Bret Stephens: Climategate: Follow the Money

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703939404574566124250205490.html?mod=rss_Today%27s_Most_Popular

by littleiffel • 17 years ago

20 13 17 years ago

online.wsj.com

Tichy2• 17 years ago

"I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seems to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. . . . Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight. . . . We can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!"

Sorry, but that sounds like a normal database. Enter any organization with more than 3 employees to hear the same shouts of despair.

BearOfNH• 17 years ago

We should hold scientists to a higher standard than any organization with more than 3 employees. Especially if they are spending Other People's Money.

jberryman• 17 years ago

Sorry, but the "other people's money" thing irks me. You've experienced all the benefits of living in a society that chooses to fund things collectively with taxes, and paying taxes is part of being an active participant in that society.

Tichy2• 17 years ago

You don't get my point: it is normal that databases/software is a mess (as codinghorror says, all code is shit). Somehow work gets done anyway.

What is your solution: some certification maybe? Please - these are the worst companies... Otherwise, make a suggestion.

drp• 17 years ago

The Watergate is a hotel/office/apartment building. Why do all 'scandals' have to end with -gate?

olefoo• 17 years ago

Because it's a cheap way to make your opponents look sleazy and create a whiff of scandal around a topic.

jfoutz• 17 years ago

Does the CRU even collect data? i thought they were some sort of aggregation organization. Maybe I'm wildly off base, but it thought a whole bunch of people working in independent fields with independent methodologies said, "huh. looks like it's getting a little warmer over time".

Isn't CRU's purpose to reconcile all that data? i'd be willing to stipulate they're a bunch if lying liars, but that doesn't mean all the raw data is faked, just that we don't understand the relationship between less ozone and tree ring thickness (or whatever metric scientist X chose to measure)

uuilly• 17 years ago

A major problem is they have refused to publish the raw data they used for their conclusions. One of the emails said something like, "I hope nobody figures out that the Freedom of Information act applies to us." (Britain's FOI act.) I also don't get the sense that they faked data. But they hand picked it from different sources at different times and used questionable statistical methods to make it look worse.

diego_moita• 17 years ago

This whole "climategate" is smelling like hipocrisy in more than one way.

For 8 years Republicans raised a war against science by repressing environmental research by NASA and EPA, blocking stem cell research, supporting creationism and fighting the teaching of evolution.

Now, because one University in UK leaked a few comments out of context and concealed data and methodology they are "oh-so-shocked!" about all global warming research.

rbranson• 17 years ago

Oh please, comparing a few billion distributed over years and years in government projects to the multi-hundred-billion-dollar-a-year oil cartel is shameful "journalism." There's no science in this opinion piece, it's just Glenn Beck style arrow graph tin foil hat nonsense.

Bret Stephens: Climategate: Follow the Money

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