12/01/09 WHERE'S THE DATA?

THE SUN RISES LOWER AND LOWER ON THE HORIZON
AN EPHEMERAL SNOWFALL

Tuesday, 8:00 AM. 29 degrees, wind W, light. The channel is glassy, the sky partly cloudy, and the barometer predicts rain, of which there is .3” in the gage from sometime since I looked at it last.
We experienced our first real snowfall yesterday afternoon (at least that I actually observed) it coated a pine tree in the back yard with large fluffy flakes but in an hour or less there was no evidence left of the occurrence. It seems that weather related information is terribly hard to hold onto these days, as evidenced by the scandalous “dumping” of irreplaceable data by the prestigious Climate Center of the University of East Anglia in England (the name sounds rather like that of a community college, eh what?), evidently destroying much of the basic evidence cited for “climate change” over the last 150 years.
Really! Are scientists just as susceptible to the common human frailties of greed, deceit, self-aggrandizement and political ambitions as us ordinary humans? If you haven’t by now answered “you bet,” I have a bridge in Brooklyn you may be interested in purchasing.
This scandal will result in significant economic, political and social reverberations, but the real tragedy in this and similar (they are not that rare) instances of scientific skullduggery is the damage it does to science itself, which is the very basis for modern civilization and most importantly for the future of our own country. There is only one way to save ourselves, and science itself, from scientists, and that is to constantly use our own powers of observation and logic to judge for ourselves the theories and evidence presented to us as scientific fact. None of us can be knowledgeable in all things, but all of us can cultivate a healthy skepticism to combat the rogues among us. One red flag to watch for: if you ask a simple question about a subject and are told it is too complicated to explain and that you must “read the book,” it is probably unsubstantiated theory or pure nonsense. Another: if scientific data or theory is presented as “consensus,” it is probably false, because science is based on incontrovertible truth, not general agreement. Yet another: if a proof cannot be replicated, it cannot be accepted as valid science. Finally and most importantly, follow the money.
Yesterday’s ephemeral snowfall really happened, as evidenced by the accompanying photo, the original of which remains, unenhanced, in my computer.