Some people have posted about the Climagate scandal.
This Financial Post has a good two part article on it.
Terence Corcoran: Climategate Part 1 - A 2,000-page epic of science and skepticism
Terence Corcoran: Climategate Part 2 — A 2,000-page epic of science and skepticism
Who can we trust in climatic research? Ultimately it is a question of who we trust, as long as we haven’t done the research ourselves. Why would the climate movement have another agendas than stopping the warming up of the earth? Why would lots of climate scientists want to start such a gigantic scam to establish a world government or anything like that? Any plausible answers?
http://www.freedomforceinternational.org/pdf/Report_from_Iron_Mountain.pdf
Simple, as that.
“World government is coming because the leaders of the West have given up. They no longer care about democracy, they know longer care about the truth about the climate.” Monckton said. “They are willing to go along with this world government because they see roles for themselves in that world government in exactly the same way as the leaders of the EU did.”
“They can get more power as unelected leaders than they can at home.” Monckton added.
Isn’t the idea that climate scientists have such an agenda rather like a religion?
The scenarios that are being drawn if we have a warming of 2, 3 or more degrees Celsius are hard to accept for many. I think it can be tempting to ignore what the scientists say.
According to Wikipedia, the aim of the IPCC is
to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation.
So, quite clearly, there is an agenda, at least behind the work done by the IPCC. If a think tank’s premise is that there is man-made climate change, even though there is a very healthy scientific debate about whether or not it actually exists, then it’s just a tool in scientific clothing used to promote a biased agenda.
The fact that scientists are also working there (some of whom have quit due to a dislike of apparently present political pressures) is great, but when tobacco companies employed scientists to disprove the alleged harm caused by their products, it didn’t actually convince people either.
Again, if the IPCC was a scientifically motivated institution, it wouldn’t assume a not-so-certain conclusion as its premise. Since it does, the granting of the label “scientific” should be reconsidered.
Edit: Of course, the IPCC is not representative for all climate scientists. But it’s often the mouthpiece of pro-AGW climatology.
Source?
It seems that many “outsiders” have this vision where Science is a parallel universe populated by totally selfish men and women who only care about the truth. Probably you’ve never seen it from the inside or even from up close. It’s an environment full of backstabbing, selfish, lying, inconsiderate, vengeful persons as any other. Throw in the usual scramble for grants and you get the idea.
And it also seems that many still fail to understand where the big problems of Climategate lie. The first, and by far the worst, is the suppression of peer review. This doesn’t mean “bash the skeptics” but denying independent researchers data and procedures they need to validate your research and conclusions. You usually do this when you know you are trying your luck because your research methods and conclusions are questionable or simply because you cheated. You also usually do not get away with this for too long: that the East Anglia University allowed their climatology department to keep up this for years and was not pressured to order them to release the critically needed material hint at the fact they had some very influential patrons.
The second is the downright censure applied by “scientific” journals like Nature, New Scientist and Scientific American . Until Climategate broke out they only had one goal “Man-made Global Warming is real and must be stopped”. Two years ago Nature was caught pants down publishing an article which contained not only some inaccuracies but downright lies. If I remember correctly the author even gave a fake identity. Nature editors simply threw in the garbage all protest letters and only mounting pressure from the Internet forced them to acknowledge they “may have made a mistake”. Scientific journals do not make “mistakes”, trust me. How this came into being will be the matter of some debate but one thing is sure: their credibility is gone. It will take them years (and many millions) to build it back. If they do not go under like they deserve.
See Christoper Landsea resignation in the Wikipedia article, or this article for more details. To learn about four more scientists who resigned, check out this page.