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Michael Mann Vindicated (Again) Over Climategate
An anonymous reader writes "Michael Mann, a climatologist at Pennsylvania State University, was one of the central figures involved in the 'Climategate' controversy, which saw many private email conversations between researchers posted publicly. Now, an investigation (PDF) by the National Science Foundation has found "no basis to conclude that the emails were evidence of research misconduct or that they pointed to such evidence." Phil Plait points out that other investigations have found similarly that claims of Mann's misconduct took his statements out of context. 'A big claim by the deniers is that researchers were using "tricks" to falsify conclusions about global warming, but the NSF report is pretty clear that's not true. The most damning thing the investigators could muster was that there was "some concern" over the statistical methods used, but that's not scandalous at all; there's always some argument in science over methodology. The vague language of the report there indicates to me this isn't a big deal, or else they would've been specific. The big point is that the data were not faked.'"
Psst. Might want to read the full post. Or calibrate your irony meter.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
The whole rhetoric of environmental scientists is a problem. What most people object to is the use of weasel words and dubious statistics to justify another round of expensive research funding. In fact, even the genre's title is misleading. The Globe is not Warming. Yes, there is probably Climate Change, which may or may not be human activity driven, but the idea that the globe is warming and the net result is more deserts between the tropics (which seems to be the layman's view) is really rather preposterous and totally unjustifiable by facts.