My impression from reading the emails is that different standards are being applied to the AGW skeptics because of their conclusions rather than because of their methods. At the same time there is evidence of data massaging and dubious practices around their own methods in order to match their pre-conceived conclusions. The whole process does not look like the disinterested search for truth that is the scientific ideal.
My P(B|E) would be higher if I read emails that seemed to focus on methodological errors first rather than proceeding from the fact that a journal has published unwelcome conclusions to the proposal that the journal must be boycotted.
I think there’s too much attention paid to the emails, and not enough to all of the publicly available information about the exact same events. Maybe it’s because private communications seem like secret information that contain the hidden truth, or maybe it’s just a cascade effect where everyone focuses on the emails because everyone is focusing on the emails.
The second email that you quoted is in response to the publication of a skeptical article by Soon & Baliunas (2003) in the journal Climate Research which generated a big public controversy among climate scientists. Reactions to that publication include several editors of the journal resigning in protest (and releasing statements about why they resigned), the publisher of the journal writing a letter admitting that the article contained claims that weren’t supported by the evidence (pdf), and a scientific rebuttal to the article being published later that same year. I think that you get a better sense of what happened (and whether climate scientists were reacting to the methods or just the conclusions) by reading accounts written at the time than from the snippets of emails. And of course there’s Wikipedia.
My impression from reading the emails is that different standards are being applied to the AGW skeptics because of their conclusions rather than because of their methods. At the same time there is evidence of data massaging and dubious practices around their own methods in order to match their pre-conceived conclusions. The whole process does not look like the disinterested search for truth that is the scientific ideal.
My P(B|E) would be higher if I read emails that seemed to focus on methodological errors first rather than proceeding from the fact that a journal has published unwelcome conclusions to the proposal that the journal must be boycotted.
I think there’s too much attention paid to the emails, and not enough to all of the publicly available information about the exact same events. Maybe it’s because private communications seem like secret information that contain the hidden truth, or maybe it’s just a cascade effect where everyone focuses on the emails because everyone is focusing on the emails.
The second email that you quoted is in response to the publication of a skeptical article by Soon & Baliunas (2003) in the journal Climate Research which generated a big public controversy among climate scientists. Reactions to that publication include several editors of the journal resigning in protest (and releasing statements about why they resigned), the publisher of the journal writing a letter admitting that the article contained claims that weren’t supported by the evidence (pdf), and a scientific rebuttal to the article being published later that same year. I think that you get a better sense of what happened (and whether climate scientists were reacting to the methods or just the conclusions) by reading accounts written at the time than from the snippets of emails. And of course there’s Wikipedia.
Would you expect to see evolutionary biologists discuss the methodological errors of creationist arguments in private correspondence?
(I don’t think this is the place for this, since I don’t think we’re getting anywhere.)
Upvoted for the parenthetical.