| "[...] if we lived in a world where it wouldn't be cherry-picked by axe-grinders and used for character assassination." Unfortunately, that is exactly the current problem as well, without the data being available. The article this discussion is keyed off of Flawed climate data (http://www.financialpost.com) which argues pretty convincingly that the AGW researchers cherry-picked their data to show the "hockey stick." The article The Economics of Climate Change http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870349940457455... argues very convincingly that the AGW promoters in question had a financial axe to grind. The purloined emails (disclaimer, I only read the commonly reported quotes) were replete with character assassination. Between my assertions and mechanical_fish's assertions, releasing and hiding both lead to nastiness. IMHO, hiding the data caused as much or more nastiness as releasing it. Given that Good Science is verifiable, that argues strongly that the data must be released. There's an old legal aphorism that goes, "If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table." -- http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pound_the_table There is a lot of table pounding going on, and it sounds like it started with the AGW researchers not having quality data that could be pounded on, so they hid the data and pounded the table. |
For example, there's currently a bit of a tiff among some climate scientists over whether the statistical methods used to produce the "hockey stick" graphs are mathematically valid. These other scientists use different statistical methods which produce a different graph, and they argue that there's no intrinsic reason why the "hockey stick" method is better.
However, the "hockey stick" graphs correlate much more closely with CO2 measurements. If this other method is valid, then there needs to be an explanation of the divergence between temperature and CO2, which otherwise has been assumed to be closely related.
Given this disagreement among actual scientists, I can imagine the raucous noise produced when a whole bunch of armchair scientists get ahold of "raw" data and say, "Aha! Your data doesn't match your graphs! We're yanking your funding!"