Lies and consequences
<p>In the horrible-inevitability department: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/science/earth/04climate.html">Darwin Foes Add Warming to Targets</a>.</p>
<p>My first thought when I read this was: &#8220;Creationists opposing AGW hysteria?  Wow.  So those stupid fucks are good for something after all.&#8221;</p>
<p>My second thought was: &#8220;It&#8217;d be a damn shame if AGW ends up discrediting good science with the public, but if it happens the scientific establishment has only itself to blame for not busting the AGW fraud first.&#8221;</p>
<p>In fact, I don&#8217;t think that bad outcome is likely to happen, for reasons I explained in <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1465">Will the AGW fraud discredit science?</a>.  But this news story is a warning to all scientists: if you don&#8217;t want creationists to get traction, you can&#8217;t just treat this as someone else&#8217;s problem.  You have to clean house.  You have tolerated liars and rascals like Phil Jones and Rajendra Pachauri in your midst too long; you need to throw them out.</p>
<p>A diplomatic way for any random professional society to do this would be to demand that all climate science must be held to the strictest standards of methodological scrutiny. All data, including primary un-&#8220;corrected&#8221; datasets, must be available for auditing by third parties.  All modeling code must be published.  The assumptions made in data reduction and smoothing must be an explicitly documented part of the work product.</p>
<p>These requirements would kill off AGW alarmism as surely as a bullet through the head.  But its credibility is already collapsing; the rising issue, now, is to prevent collateral damage from the scientific community&#8217;s failure to insist on them sooner.  Every day you delay will strengthen the creationists and the flat-earthers and all the other monsters begotten from the sleep of reason.</p>
<p>UPDATE: and, in a nice bookend, <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2835581.htm">ABC follows the money</a>, suggesting strongly that the scientific establishment has failed to clean house because alarmism is just too damn lucrative.</p>
