The summaries are worse than the actual emails, because folks who don’t really understand what they’re saying or doing try to interpret (and fail).

I think most who work in an academic setting will agree.in my personal work, i use low-pass filters. probably not what they use (i have a much higher sampling rate than they do). when they talk about making peaks go away or performing “tricks”, they’re talking about doing things to make their data prettier – smoothing is a normal and natural way to get long-term trends.

The idea of uncertainty is what really keeps biting scientists in the ass. Acknowledging and quantifying uncertainty is a great virtue in science from a scientific standpoint, but in certain fields there are politically motivated idiots who’ll jump on that like a pack of rabid wolves.

If someone says he’s uncertain whether one of Darwin’s finches evolved from one ancestor or another, and he’s not careful with his wording, he could easily end up with a National Review headline blaring “SCIENTIST X SAYS DARWIN WAS WRONG” with an article saying he implicitly admitted that the Earth is 6,000 years old and Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs to church.

Climate scientists are in that same boat. Thank goodness I work in a relatively uncontroversial field…

The summaries are worse than the actual emails, because folks who don’t really understand what they’re saying or doing try to interpret (and fail).

I think most who work in an academic setting will agree.in my personal work, i use low-pass filters. probably not what they use (i have a much higher sampling rate than they do). when they talk about making peaks go away or performing “tricks”, they’re talking about doing things to make their data prettier – smoothing is a normal and natural way to get long-term trends.

The idea of uncertainty is what really keeps biting scientists in the ass. Acknowledging and quantifying uncertainty is a great virtue in science from a scientific standpoint, but in certain fields there are politically motivated idiots who’ll jump on that like a pack of rabid wolves.

If someone says he’s uncertain whether one of Darwin’s finches evolved from one ancestor or another, and he’s not careful with his wording, he could easily end up with a National Review headline blaring “SCIENTIST X SAYS DARWIN WAS WRONG” with an article saying he implicitly admitted that the Earth is 6,000 years old and Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs to church.

Climate scientists are in that same boat. Thank goodness I work in a relatively uncontroversial field…

The summaries are worse than the actual emails, because folks who don’t really understand what they’re saying or doing try to interpret (and fail).

I think most who work in an academic setting will agree.in my personal work, i use low-pass filters. probably not what they use (i have a much higher sampling rate than they do). when they talk about making peaks go away or performing “tricks”, they’re talking about doing things to make their data prettier – smoothing is a normal and natural way to get long-term trends.

The idea of uncertainty is what really keeps biting scientists in the ass. Acknowledging and quantifying uncertainty is a great virtue in science from a scientific standpoint, but in certain fields there are politically motivated idiots who’ll jump on that like a pack of rabid wolves.

If someone says he’s uncertain whether one of Darwin’s finches evolved from one ancestor or another, and he’s not careful with his wording, he could easily end up with a National Review headline blaring “SCIENTIST X SAYS DARWIN WAS WRONG” with an article saying he implicitly admitted that the Earth is 6,000 years old and Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs to church.

Climate scientists are in that same boat. Thank goodness I work in a relatively uncontroversial field…

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/sci…..370282.stm

A bunch of hackers managed to grab a whole bunch of documents from some very important science research concerning global warming.

Good thing these are professional scientists, there’s no way you’d find blatant attempts to falsify data for funding, especially on such an important topic like global warming. They should have nothing to hide.

No wait, actually they did.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/n…..l-warming/

http://blogs.news.com.au/heral…..ey_hacked/

You can find the documents here:

http://thepiratebay.org/torren…..009.zip%29

or

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Clim….._1996-2009

Here’s a picture I took of a random email. It doesn’t get more plain as day that this is not science, but rather politics.

http://img263.imageshack.us/im…..efraud.png

One comment in the bbc report really made me laugh.

“There are passionate opinions on both sides of the climate debate and there will be people trying to knock down the other side,” Mr Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos, told BBC News.

“If they feel that they can gather inside information on what the other side is up to, then they may feel that is ammunition for their counterargument.”

Well shoot, here I thought science was supposed to be transparent to everybody, and subject to rigorous peer review. But I guess we can’t have other learn our dirty little secrets now can we?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/sci…..370282.stm

A bunch of hackers managed to grab a whole bunch of documents from some very important science research concerning global warming.

Good thing these are professional scientists, there’s no way you’d find blatant attempts to falsify data for funding, especially on such an important topic like global warming. They should have nothing to hide.

No wait, actually they did.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/n…..l-warming/

http://blogs.news.com.au/heral…..ey_hacked/

You can find the documents here:

http://thepiratebay.org/torren…..009.zip%29

or

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Clim….._1996-2009

Here’s a picture I took of a random email. It doesn’t get more plain as day that this is not science, but rather politics.

http://img263.imageshack.us/im…..efraud.png

One comment in the bbc report really made me laugh.

“There are passionate opinions on both sides of the climate debate and there will be people trying to knock down the other side,” Mr Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos, told BBC News.

“If they feel that they can gather inside information on what the other side is up to, then they may feel that is ammunition for their counterargument.”

Well shoot, here I thought science was supposed to be transparent to everybody, and subject to rigorous peer review. But I guess we can’t have other learn our dirty little secrets now can we?