Posted on 12/02/2009 5:27:06 PM PST by ricks_place
Surely there must have been serious men and women in the hard sciences who at some point worried that their colleagues in the global warming movement were putting at risk the credibility of everyone in science. The nature of that risk has been twofold: First, that the claims of the climate scientists might buckle beneath the weight of their breathtaking complexity. Second, that the crudeness of modern politics, once in motion, would trample the traditions and culture of science to achieve its own policy goals. With the scandal at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, both have happened at once.
I don't think most scientists appreciate what has hit them. This isn't only about the credibility of global warming. For years, global warming and its advocates have been the public face of hard science... This was it. The public was told repeatedly that something called "the scientific community" had affirmed the science beneath this inquiry. A Nobel Prize was bestowed (on a politician).
Global warming enlisted the collective reputation of science. Because "science" said so, all the world was about to undertake a vast reordering of human behavior at almost unimaginable financial cost. Not every day does the work of scientists lead to galactic events simply called Kyoto or Copenhagen. At least not since the Manhattan Project.
What is happening at East Anglia is an epochal event. As the hard sciencesphysics, biology, chemistry, electrical engineeringcame to dominate intellectual life in the last century, some academics in the humanities devised the theory of postmodernism, which liberated them from their colleagues in the sciences. Postmodernism, a self-consciously "unprovable" theory, replaced formal structures with subjectivity. With the revelations of East Anglia, this slippery and variable intellectual world has crossed into the hard sciences.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
The goons involved are little men playing vacuous games and readily spotted as frauds. That lots of interested people enjoy flocking to those frauds has entirely different causes. Hint, they don't like rich American Republicans ruling the world...
Coming to medicine soon (see Mammogram recomendations)
I know people who do research on the university level and what you say is highly exaggerated. It's like everything else in this world. A lot of good people and a number not so good.
“The guy who invented the idea of “Open Source” software has the right idea. Put the data and methods of any scientific publication on a website, open to everyone and anyone. It’ll be painful for a while as errors are caught and corrected, but science will advance more rapidly as a result.”
Agreed.
http://travismonitor.blogspot.com/2009/12/climategate-aftershocks.html
No call for workers of the world to unite from me. Only appreciation of those identifying anti-truth, anti-life criminals devaluing all life by fraud.
No disagreement here. That's what is taking place now. Let's see how this one aspect of international posers (socialists) plays out.
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