See, "climategate" I think was a good example: no one in the scientific community seems to think it changed anything, the emails themselves that I read and read about seemed innocuous, but there're people who are absolutely certain it was part of a conspiracy. Apparently the various university investigations into the emails that concluded nothing was wrong, and that they didn't show falsification of any data or positions, were just proof of the extent of the conspiracy?
That's one of the oldest tricks in conspiracy theories - expand the conspiracy so that everyone who could debunk it is part of it.
If you can spot the holes in their science with your background, I see no reason why you couldn't publish a refutation that demonstrably embarrasses all of the climate scientists publishing this stuff now. Unless you think the journals are in on it too, and that no scientists anywhere are willing to examine your conclusions honestly and support them.
Like I said, seems more than a little improbable.
It doesn't require a conspiracy to understand the whitewashing done in response to Climategate I & II, just an understanding of human nature. Both the AGW-boosting "scientists" and their administrative boosters are hogs at the public trough. If AGW is shown to be bunk, the gravy train stops, people get fired and have to find useful employment. I would expect such an investigation to produce the same results if you were to have fellow welfare-check receiving slugs "investigate" their neighboring dole-ists.
Also, there is one small problem with your "publish a refutation" deal: the AWG-boosting "scientists" are unwilling to release the entirety of the source code that they wrote while consuming taxpayer dollars. This is in contrast to real, actual, science and modeling & simulation practice where code, methodology, and data are open to audit when claims are made. Despite thei, some have produced well-documented refutations and criticisms that the AGW fraudsters can counter only with accusation & hand-waving.
My background in this area gave me some insight before the Climategate revelations, given the actions & attitudes of the AGW-fraudsters. Refusing to allow one's code, data, and methodology to be examined are the actions of someone who knows their work is crap. Then, one of the "deniers" FOIA-ed an executable (but not data or source code) and found that the input data was not all that important, given that randomly entered data produced the "hockey stick" chart so touted for years.
Toss on top of that my other major was history, with a Dark-Middle Age focus. I have read some of the primary sources from WAY back, some with anonymous authors, some with cool names like "Notker the Stammerer." When the AGW fraudsters began going all 1984 with regard to history and wiping out commonly known and undisputed temperature changes like the Medieval Warming Period, was a sign their underlying data could not retrodict past climate changes.
Then, the Climategate email
and source code snippets came out. The emails were damning enough, but the
source code & in-line comments were the stuff that really blow a hole below the waterline on the AGW-fraudster ship. There were plenty of places where the code writer/maintainer wrote comments to the effect of, "I have no idea what os going on here. Dr. Mann says the original data is lost. So, I'll just plug the results in from YearX to YearZ."
I had one of those "will you get out of my brain" moments reading one of esr's post a few years back. An excerpt:
Error cascade: a definition and examples
...
I use the term “error cascade” in a meaning halfway between the restricted sense of the medical literature and “information cascade”, and I apply it specifically to a kind of bad science, especially bad science recruited in public-policy debates. A scientific error cascade happens when researchers substitute the reports or judgment of more senior and famous researchers for their own, and incorrectly conclude that their own work is erroneous or must be trimmed to fit a “consensus” view.
But it doesn’t stop there. What makes the term “cascade” appropriate is that those errors spawn other errors in the research they affect, which in turn spawn further errors. It’s exactly like a cascade from an incorrect medical diagnosis. The whole field surrounding the original error can become clogged with theory that has accreted around the error and is poorly predictive or over-complexified in order to cope with it.
...
In extreme cases, entire fields of inquiry can go down a rathole for years because almost everyone has preference-falsified almost everyone else into submission to a “scientific consensus” theory that is (a) widely but privately disbelieved, and (b) doesn’t predict or retrodict observed facts at all well. In the worst case, the field will become pathologized — scientific fraud will spread like dry rot among workers overinvested in the “consensus” view and scrambling to prop it up. Yes, anthropogenic global warming, I’m looking at you!
...
There an important difference between the AGW rathole and the others, though. Errors in the mass of the electron, or the human chromosome count, or structural analyses of obscure languages, don’t have political consequences (I chose Chomsky, who is definitely politically active, in part to sharpen this point). AGW theory most certainly does have political consequences; in fact, it becomes clearer by the day that the IPCC assessment reports were fraudulently designed to fit the desired political consequences rather than being based on anything so mundane and unhelpful as observed facts.
When a field of science is co-opted for political ends, the stakes for diverging from the “consensus” point of view become much higher. If politicians have staked their prestige and/or hopes for advancement on being the ones to fix a crisis, they don’t like to hear that “Oops! There is no crisis!” — and where that preference leads, grant money follows. When politics co-opts a field that is in the grip of an error cascade, the effect is to tighten that grip to the strangling point.
Consequently, scientific fields that have become entangled with public-policy debates are far more likely to pathologize — that is, to develop inner circles that collude in actual misconduct and suppression of refuting data rather than innocently perpetuating a mistake. The CRU “team” isn’t the only example of this....
So…how do you tell when a research field is in the grip of an error cascade? The most general indicator I know is consilience failures. Eventually, one of the factoids generated by an error cascade is going to collide with a well-established piece of evidence from another research field that is not subject to the same groupthink.
...
Consilience failures offer a way to spot an error cascade at a relatively early stage, well before the field around it becomes seriously pathologized. At later stages, the disconnect between the observed reality in front of researchers’ noses and the bogus theory may increase enough to cause problems within the field. At that point, the amount of peer pressure required to keep researchers from breaking out of the error cascade increases, and the operation of social control becomes more visible.
You are well into this late stage when anyone invokes “scientific consensus”. Science doesn’t work by consensus, it works by making and confirming predictions. Science is not democratic; there is only one vote, only Mother Nature gets to cast it, and the results are not subject to special pleading. When anyone attempts to end debate by insisting that a majority of scientists believe some specified position, this is the social mechanism of error cascades coming into the open and swinging a wrecking ball at actual scientific method right out where everyone can watch it happening. [Yes, that is you & your AGW buddies, DS---roo_ster]
Do read the whle thing. Well worth your while.
