It’s been said that “There are liars, lies and statistics”, which those who don’t know anything about statistics have led them to infer that statistics aren’t useful, which is wrong. We’ve heard all about the hacked emails that show English climate researchers, at Univ. of East Anglia talked about manipulating data and the reaction who question the existence of a global warming crisis. What we haven’t heard much of is an explanation as to why this isn’t the smoking gun that the right wing media portrays it to be.  If Glenn Beck, Hannity and the rest of the folk don’t understand how science works, and they are the only ones “explaining” the meaning of this, the whole rational world is in trouble.

First of all, science itself, by definition, is a practice that is designed to avoid just the very problem of the “Cheating Scientist”.  The first two requirements of science are “results that are both measurable and repeatable”. if this scientist and his associates fudged his numbers then the 100s or 1000s of other researchers wouldn’t have found the evidence of climate change that they’ve already documented.  Granted, some people may have used the manipulated data series, but the fact is that researchers in many different fields have done experiments within their areas of studies and most support the idea that their is a climate change crisis.  If all the scientists are wrong, because of one group in the UK, there is a lot more wrong with the world than global warning.