Emeritus Professor Garth Paltridge is an atmospheric physicist and was a Chief Research Scientist with the CSIRO Division of Atmospheric Research before taking up positions in Tasmania as Director of the Institute of Antarctic and Southern Ocean Studies and CEO of the Antarctic Cooperative Research Centre. He retired in 2002 and continues to live in Hobart. He is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Tasmania and a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. He is author of The Climate Caper.
In an article published today in the Australian Prof Paltridge comments on Climategate and the Hockey Team at the CRU.
Boffins may be illegal
THE Climategate scandal continues to unfold. The thousands of emails leaked to the internet from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia reveal a tight-knit, influential group of scientists whose attitude to their profession is, to say the least, distorted.
It seems that a religious belief in disastrous climate change has destroyed their common sense and their appreciation of what is the appropriate way to carry out research.
See Read More link for further details
Prof Paltridge continues,
Climategate may at least demonstrate that the concept of a scientific consensus with regard to global warming is nonsense. There may indeed be thousands of scientists contributing to the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but on any particular aspect of the overall story all have to rely on the word of the few scientists who are directly involved. And when the particular aspect concerns experimental data on which the whole story rests, the data purporting to show the world is getting warmer, then the consensus argument is indeed on shaky ground.
On the evidence so far, there is not much doubt that the group of scientists linked to the CRU has behaved fairly badly. Any individual email from the Climategate pile may be explained and excused as a stupid mistake of the time, but when all are taken together it seems obvious enough that there have been lots of violations of what might be called the scientific code. The most glaring examples concern efforts to keep basic sets of data out of the hands of people who may not be sympathetic to the official story about the disastrous nature of global warming. This, when the CRU is specifically paid to collate the data gathered by national meteorological services across the world, and to make the data available to outside scientists to check and to use.
In any event, the CRU information is covered by environmental information regulations that specifically require public bodies in Britain to make their data progressively available to the public by electronic means that are easily accessible.
So the ducking and weaving in the face of reasonable requests for CRU data by outside scientists and indeed in the face of Freedom of Information requests by those same outside scientists may not be just bad scientific form. It may be illegal. Which makes the lukewarm reaction to Climategate by the great and powerful of the scientific establishment even more difficult to swallow. The journal Nature, for instance, has this to say: "If there are benefits to the email theft, one [of those benefits] is to highlight yet again the harassment that denialists inflict on some climate-change researchers, often in the form of endless, time-consuming demands for information under the US and UK Freedom of Information Acts. ..."
The full article is available in
the Australian here.
Prof Paltridge certianly is not the first scientist speaking out about Climategate and the activities of the Climatic Research Unit of the East Anglia University of which Prof Phil Jones was the director of until he stepped down recently following publication of the Climategate emails.
Prof Paltridge does a service to the Australian public by keeping this conduct squarely in the public eye.
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