An update on the UK Meterological Office

Last week, I posted that the UK Met Office refused a Freedom of Information Act request to release a data set that is being used to justify the theory that man is causing global warming.

The story is not being reported in the Mastodon Main Stream Media, but is showing no signs of dieing down. Slashdot has a furious thread where the debate is raging on what this means about science. Neither of my two regular readers will be surprised at some of the arguments being made that data and method needs to be disclosed in full so that anyone - especially your opponents, who have a vested interest - can test them.

But this really sums up my feelings on the matter:

The thing I cannot understand is this. We have a bunch of scientists, lots of them. Starting with Michael Mann in front of Wegman, but including Jones, Thompson, lots of really well known and respected people. They have all done work which supposedly proves that the human race on Earth is facing catastrophe. They supposedly have decisive evidence for this, in the form of data and code.

We then have a lot of sceptics who allege that the data does not exist, is not as described, and the code used to process it does not do what it is said to do, and that there is no such threat as described, or at leas that there is no evidence for one.

You would expect the scientists to immediately produce their evidence and their code and to silence debate once and for all. It would be so simple, it would just be end of story, and now lets focus on what to do about it all. But they do not. Instead they refuse to reveal anything. Jones, for instance, refused to even reveal the names of the stations in China on which his study was based. Mann would not reveal the algorithm which generated the hockey stick to a Congressional Committee. Thompson is silent. Yet supposedly this secret evidence proves decisively, contrary to the claims of sceptics, that the future of the human race is under severe and imminent threat?

It makes absolutely no sense. They never give any reasons for refusing that make any sense either. Sometimes it is commercial considerations. What commercial considerations can there be that outweigh the possible extinction of humanity? Sometimes it is, as Jones once is reported to have said, that they do not want people trying to poke holes in it. WTF??? Sometimes, as with Thompson's ice core data, there is just silence.

It is very hard to believe that this wonderful evidence really exists, and really is as represented. Or maybe it is, and they really do not want to convince everyone of the threat? I don't know, but the story as told makes absolutely no sense. Something is not right here.

Bingo. +5 Insightful, right there.

There's something going on all right. Ockham's Razor says that it's not scientific. Nothing else remotely makes sense.