On Thu, 2009-11-12 at 15:28 -0500, c b wrote: > CB: On climate change, actually, the new technology of the internet > can give you things that in the past would require going to a > university library and perhaps climatology classes. With your > critical thinking skills applied you can get for yourself a > preliminary solid answer to your question as to whether climate change > is occurring. There is a history on this of a number of skeptics > raising questions, which I'm sure are readily avaiblable from a search > engine search.
If you're looking for an interesting case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_McIntyre http://www.climateaudit.org/ By looking at government processed temperature data this guy found some anomaly, asked for source code and raw data but was denied his request. In the end the government scientist acknowleged there was a bug and thanked him. *But* raw unprocessed data on temperature collected using taxpayer funding, processing software and many other aspects of climate science still remains totally secret even after this affair. Now of course there is one category of people who tend to want to keep data secret: politicians. When I see so called "scientists" hide raw data from the public eye I see politicians not scientists. Now it's very likely to me that pumping carbon in the atmosphere at the scale and speed mankind has been doing will have major consequences. But in the internet age not making raw data public is a major shortcoming transforming in practice science/knowledge into religion/belief and making any informed and constructive debate impossible. See also my previous post on public data. Laurent PS: does Super Freakonomics mention this? _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
