Passing a bill, as the opposition, telling the government they have to somehow reach the Kyoto targets...
Yeah, that's real bold action there.
It's easy to say you want to achieve the targets, the problem is actually doing something to achieve those targets. That's the unpopular part that generally gets parties in trouble, that's why the other parties didn't propose any specific measures, they wanted the credit for achieving Kyoto, but they also wanted the Conservatives to take the political hit for taking the necessary action (and don't imagine the opposition would let them off easy).
The truth is since 1990 the only thing that's slowed emissions is the recession.
We actually did have one party actually try to take specific action to achieve Kyoto once, Stephane Dion ran on a platform of introducing a carbon tax, and then he lost the election because voters didn't want to pay for carbon (even though the tax was supposed to be revenue neutral and be offset by reductions in income tax).
We didn't cut our carbon because our economy and population were both growing. Now we could have done better than we did, more fuel efficient vehicles, starting to clean up our power generation, etc. However, since we had no shot at the Kyoto targets without major economic consequences we didn't have much motivation to do anything in between. I really think Kyoto was flawed that way and there needed to be some mechanism for countries with big primary industry, who obviously weren't going to hit Kyoto, to make gains from some intermediate action rather than volunteering to a giant slap on the wrist at the end.
It's almost as if religious folks -know- that they're wrong. Thus to preserve their wrongheadedness, it's requires to not even learn about the alternatives. (presumably, learning would risk realising that the alternative theories are correct.)
I strongly disagree. If I had to go back in time to Nazi Germany, and listen to lectures about the evils of the Jews, I would not have the stomach to sit there and listen to it. It's not because I secretly fear that the Jews are indeed responsible for the world's suffering, just that I could only tolerate so much hatemongering bullshit before realising that I had better things to do with my time.
Of course, that's not to say that evolution is akin to Nazi propaganda, just that refusing to listen != you know you're wrong.
I don't think it's anything to do with belief, it's to do with tribal identity.
I think it would probably be easy to sit there and listen to lectures about the evils of the Jews, it would probably be pretty frustrating but I wouldn't have to leave the room. What would be difficult is to sit there are be associated with anti-semites and Nazis, that is why I'd leave the room, to disassociate with them. (Though in reality I'd probably stick around as leaving might get me shot)
I think these students are in a similar position, while they hate the idea of evolution what they're really trying to show is they can't stand to be associated with evolutionists and atheists.
If you honestly believed 100% that when you die you go to a beautiful place then why mourn death?
Because their friends and family and loved ones have still lost someone very dear to them. If you think about it, funerals are for the living as much as they are for the dead, if not more.
The carbon from the oil under ocean beds is in the ground.
While the carbon from the oil in that link is made from pig manure, which a few hours previously was in a plant, and a few days/months previously to that in the air.
And if it wasn't turned into oil a good portion of that manure would biodegrade and end up back in the air anyhow.
So putting the carbon in that pig manure oil back into the atmosphere isn't really adding much.
The environmental movement is likely one of the major reasons why Nuclear power has fallen out of public favour.
Consider the possibility that after weighing all the factors (carbon emissions, other air pollution, mining, radiation, etc) that Nuclear power is a major net benefit to the environment.
It's entirely possible that the planet would be better off if the environmental movement never existed.
I don't know if that's actually the case, but I think it's pretty damning of the environmental movement that it could come down so strongly on either side of an issue where there's a legitimate debate. Maybe as a rule of thumb when a movement starts rallying around causes that could very be hurting their objectives than that movement has gone off the rails.
All the emails that I have seen relate to the work that, in the case of UEA, I have to fund. None relate to private issue unless it's slagging off colleagues for their research.
Because people at their offices are drones with no private life, professional or personal rivalries, and they'd never send a personal email from their work account.
Besides, have you read the entire archive? The climate skeptics might only pull out the stuff that bolsters their case, but I'm sure there's no shortage of people who know CRU employees personally snooping through the logs to see what their buddy, rival, or romantic interest might be doing.
MInd you since CRU/UEA is confirming them, they are going to be in hot water. Imagine denying you have them for FOI requests, then being able to confirm them.
Tut tut. Very stupid
I didn't see any mention of this in either of the links.
What we get is every 10 years a new set of predictions and models explaining why the last 20 years models and predictions weren't correct but we are still doomed anyway
The young specialist in English Lit, having quoted me, went on to lecture me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern "knowledge" is that it is wrong. The young man then quoted with approval what Socrates had said on learning that the Delphic oracle had proclaimed him the wisest man in Greece. "If I am the wisest man," said Socrates, "it is because I alone know that I know nothing." the implication was that I was very foolish because I was under the impression I knew a great deal.
My answer to him was, "John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
Maybe if they had good reason to believe that more emails were obtained but not yet released.
But it's also a very understandable reaction. Would you want to release your organization's private emails when the only people interested in them are people trying to discredit you?
Also note that even if these emails are work related they are still private, consider any time you've sent an email without CC'ing someone, now consider your worst enemies combing through those emails.
I don't know anything about the gene in question (nor a ton about genetics), but it is possible to have "a little" or "a lot" of a gene instead of 0, 1, or 2. There can be multiple copies of a gene on a single chromosome, and this could cause more of the associated protein to be created, and thus enhance whatever effect that gene has. I don't know how common this is in nature, but I know they recreate some neurological diseases in lab mice by inserting multiple copies of the affected gene into the the genome.
To play the devil's advocate producing a top sportsman isn't the only reason one might want this test.
You want them "to be encouraged to do whatever form of sport/exercise they are willing/happy to do."
Well two big factors in enjoying sport are a) having some talent for it, and b) being able to improve at it. If they have success they're more likely to stay active, and healthy. That doesn't mean forcing them into a sport, but I think guiding a child towards areas where they have potential is good parenting.
Apple and the labels are both still competing against free which factors into the price point. It will also be hard for a new competitor to charge more since people could just purchase the song for cheaper from Apple since a label probably doesn't want to withhold their music from a big retailer like Apple.
Cent OS has a lag of anywhere from around a month, to 9 months in the case of 6.0, and 5 months and counting for 6.1. I have no idea of the delay for bug fixes, particularly security bugs, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was a decent delay there as well.
For the support angle, it's not so much the case that you're going to call them up and ask how to configure apache. But if you do encounter a bug that a real issue they're going to take it a lot more seriously if you're paying them some money.
Also note that 3rd party packages are generally packaged for RHEL, I recently tried to set up a Cent OS virtual server for my own use and ended up switching to Fedora since the LDAP package I wanted couldn't be installed on Cent OS. And that's not just the first example, I remember a previous co-worker who convinced his manager to get RHEL after screwing around with another 3rd party app that didn't like Cent OS.
Cent OS is great for some uses, but it can also be an extra hassle, and if you've got the cash to avoid the potential complications I'd go for it.
The FAQ covers this "4. How are business photos collected?
Business photos are being gathered by a team of Google trusted photographers with permission from the businesses involved. These are local photographers who service your neighborhood."
"8. Who from my business can give permission to Google to take photos?
You can only apply for a business photo shoot if you have the proper authority to allow a Google trusted photographer access to the business premises to collect photographs, and to allow Google to use those photographs in its products and services. For example, you might be the owner of the business, or a director or manager with sufficient authority to make those commitments on behalf of the business. Please note that by submitting your application for a business photo shoot you are confirming with Google that you have the authority to make that commitment."
While a store's local manager might accidentally go against the wishes of the higher ups this is true for any business decision. I think the critical point with respect to security is that this is explicitly opt-in, so the businesses can decide on the security risk for themselves.
Finally, I think it's important to note that if this study had come to the opposite conclusion, it would have been derided as quack science and laughed off of Slashdot. Furthermore, the fact that the Koch brothers funded an apparently legitimate scientific study is unlikely to challenge the conception of most on this forum that they are a bunch of purely evil monsters, but it should.
Well yeah.
If you interview a 100 mathematicians, 99 say x=3, and the 100th says x=2, than one of three things has happened. Either the 100th was right, the 99 were right, or neither were right.
Now it's not impossible that the 100th is right, but siding with the 100th on a regular basis is a very good way to be wrong.
The only people upset by the split hypothesis is the climate skeptics. All the debate I've seen among the scientists is trying to figure out how much of the current trend is AGW and how much is natural (note it could be 150% if we're in a natural cooling cycle).
There's also been a lot of study over whether AGW is good or bad. A little isn't a huge deal (we already have a little), but a lot means massive drops in food production leading to famines and a lot of war, it hits the poorest equatorial nations a lot worse than the developed world. Maybe it eventually stabilized at a higher productive value, but that's decades or even centuries in the future.
Scientists have been fairly unanimous in predicting warming since the mid 1970's, and so far they've been right.
And it isn't a coin flip, there are degrees of warming, if you predict that it's going to be warmer than it has in thousands of years you have a far smaller chance than 50/50 of getting lucky.
The first is you have to make do with what you can. For many problem types they can't achieve results with the rigour of particle physicists, but that doesn't mean the results they can get aren't useful science. Like it or not that's the confidence they can achieve, now the question is what do you do with that information. If someone is 95% sure something important is going to happen, and you choose to ignore them because they can't achieve the answer you want, than a lot of the time you're probably going to regret it.
The second reason is publication bias. When a scientist gets a 99% confidence that doesn't really mean there's only a 1% chance they're wrong, it only means there's a 1% chance that particular experiment would produce a false positive if they were wrong. But if a 1000 scientists are doing the same experiment, and they're all wrong, there's still going to be a lot of people getting a positive result with 99% confidence.
I suspect particle physics effectively has a lot more data, and a lot more experiments, so they're a lot more susceptible to publication bias. It's entirely possible that the true probability of a particle physics experiment with 99% confidence is lower than a climate model with 95% confidence.
I don't know enough about either field to say to what degree this is the case, but I don't think you can compare the probabilities as simply as you do. And your resulting indictment of the integrity and competency of climate scientists is on very shaky ground.
Experts can be wrong, but they're still by default the best opinion you're going to get on any subject unless you have good evidence to the contrary. And if you think you have good evidence to the contrary try asking the experts about it, chances are a) the evidence isn't nearly as good as you thought it was, or b) you misunderstood what the experts think.
BTW, I heard experts talking about how the housing bubble would cause a massive recession in the run up to the 2004 election, don't confused punditland with expert opinion.
Different fields have different capabilities to obtain data and achieve statistical certainty. My gut says particle physicists have an easier time collecting new of data, testing different hypothesis, and therefore can afford (and need) a higher standard of statistical confidence. If you're performing 20 different experiments, and one comes back positive, than 95% confidence doesn't mean much and you should easily be able to do better. But if you only have one real big experiment, and collecting another data point means waiting another year, than 95% suddenly means a lot more and might be the best you can do.
These are different fields talking about very different kinds of hypothesis with very different kinds of data. Doesn't it make sense that they calibrate their language usage differently?
What exactly is supposed to be in those documents that's so damaging?
What documents?
Why on earth are you so defensive about letting people see documentation from a state-sponsored project?
You sound like a shill.
So if you're innocent than you have nothing to hide by letting us search your house? There's a difference between the good of government sponsored research being made public (which I assume they were in this case) and the private lives of government employees, including aspects of their private work environment, being open for all to see.
Cuccinelli obviously has an axe to grind, I don't know if his plan is to make whatever scrap he can into as big a case he can, throw stuff into the public domain for the quote miners, or simply to intimidate and put personal pressure on Mann. But whatever his plan it's an obvious abuse of his office to target a political opponent without evidence in the hopes of finding something incriminating.
AFAIK #2 is true, some of the data couldn't be publicly released because of copyright issues, but that data didn't change the conclusions and could presumably be accessed by other researchers.
As for the rest.
The data is public.
The code is public.
The papers are public.
What else do you fracking need?
Lets be honest here. This isn't about the science of global warming, all the information necessary to debate the science of global warming is out there, it can, and has been debated publicly and openly, and for the most part the scientists all agree AGW is real.
So other than all the scientists simply making a giant honest mistake (which they're VERY adamant they're not doing) the only plausible scenario where AGW is wrong is if a few key scientists are skewing data to support AGW, and the rest of the field is just following them.
So what Climategate is about is showing that one of these key scientists is lying, the problem is that there doesn't seem to be any evidence of that, there were a couple suspicious looking references in the CRU emails, but those turned out to be a red herring as this inquiry found. And further claims of misconduct are vague because there's nothing to base them on when everything is in the open and can be reproduced, but skeptics want the investigation to continue to find any dirt on him so the public will think it's all a big fraud.
Really? What could Mann be hiding, that can't be discovered in the published research, that's actually relevant to the science of global warming?
Slashdot Mirror
Passing a bill, as the opposition, telling the government they have to somehow reach the Kyoto targets...
Yeah, that's real bold action there.
It's easy to say you want to achieve the targets, the problem is actually doing something to achieve those targets. That's the unpopular part that generally gets parties in trouble, that's why the other parties didn't propose any specific measures, they wanted the credit for achieving Kyoto, but they also wanted the Conservatives to take the political hit for taking the necessary action (and don't imagine the opposition would let them off easy).
The truth is since 1990 the only thing that's slowed emissions is the recession.
We actually did have one party actually try to take specific action to achieve Kyoto once, Stephane Dion ran on a platform of introducing a carbon tax, and then he lost the election because voters didn't want to pay for carbon (even though the tax was supposed to be revenue neutral and be offset by reductions in income tax).
We didn't cut our carbon because our economy and population were both growing. Now we could have done better than we did, more fuel efficient vehicles, starting to clean up our power generation, etc. However, since we had no shot at the Kyoto targets without major economic consequences we didn't have much motivation to do anything in between. I really think Kyoto was flawed that way and there needed to be some mechanism for countries with big primary industry, who obviously weren't going to hit Kyoto, to make gains from some intermediate action rather than volunteering to a giant slap on the wrist at the end.
As it is just yesterday we threw away an opportunity to clean up the oilsands, though in this case the environmental movement is probably more to blame.
I strongly disagree. If I had to go back in time to Nazi Germany, and listen to lectures about the evils of the Jews, I would not have the stomach to sit there and listen to it. It's not because I secretly fear that the Jews are indeed responsible for the world's suffering, just that I could only tolerate so much hatemongering bullshit before realising that I had better things to do with my time.
Of course, that's not to say that evolution is akin to Nazi propaganda, just that refusing to listen != you know you're wrong.
I don't think it's anything to do with belief, it's to do with tribal identity.
I think it would probably be easy to sit there and listen to lectures about the evils of the Jews, it would probably be pretty frustrating but I wouldn't have to leave the room. What would be difficult is to sit there are be associated with anti-semites and Nazis, that is why I'd leave the room, to disassociate with them. (Though in reality I'd probably stick around as leaving might get me shot)
I think these students are in a similar position, while they hate the idea of evolution what they're really trying to show is they can't stand to be associated with evolutionists and atheists.
If you honestly believed 100% that when you die you go to a beautiful place then why mourn death?
Because their friends and family and loved ones have still lost someone very dear to them. If you think about it, funerals are for the living as much as they are for the dead, if not more.
So it's a going away party.
Unlimited supply once you take pricing effects into consideration. That and we can make more. We could set this on up in Washington, or any eco zone... http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4732398/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/researchers-turn-manure-crude-oil/
The carbon from the oil under ocean beds is in the ground.
While the carbon from the oil in that link is made from pig manure, which a few hours previously was in a plant, and a few days/months previously to that in the air.
And if it wasn't turned into oil a good portion of that manure would biodegrade and end up back in the air anyhow.
So putting the carbon in that pig manure oil back into the atmosphere isn't really adding much.
The environmental movement is likely one of the major reasons why Nuclear power has fallen out of public favour.
Consider the possibility that after weighing all the factors (carbon emissions, other air pollution, mining, radiation, etc) that Nuclear power is a major net benefit to the environment.
It's entirely possible that the planet would be better off if the environmental movement never existed.
I don't know if that's actually the case, but I think it's pretty damning of the environmental movement that it could come down so strongly on either side of an issue where there's a legitimate debate. Maybe as a rule of thumb when a movement starts rallying around causes that could very be hurting their objectives than that movement has gone off the rails.
All the emails that I have seen relate to the work that, in the case of UEA, I have to fund. None relate to private issue unless it's slagging off colleagues for their research.
Because people at their offices are drones with no private life, professional or personal rivalries, and they'd never send a personal email from their work account.
Besides, have you read the entire archive? The climate skeptics might only pull out the stuff that bolsters their case, but I'm sure there's no shortage of people who know CRU employees personally snooping through the logs to see what their buddy, rival, or romantic interest might be doing.
MInd you since CRU/UEA is confirming them, they are going to be in hot water. Imagine denying you have them for FOI requests, then being able to confirm them.
Tut tut. Very stupid
I didn't see any mention of this in either of the links.
What we get is every 10 years a new set of predictions and models explaining why the last 20 years models and predictions weren't correct but we are still doomed anyway
In the words of Issac Asimov
The young specialist in English Lit, having quoted me, went on to lecture me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern "knowledge" is that it is wrong. The young man then quoted with approval what Socrates had said on learning that the Delphic oracle had proclaimed him the wisest man in Greece. "If I am the wisest man," said Socrates, "it is because I alone know that I know nothing." the implication was that I was very foolish because I was under the impression I knew a great deal.
My answer to him was, "John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
Maybe if they had good reason to believe that more emails were obtained but not yet released.
But it's also a very understandable reaction. Would you want to release your organization's private emails when the only people interested in them are people trying to discredit you?
Also note that even if these emails are work related they are still private, consider any time you've sent an email without CC'ing someone, now consider your worst enemies combing through those emails.
I don't know anything about the gene in question (nor a ton about genetics), but it is possible to have "a little" or "a lot" of a gene instead of 0, 1, or 2. There can be multiple copies of a gene on a single chromosome, and this could cause more of the associated protein to be created, and thus enhance whatever effect that gene has. I don't know how common this is in nature, but I know they recreate some neurological diseases in lab mice by inserting multiple copies of the affected gene into the the genome.
To play the devil's advocate producing a top sportsman isn't the only reason one might want this test.
You want them "to be encouraged to do whatever form of sport/exercise they are willing/happy to do."
Well two big factors in enjoying sport are a) having some talent for it, and b) being able to improve at it. If they have success they're more likely to stay active, and healthy. That doesn't mean forcing them into a sport, but I think guiding a child towards areas where they have potential is good parenting.
Apple and the labels are both still competing against free which factors into the price point. It will also be hard for a new competitor to charge more since people could just purchase the song for cheaper from Apple since a label probably doesn't want to withhold their music from a big retailer like Apple.
Just compare the release histories
Cent OS has a lag of anywhere from around a month, to 9 months in the case of 6.0, and 5 months and counting for 6.1. I have no idea of the delay for bug fixes, particularly security bugs, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was a decent delay there as well.
For the support angle, it's not so much the case that you're going to call them up and ask how to configure apache. But if you do encounter a bug that a real issue they're going to take it a lot more seriously if you're paying them some money.
Also note that 3rd party packages are generally packaged for RHEL, I recently tried to set up a Cent OS virtual server for my own use and ended up switching to Fedora since the LDAP package I wanted couldn't be installed on Cent OS. And that's not just the first example, I remember a previous co-worker who convinced his manager to get RHEL after screwing around with another 3rd party app that didn't like Cent OS.
Cent OS is great for some uses, but it can also be an extra hassle, and if you've got the cash to avoid the potential complications I'd go for it.
The FAQ covers this
"4. How are business photos collected?
Business photos are being gathered by a team of Google trusted photographers with permission from the businesses involved. These are local photographers who service your neighborhood."
"8. Who from my business can give permission to Google to take photos?
You can only apply for a business photo shoot if you have the proper authority to allow a Google trusted photographer access to the business premises to collect photographs, and to allow Google to use those photographs in its products and services. For example, you might be the owner of the business, or a director or manager with sufficient authority to make those commitments on behalf of the business. Please note that by submitting your application for a business photo shoot you are confirming with Google that you have the authority to make that commitment."
While a store's local manager might accidentally go against the wishes of the higher ups this is true for any business decision. I think the critical point with respect to security is that this is explicitly opt-in, so the businesses can decide on the security risk for themselves.
Finally, I think it's important to note that if this study had come to the opposite conclusion, it would have been derided as quack science and laughed off of Slashdot. Furthermore, the fact that the Koch brothers funded an apparently legitimate scientific study is unlikely to challenge the conception of most on this forum that they are a bunch of purely evil monsters, but it should.
Well yeah.
If you interview a 100 mathematicians, 99 say x=3, and the 100th says x=2, than one of three things has happened. Either the 100th was right, the 99 were right, or neither were right.
Now it's not impossible that the 100th is right, but siding with the 100th on a regular basis is a very good way to be wrong.
Yeah, because Watts would never blog about climate research that hasn't been published and peer-reviewed.
Climate skeptic goalposts recede faster than the glaciers.
It actually might be.
The average consumer hears about technical difficulties and they just forget about it.
They hear denial of service attack they're suddenly thinking about a bad guy trying to steal their money.
Even the article summary lumps DDOS with hacking and malware.
Sorry, global cooling was never the rage among scientists.
The only people upset by the split hypothesis is the climate skeptics. All the debate I've seen among the scientists is trying to figure out how much of the current trend is AGW and how much is natural (note it could be 150% if we're in a natural cooling cycle).
There's also been a lot of study over whether AGW is good or bad. A little isn't a huge deal (we already have a little), but a lot means massive drops in food production leading to famines and a lot of war, it hits the poorest equatorial nations a lot worse than the developed world. Maybe it eventually stabilized at a higher productive value, but that's decades or even centuries in the future.
Scientists have been fairly unanimous in predicting warming since the mid 1970's, and so far they've been right.
And it isn't a coin flip, there are degrees of warming, if you predict that it's going to be warmer than it has in thousands of years you have a far smaller chance than 50/50 of getting lucky.
"The real significance of this, in my view, is that this ice has reportedly been there for thousands of years."
So we see the strongest warming cycle in thousands of years.
What's more likely?
That this unprecedented warming is natural and just happened to correspond with AGW.
Or that the AGW thing that scientists have been talking about for decades is doing exactly the thing they've been predicting.
True there's more nuance than that (not everywhere warms the same, etc) but the evidence has piled up pretty damn high.
So there's two issues here.
The first is you have to make do with what you can. For many problem types they can't achieve results with the rigour of particle physicists, but that doesn't mean the results they can get aren't useful science. Like it or not that's the confidence they can achieve, now the question is what do you do with that information. If someone is 95% sure something important is going to happen, and you choose to ignore them because they can't achieve the answer you want, than a lot of the time you're probably going to regret it.
The second reason is publication bias. When a scientist gets a 99% confidence that doesn't really mean there's only a 1% chance they're wrong, it only means there's a 1% chance that particular experiment would produce a false positive if they were wrong. But if a 1000 scientists are doing the same experiment, and they're all wrong, there's still going to be a lot of people getting a positive result with 99% confidence.
I suspect particle physics effectively has a lot more data, and a lot more experiments, so they're a lot more susceptible to publication bias. It's entirely possible that the true probability of a particle physics experiment with 99% confidence is lower than a climate model with 95% confidence.
I don't know enough about either field to say to what degree this is the case, but I don't think you can compare the probabilities as simply as you do. And your resulting indictment of the integrity and competency of climate scientists is on very shaky ground.
Is it unfathomable that they're wrong?
No.
Is it a good bet that they're right?
Yes.
Experts can be wrong, but they're still by default the best opinion you're going to get on any subject unless you have good evidence to the contrary. And if you think you have good evidence to the contrary try asking the experts about it, chances are a) the evidence isn't nearly as good as you thought it was, or b) you misunderstood what the experts think.
BTW, I heard experts talking about how the housing bubble would cause a massive recession in the run up to the 2004 election, don't confused punditland with expert opinion.
Different fields have different capabilities to obtain data and achieve statistical certainty. My gut says particle physicists have an easier time collecting new of data, testing different hypothesis, and therefore can afford (and need) a higher standard of statistical confidence. If you're performing 20 different experiments, and one comes back positive, than 95% confidence doesn't mean much and you should easily be able to do better. But if you only have one real big experiment, and collecting another data point means waiting another year, than 95% suddenly means a lot more and might be the best you can do.
These are different fields talking about very different kinds of hypothesis with very different kinds of data. Doesn't it make sense that they calibrate their language usage differently?
What exactly is supposed to be in those documents that's so damaging?
What documents?
Why on earth are you so defensive about letting people see documentation from a state-sponsored project?
You sound like a shill.
So if you're innocent than you have nothing to hide by letting us search your house? There's a difference between the good of government sponsored research being made public (which I assume they were in this case) and the private lives of government employees, including aspects of their private work environment, being open for all to see.
Cuccinelli obviously has an axe to grind, I don't know if his plan is to make whatever scrap he can into as big a case he can, throw stuff into the public domain for the quote miners, or simply to intimidate and put personal pressure on Mann. But whatever his plan it's an obvious abuse of his office to target a political opponent without evidence in the hopes of finding something incriminating.
AFAIK #2 is true, some of the data couldn't be publicly released because of copyright issues, but that data didn't change the conclusions and could presumably be accessed by other researchers.
As for the rest.
The data is public.
The code is public.
The papers are public.
What else do you fracking need?
Lets be honest here. This isn't about the science of global warming, all the information necessary to debate the science of global warming is out there, it can, and has been debated publicly and openly, and for the most part the scientists all agree AGW is real.
So other than all the scientists simply making a giant honest mistake (which they're VERY adamant they're not doing) the only plausible scenario where AGW is wrong is if a few key scientists are skewing data to support AGW, and the rest of the field is just following them.
So what Climategate is about is showing that one of these key scientists is lying, the problem is that there doesn't seem to be any evidence of that, there were a couple suspicious looking references in the CRU emails, but those turned out to be a red herring as this inquiry found. And further claims of misconduct are vague because there's nothing to base them on when everything is in the open and can be reproduced, but skeptics want the investigation to continue to find any dirt on him so the public will think it's all a big fraud.
Really? What could Mann be hiding, that can't be discovered in the published research, that's actually relevant to the science of global warming?