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Just to show that I, too, can cut & paste - I bring to you, that
one mythical reader that is actually following this stuff, the
following opinion piece from the Wall Street Journal:<br>
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<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703499404574559630382048494.html?mod=wsj_share_facebook">http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703499404574559630382048494.html?mod=wsj_share_facebook</a><br>
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<h1>How to Forge a Consensus
</h1>
<h2 class="subhead">The impression left by the Climategate emails is
that the global warming game has been rigged from the start. </h2>
<div id="article_pagination_top" class="articlePagination"> </div>
<p>The
climatologists at the center of last week's leaked-email and document
scandal have taken the line that it is all much ado about nothing. Yes,
the wording of the some of their messages was unfortunate, but they
insist this in no way undermines the underlying science, which is as
certain as ever.</p>
<p>"What they've done is search through stolen personal
emails—confidential between colleagues who often speak in a language
they understand and is often foreign to the outside world," Penn
State's Michael Mann told Reuters Wednesday. Mr. Mann added that this
has made "something innocent into something nefarious."</p>
<p>Phil Jones, Director of the University of East Anglia's Climate
Research Unit, from which the emails were lifted, is singing from the
same climate hymnal. "My colleagues and I accept that some of the
published emails do not read well. I regret any upset or confusion
caused as a result. Some were clearly written in the heat of the
moment, others use colloquialisms frequently used between close
colleagues," he said this week.</p>
<p>We don't doubt that Mr. Jones would have phrased his emails
differently if he expected them to end up in the newspaper. His May
2008 email to Mr. Mann regarding the U.N.'s Fourth Assessment Report:
"Mike, Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?"
does not "read well," it's true. (Mr. Mann has said he didn't delete
any such emails.)</p>
<p>But the furor over these documents is not about tone, colloquialisms
or even whether climatologists are nice people in private. The real
issue is what the messages say about the way the much-ballyhooed
scientific consensus on global warming was arrived at in the first
place, and how even now a single view is being enforced. In short, the
impression left by the correspondence among Messrs. Mann and Jones and
others is that the climate-tracking game has been rigged from the
start. </p>
<p>According to this privileged group, only those whose work has been
published in select scientific journals, after having gone through the
"peer-review" process, can be relied on to critique the science. And
sure enough, any challenges that critics have lobbed at climatologists
from outside this clique are routinely dismissed and disparaged. </p>
<p>This past September, Mr. Mann told a New York Times reporter in one
of the leaked emails that: "Those such as [Stephen] McIntyre who
operate almost entirely outside of this system are not to be trusted."
Mr. McIntyre is a retired Canadian businessman who fact-checks the
findings of climate scientists and often publishes the mistakes he
finds—including some in Mr. Mann's work—on his Web site,
Climateaudit.org. He holds the rare distinction of having forced Mr.
Mann to publish a correction to one of his more-famous papers.</p>
<p>As anonymous reviewers of choice for certain journals, Mr. Mann
& Co. had considerable power to enforce the consensus, but it was
not absolute, as they discovered in 2003. Mr. Mann noted to several
colleagues in an email from March 2003, when the journal "Climate
Research" published a paper not to Mr. Mann's liking, that "This was
the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the
'peer-reviewed literature'. Obviously, they found a solution to
that—take over a journal!"</p>
The scare quotes around "peer-reviewed
literature," by the way, are Mr. Mann's. He went on in the email to
suggest that the journal itself be blackballed: "Perhaps we should
encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer
submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to
consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who
currently sit on the editorial board." In other words, keep dissent out
of the respected journals. When that fails, re-define what constitutes
a respected journal to exclude any that publish inconvenient views.
It's easy to manufacture a scientific consensus when you get to decide
what counts as science.
<a name="U10298036121FXC"></a>
<p>The response to this among the
defenders of Mr. Mann and his circle has been that even if they did
disparage doubters and exclude contrary points of view, theirs is still
the best climate science we've got. The proof for this is circular.
It's the best, we're told, because it's the most-published and
most-cited—in that same peer-reviewed literature.</p>
<p>Even so, by rigging the rules, they've made it impossible to know
how good it really is. And then, one is left to wonder why they felt
the need to rig the game in the first place, if their science is as
robust as they claim. If there's an innocent explanation for that, we'd
love to hear it.</p>
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