Still Hiding The Decline?
Global Warming: Alarmist academics are being forced to show their work and they don't like it. Do they fear that a web of deception will unravel if their data are made public?
A state judge has ordered the University of Virginia to cough up documents that pertain to the climate change research of Michael Mann, a former professor known for the hockey stick chart that supposedly shows the earth warming sharply over the last 100 years.
Mann's response has been to accuse "fossil fuel industry-funded climate change deniers" with harassing the university, NASA "and scientific institutions with these frivolous attacks."
Across the Atlantic, Paul Nurse, head of a scientific group, is moaning about how unfair it is for British scientists to put up with freedom-of-information laws.
Requests for drafts and notes, he says, are intimidating and "will consume a huge amount of time" to comply with.
"It is essential that scientists are as open and transparent as possible and, where they are not, they should be held to account," Nurse, president of the prestigious Royal Society, told the British press.
"But at times this appears to be being used as a tool to stop scientists doing their work. That's going to turn us into glue. We are just not going to be able to operate efficiently."
Nurse must have a first-rate mind, at least according to author F. Scott Fitzgerald's definition. Because he seems to be functioning normally while holding two contradictory ideas in his head at the same time: Though he agrees with transparency — or at least says he does — he nonetheless condemns it as a hurdle to academic inquiry.
Listen to the PodcastWith all due respect to Fitzgerald, Nurse appears to be simply covering up his real feelings about scientific transparency, while attempting to look open-minded.
If the scientists who are pushing the clown's nose of a global warming panic button aren't willing to share their work and show how they reached their positions, the only logical conclusion is that they are hiding something. If not, then a full release of their documents would back them up.
Because their work influences public policy that affects lives, the public needs to know what the scientists who are predicting doom have been up to.
Taxpayers who fund the public universities where research is being done deserve a full accounting, too. The many whose lives have been and will be touched by global warming-related legislation have earned the right to see behind the curtain, as well.
We already know what some researchers are capable of.
Mann's so-called hockey stick has been discredited. And British scientist Phil Jones has refused to make data available to a mathematician who was seeking it because he feared that person would "try and find something wrong with it."
Jones is also the scientist who wanted to "hide the decline" by using a "nature trick."
Are these isolated incidents in a largely honest effort?
Or are they examples of how politics and agendas have corrupted science?
Given what we've seen so far, the safe bet is to go with the latter.
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