more on -er (UNCLASSIFIED)

[victor steinbok]

These are fair points for discussion and probably should have written
"manufactured" instead of "fictitious". As I said earlier, the issue
here seems to be more "science as sausage making" than "science as
politics". #2 is just plain wrong--if you want to see "huge fudge
factors" try economics. As for the rest, just substitute "evolution"
for "AGW" and "Creationism" for opposition, and try to explain how
that would be a controversy. Furthermore, for at least 120 years now
scientists have colluded to exclude papers on perpetual motion form
scientific journals, yet, aside from a handful of delusional
crackpots, there seems to be no controversy about that decision.

It is not uncommon for normal science to be overly contemptuous of
perceived crackpot theories. This is particularly true if the
opposition is perceived as political (which also may make the support
political). And, occasionally, the "groupthink" may be wrong. This is
not an excuse for eliminating bullshit threshold and turning science
writing into a version of contemporary US journalism where facts
matter less than balancing of competing opinions.

So I will respectfully continue to disagree with the view that there
is a meaningful controversy here.

VS-)

On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 12:42 PM, Mullins, Bill AMRDEC
<Bill.Mullins at us.army.mil> wrote:
>
> Well, I guess I respectfully disagree, at least as follows.
>
> There is a controversy (it isn't fictitious or imagined), and has been
> reported in mainstream press such as the NYT, The Wall Street Journal,
> The Atlantic, and elsewhere.
>
> The controversy, as I understand it, is that emails circulated by
> members of the Climate Research Unit show that:
>
> 1.  Data which don't support Anthropogenic Global Warming have been
> ignored or even suppressed.
> 2.  The climate models have artificial "fudge factors" inserted which
> give unequal weights to data sets, such that trends of AGW are made more
> prominent.
> 3.  Scientists colluded to ignore Freedom of Information Act-type
> requests for data.
> 4.  Scientists purposefully failed to share data sets with others whose
> views were contrary.
> 5.  "Peer Review" was done based on conclusions rather than data and
> methods -- papers which ran contrary to conclusions of AGW weren't given
> a fair hearing.  [This being the case, I don't think "groupthink" is an
> unfair label.]
> 6.  Data sets which support AGW have been lost or destroyed, such that
> it cannot be peer reviewed, and conclusions based on them may not be
> examined.

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