Maybe one day Patrick’s better half will guest-blog the whole CRU hack for us, but in the meantime this quote — from RealClimate — is enlightening, nay: inspiring.
It’s obvious that the noise-generating components of the blogosphere will generate a lot of noise about this. but it’s important to remember that science doesn’t work because people are polite at all times. Gravity isn’t a useful theory because Newton was a nice person. QED isn’t powerful because Feynman was respectful of other people around him. Science works because different groups go about trying to find the best approximations of the truth, and are generally very competitive about that.
From what I’ve read of the leaked emails — and bear in mind it’s early, yet — this does not change my take on the climate change issue even a little. What exactly my take is may or may not be the subject of another post.
