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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

It is curious that for a community which theoretically worships peer review that increased scrutiny into their methods starts to come up with all sorts of low-hanging fruit like this.

I kind of feel sorry for them: humans make mistakes, and retrospective digging into any human endeavor is going to uncover them. That wouldn't be a problem if their marketing hadn't been "This is the infallible Voice of Science: the only people capable of understanding it all have already signed off on it. Implement our recommendations or be cast into a fiery pit." Mr. Wizard always looks less impressive from behind the curtain.

I have half a mind to take a week or two this summer, grab one of the old papers in the field and the associated data sets, and just try to reproduce the math. The reason I have only half a mind is that I know I'm likely to discover that the process is not covered in sufficient detail publicly to reproduce it.

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Mr. Wizard always looks less impressive from behind the curtain.

Hey hey now, Mr. Wizard never hid himself or any of his demonstrations behind a curtain, he always explained what was being shown, no matter how awesome it was. He also talked his helpers through forming hypothesizes and testing them. Everything was always reproduceable, and doing it at home was often encouraged (with adult supervision, of course). Let's not sully the Mr. Wizard name by implicating him with this climate data stuff -- we'd be better off if there were still shows on like his.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Wizard

(and yes, I know you're making a reference to The Wizard of Oz; should've said "The Wizard" instead of "Mr. Wizard" :) ).

It's difficult to know what to make of this. There seems to also be such a massive disconnect between other media voices over what the impact of revelations like this are to the overall global warming / climate change thesis.

There has been a stunning lack of intellectual curiosity/skepticism by journalists on the issue and if anything, much of the media seems outright hostile to the possibility that the overriding thesis could possibly be wrong.

This wouldn't be such a big issue if it weren't for the policy recommendations that would have us greatly change our way of life by people who by and large are insulated from proving their work has intrinsic value/subject to markets/or even the costs if they're wrong. It is to the Telegraph's credit that they've stayed on this story but I'm not sure if I'm more surprised or worried that these revelations have not caused a greater level of introspection or reached a wider mainstream audience.

That said, it would seem at least the news is trickling out: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8500443.stm. It does make me wonder even more about the news industry before internet use became pervasive.

"his wouldn't be such a big issue if it weren't for the policy recommendations that would have us greatly change our way of life"

The whole point of implementing cap-and-trade is so that we don't have to significantly change our way of life:

http://correspondents.theatlantic.com/conor_clarke/2009/06/d...

I will believe that graph is likely to contain something with any connection whatsoever to reality when shown an accurate representation of the economic situation in 2010 produced in 1970.

Here is an accurate economic representation of 2010 produced in 1956:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/58/Hubbert_U...

The Obama administration internally believes that cap and trade will cost the average family $1761 USD/year: http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/09/15/taking_liberties/ent... - and that's their estimate that's almost certain to be light ignoring the impact on industry itself.

Now what happens in actual implementation? Read http://www.aolnews.com/world/article/europes-cap-and-trade-m... and http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/health-science/csiro-bi...

Well, cap-and-trade will be partly offset by peak oil causing less of a shock.

Which assumes that, this time, the Peak Oil crowd is right.

I see no reason to give them any more credence than the last N times they've claimed this (my personal knowledge goes back only to the"Limits to Growth" '70s, but you can go back many more decades).

Nicholas Stern (of the stern review) is asking for 2% global gdp (!) based on findings of the IPCC report

Unfortunately, I think the peer review idea, which is great, is starting to break down. The latest news item that makes me sketical is the Lancet/autism piece, and then this article.

When did the common culture in the science start that "authorities" on a subject could release studies and criticism was not allowed?

I'll fully admit that I'm not qualified to judge the merits of most of these things, but in the past, scientists were excited to explain their findings to skeptics...now, they seem to want to change the subject away from findiings. Maybe I'm just old fashioned.

Well ... while The Lancet is in theory peer reviewed, it has had a very poor reputation for a long time. Anyone who takes what it publishes without a large grain of salt deserves what they get.

(Unfortunately in this case, by trashing herd immunity they've killed quite a few children with e.g. measles (yes, you can name names with a little Google fu).)

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