> Some commentators, including the former chancellor Nigel Lawson and the environmental campaigner and Guardian writer George Monbiot, have called on Jones to resign but Pachauri [chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] said he did not agree. He said an independent inquiry into the emails would achieve little, but there should be a criminal investigation into how the emails came to light.
The chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Pachauri, does not inspire trust in the scientific results. Rather than focusing on the misdeeds of the scientists, he's pushing for those who exposed the misdeeds to be punished. Mr. Pachauri's reactions are more consistent with a fake who is afraid of being found out than with an honest scientist who is just interested in exposing truth.
He's a politician, of course he isn't interested in the truth. He's interested in getting the biggest dollar value into his pocket, that's all politics is and ever has been.
The chairman is not very concerned that his scientists are behaving badly, but is very concerned that they were caught.
I really think people should be discreet … in this day and age anything you write, even privately, could become public and to put anything down in writing is, to say the least, indiscreet … It is another matter to talk about this to your friends on the telephone or person to person but to put it down in writing was indiscreet. If someone was to say something like this in an IPCC authors' meeting then there are others who would chew him up."
That last sentence almost makes me want to ask the obvious follow-up: do you keep records of what people say in IPCC meetings? Where are they?
I don't think this is it. There is a system for exposing confidential correspondence to the public; it's called a trial. If there is reasonable suspicion that fraud is going on (and lying about your data to get more research money is fraud), then charges can be filed, and the internal emails can be legally obtained. (Or, a condition of receiving research money can be that all your emails must be made public.) Some Random Hackers breaking into private computer systems, though, is not acceptable, no matter how noble the goal. Some judicial oversight is necessary to protect the researchers. (Even criminals deserve privacy.)
I would very much have preferred for this information to come to light via the legal way for exposing it: a FOI request. Unfortunately, there seems to have been a consp^H^H^H^H^H intentionally organized effort to defeat FOI requests. That makes things sort of a catch-22. (I am starting to believe the theory that this archive was prepared for a FOI request, quashed, and then leaked by a whistleblower. The argument that cinched it for me: how the heck did somebody get a random dump of emails and documents with the ratio of work : personal : spam looking like infinity: negligible: negligible? Either our mysterious hacker has OCD or someone was pretty careful when collecting this data.
Surely if the original data sets upon which important decisions will ultimately be based are missing or destroyed, such that the results can't be independently reproduced, that alone ought to be cause for concern and discussion.
Most decisions at that level aren't made based on data and facts. They are made based on the emotional appeal of the acquisition of power both through increased control and financial benefit.
Politicians ignore the facts all the time. They invent facts all the time. Politics has little to do with science.
ESR finally noticed the missing data; http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1487 , which I linked on HN http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=966888 . I don't know what took him so long, I heard about the missing base data before this last media wrangle; I hadn't brought it up in any of my comments anywhere because I had assumed everyone else had also heard about it; until ESR's post today.
The IPCC and CRU are really starting to look very guilty in their words and actions, whether they are or not. This whole thing reminds me of the 'sexing up' of intelligence reports to justify invasion of Iraq. It started out as a trickle of leaked information and turned into a torrent that eventually led to a lot of people losing a lot of respsect. They need to come clean now, admit their faults and invite others to look at the data and come to independent conclusions.
It's turning into a big mess, and it's not going away. Whoever was behind it knew exactly what they were doing.
It is very funny that many of the people that spent 8 years saying amen to the broad war against science by the Bush administration are now "oh, so chocked!" by some out of context comments and suppressed data by some researchers in a UK university.
I'm not familiar with that war. Is it "outlawing stem cell research", when all he did was say we wouldn't use federal tax dollars to do it? Or is it not toeing the line as far as Kiyoto, because "all scientists agree the end is near if we don't"? Refresh my memory as to this "war against science"? I'm interested.
1) They banned using ANY equipment or resources payed for with ANY federal dollars in stem cell research (and very strictly enforced it). Since many labs have to share equipment between projects, this effectively banned most stem cell research.
2) They had direct ties to the Discovery Institute, the main force behind the Intelligent Design Creationism pseudoscience movement.
3) And whether or not there's a vast pro-AGW conspiracy, that doesn't excuse interfering with publication of climate science from NASA.
The chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Pachauri, does not inspire trust in the scientific results. Rather than focusing on the misdeeds of the scientists, he's pushing for those who exposed the misdeeds to be punished. Mr. Pachauri's reactions are more consistent with a fake who is afraid of being found out than with an honest scientist who is just interested in exposing truth.