Monday
Nov292010
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Harrabin: Climategate inquiries "inadequate"
Nov 29, 2010 BBC Speaking at the Environment Agency's annual conference, RH had this to say
[Then there were] the shenanigans around Climategate, into which I have looked very closely, and I can find no smoking gun, but the investigations into Climategate have really been rather inadequate, I think, from the point of view of the public’s expectations of what they would produce, and there has been a loss of public confidence in climate science...
Video here. Money quote from 3:45.
Reader Comments (8)
Hedging his bets, no smoking gun but inquiries inadequate. Its either one or the other, come off the bloody fence !!!!
Cut the guy a little bit of slack. He was being paid to open a conference, not to be a major controversial speaker. Good enough, I think , that he raised the subject of Climategate and left at least a question mark with them.
And his later remark about the numbers who aren't convinced that climate change isn't a problem are growing will have been a fright to his audience...who probably don't meet any normal people in their daily course of existence.
6(1/2?)/10
@ Latimer Alder,
You've got that spot on, ordinary people all live on the outside of there little, and ever smaller bubble!
The smoking gun analogy is not the best, as it suggests the team had carried out a murder, rather than scientific fraud and/or gross incompetence. Finding evidence for the latter is obviously not going to be so easy or clearcut, especially when it is known that members of the team were deleting emails. I would have thought that there was plenty of evidence for fraud / incompetence in the Harry_Read_me file, but maybe Harrabin never looked at it in detail. At least he has publicly stated that the investigations were inadequate, so he is beginning to see the light. I have not closely followed Harrabin's output, does he still standby the hockeystick?
@lapogus : I would have thought that there was plenty of evidence for fraud / incompetence in the Harry_Read_me file, but maybe Harrabin never looked at it in detail.
... and if he did, I doubt that he'd have understood most of it anyway. :-(
"into which I have looked very closely"
Has he b*ll*cks
The gun was warm. The gun was linked conclusively to the slugs found in the bodies by forensics. The perp's fingerprints were found on the gun and on the box of bullets from which the fatal slugs were loaded. But the gun was no longer "smoking" when the cops showed up. Hence -- no smoking gun.
In Climategate, there is no e-mail exchange in which all the members of the team take a formal vote in which they agree to commit scientific fraud.
Stan wrote:
"In Climategate, there is no e-mail exchange in which all the members of the team take a formal vote in which they agree to commit scientific fraud."
No, but agreeing to coauthor a paper with a goateed fantasist from Pennsylvania State University is pretty darned close