 'American Ingenuity.'
  - lionhearted 17y ago
    Please re-read your comment and stop and reflect. You're using buzzwords rather than trying to get the scope of the argument - it's like your mind is already made up. If your mind is already made up, then you won't be open to various truth and evidence.
jeremyw 17y ago
Agreed. Which is why open access to code and data would make this text publication ready. When I ship code to a client you can bet the ambiguities have been removed. Thorny parts have defensible explanations.

nestlequ1k 17y ago

Haha. Don't criticize the scientists cause "they are so much smarter than us!!"

pyre 17y ago
How about something more along the lines of, "I think that we should trust a doctor to evaluate another doctor's performance rather than <random assembly line worker without a highschool education>?" I mean have you seen some of the arguments against things like evolution by 'lay people?' The correct course of action here is to get them to produce an explanation, then evaluate whether it's reasonable or not. Edit: Maybe I should mention that there are plenty of things a doctor could do wrong that anyone could be able to call him/her out on, but there are many things where the subtleties may confuse.
- byrneseyeview 17y ago
  Would you trust an astrologer to validate another astrologer's data?
  - youngian 17y ago
    Do you seriously place as little faith in climate scientists as you would in an astrologer? Obviously it's not as mature a field as, say, medicine, but refusing to believe that any of the results are at all valid is just being wilfully ignorant.
    - byrneseyeview 17y ago
      No, but it should illustrate the point. If the only people who can validate the work of an X are fellow X's, then X's are either specialists or frauds.
      - azgolfer 17y ago
        Science is the organized skepticism in the reliability of expert opinion - Richard Feynman
      - pyre 17y ago
        The idea isn't that only a doctor can evaluate a doctor's performance, but that you need a doctor to explain why the other doctor may have done what he did. Without this expert opinion, no conclusions that you can try to draw from it as a non-doctor hold any weight. i.e. Get some climate scientists to weight in on this and evaluate what they have to say on it rather than just looking at some of the evidence on your own and drawing your own conclusions. I'm not saying to have a climate scientist give you a 'yes/no' answer to "Is this a fruad?" and then blindly trust their answer. I'm saying that someone in the field of climatology should be able to explain some of this away in a reasoned and understandable manner with facts that can be verified if this isn't some sort of fraud. Declaring something a fraud by looking at snippets of emails and comments from source files out of context is not the way of rational debate. I highly doubt that you or many of the people rushing to label this as "100% of everything said about Global Warming since the beginning of time is now false" have done more than read snippets from blog posts.

thras 17y ago

You know, 20 years ago, the place of "climate scientists" in the scientific hierarchy was (justifiably) about the same as the placement of dentists in the medical hierarchy. The physics behind global warming makes a lot of sense. The warming models aren't pure physics, however, and require feedback effects. Now, are the models right about 6 degrees of warming in the next century? I don't have a clue because the historical climate reconstructions are so shitily done. I have no idea if the temperature anomaly over the last 30 years exceeds historical bounds for standard deviation. I have no idea what the magnitude of the Medieval Warm Period was. This is an important question. A trillion dollar question. We need to throw the hopped-up climate scientists out, fools who were lucky to be in the field when it became important, and get some real intelligence working on this problem. Cause this ain't it.

youngian 17y ago
Fair enough. I'm certainly willing to believe there are some hack scientists in the field. And even if they were all unimpeachable, there's the simple truth that we are very far from understanding the intricacies of the weather. So sure, it's possible that we're wrong about global warming. And it's definitely possible that we're wrong about certain weather patterns being related to global warming, even if we're right about the long-term effects. I'm just sick of people using their ignorance as a weapon.
pyre 17y ago
I think the real problem is the people that want to use this as a 'smoking gun' to prove that they were 'right all along' that Global Warming is some sort of conspiracy to harm the auto industry by a bunch of 'hippy liberals' and that 'American industry' should keep on pouring out the pollution (of any kind) as long as it's able to make money because that's the 'American Way' that we use out 'American Ingenuity.'
- lionhearted 17y ago
  Please re-read your comment and stop and reflect. You're using buzzwords rather than trying to get the scope of the argument - it's like your mind is already made up. If your mind is already made up, then you won't be open to various truth and evidence.

jeremyw 17y ago

Agreed. Which is why open access to code and data would make this text publication ready. When I ship code to a client you can bet the ambiguities have been removed. Thorny parts have defensible explanations.