Thread: Climate change
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Old 17-12-2009, 04:01 PM
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AstralTraveller (David)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Solanum View Post
I think the email leak is overplayed. It certainly isn't good and it has certainly done science a disfavour. But to some extent it just reflects reality. We scientists are people, personal politics, have dissagrements and have to fight over funding etc. We aren't a perfect science machine. I don't think there is anything there that casts doubt on the publicly released results.
I haven't followed the email saga much at all but I think everyone has observed the timing and whos interests' it serves.

However I was taking to one of our academics who knows a researcher at East Anglica - though I'm not sure whether it was his emails that were leaked. Apparently the media picked up on the use of the word 'trick' to suggest that the scientists were pulling a swifty. It came up in the context of trying to put together a climate history over the past few millenia. There are multiple climate proxy records to consider and each one operates in a different way and has different spatial and temporal coverage and resolution. Then there is the instrumental record which also varies in quality and coverage. The comment was then something like .. "the trick is how to combine them..". So that bit, at least, is a storm in a tea-cup.
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