“Climategate”

One thing that the recent “Climategate” episode may have done is to rightly focus more attention on the science that is really the driving force behind the COP15 meeting currently taking place in Copenhagen. Reading through the hacked e-mails published on various blog sites, it becomes obvious very quickly that the rigor and pure approach of science has been totally overwhelmed and compromised by politics and money.

Science should work on the basis of an open, free debate and a fair peer review process. If that is stifled then what we have is neither science nor reliable. What these e-mails show can be summarized as follows:

* The neutral and unbiased approach necessary in science has been replaced with almost a religious fervor that seeks a particular finding at almost any cost including carefully choosing exactly what data is used,
* The data is a mess with, for example, instances of data from recording stations predating that stations inception and, data of unknown quality and origin,
* Avoiding public scrutiny of the data and assumptions even to the point of destroying it,