You are quite right: this is pure politics, and has no impact on the actual science. People are making a big deal of this who do not understand that scientific theory rests on multiple, independent, reproducable lines of evidence and does not depend on the credibility of one particular institution. The laws of physics don't change because someone hacked someone's email.

This "scandal" is a tempest in a teapot, with much political but little scientific significance.

Meanwhile, back in reality, the ice caps are melting, the oceans are warming, the last decade was the hottest on record, and the current warming is unprecedented for at least 1300 years. I am a big fan of The Hitchhiker's Guide, so I don't think panic is ever an appropriate reaction, but there is plenty of cause for strong action to reduce the risk of catastrophic climate change.

I agree that the data and code should be made public. Fortunately, NASA has been doing this for some time, as have many other researchers. Gavin Schmidt at NASA has put together a list of links to global warming data and code that is available online.

If you are interested in the scientific context of this story and the emails, I would recommend reading Gavin's posts on context at Real Climate as well.

There have also been interviews with Gerald North who led the NAS investigation into the hockey stick controversy a few years ago, and Peter Kelemen, prof at Columbia, explaining why this hack will not affect the science. Basically, global warming theory is supported by many lines of evidence from many different sources, and does not depend on the credibility of any one source. Furthermore, there is nothing in these emails or data that actually disproves any of the published research.

If this is the best skeptics can do, I think they're in for a rough time. The skeptical argument has little scientific support, so they resort to a silly PR stunt like this hoping to get a draw in the public debate. It has been great to see prominent deniers like Inhofe in the senate going way out on a limb, claiming this proves global warming is a hoax and so forth. There will hopefully be full investigations, at which point they'll probably end up looking pretty foolish when the science is vindicated.

What you are not mentioning is the other factor revealed in these emails -- these scientists were under sustained, concerted attack by opponents with no scruples and no intellectual integrity. The reluctance to release source data is bad, I agree, but you have to consider what they are up against. They knew that any information released would be twisted by their opponents to discredit the science, just as these emails are.

Your analysis makes a number of faulty assumptions:

You assume that money spent on mitigation will be lost. However, if that money is invested in renewable energy technologies, it will pay dividends in the form of energy sources that are not affected by scarcity of fossil fuels -- this gives countries that pursue the R response a huge advantage during peak oil.

You assume that money not spent on mitigation will be well-invested and pay dividends via compound interest. Recent economic events call this assumption into question, to put it mildly.

You assume that the dividends obtained by investing the saved money will be sufficient to pay the cost of adaptation. However, most credible economic estimates put the cost of adapatation so far above the cost of mitigation that it would take unrealistically good investment to return enough to cover the cost. An ounce of prevention...

You assume that the H response by AGW will be relatively mild in any case. There are growing indications that there is significant risk that this response will be severe -- that is, beyond the reasonable possibility of adaptation. See for example the latest modeling from MIT.

Generally speaking, you are failing to account for interaction with other factors, such as resource scarcity, political instability, economic instability, slow physical feedbacks, population pressure, and many other factors that influence the outcome significantly. Nothing happens in a vacuum.

Greg Craven has a detailed analysis of global warming from a risk management perspective, I think you would find it interesting.

Thanks for the thorough analysis, coaxial.

I think in many ways the response to this says as much about the "skeptic" community as it does about the scientists. They are very quick to jump to conclusions with very scant evidence if it supports their beliefs.

To their credit, many commenters on wattsupwiththat expressed admirable skepticism and urged waiting until this can all be analyzed and confirmed.

The data he was attempting to "conceal" is completely public -- it has long been known that some of the proxy studies don't match the actual temperature record for the late 20th century.

The proxy studies in question have all been updated extensively, and the debate continues as to their validity and the legitimacy of the techniques used. However, they are ultimately a side issue to global warming, as the bulk of the evidence does not depend on proxy studies.

You've obviously never been involved in a global warming debate on Facebook.

It is more interesting because these delusional theories constitute the bulk of the "skeptical" argument these days. The accusation of bias and so forth is damning to the particular researchers involved, but so far I haven't seen anything that seriously calls into question the actual science of global warming, which is the important question.

So far there has been no claim that any of this data falsifies any peer-reviewed research. I suspect that if there were evidence of that, the skeptics would have jumped all over it by now. So what it shows is scientists behaving badly and generally being human. This should not come as a huge surprise. It is not, however, likely to have any impact on the actual science.

The important thing to note about this story is that, even if it's all true and all of the emails are genuine, and even if it completely discredits every scientist involved and all of the work they've ever done, this does not falsify AGW theory.

The great thing about a robust scientific theory is that it's not dependent on any one line of evidence or the work of any particular individual or group. Most of the research this calls into question are proxy studies of the temperature over the last couple of millennia. This is only one of many lines of evidence supporting AGW, and it is not the primary line of evidence.

Even if you throw out every piece of research done by every scientist mentioned in this data, there will still be plenty of evidence to show that global warming is real and created by human activity.

So ultimately this is a tempest in a teacup. The deniers will make a huge deal about it, and it may have an impact on public opinion, but it will have very close to zero impact on actual science.

The lawyers!

It actually makes a perverse kind of sense though. Banks can effectively lend money to themselves, so they should be able to sue themselves too!

I think the primary purpose of this TOS is simply to encourage people to link to Wolfram|Alpha. Note the part about how it would be best to link to the specific result -- keep in mind that from Google's perspective, such a link creates another "page" on the site which Google can index, thus giving Wolfram|Alpha more opportunities to rank well in Google.

I think this is an SEO tactic, and not much more. I use much the same terms on my site. It'll probably work, too. Look for Wolfram|Alpha results to start beating Wiki in the Google SERPs.

As such, I doubt they'll be particularly vigorous about enforcing it, as long as they get lots of links and violators keep a fairly low profile.

The insight above is basically the philosophy of science of Karl Popper. Theory implies experimental predictions. If experimental predictions are false, then theory is false.

Then Thomas Kuhn pointed out that it's even worse than that. Really, it goes: Theory+Auxiliary Assumptions => prediction. If prediction=false, then (theory=false OR auxiliary assuptions=false).

The OR in that statement can never be completely eliminated. For example, if you assume there is a small invisible planet somewhere inside the orbit of Mercury, you can exactly reproduce the results of General Relativity using only Newtonian Mechanics. With enough auxiliary assumptions, you can make any theory work.

Because of this, you can never completely falsify any theory either, which makes the process of switching theories very fuzzy, social, aesthetic, and generally much messier than scientists want it to be. Kuhn coined the term "paradigm shift" to describe this process.

"All proofs inevitably lead to propositions which have no proof! All things are known because we want to believe in them." -- Frank Herbert

we obey the laws of Thermodynamics!" -- Homer Simpson

That would be the second law, that would be broken if you could recover all the heat. The third law is a bit more obscure and basically means that the first two laws apply to everything.

The amount you can recover varies according to the efficiency of the device you use to recover it, and depends completely on the details of your setup. Obviously no device is 100% efficient (that's the second law again), so you will never be able to recover all of the lost heat. It is possible to get remarkably high efficiency in some setups.

Exactly! And not only that, the part that people always seem to forget that is vitally important: Rosa Parks wasn't just a random person who decided to do this. She came from a robust tradition of civil rights activism. She was acting as the point person for a social movement, not just as an individual. But of course we all have to buy into the "great person" myth, so she's always presented in isolation.