Agreed. Which is why open access to code and data would make this text publication ready.

When I ship code to a client you can bet the ambiguities have been removed. Thorny parts have defensible explanations.

Haha. Don't criticize the scientists cause "they are so much smarter than us!!"

How about something more along the lines of, "I think that we should trust a doctor to evaluate another doctor's performance rather than <random assembly line worker without a highschool education>?"

I mean have you seen some of the arguments against things like evolution by 'lay people?' The correct course of action here is to get them to produce an explanation, then evaluate whether it's reasonable or not.

Edit: Maybe I should mention that there are plenty of things a doctor could do wrong that anyone could be able to call him/her out on, but there are many things where the subtleties may confuse.

Would you trust an astrologer to validate another astrologer's data?

Do you seriously place as little faith in climate scientists as you would in an astrologer?

Obviously it's not as mature a field as, say, medicine, but refusing to believe that any of the results are at all valid is just being wilfully ignorant.

No, but it should illustrate the point. If the only people who can validate the work of an X are fellow X's, then X's are either specialists or frauds.

The idea isn't that only a doctor can evaluate a doctor's performance, but that you need a doctor to explain why the other doctor may have done what he did. Without this expert opinion, no conclusions that you can try to draw from it as a non-doctor hold any weight.

i.e. Get some climate scientists to weight in on this and evaluate what they have to say on it rather than just looking at some of the evidence on your own and drawing your own conclusions.

I'm not saying to have a climate scientist give you a 'yes/no' answer to "Is this a fruad?" and then blindly trust their answer. I'm saying that someone in the field of climatology should be able to explain some of this away in a reasoned and understandable manner with facts that can be verified if this isn't some sort of fraud.

Declaring something a fraud by looking at snippets of emails and comments from source files out of context is not the way of rational debate. I highly doubt that you or many of the people rushing to label this as "100% of everything said about Global Warming since the beginning of time is now false" have done more than read snippets from blog posts.

Science is the organized skepticism in the reliability of expert opinion - Richard Feynman

You know, 20 years ago, the place of "climate scientists" in the scientific hierarchy was (justifiably) about the same as the placement of dentists in the medical hierarchy.

The physics behind global warming makes a lot of sense. The warming models aren't pure physics, however, and require feedback effects. Now, are the models right about 6 degrees of warming in the next century? I don't have a clue because the historical climate reconstructions are so shitily done. I have no idea if the temperature anomaly over the last 30 years exceeds historical bounds for standard deviation. I have no idea what the magnitude of the Medieval Warm Period was.

This is an important question. A trillion dollar question. We need to throw the hopped-up climate scientists out, fools who were lucky to be in the field when it became important, and get some real intelligence working on this problem. Cause this ain't it.

Fair enough. I'm certainly willing to believe there are some hack scientists in the field. And even if they were all unimpeachable, there's the simple truth that we are very far from understanding the intricacies of the weather. So sure, it's possible that we're wrong about global warming. And it's definitely possible that we're wrong about certain weather patterns being related to global warming, even if we're right about the long-term effects. I'm just sick of people using their ignorance as a weapon.

Please re-read your comment and stop and reflect. You're using buzzwords rather than trying to get the scope of the argument - it's like your mind is already made up. If your mind is already made up, then you won't be open to various truth and evidence.

Parent is just quoting buzzwords, but I can't say that he's altogether wrong: the reason this is a story has nothing to do with science, or any desire to find the truth. It's a clash where each side has already decided that it's Right based almost exclusively on political lines in the sand. Hacker News is pretty much one of the only places on the net where a significant proportion of posters have not already decided the issue for sure.

For my part, and I am educated in the sciences (though not environmental ones, to the extent they can be considered "science"), I have no freaking idea what the true state of affairs is, and I doubt that anyone has much valid knowledge in this area. I don't trust any of the data that I see because a) historical inference is really, really difficult, and I'm very unimpressed by how it's been done, and b) there's so much incentive on each side to mangle the data to fit the conclusion. I don't have any faith in the environmental researchers to fairly report what the data tells them, but I'm just as skeptical about the bias of people arguing against them, aligned as they tend to be with the idiots and organizations that fight so hard against evolution.

Just to be clear, I absolutely believe that there are valid theoretical reasons to consider the possibility of (human caused) global warming; the models are more than enough to show that it's a real possibility. It's only the claim that it's already been observed (and that it's significant, reversible, etc.) that I'm skeptical about.

However, I think that strategically speaking, the environmentalism movement's increased focus on global warming is a big mistake because it gives anti-environmentalists a fixed target to nibble away at, and they're doing a pretty good job of causing doubt. Wasn't it obvious enough that spewing pollutants into the air is bad? Why not focus on that, like everyone used to? Instead, the environmentalists have taken on the burden of proving that global warming is man-made, catastrophic, and reversible; until then, the burden was on the anti-environmentalists to prove that it was safe to pollute as much as they wanted, which was pretty much an impossible task.

I worry that far more important environmental concerns than carbon output are being ignored because of the excessive focus on global warming, and this shift in attention could be truly catastrophic.

Very well said. I commented elsewhere that the politicization is also likely the reason for the scientists doing dubious things in the first place - having their life's work under constant attack by reactionary nutjobs probably left them feeling a bit cornered, and so they made the mistake of viewing all criticism as nutjob criticism.

It's true that we've become obsessively focused on global warming as of late, although I would place at least as much blame on the media for that. In the past couple years, though, some groups have been doing a better job of saying "BTW clean energy will also create jobs and improve our national security." The WE campaign is one such example.