
Bret Stephens: Climategate: Follow the Money - littleiffel
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703939404574566124250205490.html?mod=rss_Today%27s_Most_Popular
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jfoutz
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)

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uuilly
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.

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

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

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Tichy
"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.

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BearOfNH
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.

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jberryman
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.

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jerf
That's not the perspective in question. The point is that when you are taking
other people's money, you have a responsibility, as part of that society you
mention, to take that money more seriously than you might take money you earn
from your own labors.

Money is a big deal; money is retirement funds, money is food, money is
medical care, money is all kinds of things. Money isn't just "big TVs" and
"fast cars", though it is those things too. Society needs to take money to do
various things, but the recipients should be treating it as a sacred honor,
not their birthright. When you waste $1000 of your own money, you (hopefully!)
do it in the knowledge that you can afford it; when you waste $1000 of public
money, you should do it in the knowledge that at least some of the people that
came from really _couldn't_ afford it, especially if it brought them no value.

I say this in general, actually, not specifically in reference to any
recipient of public money. And I say it with full knowledge that it's
horrifically utopian and there's hardly anyone that actually acts that way.
But they _should_.

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nollidge
But taking extra care of a database requires more time and therefore more
money. There's a break-even point somewhere (not that I claim to know exactly
where that is).

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rbranson
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.

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diego_moita
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.

