ClimateGate Arrogant Scientists

A link on the excellent Burning our Money flagged up Friday's Newsnight, where a climate scientist called an American sceptic "an asshole". The argument really has come down to that. With that one word, Professor Watson shows how much contempt he feels for man made global warming deniers.

Watch the program for yourself (while you can) and see that Professor Watson from UEA is the sort of arrogant self-serving scientist that will brook no dissent. This is the same sort of attitude that has got the MMGW camp into such a mess: the almost religious belief that they are right and everyone else are wrong. Not only that, but those that disbelieve are idiots or "assholes".

There is very little doubt in my mind that what has happened with man made global warming is that the scientists crossed a big fat red line which marked the boundary between subjectivity and objectivity. By crossing the line into the territory marked subjectivity, the MMGW people have created their own problem. They have purposefully gone about making the science fit the thesis, manipulating data where it diverted from their theoretical model. Even Professor Watson in the newsnight interview, (if you listen carefully) says that the email entries about hiding the decline were to do with tree ring data, that matched their thesis, until a point where it diverted, so they had to fudge the data. In his own words: "they are looking at temperatures over the last thousand years, trying to reconstruct them and they use a particular method; Er, with tree rings and it works well, up until about 1960 and then it goes wrong for reasons which, which.. there are lots of papers on, which we don't need to go into..."

In other word, they use tree ring data whilst it supports their thesis, up until it diverts from their model, for a reason they can't or won't explain, then they discard it, or make up the data to fit their model.

The arrogance with which Professor Watson dismisses this poor science boggles me. If the data doesn't fit the model, then the model is wrong, at that point they have to prove the mechanism by which the divergent data still continues to fit the model, or modify the model. All of which has to stand up to independant scrutiny, not some closed shop cabal of climate disciples.

I didn't believe at first that ClimateGate was such a big deal, but the more that comes out ot the affair, the more I'm convinced that its big and unstoppable. There will be major repercussions in science, climatology, high finance and politics.

Thank you mysterious climategate hacker/whistleblower, wherever you are. You have given the blogosphere global provenence.

The downside is, I fear a global backlash. Be ready for it.