hot enough for ya?

[Gene]

Of course, the planet's climate has always been in flux thanks to "natural" factors such as changes in solar or volcanic activity, or cycles relating the Earth's orbit around the sun. According to the scientific literature, however, the warming recorded to date matches the pattern of warming we would expect from a build up of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere – not the warming we would expect from other possible causes.

Even if scientists did discover another plausible explanation for the warming observed to date, that would beg a difficult question. As Robert Henson puts it in The Rough Guide to Climate Change:

"If some newly discovered factor can account for the climate change then why aren't carbon dioxide and the other greenhouse gases producing the warming that basic physics tells us they should be?"

The only way to prove with 100% certainty that humans are responsible for global warming would be to run an experiment with two identical Earths – one with human influence and one without. That obviously isn't possible, and so most scientists are careful not to state human influence as an absolute certainty. Nonetheless, the evidence is now extremely strong.

And such is the conundrum of prudence. There are those who'll sacrifice nothing until something is proven beyond the shadow of a doubt, and such proof will never be possible, however dire the outcome.

It's like coming upon a football coach ass pounding a child in the locker room and declaring one needs more data before they can decide if they should stop it or not. After all, what if it's not as detrimental as some might suggest?

So if it turns out that there is no Human Caused Global Warming but we get "Global Governance" that degenerates into a tyranny which one of you dumbass Progressives is gonna put a stop to that?

Since you consider such "excesses" as gun registration, environmental protection, restrictions against drunk driving, etc, to be tyrannical, I think it's a risk worth taking.

When other kids were lying in bed at night fearful a zombie might be in their closet waiting to kill them, you were petrified a building code enforcement agent might be under your bed waiting to fine you. What crimes against humanity are you so afraid of being prohibited from performing?

Gene, you need to get your ass out of Pennsyltucky, or wherever the fuck you live, for a day or two and see the world. Go visit a social democracy and stare the beast in the eyes. It's might not be as dreadful as you think.

You made my strawman cry, you meanie!!

Gene

PS

Thanks for admitting that this "Global Warming" horseshit is political and not scientific.

[dead man walking]

ScienceDaily (Aug. 18, 2011) — A key glacier in Greenland is melting faster than previously expected, according to findings by a team of academics. . . .

The researchers found that Greenland's longest-observed glacier, Mittivakkat Glacier, made two consecutive record losses in mass observations for 2010 and 2011. The observations indicate that the total 2011 mass budget loss was 2.45 metres, 0.29 metres higher than the previous observed record loss in 2010. The 2011 value was also significantly above the 16-year average observed loss of 0.97 metres per year.

for "gob-smacking pictures of the melting":

http://theconversation.edu.au/pics-of-g ... xpert-3244

[Gene]

ScienceDaily (Aug. 18, 2011) — A key glacier in Greenland is melting faster than previously expected, according to findings by a team of academics. . . .

The researchers found that Greenland's longest-observed glacier, Mittivakkat Glacier, made two consecutive record losses in mass observations for 2010 and 2011. The observations indicate that the total 2011 mass budget loss was 2.45 metres, 0.29 metres higher than the previous observed record loss in 2010. The 2011 value was also significantly above the 16-year average observed loss of 0.97 metres per year.

for "gob-smacking pictures of the melting":

http://theconversation.edu.au/pics-of-g ... xpert-3244

Which may or may not have anything to do with fossil fuel use.

Heck at this rate maybe people can grow grain on Greenland. Again. Those pesky Romans and their SUVs....

[PC Polar Circle Person]

Gene, I actually thought that you might be somewhat intelligent - just mightily fucked up in other significant ways. Clearly you are also a complete fuckin' idiot. What are your plans for when we have burned off all the carbon? What should we do after all the fish is gone? What about the forests? It doesn't matter if burning carbon is causing warming or not. We're running out of it. Your solution is that we continue with business as usual?

[dead man walking]

Heck at this rate maybe people can grow grain on Greenland. Again.

and while they are doing that, sea levels will have risen 20-25 feet.

who gives a fuck about florida, the carolinas, new jersey, new york city, boston, new orleans, houston, the netherlands, bangladesh, etc.

[Holland Oates]

Heck at this rate maybe people can grow grain on Greenland. Again.

and while they are doing that, sea levels will have risen 20-25 feet.

who gives a fuck about florida, the carolinas, new jersey, new york city, boston, new orleans, houston, the netherlands, bangladesh, etc.

Not me.

[Turdacious]

Gene, I actually thought that you might be somewhat intelligent - just mightily fucked up in other significant ways. Clearly you are also a complete fuckin' idiot. What are your plans for when we have burned off all the carbon? What should we do after all the fish is gone? What about the forests? It doesn't matter if burning carbon is causing warming or not. We're running out of it. Your solution is that we continue with business as usual?

We should feed it to the volcano gods, that is obviously.

[dead man walking]

Heck at this rate maybe people can grow grain on Greenland. Again.

and while they are doing that, sea levels will have risen 20-25 feet.

who gives a fuck about florida, the carolinas, new jersey, new york city, boston, new orleans, houston, the netherlands, bangladesh, etc.

Not me.

are you concerned that bangkok, the heart of tranny land, is experiencing record flooding?

[Holland Oates]

Heck at this rate maybe people can grow grain on Greenland. Again.

and while they are doing that, sea levels will have risen 20-25 feet.

who gives a fuck about florida, the carolinas, new jersey, new york city, boston, new orleans, houston, the netherlands, bangladesh, etc.

Not me.

are you concerned that bangkok, the heart of tranny land, is experiencing record flooding?

I prefer thick Brazilian trannies not little Thai lady boys.

[dead man walking]

I prefer thick Brazilian trannies not little Thai lady boys.

be worried my friend

The pictures today from around the world of dramatic rooftop rescues from raging waters, makes it seem as though natural disasters are becoming an everyday occurrence. But they're not all that natural; climate scientists say man-made global warming is the sudden force behind the forces of nature.

In the mountains of southeast Brazil, more than 340 people have died after fierce mudslides swept away homes. At least 50 are still missing and victims continue to search for loved ones. On the other side of the globe, floods in Queensland, Australia have ravaged an area the size of France and Germany combined.

[Holland Oates]

I prefer thick Brazilian trannies not little Thai lady boys.

be worried my friend

The pictures today from around the world of dramatic rooftop rescues from raging waters, makes it seem as though natural disasters are becoming an everyday occurrence. But they're not all that natural; climate scientists say man-made global warming is the sudden force behind the forces of nature.

In the mountains of southeast Brazil, more than 340 people have died after fierce mudslides swept away homes. At least 50 are still missing and victims continue to search for loved ones. On the other side of the globe, floods in Queensland, Australia have ravaged an area the size of France and Germany combined.

My gawd! You have my full support.

[PC Polar Circle Person]

I prefer thick Brazilian trannies not little Thai lady boys.

be worried my friend

The pictures today from around the world of dramatic rooftop rescues from raging waters, makes it seem as though natural disasters are becoming an everyday occurrence. But they're not all that natural; climate scientists say man-made global warming is the sudden force behind the forces of nature.

In the mountains of southeast Brazil, more than 340 people have died after fierce mudslides swept away homes. At least 50 are still missing and victims continue to search for loved ones. On the other side of the globe, floods in Queensland, Australia have ravaged an area the size of France and Germany combined.

My gawd! You have my full support.

Does this mean that we now have absolute proof that the climate change is man made, or not?

[Herv100]

Bwahahahahahhahahahahaha!!!!!

Climategate 2.0

The gift that keeps on giving

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor ... ng-debate/
[quote]A new batch of 5,000 emails among scientists central to the assertion that humans are causing a global warming crisis were anonymously released to the public yesterday, igniting a new firestorm of controversy nearly two years to the day after similar emails ignited the Climategate scandal.

Three themes are emerging from the newly released emails: (1) prominent scientists central to the global warming debate are taking measures to conceal rather than disseminate underlying data and discussions; (2) these scientists view global warming as a political “cause” rather than a balanced scientific inquiry and (3) many of these scientists frankly admit to each other that much of the science is weak and dependent on deliberate manipulation of facts and data.

Regarding scientific transparency, a defining characteristic of science is the open sharing of scientific data, theories and procedures so that independent parties, and especially skeptics of a particular theory or hypothesis, can replicate and validate asserted experiments or observations. Emails between Climategate scientists, however, show a concerted effort to hide rather than disseminate underlying evidence and procedures.

“I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI [Freedom of Information] Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process,”writes Phil Jones, a scientist working with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in a newly released email.


“Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get – and has to be well hidden,” Jones writes in another newly released email. “I’ve discussed this with the main funder (U.S. Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.”

The original Climategate emails contained similar evidence of destroying information and data that the public would naturally assume would be available according to freedom of information principles. “Mike, can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith [Briffa] re AR4 [UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 4th Assessment]?” Jones wrote to Penn State University scientist Michael Mann in an email released in Climategate 1.0. “Keith will do likewise. … We will be getting Caspar [Ammann] to do likewise. I see that CA [the Climate Audit Web site] claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper!!”

The new emails also reveal the scientists’ attempts to politicize the debate and advance predetermined outcomes.

“The trick may be to decide on the main message and use that to guid[e] what’s included and what is left out” of IPCC reports, writes Jonathan Overpeck, coordinating lead author for the IPCC’s most recent climate assessment.

“I gave up on [Georgia Institute of Technology climate professor] Judith Curry a while ago. I don’t know what she thinks she’s doing, but its not helping the cause,” wrote Mann in another newly released email.

“I have been talking w/ folks in the states about finding an investigative journalist to investigate and expose” skeptical scientist Steve McIntyre, Mann writes in another newly released email.

These new emails add weight to Climategate 1.0 emails revealing efforts to politicize the scientific debate. For example, Tom Wigley, a scientist at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, authored a Climategate 1.0 email asserting that his fellow Climategate scientists “must get rid of” the editor for a peer-reviewed science journal because he published some papers contradicting assertions of a global warming crisis.

More than revealing misconduct and improper motives, the newly released emails additionally reveal frank admissions of the scientific shortcomings of global warming assertions.

“Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the uncertainty and be honest. Phil, hopefully we can find time to discuss these further if necessary,” writes Peter Thorne of the UK Met Office.

“I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run,” Thorne adds.

“Mike, The Figure you sent is very deceptive … there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC,” Wigley acknowledges.

More damaging emails will likely be uncovered during the next few days as observers pour through the 5,000 emails. What is already clear, however, is the need for more objective research and ethical conduct by the scientists at the heart of the IPCC and the global warming discussion./quote]

[Herv100]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/23 ... irst_look/

There was always an element of tragedy in the first “Climategate” emails, as scientists were under pressure to tell a story that the physical evidence couldn’t support – and that the scientists were reluctant to acknowledge in public. The new email archive, already dubbed “Climategate 2.0”, is much larger than the first, and provides an abundance of context for those earlier changes.

“I can’t overstate the HUGE amount of political interest in the project as a message that the Government can give on climate change to help them tell their story,” a civil servant wrote to Phil Jones in 2009. “They want the story to be a very strong one and don’t want to be made to look foolish.”

Having elevated global warming to the most dramatic, urgent and over-riding issue of the day, bureaucrats, NGOs, politicians and funding agencies demanded that the scientists must keep the whole bandwagon rolling. It had become too big to stop.

“The science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run,” laments one scientist, Peter Thorne. While Professor Jagadish Shukla, a lead IPCC author, IGES founder, and one of the most senior climate experts writes that, “It is inconceivable that policymakers will be willing to make billion-and trillion-dollar decisions for adaptation to the projected regional climate change based on models that do not even describe and simulate the processes that are the building blocks of climate variability.”

With the release of FOIA2011.zip, the cat’s now well and truly out of the bag.

To their credit, some of the climate scientists realised the dangers of the selective approach politicians demanded, which meant cherry-picking evidence to make it suitably dramatic, and quietly hiding caveats. “We need to communicate the uncertainty and be honest,” pleads Thorne, in another email from 2005. Thorne noted that a telltale "signature" of greenhouse gas warming was absent. “Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous.”

“What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multidecadal natural fluctuation?”

Elsewhere, discussing the homogeneity of temperature readings from different sources, Thorne mulls the need to “balance the text so this is not the message”, and expresses his discomfort with making claims that conceal the uncertainty. But such were the demands of activists, agencies and the political class, uncertainty was not on the menu.

This was why the first Climategate caused such repercussions. The revelations came as little surprise to those few who follow state of temperature reconstructions, but they rocked supporters who had put their trust in climate scientists. Clive Crook, a believer in the manmade global warming hypothesis and supporter of carbon reduction measures, expressed it like this:

“The closed-mindedness of these supposed men of science, their willingness to go to any lengths to defend a preconceived message, is surprising even to me. The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering.”

Intellectual corruption
Where the "intellectual corruption" is plain is that somehow these doubts and uncertainties, along with the limitations of using computer models as evidence, never made it into the “bible” of climate science, the reports produced by the United Nation Organisation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports.

“Basic problem is that all models are wrong,” writes Phil Jones, bluntly, “not got enough middle and low level clouds.”

If that’s the case, then why isn't this printed as a large health warning on the cover of the IPCC reports? Politicians who devised policy based on estimates of certainty by the IPCC now know they’ve been sold a pup.

In the short term, the issues raised by Climategate I, which subsequent inquiries failed to explore, are back with a vengeance. Parliament looked at several issues including transparency – withholding code and raw data to allow third parties to replicate CRU’s temperature work – corruption of the peer review process, poor quality programming, and the destruction of internal emails. Since CRU’s temperature work was at the heart of the IPCC, this is troubling. Climategate II finds Phil Jones telling the University of East Anglia’s FOIA climate officer that:

“I wasted a part of a day deleting numerous emails and exchanges with almost all the skeptics. So I have virtually nothing. I even deleted the email that I inadvertently sent. There might be some bits of pieces of paper, but I’m not wasting my time going through these.”

And “I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process.”

His colleague Keith Briffa – expressing doubts about “all temperature reconstructions” also appears to ensure such doubts are not on the public record:

“UEA does not hold the very vast majority of mine [potentially FOIable emails] anyway which I copied onto private storage after the completion of the IPCC task.”

Elsewhere Briffa adds: “But for GODS SAKE please respect the sensitivity here and destroy the file immediately when finished and please do not tell ANYBODY I sent this. Cheers Keith.”


Documentation from "Climate Change": a game from 1998
A 100 MHz Pentium PC with 16 Mbytes of RAM is recommended
Source: USE_NOTE.DOC
Some context is worth remembering.

As with the first Climategate archive, much of the correspondence focuses on modern temperature trends and historical temperature reconstructions – not on the stuff we call hard physics: the behaviour of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere. (Note also that the emails stop in 2009.)

The temperature work was only thrust into such a dramatic political role because of the state of the hard physics of climate. There’s broad agreement amongst supporters of the manmade greenhouse gas theory, and ‘lukewarmers’, on what an increase in CO2 should do to the Earth’s energy budget – a modest increase in temperatures, before any feedbacks are taken into account. But speculation about runaway temperatures, while entirely legitimate, is for now, just that.

In the absence of telltale manmade global warming "fingerprints" (and there have been several candidates over the years, such as the tropospheric hotspot, or elusive ocean heat sinks) contemporary temperature readings and historical temperature reconstructions were freighted with immense significance.

So the mewling infant that we call Climate Science – a 40-year-young offshoot of meteorology – has been thrust into a political role long before it’s capable of supporting the claims made on its behalf. From the archives we can see the scientists know that too, and we can read their own reluctance to make those claims, too.

“What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multidecadal natural fluctuation?” muses one scientist. “They’ll kill us probably.”

[Herv100]

LMAO

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/james ... -them-all/

"

What was the most damning email in the entire Climategate saga?" future historians will no doubt ask. "Was it the Hide the Decline one? Was it maybe the one where Michael Mann tries to recruit private detectives to spy on Steve McIntyre for the crime of debunking his Hockey Stick? Was it the one where Kevin Trenberth describes it as a "travesty" that he and his climate conspirators can't account for the lack of warming?"
Nope. None of the above.
The worst, most toecurlingly awful, damning, vile, reprehensible, stomach-churningly dreadful email – the one that shows the Warmist junk-scientists in a light of such festering syphilitic repellance they can never possibly recover is this, the Christmas ditty specially written by Kevin Trenberth in celebration of the Nobel committee's comedic decision to award the Peace Prize to Al Gore and the IPCC.
Hold onto your stomachs real tight boys and girls, here we go: (H/T Watts Up With That, via Tallbloke)
0462.txt (h/t to Rog Tallbloke)
date: Fri, 14 Dec 2007 08:58:09 -0700
from: Kevin Trenberth
subject: The first Nobel and other Christmas greetings
to: IPCC-group
Seasons greetings to you all, my fellow Nobel Laureates (even if we did not get to go to
Oslo).
I just want to wish you and your families all the best for the holiday season, and Merry
Christmas to those of you who celebrate that festival. As part of IPCC we have achieved
something to be proud of. Thankyou for being a part of it with me.
At NCAR at the Christmas party a group made up a song that mentions by name all the NCAR
LAs in AR4. The song is below. You may appreciate it. (or not).
All the best for 2008.
Kevin

Sung to tune of The first Noel

Our First Nobel
Our First Nobel, for the IPCC,
Goes to Beth, Bette, Bill, Jerry, Kathy and Guy.
Kevin, Linda, Paty, Re-to and so many more,
And we’re sharing the honor with Mister Al Gore.
Nobel, Nobel, a story to tell,
We hope our coworkers’ egos don’t swell.
The First Working Group said to sound the alarm,
Rising CO2 levels are causing great harm.
Temperatures and greenhouse gas are racing up neck and neck,
Soon the whole Earth will be hotter than heck.
Nobel, Nobel, the planet’s unwell,
This is the future the models foretell.
The Second Working Group said that change is assured,
>From the melting of glaciers to migration of birds.
>From loss of land and crops to habitats,
How can they make it much clearer than that?
Nobel, Nobel, the oceans swell,
Polar bears search for new places to dwell.
We must work to mitigate, tells us Working Group Three,
Change from fossil consumption to clean energy.
If we all do our share in reversing the trend,
Our children might have a clean Earth in the end.
Nobel, Nobel, sound the warning bell,
Let’s make a future where all can live well.
Nobel, Nobel, we are stars for a day,
Can an Oscar be far away?
–
****************
Kevin E. Trenberth

[dead man walking]

igxers distracted by the sideshow, not surprisingly

http://www.realclimate.org/

The blogosphere is abuzz with the appearance of a second tranche of the emails stolen from CRU just before thanksgiving in 2009. Our original commentary is still available of course (CRU Hack, CRU Hack: Context, etc.), and very little appears to be new in this batch. Indeed, even the out-of-context quotes aren’t that exciting, and are even less so in-context.

A couple of differences in this go around are worth noting: the hacker was much more careful to cover their tracks in the zip file they produced – all the file dates are artificially set to Jan 1 2011 for instance, and they didn’t bother to hack into the RealClimate server this time either. Hopefully they have left some trails that the police can trace a little more successfully than they’ve been able to thus far from the previous release.

But the timing of this release is strange. Presumably it is related to the upcoming Durban talks, but it really doesn’t look like there is anything worth derailing there at all. Indeed, this might even increase interest! A second release would have been far more effective a few weeks after the first – before the inquiries and while people still had genuine questions. Now, it just seems a little forced, and perhaps a symptom of the hacker’s frustration that nothing much has come of it all and that the media and conversation has moved on.

If anyone has any questions about anything they see that seems interesting, let us know in the comments and we’ll see if we can provide some context. We anticipate normal service will be resumed shortly.

[dead man walking]

and there's this, too

http://www.skepticalscience.com/

Aside from containing the B-list, benchwarmer stolen emails, the main difference between this round of Climategate and the last is that this time the Climategate hacker revealed the motivation behind his crime in a READ ME file:

"Over 2.5 billion people live on less than $2 a day."

"Every day nearly 16.000 children die from hunger and related causes."

"One dollar can save a life" -- the opposite must also be true.

"Poverty is a death sentence."

"Nations must invest $37 trillion in energy technologies by 2030 to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions at sustainable levels."

Today's decisions should be based on all the information we can get, not on hiding the decline.

In short, the hacker believes that money spent on reducing greenhouse gas emissions to mitigate human-caused climate change is money not spent on alleviating poverty. Thus, by hacker logic, mitigating global warming will lead to the deaths of many poor people.

[Turdacious]

and there's this, too

http://www.skepticalscience.com/

In short, the hacker believes that money spent on reducing greenhouse gas emissions to mitigate human-caused climate change is money not spent on alleviating poverty. Thus, by hacker logic, mitigating global warming will lead to the deaths of many poor people.

He's got a point-- removing the Malthusian influence from the pro-climate change side is a good thing.

[Herv100]

LOL at spinning it to why the hacker exposed liars and deceivers!!
Just LOL

ITS STILL REAL TO ME DAMMIT!!! -dmw

[powerlifter54]

The hubris of lefties...the gift that keeps on giving.

Shugyo!

[Herv100]

igxers distracted by the sideshow, not surprisingly

.

Actually, the motives of the hacker would be the sideshow, dumbass. The real story is THE ACTUAL CONTENT OF THE EMAILS WHICH EXPOSES JUNK SCIENCE, LYING, AND DECEIVING. For fuck's sake, just give it up already

[dead man walking]

let's review the recent bidding:

record arctic ice melt
greenland glacier melting faster than previously anticipated
a highly regarded climate skeptic funded in part by one of the koch brothers concludes climate change is real
problems in the american west

BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that grizzly bears in the Yellowstone region need continued protection under the Endangered Species Act due to the decline of a tree species that serves as a key food source for some of the animals.
The ruling from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals blocks the federal government's effort to lift protections on about 600 threatened grizzlies across 19,000 square miles of Montana, Wyoming and Idaho.
Such a move would have turned over management of the animals to state wildlife agencies that could set hunts for grizzlies for the first time in decades.
But Yellowstone's whitebark pine tree stands are fast disappearing because of beetle infestations brought on by a warmer climate. And that means some grizzlies can't get the pine nuts they relied on as a source of protein.

that's merely a partial list.

to counter that, what do you have?

emails that show scientists arguing, but nothing that alters the fundamental conclusions of the science.

[Gene]

The leaked Emails prove a point......

In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.

Now it behooves me, of course, to tell you what they're missing. But it would be just about as difficult to explain to the South Sea Islanders how they have to arrange things so that they get some wealth in their system. It is not something simple like telling them how to improve the shapes of the earphones. But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science. That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school--we never explicitly say what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly.

It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you
think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked--to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.

Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can--if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong--to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.

We've learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature's phenomena will agree or they'll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven't tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it's this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science.

But this long history of learning how not to fool ourselves--of having utter scientific integrity--is, I'm sorry to say, something that we haven't specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope you've caught on by osmosis.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.

I would like to add something that's not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you're talking as a scientist. I am not trying to tell you what to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your girlfriend, or something like that, when you're not trying to be a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being. We'll leave those problems up to you and your rabbi. I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you are maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.

Nobel Prize Winner Richard Feynman - "Cargo Cult Science"
http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm

[Turdacious]

record arctic ice melt
greenland glacier melting faster than previously anticipated
a highly regarded climate skeptic funded in part by one of the koch brothers concludes climate change is real
problems in the american west

We have a strong tradition of haiku, limericks, and other poetry here at IGx. I give this one an F.

[baffled]

I'm not really sure where I come down on this, but I saw this and thought it was interesting.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15858603