Last fall, there was a round of news and scandalous chatter, about how climate scientists around the world, especially in a government funded research program in Britain,
were exchanging emails about what a hard-sell human-caused climate change is and the methods they used to sell it.
The furor made its way here. Long story short, it was discrediting to the research and theory, and in the way of all scandals, was taken as proof positive that the entire field is quackery and everything ever said on the matter should be thrown out the window.
Well, one of the jobs of a government agency is that when a program they fund is questioned, they look into it. This is a process that takes a while. And now, about nine months later, the agents appointed by the British government to investigate the academic process of the report have decided
the Climate Research Unit at the heart of the matter was completely honest, just defensive and cagey about being questioned. This was
not a review of their data, it was review of their
methods and presentation. And the people whose job it is to decide if academic research is worth their government's recognition decided, for the third time no less, that there was no reason to doubt the honesty of the reports.
I don't raise this story to reopen old arguments or start new ones per se (although I know it will); Lord knows we've had enough of that lately. I raise this because it's far easier and more popular to
jump on the hate train than listen to the conductor. When an issue is hot, it's hot, and by the time an actual investigation makes a real conclusion, everybody's long since stopped caring if they remember it at all, and the conclusion of the first moment is set in stone forever as the "common wisdom". When people who know what they're talking about come back later and vindicate other people's work after being made into pariahs, I think that is an event worth mentioning.
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Topic: "Climategate" Exonerated (Read 3017 times)