Trying to manipulate peer review, destroying evidence and sources, conspiring to not respect FOIA, besides issues with data.
We now for this blogger that is normal scientific process…
Now we are supposed to continue to trust them.

I really hope it was a too fast read over the issue.

For me, this is real news.

“Yup, this behavior has long been typical when academics form competing groups, whether the public hears about such groups or not. If you knew how academia worked, this news would not surprise you nor change your opinions on global warming. I’ve never done this stuff, and I’d like to think I wouldn’t, but that is cheap talk since I haven’t had the opportunity. This works as a “scandal” only because of academia’s overly idealistic public image.

It is a shame that academia works this way, and an academia where this stuff didn’t happen would probably be more accurate. But even our flawed academic consensus is usually more accurate than its contrarians, and it is hard to find reliable cheap indicators saying when contrarians are more likely to be right.”

If you don’t like this state of affairs join me in trying to develop a more reliable consensus mechanism on such topics: prediction markets.
You’ll note that Professor Hanson is saying the same thing as me – with only three differences.

One: this doesn’t change his opinion of global warming. Nor does it change mine. But he started out believing in it! Somehow, the actual facts of the matter are too unimportant to engage his attention. Does this inspire you to engage Professor Hanson to help overcome your biases?

Two: he expresses no shame whatsoever at being a member of this basically criminal endeavor. Indeed, if he has ever before bothered to inform his readers of the nature of his Mafia oath, I missed the post. How kind of him, to help his readers overcome their bias! You know, the one toward unconditionally trusting the products of Science – just on account of the name, it seems.

And three: his “solution” is… well… retarded. Like any design for the production of government by formula without human intervention, it is a perpetual-motion machine. There is no way to produce good government (or good management) without good people in a good organizational structure. Professor Hanson is certainly not the first to dabble in the transformation, by ritual mathematics, of base metals into precious. He would be the first, however, to make it work!

But other than that, he’s exactly right. What you’ll find, historically, is that his is the perspective of every decent cog in a bad wheel: not even slightly unaware or demented. There are never good cogs in a bad wheel, but there are always decent ones. You will find this exact same Oriental mentality in: Reinhard Spitzy’s How We Squandered The Reich (National Socialism); Alexander Barmine’s One Who Survived (early Communism); or Victor Klemperer’s The Lesser Evil (late Communism).

The perspective is that – sure – the system is bad. It is bad. Criminal? Sure. Thus, anyone who has seen the machine from the inside cannot possibly be surprised by Climategate. That’s just how professors behave! At least, now that professors run the world. Acton gets it right again.”

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/

If successful manipulation of a climate change prediction market had even a minuscule chance of effecting policy, then it would be profitable for energy companies could spend billions of dollars on manipulation. That is literally several million times more money then has ever been seen in a prediction market.

At that level, you would need serious financial firms to close the stat-arb opportunity. Considering the very long time pace of climate change, there are probably much more profitable uses of capital, I don’t think any funds would bother.

Case in point: http://stochasticdemocracy.blogspot.com/2008/09/more-about-intrade.html , when a surge of enthusiastic republicans created an arbitrage opportunity between the IEM and intrade Obama contracts for over a month. And that was on a much smaller scale….

See here for the full story of (some of) the FOI requests.

As I said, the issue is not Trenberth or scientists talking smack. It is the illegal evasion of legitmate scientific requests for data needed to replicate a scientific study. Without replication, science cannot move forwards. And when you only give data to friends of yours, and not to people who actually might take a critical look at it, you know what you end up with? A “consensus” …

Read the whole thing. It is quite damning.

Even if there are breaks, as long as there remains an economic incentive for a company to reduce it’s carbon footprint, there can be a benefit. People always want to make money.

However politically intricate and challenging it will be to create some incentive system, we shall have to do it or suffer the consequences. My personal opinion is that the consequences will become more visible soon, because there has been a La-Nina cooling cycle for the last few years, and it seems to be shifting to an El-Nina warming cycle. (The difference is marked by certain southern Pacific storm patterns.) That means that the warming trend has been to some extent hidden recently, and will now go into an above-trend mode. (This is just my opinion, based on reading.) If that’s correct, the emphasis on climate change, which has been diffused by the current economic situation, may re-form.

I recall hearing that Munich Re, a re-insurance company, was building in big damage estimates due to climate change, a few years ago.

ALL CREDIBILITY IS LOST