John Ingham
Daily Express [UK]
9/15/2010
PUBLIC inquiries into the Climategate scandal have failed to restore confidence in the science behind global warming, a report claimed yesterday.
It branded as flawed the three inquiries into the leaking of e-mails by scientists at East Anglia university’s world-leading Climate Research Unit.
And it called for independent inquiries into the ethos of climate research and the science itself.
Yesterday’s report for Lord Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation – a climate change sceptic think-tank – said: “The inquiries avoided key questions and failed to probe some of the most serious allegations.”
Climategate leaks appeared to show scientists manipulating data to strengthen the case for manmade climate change, obstructing freedom of information requests and pressuring academic journals to ignore critical studies.
Climategate was particularly damaging as the CRU is at the heart of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose reports are shaping the world’s response to the issue.
The CRU scientists have been cleared of wrongdoing by three independent inquiries, by the Commons Science and Technology committee and two for the University of East Anglia, led by Sir Muir Russell and another by Lord Oxburgh and the Royal Society.
But yesterday’s report by sceptic Andrew Montfort said: “Despite the seriousness of the matters revealed in the Climategate e-mails, the inquiries into the conduct and integrity of scientists at the CRU were rushed, cursory and largely unpersuasive.”
The article continues at the Daily Express.
Read also Obama’s Science Adviser: Don’t Call it ‘Global Warming’:
John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, says that the term “global warming” is “a dangerous misnomer” that should be replaced with “global climate disruption.”…
There is video of Holdren at the link. We’re not scientists but a comment written by a CNSNews reader at the end of the article framed the kind of argument that makes sense to us:
…Okay, at least if you claim that the climate is warming, then you can take measurements and then prove or disprove the hypothesis.
But if you claim that the climate is “nonuniform”, then there is no objective measure. The same if you claim that the changes are “harmful” — compared to what and compared to when?
And while he admitted that warming might be “quite possibly benign”, how can you analyze the costs and benefits of this “global climate disruption”? The answer is, the phrase is meaningless but difficult to argue against, because there are no objective measurements that can be used to define “disruption”.
