Slashdot Mirror
House of Commons Finds No Evidence of Tampering In Climate E-mails
dwguenther writes "The first of several British investigations into the e-mails leaked from one of the world's leading climate research centers has largely vindicated the scientists involved. The House of Commons' Science and Technology Committee said Wednesday that they'd seen no evidence to support charges that the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit ... had tampered with data or perverted the peer review process to exaggerate the threat of global warming."
According to the article, the head of committee which produced the report "said the lawmakers had been in a rush to publish something before Britain's next national election, which is widely expected in just over a month's time"; two further inquiries are to examine the issue more closely. The "e-mails appeared to show scientists berating skeptics in sometimes intensely personal attacks, discussing ways to shield their data from public records laws, and discussing ways to keep skeptics' research out of peer-reviewed journals," but the committee concluded that East Anglia researcher Phil Jones was not part of a conspiracy to hide evidence that weakens the case for global warming.
Does this mean ManBearPig is real?
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
that the bullshit noise that fox news and deniers spread around got quashed by some actual investigation.
I think that the crap that the right wing manages to pass off as 'facts' has done a lot to hurt any attempt to debate issues openly with any chance of keeping the discussion rational and factual
Wherever You Go, There You Are
So I guess I can look forward to public apologies from all of those Phil Jones bashers...
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!! Look at me, expecting people to do the right thing.
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
Self-referential irony leading to self-pwnage. I love this stuff.
I'm sorry, but my argument is valid, is not shouting, and does not appeal to emotion. If you'd like to prove me wrong, show some evidence rather than shouting and appealing to emotion. Like you said, your self-referential irony leads to your self pwnage.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
(...sound of crickets...)
You are welcome on my lawn.
The economy != one business.
To use a Slashdot-approved cliche, it wasn't the fault of the automobile manufacturers that the buggy whip industry up and died.
And the guy I responded to was just anonymously pulling shit from his ass in any case. Don't get all jumpy worrying about it.
Nice attitude. Doesn't matter that freon was never a problem to the environment. Coincidentally the patents were due to expire, and it was claimed that chlorine was bad for the ozone layer. Doesn't matter at all that we pour gallons of chlorine into the water cycle through laundry bleach, swimming pools, and municipal water. We couldn't let just anyone make freon, that would hurt DuPont's bottom line, so we had to ban it and make everyone start buying a newly patented chemical that's "safe."
So yeah, this bullshit save the planet scam really does hurt people in real ways and it's got nothing to do with feeling you're owed anything. It's got to do with greedy politicians playing your heart strings and you being too gullible to not fall for it.
It's a hard battle. We not only have to fight against greedy politicians and corporate monsters, we have to fight against gullible over-emotional assholes like you.
You still haven't explained how they faked the moon landing and have managed to keep the evidence from Roswell so well hiding over the last 40+ and 60+ years, respectively.
Until you do that, I'm unconvinced.
I'm not so sure the moderation of "troll" is really accurate.
The account of the banning of freon (related to the "ozone hole", which has certainly receded as a catastrophic concern...how many of you observed "Ozone Day" this year??) exemplifies an admirable cynicism. While there were definitely environmental concerns, who would be so naive as to think the expiration of DuPont pantents played no part in the ban??
However convinced many are of the nobility and innate goodness of the Gaia-lovers and Earth-savers who promote ecological actions for improving the environment, those good people* do operate in a world where the levers of power are pulled by political animals and corporate entities for their own purposes. Cynicism about their motives and actions is warranted in every case.
*-I actually find many of them to be vile misanthropes, but hey...
"To be fair, I was left completely unsupervised." ~Anon
I'll give an equivalent example, and let's see if you come to my defense:
I ran a business and it produced a lot of garbage. I used to throw all my garbage out into the street, but the city changed the laws to outlaw that, and now garbage removal costs me more than the business could afford! I had to close my business, and now I make half of what I used to.
So can you help a guy out and tell everyone how it's a bad thing for the economy that I shouldn't be able to dump garbage in the street?
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
Your "overwhelming and blatantly obvious" evidence is smelling a city and looking at melting ice?
You compare the opposing views to flat earthers!
You provide no scientific proof!
You call skeptics "crazed unscientific nut-jobs".
Your proof that it is anthropogenic is to look at a city to view the smog and smell it compared to the country air?
You then switch to talking about pollution and then say its irrelevant that we are causing GW or not...
Then blame energy companies and the republicans?
You talk about consensus... when there is no such thing.
Then pull statistics out of your ass (50% of people deny well accepted science????)
How the hell you could have been modded insightful is beyond me.
You are the Glen Beck of the green movement. Get of of this important discussion until you have something worthwhile to say.
Who gives a damn what the pollution is made out of. Let us just follow a simple logical process. Smog happens over cities. Smog is bad for people. Smog has never existed over countryside, unless very close to city and blown there. Smog filled areas are warmer than non-smog filled ones, any number of data collection surveys have proved that, and it is obvious to anyone who commutes. And the fact that the earth is warming, and CO2 levels rise in a way directly proportional to what we output, as does total heat content of earth, which is all just icing on the cake.
You remind me of evolution deniers in that you take a major theory with blatantly obvious effects that can be observed all around you (such as drug resistant bacteria) and you b) pick a small insignificant detail to insult, and stand on your mighty high horse of self-confidence. The problem is that you are talking about something small, and ignoring the angry elephant in the room.
as an aside, we know carbon emissions harm people, we know how much emissions things produce. Regulating them is a matter or protecting people. The environment is just an add on. Back in the days before I was alive, when something was toxic and harming people it was banned, not left alone so that big businesses didn't have to pay a few more dollars to save an enormous amount of money in the long run.
So carbon emissions should be limited no matter what. I don't even see why you bothered bringing it up.
The fact of the matter is that the earth is warming, and no matter how many times you say it isn't, or try to spend decades debating possible causes beyond all reasonable doubt, meanwhile the sea levels rise, coastal cities flood, people die of pollution related ailments, all because some super-corporation decided that it was cheaper to buy a lobbyist now, or bribe a few scientists, instead of invest in more efficient technology what would save them money in the long run, which just goes back to greedy stock holders only caring about the share price in the next couple weeks and saying to screw the long term health of the company.
And carbon is not the only pollution. Nitrous oxides are bad for people and cause acid rain, industrial waste products can be lethal even in relatively small amounts, or can cause birth defects in children and blah blah blah.
I mean really, your argument relies on the idea that the environment is the only important thing in the world, and that it is fine until trillions of dollars of research have been spent to verify things that were known after only a million dollars of research.
Really, what are you trying to achieve? There is no good reason not to decrease emissions, it creates efficiency which saves money and advances technology, and improves the quality of life. And global warming exists beyond reasonable doubt, and it is happening ridiculously fast in parallel to human emissions of several pollutants.
Do we know it for an absolute fact? of course not, but we know it within enough probability that it is totally pointless to pretend that very small possibility that there is a major force at work on earth that we have not yet discovered that changes earths temperature is like saying that we should just let an asteroid hit earth and some 'God' will save his chosen people.
The real question is, what point does that argument serve? As far as the science goes it is far less probable that your argument is right than that UFO scientists will discover something useful, and it is only useful to mega-corps in the extreme short term. Why even bother, when there are so many, far more important issues that we need to be dealing with.
Where is the mod rating for "scary"? Also,
Nice try - but as reality shows, opening data to deniers just leads to them either cherry-picking or totally ignoring it. And the article you linked to is the proof. As well as the Read Me - you didn't even notice that it has nothing to do with climate modelling, did you?
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
So it doesn't matter that efficiency is good for business in the long term, or that carbon emissions hurt people, or that the earth is warming regardless of the cause, we should listen to something that is so unlikely it is totally pointless to consider for more than ten minutes (which of course, we have already).
Regardless of the general hate of reality, the end results will be the same, and the science will still be true, but it will still be denied when Florida is totally submerged, the ice caps are melted, and so on.
Where is the mod rating for "scary"? Also,
It's amazing how some people berate others for bias whilst ignoring their own.
Perhaps there really is "nothing to see here". Certainly that is the most probable explanation (oh noes, he's using common sense, stop him).
Do you have some evidence to back up this rather far fetched claim. No...
OK I guess I'll have to take you at your word, Mr policeman, Mr scientist, we call all go home now as Moryath has declared this whole thing to be a sham, feel free to deposit that evidence in a bin on your way out, we don't need it any more thanks to Moryath.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
The real question is what the fuck the right actually wants us to do.
We created a damn free market to encourage people not to pollute. People who pollute have to, not pay fines, but purchase credits from non-polluters at market value. Meanwhile, people who manage to reduce their pollution can sell their right to pollute to others.
It's not only a 'free market' way of doing it, it's the right's goddamn idea.
And not the right bitches and moans about how it's 'destroying' everything.
So what, we should drop all this free market stuff and...fine people who pollute, with arbitrary decreases in pollution required? Like car MPG regulations? That's what the left wanted to do in the first place.
Oh, instead, we should just give money to businesses? First of all, that's possibly the stupidest idea ever, but bonus points for being the right unable to hide the fact what that actually have a problem with is 'anything costing businesses money, and in fact we demand you give them assloads of cash', but, um, if we actually handed non-polluting businesses money, wouldn't that be exactly the sort of 'government handout' that the right rails about all the time? (To 'greens', no less.)
I have to suspect that if we actually decided to do that, the right would come up with some reason it doesn't like that, either. It'd be 'government subsidies to left-leaning companies' or something.
Cap and trade is an idea designed to keep the government out of the 'pollution market', designed by the right. Now, of course, they absolutely hate the idea. They hate the idea of anything that might cost any business any money at all.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?