Add me to the list of chemists with the same views.

Of course, there was no ‘free’ land there! But the British mania for collecting natural data (and I think it was a peculiarly British eccentricity – you can trace individual records of natural occurences which are associated with festivals or religious rites back to 2000BC or earlier in Egypt and other old civilisations, but you don’t get them recording ‘weather’) is often associated with the Church. I would be very surprised if missionaries, or, indeed, administrators generally did not record weather somewhere. They didn’t have to be ‘settled’ in the country to do so – in fact, one might think they were MORE likely to record the weather of a strange land, which might hold more surprises than home. Monsoon onset is surely something you want to predict?

Of course, such ‘pointless’ activity would be unlikely to be saved for posterity, but I wonder if the Foreign Office or the CofE archives hold anything interesting which has not been weeded out and thrown…

sorry, Luis. You broke a red-letter rule in one of the examples you raised. I do not edit or snip posts that break this particular rule. Usually they are automatic deletes.

Got it.

(Steve, please don’t snip this. If I ever refer to politics of some kind is only as a observer of social phenomenon in the most objective way that I can write, as a recognition its ideological power underneath this discussion and its consequences, but with the most toning down that was possible to me)

snip- sorry, Luis. You broke a red-letter rule in one of the examples you raised. I do not edit or snip posts that break this particular rule. Usually they are automatic deletes.

Global warming isn’t something you believe in. It is something you measure as carefully and objectively as possible and then try to understand without making extravagant and unjustified claims. Consensus has nothing to do with science, everything to do with politics.

I defy any real scientist to read RealClimate for more than a few hours without feeling totally sickened at the degradation of science and scientists that it represents.

I read CA with enjoyment and appreciation because it represents the kind of careful, open and objective science I believe in and respect.

Ah, but doug, we now know that climate scientists think that the popular media are “irrelevant”.

Why would such smart fellas waste their time running to the media all the time if what the media print isn’t to be taken seriously?

My background is in chemistry, and in that science, which has been around for a while, it is absolutely unthinkable that any paper could be published without total disclosure of data and methods–in short, everything one would need to reproduce the work or falsify the result.

What amazes me is how gullible the majority of the Realclimate readership must be, they obviously have total belief in their leader, any leader, they do not need proof, these are true believers of the team religion, how sad.