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Wed Nov 25 03:12:48 GMT 2009
It seems I am a little late to add a comment to this controversy. There is a lot of argument over the word "trick" in one of the e-mails. Personally, I am prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt. What concerns me are the e-mails that expose concerted efforts to suppress publication of papers from sceptical scientists, and there is no ambiguity about what is contained in those e-mails. Michael Mann is involved in that correspondence. He was co-author of the fraudulent hockey stick graph. There are several commenters here who expressed the view that this skuldugery does not detract from the scientific efforts of the people concerned. I cannot agree with that. I believe that people who have been shown to indulge in dishonesty and deceit can not be trusted in anything they do. The process of science has always involved creating theories from available data, then making the data openly available to see if others can replicate the results, or conversely find fault in the theory. Open debate then leads to the theory being accepted, modified, or abandoned. This process has been totally corrupted by the participants in this record of e-mails. The only reason I can see for doing that is the knowledge that their theories are wrong, but they don't want to admit it for political or personal gain.