Data? Who Needs Data?

The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.

Data? Who Needs Data?
So now that climate scientists have been shown to have engaged in all manner of shenanigans, will they release their data so that others can check their conclusions? Um, they’d love to, really, but, er, they lost the data. Or rather, they threw it out, as London’s Sunday Times reports:

Scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years. . . .

The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals–stored on paper and magnetic tape–were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building. . . .

Roger Pielke, professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, discovered data had been lost when he asked for original records. “The CRU is basically saying, ‘Trust us.’ So much for settling questions and resolving debates with science,” he said.

The New York Times’s Andrew Revkin–whom we faulted last week for parroting “peer reviewed” studies even after the revelation that the peer-review process was corrupt–has been covering the story more aggressively than one might have expected from the Times. On Saturday he reported that “some prominent climate scientists are calling for changes in the way research on global warming is conducted”:

The scientists say that the e-mail messages, which have circulated on the Internet and which disclose the inner workings of a small network of climatologists who chart the planet’s temperature, have damaged the public’s trust in the evidence that humans are dangerously warming the planet, just as many countries are poised to start reining in greenhouse gas emissions.

“This whole concept of, ‘We’re the experts, trust us,’ has clearly gone by the wayside with these e-mails,” said Judith Curry, a climate scientist at Georgia Institute of Technology.

The folks at Reuters, however, are keeping hope alive. “The head of the U.N.’s panel of climate experts rejected accusations of bias on Thursday, saying a ‘Climategate’ row in no way undermined evidence that humans are to blame for global warming,” the “news” service reported Thursday:

Rajendra Pachauri, who chairs the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), stood by his panel’s 2007 findings, called the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4). “This private communication in no way damages the credibility of the AR4 findings,” he told Reuters in an email exchange. . . .

“The entire report writing process of the IPCC is subjected to extensive and repeated review by experts as well as governments,” he added in a written statement to Reuters.

“There is, therefore, no possibility of exclusion of any contrarian views, if they have been published in established journals or other publications which are peer reviewed.”

“This thoroughness and the duration of the process followed in every assessment ensure the elimination of any possibility of omissions or distortions, intentional or accidental.”

You have to love the brazenness with which he simply ignores the central revelation of the emails: that the global warmists worked assiduously to keep skeptical papers from being peer-reviewed in the first place. It reminds us of that joke about the definition of chutzpah: when a guy kills his parents, then blames global warming for making him an orphan.

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