The CRU Scandal’s Real Crime Against Science.

I spent a good amount of time on Climateapalooza (hey, it’s better than Climategate or Climatequiddick) in today’s episode of The Delivery, but there’s one point I want to cover in a little more detail. I also want to share a couple very good articles on the situation that do a very good job of explaining what the major issues are and why they are important.

I talked about the issue of trust and, as I listened to the show today, I realized that I didn’t quite get across the point as well as I could have. Trust is a vital part of the scientific process, not so much for the scientists, but for the laymen. Here’s what I mean.

Science is built on proof. Theories and experiments are tested and retested, verified or disproven, continually. There is no such thing as an absolute truth in science because at any moment, there could be a new discovery that could throw the entire “truth” into turmoil (think of what Einstein’s theories did to Newtonian physics, or what quantum theory did to Einstein’s work). This amount of uncertainty is build into how scientists think. When they say something is true, what they really mean is “this has been tested as well as we can test it and it has borne up under that investigation, however, there may well be some test in the future it won’t pass, at which point it will no longer be true in the way I’m using it now”.

Make sense so far?

This is where the trust comes in. When a scientist, speaking in a scientific capacity, says something is true, other scientists (really, all of us) have to be able to assume that his unspoken caveats are true. Otherwise, we’d have to stop and demand proof of the assertion before we could move on. Inside the word “truth” is packed all the underlying testing of the theory itself so that the word itself becomes synonymous with “tested to the limit of our ability”.

The great transgression of the people at the CRU is that they intentionally kicked the foundation from underneath that concept of truth. Now, we know that when people like Phil Jones and Michael Mann were talking about “settled science”, it was most certainly not settled. Indeed, we know that those men worked to ensure that the science could never be settled in the normal scientific ways. They borrowed the word “truth” without ever subjecting their theories to the trials that word requires.  In other words, they stole authority they did not earn and, in doing so, made every scientists’ work more difficult.

Thanks to their self-serving calumny scientists will have to be more explicit about how truth became truth to a far greater extent than ever before. They will have to explain things in greater detail, spell out more of the verification process, and overcome more skepticism than they should because the wicked prevaricators at the CRU decided to throw the scientific process under the bus. Even when they do, they’ll be working from a position of having to regain trust before they can ever get on to their actual point. That is an inarguably bad thing for science in general.

That’s what I consider unforgiveable about this whole thing.

Here are a couple good articles, both at Pajamas Media, from Iain Murray (who I hope to have on the show at some point soon) and Viscount Monckton that should give you a good foundation for understanding just what was done.

Other Posts of Interest:

• If You Think Bush Was Anti-Science, Wait Until You See This Guy
• The Global Warming Debate Part Deux: Monckton Strikes Back!
• Better Fretting, Through Science!

Tags: Climate Change

Category: Oh the Climate, It is A-Changin'