Random Thoughts About Global Warming

[Ghoulish Delight]

Originally Posted by flippyshark

I've read about the hacked emails. I see that one researcher stepped down from his post for suggesting a "trick" that skewed data -

Except if you dig beyond the one-liner that was cherry picked out, he wasn't doing anything that falsified data or affected the conclusions of the research in question. He was just talking about selectively graphing the data that most clearly demonstrated the conclusions of the research.

Would it have been better to print the entire raw data (again, going past the one-liner, that's exactly what his colleagues replied to him with)? Perhaps. But boy do I understand where the dude is coming from. When facing people who walk outside in January and say, "Look, it's 32 degrees today, take THAT global warming!!!" I can appreciate the urge to avoid printing a graph that might, to people who don't have a grasp of statistics, appear to show a downward trend in temperatures.

No, it's not good scientific reporting. But it doesn't change the reality of the data behind it. It was just one guy trying to avoid having to justify his conclusions from spurious misinterpretation of the data by masking out the bit that could be misinterpreted. The guy is still an ass, but it's hardly a smoking gun that brings down the entire theory of global warming.