Dr. Gavin Schmidt – Smug sense of self-importance included at no additional charge.
The fallout continues, following the release of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit files and e-mails yesterday. What has been called a “hack” may, in fact, be an inside-job. McIntyre (who has set up a new mirror site for Climate Audit, as his traffic has increased exponentially) was getting close to obtaining the documents through FOIA, and the alarmists were scrambling – some of the e-mails direct others to delete their e-mails, presumably because they wouldn’t be able to dodge FOIAs foerver. Could it be that some public-spirited guy or gal at CRU decided to make sure that the public got to see these files? Seems like a good possibility to me.
Anyway, however this information came to light, the alarmists are scrambling to initiate damage control. Dr. Gavin Schmidt is one of the high priests of – perhaps THE high priest – of the alarmist crowd. Schmidt, a climate researcher for NASA, privately runs RealClimate.org, where he both homilizes about “global warming” and sneers at skeptics. His response to the CRU scandal is telling.
Schmidt dismisses the importance of the files, claiming that we skeptics are (as usual!) reading WAY more substance into them than is actually there. Among other things, the e-mails show:
scientists who are friendly and agree on many of the big picture issues, disagreeing at times about details and engaging in ‘robust’ discussions
Really? I thought we had “consensus”? I thought the science was settled? What’s with this disagreement stuff? Oh, but it’s just ‘details’! Like ‘details’ are important in science…
Later, Gavin give us this gem:
Science works because different groups go about trying to find the best approximations of the truth, and are generally very competitive about that.
Well, at least groups that engage in goodthink are allowed to search for the truth. And what’s up with this ‘approximation’ stuff? Again, I heard that the science was settled.
Later: More sneering. More dismissal.
But if cherry-picked out-of-context phrases from stolen personal emails is the only response to the weight of the scientific evidence for the human influence on climate change, then there probably isn’t much to it.
Actually, there’s a lot more than that Gavin, but we all know that guys like Spencer and McIntyre are crackpots.
Powerline has an excellent case study on how these hacks do science, based on e-mail exhanges from the CRU archive. A little techy, but not too bad.
Check out Nixon’s defense of the Watergate tapes. I think you’ll find some similarities.
And consider the ironies. After all the attempts to stop Nixon, or all the times he was left for dead politically, it was his own use of gov’t equipment and obsessive retention of incriminating evidence that brought him down.
I mean, really. Don’t these arrogant clowns realize that you never, ever use your employer’s email for anything other than official purposes, and never, ever say anything in them that could come back to haunt you? Who needs to “connect the dots” when the perp comes right out and tells his fellow conspirators exactly what he’s doing and exactly what is going on? Maybe what they need to teach in grad school is the proper way to circumvent the law and how to run a conspiracy.
(This doesn’t surprise me. These over-educated academic types really do live in an echo chamber where all they hear are people just like themselves. They will say outrageous, nasty things in emails and should you object, you, the objector, are just being overly sensitive. How dare you disagree with the consensus.
Science as consensus would have Galileo denounced as a terracentric denier because the earth as hub of the universe was accepted science. We won’t even start on what dangers were posed by the outlandish theories (ravings) of Louis Pasteur and William Harvey.
N.B. – if you accept the mathematical proposition that all motion is relative it is a short step to recognizing that the selection of a single center of motion is arbitrary and could as easily be the earth as any other celestial point. But the math to demonstrate that is much harder.
I’ve been saying for a while, I’ve worked on complex models and simulations for 30 years, and the climate people have been producing results from crummy models for years. As in the Nixon years…follow the money.
This is good stuff along with Gore claiming the Earth’s core is several million degrees. Case closed. In the future Gore can claim he invented himself.
Schmidt’s citing of the tenets of science makes for a good laugh. How proper for someone whose circle of influence has declared “the debate over” for years and smeared anyone who believes otherwise, to fall back on the testaments and vows of scientific research as he ducks for cover.
I’m all for cleaning the planet. Reducing CO2? No problem, lets find a way to do this through the free market with out annihilating our way of life. Gregg Easterbrook, hardly a right-winger by any means, believes the free market is not only the best approach economically but scientifically. The spirit of inventions has always been toward the cleaner and the better, ride it like the wind. Schmidt and Gore would label him a denier.
From Rand Simberg’s site, I got this:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/21/cru-emails-search-engine-now-online/
Which leads to a searchable database of all these emails. (And in the comments, the guy who set it up talks about it.)
A friend of mine from college eventually got a PhD in Meteorology, studying and simulating thunderstorms. I lost track of her back in the mid-90s or so. I’ve always been curious to know if she’d been coopted, and here was a chance to find out. I submitted her name to the database. I was relieved to see that her name isn’t mentioned anywhere.
I missed the news the evening this came out due to a storm that block my satellite dish. Last night there was nothing about the hacking. Not surprising. There were several days of Sarah’s email hacking and nothing about exposing a billion dollar scam.