Pielke Senior: NASA GISS Inaccurate Press Release On The Surface Temperature Trend Data

deech is typical of the climate alarmist attitude when he denigrates scientific skepticism — as if the skeptics’ questioning of AGW dogma, and their requests for full and complete transparency and cooperation in providing data and methods in order to independently test conclusions, is something to be sneered at; deech claims skeptics are not, in his words, ‘actual’ scientists.
The climate alarmist crowd refuses to answer skeptics’ questions for one reason: they know damn well that if they provided full and complete records of their data, methodologies and code, their CO2=CAGW hypothesis would be quickly and publicly debunked. That would cut off their grant gravy train, so they go to extraordinary lengths to stonewall requests for information, saying in effect, “trust us.” But the climategate emails show that they cannot be trusted.
Skeptical scientists are the only honest kind of scientists. Skepticism is at the heart of the Scientific Method. Skepticism is the reason we don’t go to witch doctors when we get sick. Because of skeptical doctors who instituted the practice of hand washing, there was no longer a high mortality rate among women giving birth.
In the mid-1800’s Dr Semelweiss questioned the mainstream medical profession’s lack of concern over hospital cleanliness. His questioning of the establishment was perceived as a threat — just as skeptics’ questioning of AGW is perceived as a threat today by the alarmist establishment.
The clique that controlled medicine at the time responded by heaping scorn and ridicule on Semelweiss for daring to question their methods — exactly like deech does when he writes: “…requiring that “skeptics” arise to the same standards as actual scientists…”.
The clique that currently controls the climate peer review process, GISS, HadCRU and the rest of the climate alarmist industry have only one ‘standard’: keep skeptics out of the process at all costs, because skeptics are a threat to their lucrative grant income.
deech fails to grasp the fact that every honest scientist is a skeptic, first and foremost. It is the devious AGW clique in control that lacks honest standards.
That problem could be easily rectified by simply working with skeptical scientists to falsify the AGW hypothesis if possible, and by publicly archiving all the raw and adjusted data and methods that support the AGW hypothesis. The fact that Hansen, Mann, the CRU crew and the rest of the AGW climate alarmists refuse to disclose their raw data and methods makes it clear that they value the rewards of their rent-seeking politics much more than they value scientific truth.
Dr Semelweiss was eventually driven out of his practice by the mainstream medical clique, which felt threatened by his questioning of their methods, and who ignored the fact that he had lowered female mortality in childbirth in his hospital from 18% to well under 2% in just one year. He was attacked and ridiculed in the same way that today’s AGW skeptics are attacked and ridiculed. In the end the truth won out. Semelweiss is remembered, and the establishment clique is long forgotten.
Pamela Gray shows the right way to investigate AGW claims in her post above:

If your study is based on adjusted data, you should keep a copy of the raw data AND the adjusted data. Hansen uses adjusted data (I don’t know if he asked for the raw data as well). And then adjusts it some more. To be absolutely clean, he should have started with raw data. He would then have reported on what he did to the raw data to adjust it, and then reported on the analysis. He muddied his own work by using adjusted data to start with. If it had been me, I would have required copies of the original raw data sheets be sent to me from who ever keeps them.

If that had been consistently done, the tens of $billions wasted on the non-problem of AGW would have been available to solve actual, serious problems in other areas of science. And the public wouldn’t be questioning the honesty of scientists in general, because of the mendacious and self-serving actions of a relatively small clique of AGW gatekeepers.