Previously I have said this about the lack of integrity regarding the recent Climategate investigations:
The investigations thus far are much like having a trial with judge, jury, reporters, spectators, and defendant, but no plaintiff. The plaintiff is locked outside the courtroom sitting in the hall hollering and hoping the jury hears some of what he has to say. Is it any wonder the verdicts keep coming up “not guilty”?
Now from Bishop Hill we learn that it appears that the Oxburgh investigation let Dr. Phil Jones endorse what evidence (papers he’s published) to review. So let me amend what I said above:
The investigations thus far are much like having a trial with judge, jury, reporters, spectators, and defendant, but no plaintiff. The plaintiff is locked outside the courtroom sitting in the hall hollering and hoping the jury hears some of what he has to say. And, to add insult to injury, when you let the accused endorse which pieces of evidence might be a “fair sample”, is it any wonder the verdicts keep coming up “not guilty”?
This entire mess is snowballing again with UEA, CRU, and Dr. Jones right at the center again.
Details here at Bishop Hill who writes:
Well, now we know who the redactions were. The contact through with the Royal Society was through Martin Rees – we knew that already. The other redaction, the other person consulted about whether the sample of papers was reasonable, was…Phil Jones.
Now, whichever way you look at it, this is a funny question to put to the accused if one’s objective is a fair trial. I mean, what could Jones say? “You’ve picked all my bad papers”? And of course Jones must have known that the sample was not representative.
Gobsmacked I am, surprised I am not.
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Manfred on July 19, 2010 at 1:54 pm asked:
what is the process in Britain to remove the title from a “Lord” ?
Beheadment.
Theo Goodwin says:
July 19, 2010 at 5:34 pm
James Sexton asks:
“Behavior and intelligence rarely influence one another among these folk.”
lol, yes, but, I wasn’t referring to the behavior, I was referring to the execution of their little whitewash/cover up. From my estimation, at least in the case of this small gathering of academics called the inquiry, they not only lack moral character, but lack the ability to think beyond a step or two of the “here and now”, which does indeed reflect upon their intelligence.
It seems today is different than days gone by. I’ve come to know several people which hold a PhD in something or another. I find them mundane and intellectually average. I once thought perhaps it was a bias observed because of the common denominator,….me. However, after this and several other examples, I coming to believe, for the most part, once in academia, intelligent people pursue their life while average people pursue a title of learning. In my perspective, if I held a PhD in whatever field some of these people did, I would take it as a personal insult in regards to not only their behavior, but also their apparent lack of skills to reason. But, that’s just me.
Will Steve McIntyre still call this standard practice and say we should not do anything but ‘let governments govern’? Or will this turn his unmotivated Canadian blood red?
Where these “investigations” paid for by John Q taxpayer ?
Pamela Gray
July 19, 2010 at 3:00 pm
Thank you for informing of Stephen Schneider. I had not heard until just this minute and now looked it up on the web. I am very sorry to hear about it. If anyone who knows him is reading this my condolences go out to you. I have had differences with his politics. But that has no place at this time. I am a little shocked to learn of this. He was 65, not seeming old. Again, my condolences. May your memories of him be of love.
A bad news after a good news.
Big Oil is running low on petty cash. I suspect Big Oil will scale back to Jones a bit. I see Stephen Schneider had Big Oil connections. This white wash is very important because Big Oil doesn’t like bad science.
Just the threat of CO2 causing warming helped shakedown Big Oil donations.
James Sexton,
You must read the following treatise:
http://fravia.com/realicra/basiclawsofhumanstupidity.htm
H.R. says:
July 19, 2010 at 1:39 pm
Gaia better not hear about this. The Brits already suffered enough last winter.
…and as a punishment this summer will be shorter (Gaia).:-)
Let´s get back to Sun issues before we get mad.
evanmjones says:
July 19, 2010 at 3:51 pm
Whitewashgate?
Copyright and Wikipedia immediately.
Anthony’s handling of Dr. Schneider’s passing was sheer class imbued with integrity. I hope this sets the standard in the arena when tragedy besets individuals on the skeptic’s side as I’m sure he will act similarly regarding anyone in the AGW camp.
While perhaps it’s not quite the same thing, for some reason when I read this thread start, I was prompted to remember these infamous words by ”Uncle Joe S.”:
”It’s not who votes that counts, it’s who counts the votes.”
If the defendent gets to pass judgment on what is allowed to be introduced as ”evidence” at his/her trial, why even bother with a trial at all ??
Sheesh. . . . .
It is fraud, and Mr. Oburgh helped perpetrate it. Either his staff ill-served him and he is incompetently following them, or he was in on it. He either helped by commission or omission.
And Oxburgh and his fellow ‘commissioners’ fibbed about it. They misled by claiming that the Royal Society did the selecting.
I thought peers of the realm were supposed to be good at these things.
Smokey: “The fact that the names were redacted means they had something to hide, no?”
It does look bad. I think the point is that arrogance has ascended to the point where these characters don’t even bother to masquerade as objective.
“OK kids, this is your final exam paper for entrance to the UEA. You will notice the answers to the questions have already been written in bold type on each page. Just put your name on the cover sheet and spend the next two hours in small groups marking the papers. Hand them into me as you leave the hall. Bonus marks will be allocated to anyone who finishes early. Remember to say nothing outside the examination hall as we have standards to maintain”
GW consensus is manufactured, climate science is more or less political science. So called climate “scientist” are paid to fudge data and write AGW fiction. A coordinated joint effort is/has been made by the media, educational and government institutions to manufacture public opinion and convince the population the phony problem exists. The best part of AGW, is that it wakes up the smartest segment of the population to the communist agenda.
Schneider’s biography is one of the great narratives running through AGW alarmism, and to undertand his contribution is to understand a large part of what happened. He was in a class above Phil Jones and the Hockey Team. He was a prophet, they were the priests. He was of the prophetic school of Paul Ehrlich, and will be remembered for offering ‘scary senarios’ about both kinds of change, cool and warm. In my view his greatest contribution to this scare was his approach to the the questions of uncertainty, and of uncertainty in risk management, especially after Hansen’s 1988 “99% certainty” testimony.
templar knight says:
July 19, 2010 at 3:18 pm
“…..If this crap continues much longer, it is likely to cause the death of real science. And that will be a disaster worst than anything “global warming” could ever cause.”
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
James Sexton says:
July 19, 2010 at 4:53 pm
Hopefully, November will be a start
If this man from Florida wins we will hear a different song coming from Washington, at least from him, and that is encouraging to me.
🙂
James Sexton,
I will set aside the humor and be clear. The kind of intelligence possessed by the vast majority of academics does not lend itself to working well with others. Academics should be in their offices, theatres, labs, or wherever creating what they want to create. At that task, they are very good and show great intelligence. Most work alone and most create by writing essays. But assign them a common task that requires cooperation and they fall all over themselves. Say, in a department of fifteen, four professors are selected to work with four advanced graduate students for the purpose or reading applications from prospective graduate students, ranking the applications, and offering awards of fellowships to various applications. The bottom line is that each professor and advanced graduate student will have found an applicant or two that they like and fellowships will be awarded to them. That’s the end of the work and the meeting. The clean-up, which might involve awarding a few remaining fellowships, accepting some students without fellowships, and so on will be done by the chair person according to his/her own lights. In other words, there are no standards and certainly no discussion of merits.
Given that professors so often behave in this fashion, I am very sympathetic to the CRU/UEA professors because I know that they most likely were just doing their professorial best. Nothing better could be expected of them. Where I disapprove of them is in the strong claims that they made for their work. No one should have put their professional prestige behind the hockey stick. They all knew that Jones “hid the decline” and they should not have claimed that their science was better than that. But in this age of Big Funding, these little groups are on a “war footing,” or so they believe. They believe that they must assert that their work came out of the best deliberations about science, statistics, and scientific methods. Yet they all know that the best their collaboration produced was some patched together items and that Jones’ “hide the decline” is one such patch. I support the complaint of Jones that what he did is done all the time in academia. However, his error was not the patch, but failing to acknowledge the patch and then, when challenged, defending it as first-rate science. In my humble opinion, when he did that he was lying but he did not understand what else he might do. Also, in my humble opinion, this kind of behavior is endemic in academia and everyone should admit it. Once admitted, academics should acknowledge that the work that they do cannot be used by governments to make decisions involving billions of taxpayer dollars. In some decades, the science will mature. At this time, it simply cannot support the thesis of AGW.
My only surprise about this was the gall with which it was done, or possibly the ineptitude. It is one thing to do it, but to fail to hide the information…. that is either stunning stupidity or stunning self confidence.
When the story of the emails first broke, my prediction (on another site) was that things would be hushed up, but that the scientific community would then try to clean house out of sight.
I think this is a ham fisted continuation of that approach. A face saving or time buying exercise if you will. Jones gets cleared, and then quietly retired (with honour, at least in public). Others would then get to tidy up the research stuff.
The problem that they face is that they have not adjusted to the new environment that the internet has ushered in.
An example of similar outdated thinking springs to mind. A Catholic Bishop heard that someone had translated the Bible into English, and, wanting to prevent this being distributed he came up with the cunning plan of buying every single copy, and burning them in public. A few years previously the plan would have worked, as this would have meant the destruction of years worth of work. However, he did not take into account the recently introduced printing press.
The Bishop burned his money, and the printers simply did another print run.
A similar thing is happening here. They have failed to realize that they cannot control the flow of information.
Thanks in no small part to the excellent work that you do on this site.
toyotawhizguy says:
July 19, 2010 at 5:33 pm
Next up, a whitewash of the whitewash. After all, fraud is the new “normal”.
The new ‘standard practice’.
This is not the time. This is not the place. Right or wrong, such comments are in poor taste at this time, which is precisely why Anthony closed comments on the previous Prof. Schneider-related thread.