Climategate's Final Days

The Bad Astronomer writes "Climategate may be on its way out. An investigatory committee at Pennsylvania State University has formally cleared climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann of any scientific misconduct. Mann was central in the so-called Climategate scandal, where illegally leaked emails were purported to indicate examples of scientists trying to cover up any lack of global warming in their data. This finding by the committee (PDF) is another in a series of independent investigations that have all concluded that no misconduct has occurred."

Comments

The headline belies the content...

[ojintoad]

Nor will it stop the deniers at large. Expect the comments below to be filled with changing goalposts, poisoning of the well (something along the lines of "scientists shouldn’t be investigating scientists", even though what they were investigating was Dr. Mann’s scientific conduct), distractions, diversions, and just general noise — anything to bury the cold fact that the scientists involved with modeling global warming did not cheat, did not fake any data, and the bigger issue that climate change is real.

Just a bit of bias there

[Necron69]

You article author says this about himself:

"Since Day 1 of this I have been calling it a non-event, a manufactured controversy by global warming denialists trying to make enough noise to drown out any real talk on this topic. "

Hardly an unbiased observer. I, for one, really hope that there isn't anything to 'ClimateGate' but if you've read anything about it at all, you know that the problem wasn't the emails, but in the leaked data sets and source code. The emails show typical petty human behaviour. The data and source code suggest the possibility of cherry picking of data, and mathematical modeling to reach a predetermined conclusion. That is what worries me, but I admit I don't have the expertise to make a determination on my own.

Sunshine and openness is only way to ever end this debate over global warming. All research, results, and data sets should be publicly available. Is that really too much to ask?

Necron69

News stories were retracted, as well

[2muchcoffeeman]

The story in The Sunday Times of London that kicked all this off has been fully retracted with several uses of the phrase "We apologise." The German newspaper that reported that the IPCC erred in its assessment of climate impact in Africa also retracted that story.
 
Speaking as a journalist, the most damning phrase I see in The Times' retraction is this one (boldfaced emphasis mine):

A version of our article that had been checked with Dr Lewis underwent significant late editing and so did not give a fair or accurate account of his views on these points. We apologise for this.

So what really happened there? It sounds suspiciously like somebody high up at The Times or News Corporation didn't like the point of view presented and changed it to fit his or her own worldview, facts be damned.

Re:We All Wish

[fermion]

These 'debates' end basically when the people who are used to profiting off the old ways die, and new stakeholders have the opportunity to recast their position in a new light. For instance, cigarette smoking was known to cause cancer in the late 1800's. It was relatively well established by the 1950's. The only reason the debate went on another generation or two was to give the corporations time to restructure the business model. Now smoking is bad, and some people still choose to do it.

Go further back to the way blood circulates in the heart. In 1533 Michael Servetus published a paper saying the heart pumped the blood, as opposed to previous western belief that blood flowed like the tides, which some religious people put mythical significance to, and made part of their superstitions. If blood was pumped, then it would in some way continue to assert the superiority of science in furthering the human quality of life. By the early to mid 1600's William Harvery showed that the heart pumped blood. Here is the interesting debate. In the very early years of the Common Era, many philosophers though that the heart had an active role in pumping blood, but if you read the history, it seems like there never any consensus prior to Harvey, and that the tide theory was a valid conjecture.

The point is that as advance as we think we are, we are only a few hundred years out of the supertitious muck in which we tortured and drowned little girls to prove they were not witches. In which we would not wash our hands to save children. Some us may see it as 500 years since Galileo saved us from the myths, but in practical terms it has not been nearly that long.