My brother-in-law responds to my defense of the CRU thusly:
So, you imply that climate-change skeptics are doctoring data? Well, find the data. Or find their claims that they doctored data to show cool down of earth's climate. The skeptics cannot prove that they did not doctor data. You cannot prove a negative, eh?
Say, please explain this here "scientific method" terminology for me? I'm not a scientist.
No this is not PR problem. It is a problem of fraud. The contemporary 4 horsemen are academia, media, government, and science (aka politics).
Science = politics. Environmentalism = Religion = It can't be proved and you need a lot of faith.
I reply:
There’s actually an entire subfield of science devoted to processing and interpreting climate data records. The data are often averaged, smoothed, significant digits are sometimes lost, and sometimes the data are even adjusted to reflect changes in measurement conditions, locations, etc. And that doesn’t even count the ways that temperature data can be inverted (satellites don’t measure temperature directly, for example, but measure other properties, like IR radiance, and temperature has to be inferred indirectly from these readings). It can take years to gain facility with all the zillions of little things you need to know, and then you still probably don’t know enough.
My limited understanding of the CRU E-Mails is that some of the fellows noted that certain temperature trends could be enhanced or virtually erased based on the way they were averaged and presented. Anyone who ever spends much time with statistics will also note clever ways of presenting data to make an argument. There is always a temptation for scientists to alter data to suit preconceived notions. Professional scientists do their best to resist these temptations, because once reputation is lost, it’s hard to recover.
It’s a jungle out there!
What’s important for science is that if data are altered for any purpose, that they be done so in a clear, documented manner for a disinterested purpose.
So far as I know, no one is pointing at a specific paper and alleging fraud. I think people were disturbed by the cockiness of the climatologists, but that is mostly a reflection of their embattled status: trying to keep the zombie scientists at bay. The fossil fuel industries are currently busy creating faux think tanks whose purpose is to create uncertainty where there is none. Their purpose is not necessarily to corrupt climatology, but rather to derail regulation, but they do not care how much collateral damage they do to the field to achieve their ends.
An analogy is the pharmaceutical industry, which has ways to corrupt the regulatory process by virtually purchasing science to their liking. The problem is aggravated by the amount of knowledge involved, which means health scientists are spread too thinly to always mount an effective defense. As a result, we get things like the Vioxx scandal, which would not have happened had FDA scientists been more cocksure – more like the CRU climatologists. As shown by the CRU E-Mails, the climatologists are determined to make sure this kind of corruption does not occur (and sporadic instances already have occurred). Their circle of wagons will be tight! Hooray for the CRU!
Now, the regulatory side is a whole other beast. Myself, I disagree with most of the regulatory regimes being proposed, because I think regulation is a dull tool for CO2, which is accumulating – it can’t be easily reversed, say, by wearing sweaters in the wintertime. Unlike, say, chlorofluorocarbons, it’s hard to effectively regulate accumulating gases like CO2. We need a different approach, but we don’t have one, and the regulatory approach, which works fairly-well with more-reactive air pollutants will just create difficult problems instead.
But that’s politics for you.
If everyone comes to the party with clean hands, then there’s no reason we can’t all get along: the oil/gas/coal folks and the enviros in happy harmony. But these days, it’s more like Chicago, 1929.
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