Wednesday, August 08, 2007



Crazy Al takes his Taft impression to Singapore, the land where conviction on a charge of committing an "outrage of modesty" is a caning offense, and unintentionally makes a true statement in his increasingly shrill defense of the indefensible.

My Way News - Gore: Polluters Manipulate Climate Info

Al is quoted as saying, "They're trying to manipulate opinion and they are taking us for fools." I agree as long as the "they" he refers to is the climate change alarmist group, and the "us" are the rest of us who simply live our lives and notice that short term weather models are laughably wrong every day.

As for examples of manipulation of the data, there's this, this indictment of the quality of measurement data in many cases, this on the hurricane count flap, and this summary of presentations by scientists who apparently didn't get the memo that the debate is over.

The argument that scientific consensus means that the facts are in and the debate is over for climate change is laughable if you focus on what science and the scientific method actually mean.

The definition of the scientific method at Wikipedia contains the following: "Among other facets shared by the various fields of inquiry is the conviction that the process must be objective to reduce a biased interpretation of the results. Another basic expectation is to document, archive and share all data and methodology so it is available for careful scrutiny by other scientists, thereby allowing other researchers the opportunity to verify results by attempting to reproduce them. This practice, called "full disclosure", also allows statistical measures of the reliability of these data to be established."

We have seen attempts to keep data and methods away from skeptics on numerous occasions. Who's afraid of legitimate inquiry that would either confirm or question their work? Politicians--scientists with a policy or other non-scientific axe to grind.