Show your work

If you find yourself talking to someone who has bought into the Global Warming scare, here's a handy-dandy argument that's almost guaranteed to get them to think.

There are two groups involved in this debate.  One group - let's call them the Warmists - say that there is a sudden, unprecedented, and dangerous increase in the global temperature.  They say that this is caused by mankind's burning of large quantities of Carbon Dioxide.  They say that they have climate data and computer models that show this conclusively, and we must get cracking on mitigation, including substantial reductions of our CO2.

The other side - let's call them the Skeptics - say that the science is not at all settled, that the data is not as represented, and the computer models filled with errors and egregious shortcomings.  They say that none of the proposed mitigations can for a moment be justified based on the known science of today.

It seems that this would be a trivial argument for the Warmists to win.  All they need to do is release their data and computer code.  Everyone would look at them, and that would pretty well end the argument.  The only thing left would be to discuss mitigation strategies.

Strangely, that's not what you see at all.  The Warmists refuse to release their data and computer code.  They refuse to release them to outside parties, they refuse to release them to other scientists, and they even refuse to release them when presented with Freedom Of Information Act requests.  If the proof were so incontrovertible, why not end the whole argument by releasing them?

Instead, the excuses are terribly weak.  The University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) said that there were confidentiality clauses that prevented them from releasing the data.  Others have claimed that the computer code is a trade secret, and that their University would be competitively harmed by sharing it with the rest of the world.  Remember, these are the sorts of excuses given when we're told that the future of the human race is at stake.

At this point, you should have someone who will be more open to persuasion.  A good next stop is Willis Eschenbach's excellent fisking of Mike Mann's (yes, that Mike Mann, of "Hockey Stick" fame) Washington Post Op-Ed:

The questions that you have been asked from the beginning have been the most fundamental of good-faith questions. We simply asked you to show us your data and your work. We requested you to abide by the most bozo requirements of the scientific method. Show us your data, show us your work, the same thing my high school science teacher taught me.
But no, in February of ’05 you went to the Wall Street Journal to make the extraordinary claim:

Giving them [McIntyre and McKitrick] the algorithm would be giving in to the intimidation tactics that these people are engaged in

For you to claim that such basic scientific questions were not in good faith, for you to say that merely (and politely) asking you to show your work is “intimidation”, is the opposite of science. For you to refuse to respond to those requests stops science in its tracks. We just wanted to see how you had come up with such an unusual and unexpected result as your total eradication of the Medieval Warm Period from the landscape. (It turned out that when you were finally forced to reveal your methods, your novel result could be seen to came from a stupid mathematical error combined with using bristlecone pines, known to be an invalid temperature proxy. That made your work meaningless and misleading … but I digress.)

Read the comments, too: we're told that "the science is settled" - but nobody says which science is settled, of in what way it's settled.  It seems the Geology is indeed settled, but it disagrees with Mann's hide-the-Medieval-Warm-Period Hockey Stick:



Yeah, I know - this is kicking the puppy.  The Global Warming business is collapsing - thus the desperation of its proponents.  Twenty years from now, we'll look back in wonder that we almost wrecked our economy on something this insupportable.