Even more from Ace of Spades:
Even More: Commenters assure me this explanation of how this all unfolded is crazy-delicious. I haven’t had the time to read it yet; I’m throwing it up as fast as possible.
Cuffy Meiggs, who I often think of as “Drew,” says “dig deeper” into that Tech blog site TigerHawk links. Here’s the thing: James Hansen, who accused Bush of politicizing global warming science, is responsible for the bugged algorithms that produced the erroneous figures. Furthermore, he refused to release his algorithms so that they could be checked. The bug was discovered by someone who took the time to reverse-engineer Hansen’s flawed algorithm, and then, having accurately done so, proved NASA’s numbers were wrong. Thus causing the revision.
So James Hansen, who claimed Bush was politicizing Global Warming, refused to provide his algorithms to other researchers so they could simply check his work, hiding his own errors from them and distorting the science he claims to care about oh-so-much until some persistent researchers went to the great trouble of reconstructing his algorithms themselves.
Fire him. Immediately.
The sad thing is the average person really doesn’t understand the science, and so they just have to go along with what the media tells them. And when the media doesn’t very publicly admit mistakes, most people go on believing what they originally heard.
susie
In that case James Hansen is not a scientist, and ought to return his PhD.
“... refused to provide his algorithms ...”
Maybe he thought they were Al Gore’s ithms.
If he is a gov employee it may be next to impossible.
HOWEVER, if this story can be given some legs, it has the potential of undermining all of the Global Warming advocates.
I bet by the end of the day, so to speak, this Hansen is going to be thrown under the bus by algore or have an arkenside.