"The Legacy of Climategate"

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Wayne

Tempus faciendi, Domine.
Cal Beisner writes about one fallout from the Climategate emails:

As the Congressionally commissioned Wegman Report (http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/WegmanReport.pdf), which found that Michael Mann's now infamous "hockey stick" graph of historic temperatures rested on cherry-picked data and basic fallacies in statistics and that criticisms of it by Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick were "valid and compelling," rather mildly put it, "authors in the area of paleoclimate studies are closely connected and thus ‘independent studies’ may not be as independent as they might appear on the surface. We note that there is no evidence that Dr. Mann or any of the other authors in paleoclimatology studies have had significant interactions with mainstream statisticians."

Peer review having failed abysmally in climate change science, scientists devoted to the free exchange of ideas on a level playing ground created, probably unintentionally, a substitute: peer-to-peer review.

You might picture peer-to-peer review as a swarm of piranhas hungrily tearing apart an animal that's fallen into their waters. The picture isn't pretty. There's a seething, frothing, bloody turmoil in the water as hundreds of the voracious fish, with their rapier teeth, tear off chunks of flesh. In short order, all that's left of the animal is its skeleton. It's been picked clean of all the soft, edible parts. [emphasis added]

In peer-to-peer review, the hapless animal is any published scientific study that happens to raise suspicions in a scientist reader proficient in cyberspace. He detects a soft spot in the study, attacks it, and sees where it leads. His initial reports are like blood in the water to other piranhas; they quickly attract other peers, who look for more soft spots, or deepen the penetration of the first one. A strong article survives, the peers perhaps having disclosed a few minor mistakes that need correction. A weak article gets torn to pieces.

Sort of like a scientific Puritan Board! :lol:
 
A recent blog post at Lewrockwell.com links to an article chronicling how some wretches at google.com are cloaking and cherry picking search results for climategate. Taking left wing google.com down a notch is another good coming out of climategate.
 
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