Tuesday, December 8, 2009

World's newest space agency: Reuters

I normally don't pay much attention to photo credits, but I had to do a double-take on this one. An article in the Telegraph has a satellite picture of the sun. Of course, to get that kind of picture, you have to get pretty close, exist in a high temperature environment, and have photography equipment capable of significantly attenuating the EM radiation thrown off from the sun

And who do they credit for the photo? NASA, right? No, we get:

Professor Henrik Svensmark argued that the recent warming period was caused by solar activity. Photo: REUTERS

Um, yeah dude. I think Reuters got that photo from someone else. With the budget cuts the media have had to make in the past few years, they can only afford near-earth satellites. Deeper-space probes are just out of the question.

ANYWAY, since I haven't posted on Climategate, or for that matter, anything in a while, here are my thoughts: It's absolutely disgraceful, the way the scientists in question have acted. Disclosure of your data does not mean that skeptics get to go on a multi-year scavenger hunt to find your raw data and then play guessing games about which sources you threw out and why.

The very fact that you have to make a post like this one in order to summon forth all the data is proof that you weren't being transparent enough.

There's also clear evidence that the scientists didn't seem to understand that you can't contort one data source to look like another and then call it two independent sources of data. Eric S. Raymond has done a tremendous job at exposing the tricks in the code, which explains exactly why the insular climate science doesn't want critics poring over their work

Oh, and just a hint: when you only allow people you approve of to review your work, that's not science.

PS: Recall that my outrage at many libertarians has been to their reactions *conditional* on AGW being real, and that outrage remains.

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