re: #633 Charles

It’s not possible for an organization run by human beings to be perfect. There are always going to be mistakes. And the climatology community has very clearly admitted as such, and clearly said they need to improve these areas.

But what’s really going on here is that these “critics” are scouring through every sentence written by climatologists, looking for anything at all that they can spin, distort, or exaggerate into a huge scandal. It wouldn’t matter whether the IPCC reports were 99.99999% perfect, these people would still find fodder for their scandal-making — it’s what the denial community does.

And yes, there IS a denial community, well-funded and politically powerful. They use dishonest tactics to do their work, smear excellent scientists, and harass people like the CRU scientists with constant frivolous demands for data through FOIA requests.

And Walter’s point - and mine - has been that the CRU and IPCC seem to be blissfully ignorant of any such activities, and continue to pursue loosely organized policies and allow unprofessional conduct that actively feeds them. Any college sophomore is capable of producing professional citations in a self-produced research paper; it’s a fundamental skill, and demanding the same of the IPCC isn’t setting the bar very high at all. As a software developer, I simply will not allow comments of the sort found in the ICU code - and if those comments hadn’t been there, neither would the controversy which followed, since the code itself is perfectly innocent as far as I can see.

Both organization richly deserve criticism for such behavior, not defense. They need to put a stop to it. If they don’t, I have little sympathy for them when their critics beat them over the head with clubs they provided themselves.