And every single one of them can be easily proven to be a fraud who should be in jail.
If one endorses evidence of anthropogenic global warming, the evidence one is endorsing is the findings of the IPCC. And one of the major findings of the IPCC is Phil Jones surface temperature data. So if one endorses evidence of anthropogenic global warming, one endorses the surface temperature data – which we now know came out of Tim Mitchell’s @%$#.
“So what the hell did Tim do?!! As I keep asking.”
Thousands of scientists endorsed the IPCC publications. They might say, “I trust Phil Jones, I can’t imagine he would lie.” If someone says that, he’s not speaking as a scientist, he is speaking as an outsider who is taking someone else’s word for it. But what they’re doing is claiming to speak as scientists, pretending to have examined the evidence, when the Climategate files reveal they have not, that they could not have, for Phil Jones has no evidence for them to examine. So each of them is guilty of fraud, each of them should be in jail.
Science education, both informal and formal, is full of “check it out for yourself”. You don’t get to say that you understand a mathematical theorem unless you’ve actually gone through the proof – probably regenerated the proof as an exercise based on the instructor’s clues. You don’t take anybody’s word for it. There is no trust in math. Zero. No need for it. And in programming, you have to write the damn program for yourself. You don’t take anybody’s word that it works. And in physics, you’re not learning physics unless you do the labs, and see for yourself. Otherwise you’re just doing not-very-rigorous mathematics.
But when it comes to global warming, all of a sudden the talk is of “consensus”. All along, the science student has been taught not to trust anyone, not even his own teacher. To trust only his own senses and his own mind. And now, we’re supposed to trust a “consensus”
The most incriminating part of the Climate gate files is not “hide the decline”.
The most incriminating part of the Climate gate files is not “So what the hell did Tim do?!!”
The most incriminating part of the Climate gate files is the dog that did not bark in the night time – that no one, except for Harry, showed any interest whatsoever in the data, in checking the data out, in the process of reasoning and mathematics connecting data to results, that Phil Jones delegated what was supposedly the major job of the CRU, estimating global temperatures, to a postgrad, and never asked how that postgrad obtained the desired result – that everyone, except for Harry, viewed science as the task of building a consensus and imposing that consensus on all, not the task of gathering evidence and trying to figure out what the evidence reveals.
What the Climategate files reveals is not science, but religion. Scientists replicate. Synods build consensus. The Climategate files show a synod in action.