ClimateGate—Nothing to see here, move on
As I follow the breaking scandal that has already become known as “ClimateGate,” I can’t help but think back to a lab course I had when I was still an undergraduate. On the first day of the course, the instructor warned us not to “massage” the data to make it correspond to what we knew were the proven laws of physics. “Data are sloppy” he said, “not every data point will fit. Report what you measure, nothing more, nothing less.”
It appears that an influential group of paleoclimatologists at the Hadley Climatic Research Unit at Britain’s University of East Anglia should have heeded my lab instructor’s advice …