2nd February 2012, 03:06 PM
Jack Wrote:Your mixing your metaphors there a bit.
The need for climatologists to change how they engaged with government and the public in order to get the message over in no way altered how the data, measurements, experiments, modelling etc etc were carried out.
The debate was how to present the results to a wider audience..............not how to get the results or how to interpret them or how to report them to the scientific community.
Fair comment
I didn't say anything about data collection though (for climatologists or archaeologists).
What I was trying to get across was the fact that 'The Science' was regarded as unproven. Indeed, you will still hear few candidates for President of America etc. say, "well, The Science on climate change is still unproven". The answer is, of course it's unproven, as are all things subject to scientific study because sooner or later some guy/gal is going to come up with a better explanation. And unlike pseudo-archaeologists, scientists and other similar disciplines actually *like* the fact that someone will eventually prove them wrong. Or at least, the ones who are too vain/sociopathic/scared-of-losing-their-tenure that they don't think like that would be committing a serious social faux pas to suggest otherwise.
So while the climate data had been gathered in a scientific fashion there was still interpretation going on, not just presentation of data to the public. The climatologists learned that they needed to promote the most likely interpretation (i.e. that we're all screwed), rather than standing by while people promote interpretations that were based on inadequate education, insufficient use of the available data, unjustifiable assumptions about non-anthropogenic fluctuations in climate, or good old fashioned greed.
That debate and the one regarding how we treat pseudo-archaeologists continue to sound pretty similar to me. In particular, they have the following elements: disciplines based on a tiny amount of data relative to the object of study; interpretations that are based on that data but which go beyond it; dangerous nutters seeking to subvert the discipline; a few specialists complacent enough to let them.