The UK Information Commissioner’s Office recently confirmed that the disclosure of e-mails and other documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit revealed that some of the scientists violated the UK’s Freedom of Information law by failing to respond to legitimate document requests from other researchers. I blogged on this development here. Initial […]
Archive | Politicizing Science
The IPCC Under Siege
2010 has not been kind to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This U.N. sanctioned body is supposed to issue periodic reports that summarize the state of the science of global climate change based upon a comprehensive review and synthesis of the relevant peer-reviewed scientific literature. In the past few weeks, however, it has […]
ClimateGate Scientists’ Conduct: Unethical and Illegal
The UK Daily Mail reports: Scientist at the heart of the ‘Climategate’ email scandal broke the law when they refused to give raw data to the public, the privacy watchdog has ruled. The Information Commissioner’s office said University of East Anglia researchers breached the Freedom of Information Act when handling requests from climate change sceptics. […]
The Politicization of Peer Review
Among other things, the release of e-mails and documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit has laid bare the efforts of a handful of climate scientists to manipulate how the peer review process handled research that could undermine claims of a climate science “consensus.” As climate scientists David Douglass and John Christy […]
ClimateGate and the Cost of Blurring Science and Politics
Daniel Sarewitz and Samuel Thernstrom, of Arizona State University’s Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes and the American Enterprise Institute respectively, co-authored an op-ed in today’s Los Angeles Times on how the debate over leaked e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, and climate change more broadly, is colored by the mistaken […]
Michael Mann Should Not Be Investigated by Penn State
By Jim Lindgren on December 15, 2009 12:25 am in Academia, Climate Change, Environment, Politicizing Science
According to press reports, Penn State University is conducting an inquiry to determine whether it should institute a formal ethical investigation of Michael Mann, the Penn State professor who was the lead author of the paper that invented the “Hockey Stick.” At issue are CRU emails and his role in ClimateGate. Frankly, I am not […]
The Precautionary Principle
Last night I was talking with a colleague about writing something on the “Precautionary Principle.” This morning I see John Miller at the Corner writing about a Tom Friedman column pushing that very principle. After raising Dick Cheney’s views on meeting low-probability threats from Al Qaeda and quoting Cass Sunstein on the precautionary principle, Friedman […]
Some of the “Homogenized” Temperature Data is False
By Jim Lindgren on December 8, 2009 5:43 pm in Academia, Climate Change, Environment, Politicizing Science
When the CRU at East Anglia disclosed that it had lost some of the raw temperature data, leaving only the “homogenized” data, some honest commentators expressed the hope that the homogenizing was competently done. Anyone who has been following Climate Audit for the last few years knows that at least some of the adjustments to […]
Physicists Ask American Physical Society to Rescind Its Statement on Global Warming Because It Was Based on “Cheat[ing]” and “Corrupted” Work
By Jim Lindgren on December 7, 2009 2:29 am in Academia, Climate Change, Environment, Politicizing Science
While the wider world is just beginning to realize that the subfield of paleoclimatology is in shambles (and has been for the last decade), scientists in related disciplines are increasingly fighting back against the shoddy work and orthodoxy that was foisted on them. A small group, including several prominent physicists, are asking the American Physical […]
Steven Hayward on ClimateGate
Steven Hayward (of AEI) has an excellent article in the Weekly Standard on the CRU scandal (tip to Powerline and Adler below). Hayward concludes: The distinction between utterly politicized scientists such as Jones, Mann, and NASA’s James Hansen, and other more sober scientists has been lost on the media and climate campaigners for a long […]
Threatening Reporters with the “Big Cutoff”
University of Illinois climate scientist Michael Schlesinger threatens the NYT‘s Andrew Revkin with “the Big Cutoff” because he quotes and interviews the wrong people. According to Schlesinger, this makes Revkin’s reporting “very worrisome to most climate scientists.” Revkin’s offenses? Noting that some Copenhagen prostitutes promised to give freebies to climate conference delegates (“gutter reportage”) and […]
ClimateGate Fallout Continues
Last week, Rajendra Pachauri, who heads the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, told BBC Radio that there would be a full investigation of the revelations contained in e-mails and documents leaked from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit. This must have been done awfully quickly, as the IPCC’s Working Group I released […]
Debunking Briffa’s Version of the Hockey Sticks
By Jim Lindgren on December 6, 2009 12:18 am in Academia, Climate Change, Environment, Politicizing Science
Among the most ethically challenged of the scientists at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia is Keith Briffa. A couple of months ago, the Bishop Hill blog retold in detail the sad story about Briffa’s own version of the Hockey Stick, which he was able to keep alive by his attempts […]
Looking Back at the Hockey Stick Thesis: The JoNova Acoount
By Jim Lindgren on December 4, 2009 10:16 pm in Academia, Climate Change, Environment, Politicizing Science
Besides last year’s Bishop Hill post discussed below, another blog account of the “Hockey Stick” thesis that merits excerpting is at JoNova. I do this despite my finding its tone a bit overheated and its generalizations not being adequately qualified. Substantively, I disagree with its treatment of the evidence in favor of the Medieval Warming […]
Looking Back at the Hockey Stick Thesis: The Bishop Hill Account
By Jim Lindgren on December 4, 2009 9:39 pm in Academia, Climate Change, Environment, Politicizing Science
Because a big part of the scientific misconduct in ClimateGate involves Michael Mann’s now discredited “Hockey Stick” thesis, I thought it might be good to review a couple of the better posts outlining some of the misbehavior. The first is a long post from 16 months ago at the Bishop Hill blog (tip to Andrew […]