If You Can't Beat 'Em In The Alley.....

WeAreAllEnforcers
SometimesVille


There is a whole lotta spinning, crowing, and gnashing of teeth going down about a batch of Emails, some of them 13 years old, between a passel of climate scientists this weekend.

So much so that the whole 'flap', which is based on a 'hack-and-release' from academic servers at the University of East Anglia*, was fronted by the NY Times today:

"Hundreds of private e-mail messages and documents hacked from a computer server at a British university are causing a stir among global warming skeptics, who say they show that climate scientists conspired to overstate the case for a human influence on climate change.

The e-mail messages, attributed to prominent American and British climate researchers, include discussions of scientific data and whether it should be released, exchanges about how best to combat the arguments of skeptics, and casual comments — in some cases derisive — about specific people known for their skeptical views. Drafts of scientific papers and a photo collage that portrays climate skeptics on an ice floe were also among the hacked data, some of which dates back 13 years......"

Now.

I am not a climate scientist.

But I am a scientist.

And here's something everyone should know.......

Scientists fight about everything.

In fact, we fight about every single detail - from data we view as either good or bad, to hypotheses we see as either untestable or sublimely elegant, to conclusions we view as either craptacular and/or spectacular, to peer-reviewers who drive us crazy because they either miss the point entirely or because they are hard-assed in the extreme (who, if they are fair, are the really good ones that matter).

And all of this, which has absolutely nothing to do with conspiracies or cover-ups, is small potatoes compared to the massive line brawls that are routinely triggered by a dogma-callout in the midst of a rousing end-to-end, wide-open idea fest (ie. the finest kind of scientific meeting/conference).

Why?

Because niceness means less than zero when you are really trying to figure out what is going on.

OK?


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*And, no, this is NOT the plotline from an old Monty Python sketch (although in some screamer quarters it probably could be)......

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