Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Discredit, disgrace, defund

That’s the only reasonable reaction to the latest news on the Global Warming data and the shameful behavior of NASA and GISS scientists. What else can you say when scientists massage data to fit their theory?

If the issues put forth by McIntyre are true*, then everyone involved in this nonsense needs to have their credentials irreparably tarnished and their careers ended. Not tomorrow, today. These jackasses should never research, teach, write, lecture, nor be involved in the sciences ever again. I’m not even sure they should be allowed to continue to use running water.

I’ve ridiculed global warming alarmism, and I’ve always been skeptical about the data that we had: the amount of it, its reliability, and its overall statistical robustness. But I didn’t think they’d be actively altering unpleasant data to make it fit their ends. That’s criminal; it’s certainly not science.

Think I’m being harsh? If a stock analyst falsified data on a fund and defrauded investors, he’d be prosecuted. If a surgeon lied about the results of a procedure and it was performed on thousands of people, he’d be in jail and lose his license.

These happy fraudsters pushed fake data and junk science on us and tried to change the political, economical, and moral fabric of the entire world to fit their druidic ideas of purity and enlightenment. How much time, effort, and energy has been wasted on global climate change that could have gone to something useful?

Worse, they swept up gullible millions along with them. They’ve damaged relations between the US and Europe, inflated the price of oil (thus funneling money to terrorists), encouraged the creation of a European CO2-trading scheme only slightly less complicated than a manned mission to Mars, and distracted millions of dollars in capital and research from more important projects like cures for cancer or direct-to-iPhone porn.

But their true triumvirate of malfeasance was spawned from their unholy alliance with Hollywood:

1) An Inconvenient Truth, responsible for lowering the IQs of schoolchildren all across the United States
2) The Day After Tomorrow, which stole 124 minutes from the lives of millions of moviegoers across the world which they can never have back. It’s the greatest theft of time since Born on the 4th of July.
3) Live Earth, starring the Allman Brothers and jazz great Dizzy Gillespie, which would have interrupted the schedules of millions had it not been broadcast on NBC (total audience 412 crotchety old cranks)

For all those scientists out there who just patently accepted their junk, without adequate peer review or running the numbers themselves, shame on you. As a community, we’re supposed to be better than that. Thanks for damaging scientific credibility and dragging us closer to where politicians and journalists are.

You would hope that we’d advanced past rushing into mistakes like phrenology and eugenics, but something like this shows that we haven’t moved as far as we might like.

* In the interest of disclosure, there’s a link to Daily Dollop from Watts Up With That, an associate of the guy (McIntyre) who has done this research. It actually brought me lots of traffic. But I’ve never communicated with the site proprietor that I know of.