Give you an example of what I'm talking about. Let's say you want to set the stage so that your company can collect on a large dollar value debt owed you by another company. You wish to do this with out bringing in the law ~ just nice and sweet and cheap.
You have several ways to approach this. You could send in your lawyers to talk to their lawyers. Or, you might ask if your "world's greatest experts in whatever" talk to their "experts" and trick it all out to make sure they weren't overpaying you, and vice versa.
So the "experts" meet face to face over the data, and they work it all out. Your company gets a bunch of money. The other guys get a lower price for future events of the same nature. No cops. No lawyers. No great immediate out of pocket expense.
Everybody goes away loving everybody when you can get that kind of solution.
Up until now we've been hitting the NONEXPERTS over the head with evidence that the database is flawed.
The "non-experts" are the politicians and foundation grants administrators who aren't really into this for the sake of the project and findings, but for the sense of "accomplishment" and "comity".
Clearly we need to move forward with this a bit differently. Recall if you will the time when the fellows who found the standard weather stations had not been maintained correctly did a head-on with Doc Hansen and the NASA experts ~ that's just last year. Hansen didn't argue ~ he pulled the data from those stations. It was pretty clear our side knew it's stuff, and Hansen knew they knew. The politicians still haven't caught up to this one, and some of them are in a huff.
Now we have "Climategate". We have some really good technical stuff to beat up on the technical people over there at GW central. First issue is "where's the data" ~ and none of them seem to know. I'd recommend we keep hitting on that one. It leaves the politicians out of the picture.
Another technical issue concerns the climate models ~ the coding doesn't work to predict current reality, or even the distant past. Was there fraud? Or, was someone an incompetent programmer.
I suggest we engage them with the "incompetent programmer" thesis ~ give them a "face saving" lie to let them arrive at the conclusion that fraud was committed (not by them, but on them).
It is necessary to achieve comity with this pack of criminals or they will become intransigent.
LOL!
They will be intransigent so long as there is a chance they can get what they want from government, control of all the money and everyone's behaviour.
Actually the question is not between fraud and incompetent programming, but whether between scientific fraud and scientific naïveté. Climate modelers should (and some do) understand that because they are dealing with a non-linear dynamical system, long-term prediction is impossible (the popularizing term for the phenomenon is 'chaotic dynamics') and that the coarser the discretization used in the simulation the worse even short-term predictions will be.
It's not a matter of competent or incompetent programming, but of programs, no matter the correctness of the code or the sophistication of the methods used, being unable to predict over the long term.
The "weather isn't climate" refrain suggests that deep down, there is a degree of scientific naïveté underlying the whole thing: they seem to assume that the short-term variability of weather is statistical noise, when, in fact, it is the short-term dynamics of the system they are modeling. If you have a non-linear dynamical system (weather) and make another by taking averages of the variable over fixed-length time intervals (climate) the new dynamical system is still non-linear, still exhibits chaotic dynamics, and is still not feasible to predict long-term.
I have a colleague, who, for a while, was taken in, until he went to a conference on the subject and saw how really bad the mathematical models being used are. Bad models usually are the result neither of fraud nor of outright stupidity, but of not understanding something fundamental about the nature of mathematical models or about the system being modeled.
This is why I've thought the whole thing was a crock from long before the fact that they 'modelers' have been engaging in fraud came to light.
Some of the threads back several weeks ago had links to the technical papers.
That is alos in the Skeptics Hand Book ...that is at the JoNova Website.