BBC News: ‘Show Your Working’: What ‘ClimateGate’ means December 2, 2009
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.Tags: climate change, Climategate, global warming
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‘Show Your Working’: What ‘ClimateGate’ means
BBC News, December 1, 2009
The “ClimateGate” affair – the publication of e-mails and documents hacked or leaked from one of the world’s leading climate research institutions – is being intensely debated on the web. But what does it imply for climate science? Here, Mike Hulme and Jerome Ravetz say it shows that we need a more concerted effort to explain and engage the public in understanding the processes and practices of science and scientists.
As the repercussions of ClimateGate reverberate around the virtual community of global citizens, we believe it is both important and urgent to reflect on what this moment is telling us about the practice of science in the 21st Century.
In particular, what is it telling us about the social status and perceived authority of scientific claims about climate change?
Read the rest here
An Honest Climate Debate 
The medical profession has confirmed that a mind-altering toxin contained in a variant of fudge distributed by a United Nations policy group, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), was the cause of a brain infection afflicting a large body of scientists. The sickness has been traced back to a climatologists’ hockey team playing for the UN. Doctors have dubbed this new disease Climate Wars Syndrome (CWS).
In leaked secret emails a few insiders from the hockey-playing elite admitted that for over two decades they privately suspected the fudge to be the cause of the malady. However, it now appears they publicly denied there was any problem to safeguard the reputation of the team. Doctors have now identified a range of symptoms for CWS including an overt green complexion, an irrational hatred of mankind and a Tourette syndrome-like verbal abuse of anyone who uses fossil fuels. Threats of violence may also occur. It was via the Internet on Friday November 20th 2009 that an incredulous world first learned that CWS had not only been spreading among scientists but the offending fudge had been unequivocally identified and a cure found by British scientists working at the UK’s Climate Research Unit (CRU). A vast community of Internet surfers has quickly sought to memorialise these profound events by naming them, ‘Climategate.’
Leaked documents have confirmed that the researcher accredited with this groundbreaking development was once a keen hockey player himself. The man, a self-taught computer programmer affectionately known to colleagues as ‘Harry’ solved the fudge problem in a sudden eureka moment while sat at his computer chewing on some fudge.
Harry is fast becoming a folk hero for solving one of the great mysteries of modern science. Since the story first broke the scientific community has started to come clean that CWS was indeed blighting much of their work and that swallowing the foul fudge brought on this dreadful malaise.
Meanwhile, epidemiologists and clinicians have been quick to identify the hallucinogenic properties of the offending fudge to further unravel the mystery. Incredibly, the fudge has been found to contain a psychotropic substance that acts primarily upon the central nervous system where it alters brain function, resulting in changes in perception, mood, consciousness and behaviour leading patients to feel delusions of grandeur and a sense of spiritual purpose in their lives.
It appears lone-wolf Harry, wiling away his time in the CRU laboratory experimented with a process known as ‘cognitive dissonance’ and shocked himself out of the effects of the psychotropic intoxicant, a drug now known to cause the hallucinogenic appearance of a mythical beast known as, ‘Man-Bear-Pig’ (MBP). Other experts who have replicated Harry’s experiments confirm that is is the efficacy of the cognitive dissonance reasoning process that acts as the cure. Apparently, most recovering ‘addicts’ (for this fudge-eating was clearly an addiction) soon notice a change starting with improvements in the appearance of their eyes that soon lose their tainted green colouration.
Other convalescing climatologists, that body of scientists most infected, are reporting the same side effects as Harry. Symptoms include anxiety, guilt, shame, anger, embarrassment, stress, and other negative emotional states that torment the patient. Epidemiologists have confirmed the name ’Climate War Syndrome’ (CWS) as a fitting epithet for the fudge-induced malady. Both ‘Climategate’ and ’Climate War Syndrome’ (CWS) have fast entered common usage giving a new handle on what was one of the great mysteries of our time.
Of course, like any serious disease, there will always be patients who won’t respond well to treatment. Those worst cases permeated with the deepest shade of green are believed to be James Hansen, Michael ‘upside down’ Mann and Phil Jones whom, its feared, may all need to be quarantined in isolation for several years.