Smug? Moi?

It is, of course, very flattering to see The Times reach the opinion that I published last week in its report on the "Climategate" scandal, i.e. that there should be a distinction between a scientist and an advocate and that the CRU staff failed in that regard.

We now also know that the 1980s raw data on which much of the current thinking is based was thrown away, apparently because there was nowhere to store it. This is truly appalling. Combined with the refusal to disclose the methodology by which corrections were made to the data, it means that the final results that are relied on for modern policy are not scientific; they are fictional.

If the CRU staff were proper scientists, they would realise that such corrections were perfectly acceptable, provided that you also made available the original data and the methodology by which you corrected it. That way, if someone disagrees with you, you can say "Well, go and collect your own data and/or correct it yourself and tell us what you think the answer is", allowing a debate over whose data collection methods were better and whose correction methodology was more valid. That is how science works.

You don't publish a set of data, order the world to change the basis of its economy, then delete the data, refuse to disclose the methodology, and suppress dissenting opinions. That is simply not science.

This is, in fact what I've been banging on about for years, such as my post back in June 2008, bemoaning the inability of climate change advocates to enter into a reasoned debate...