In the world of real science, if the data doesn’t exist the conclusions are invalid. Real scientists would only use readily available data, and where it doesn’t exist— everything that occurs after that is rendered useless. Especially given the recent revelations, one wonders if the data ever really existed (in which case it should exist somewhere other than CRU), or whether they manufactured it and lost the information on how they did it....
hh
Bears repeating.
I remember seeing something a long time ago about the temperature meter’s placement being a variable that was skewing data—oftentimes it was placed near a shed in an otherwise barren location so that wind and freezing rain might be blocked by the shed’s position and that even being hidden from direct sunlight would alter the meter reading. Believe it or not I think it was on a Channel 13 (read PBS) show since it was too long ago for me to have had cable.
I am going to quibble, because this is a point that nonscientists seem unable to get entirely right. Quite simply, in the absence of data to either establish it or refute ita hypothesis may or may not be valid. No evidence is no evidence.
Now, when you make claims, and it comes out that you forged the data and then destroyed the records, that is called research "misconduct" which includes research fraud. The relevant institutions and funding agencies are supposed to investigate and impose sanctions, if warranted, which can include return of unspent money, withdrawal of principal investigator privileges and firing (by the institution), termination of existing research grants (by the funding agency), ineligibility for further funds (from that agency and any other agency that works from the same banned list).
These are administrative actions, only. Whether or not civil or criminal claims could be filed in a court of law is another issue.
What’s the problem with making a request for data and having it supplied? Why the need to take it to the FOIA level unless there was a policy of STONEWALLING? FOIA was put in place to FORCE government agencies to divulge information when they would otherwise refuse because the refused data was either incriminating or embarrassing. The fact that FOIA was considered necessary is in itself evidence of malfeasance. Their lame ass excuse of destroying data because of a move or space requirements needs to be compared to the normal practices in such a situation of any other govt. agency or business.
Very well said!! The frustrating thing about this whole mash up orchestrated by environmentalist true believers is that good and reproducible science needs to be done in this area.
What is the effect of the man made contributions of CO2 to the atmosphere?? The overall % of CO2 remains tiny but is there a "tripping point"?? We really have no idea.
We know the earth has endured both hotter and much colder time periods. The ocean levels have been both higher and much lower.
Some 75,000 years ago, The eruption of Toba in Indonesia ushered in a 1,800 year Ice age and almost wiped humans out. This can and will happen again and an ice age would be devastating to civilization. In fact, we may be going into an ice age without a volcanic introduction.
So many questions and we can not trust the people best situated to answer them.
In the world of real science, if the data doesn’t exist the conclusions are invalid.
++++++++++++++++
Except in the world of the socialists, where they get to make stuff up. Doesn’t matter that they’ve violated every part of the scientific method.
Maintaining databases of information during the last 30 years has been incredibly difficult, and often requires reformatting the data and re-saving to a different media every 5 years or so at great expense.
Some here have said “it's not expensive to store 20Tb of info.” Well, not today, but no more than 20 years ago, it cost $10/Mb for Disk Storage - so $2Million/20Tb - and that does not include the space for the 200,000 Winchester drives, the air conditioning to keep them running, cost of translating the paper, paper tape and mag tape records to format for the drives, or maintaining the indexing to keep it from being useless. It isn't the case that this wasn't ever converted to digital, either, but that much of that conversion would have been originally put on paper-tape or 9-track or 7-track mag tapes, and may never have been put on hard drives after that.
Again - I'm not forgiving the CRU people on this basis- I've addressed what I think of them in post#121.
There is another major problem that has not been fully addressed in this thread.
From the story: ...the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”
Information from the recently released emails indicate that various types of data massaging was required by Jones, Mann and others to achieve their pre-determined output and predictions.
So, what we now have is
A. no original data exists
B. value added data (what kind of cr@p euphemism is that?), and
C. data that was further modified to make it fit a preconceived outcome, but no possible way to compare the twice-modified data to the original.
So essentially, they have been free to transform or modify the (value-added) data in any direction they want with no constraints, since there are no objective standards (original data) to compare their results to.
We are being served data that has been modified at least twice to get the desired results. Gossip that is furthest from the source is the least reliable.