The emails DO give insight into the state of the science in as much as there is clear evidence of collusion between principles in the IPCC AR4 and later assessments to halt the progress of science by means of attempting and in some proven cases actual prevention of the publication of dissenting papers and in the IPCC method itself of the censoring of objections made in the review process itself and the refusal to even note the objections in the final report.

Not all dissenting (or assenting for that matter) papers on any science issue will rise to the level of quality required to be published so the fact that some scientists lobbied to keep certain papers out of consideration or publication is not in itself proof absolute that science was done a disservice. It may be — one would have to know the facts and be able to judge the merits of the papers in question and the discipline in particular.

There will be gatekeepers of necessity — that’s why there are editors or editorial boards and reviewers involved in selecting papers to be published or included in conferences, etc. The processes put in place should work to ensure the editors are fair and the reviewers are fair but the leaders in a field will be the ones solicited to do reviews. They are expected to be the ones who are capable of evaluating the work. They might work to keep out of publication those papers they feel are substandard, both assenting and dissenting. That is supposed to be the role of peer review.

The frauds in the past show that this is not enough to ensure that only deserving papers are published or considered as part of the literature.

This is directly discernable from reading the emails and is independent from any assessment of the tree ring data conflicts (which are however amply shown to be strongly and artificially biased in the code released).

The emails DO give insight into the state of the science in as much as there is clear evidence of collusion between principles in the IPCC AR4 and later assessments to halt the progress of science by means of attempting and in some proven cases actual prevention of the publication of dissenting papers and in the IPCC method itself of the censoring of objections made in the review process itself and the refusal to even note the objections in the final report.

Stifling dissent in science is not science.

1) The epic stories in the emails, in any honest reading, do not produce any concrete results or conclusions regarding the state of the science.

2) It is, in my view, not possible for a layman, or even an expert, to make any assessment of the tree ring data conflicts — to pick one issue — based on the emails.

I’m just agreeing.

IMO, it would be judicious to take his advice and stop trying to play cop, CSU, DA and Judge/Jury and leave that to the experts who will have access to all the relevant evidence.

Read the title of the thread, this discussion is regarding the Corcoran dissection of Climategate, not the science behind it to the exclusion of any or all other issues raised by the leaked documents. Perhaps you could return to the home page and scroll down to the threads discussing the science behind the debate and you would feel much more at home disparaging others for commenting on things other than science in science threads.

In this thread, any aspect touched upon by Corcoran is fair game IMHO, and evidently in Steve’s as he has not used his snipper to force people to keep on track as he does when things go astray.

Straw man arguments in this thread are likely to get noticed and commented on.

There are several relevant posts on THIS blog regarding both code and email issues. Perhaps you could pick one of the commented upon email trails and one analysis of the code and data and show where each does NOT make sense, or how the computer code and data sets do NOT show evidence of at least manipulation if not outright fraud.

Without showing at least one instance where you disagree with another layman’s analysis of the code and an instance where you disagree with a layman’s analysis of one of the email threads, your posting has, to me, zero relevance, as both have been well commented upon with excellent analyses.

I look forward to your showing what exactly does not make sense in any one of such lay analyses on this forum.