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The Telegraph reports "The fiddling with temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever"
From the article:
"When future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature records – on which the entire panic ultimately rested – were systematically “adjusted” to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data justified."
It seems that the norm in science may well be to cherry pick the results, but the story points to evidence that some climate data may have been falsified to fit the theory.
Sure, it's clickbait, but we've recently discussed cases where science and scientific consensus has gotten it so very wrong. Can we trust the science if we can't trust the data?
(Score: 5, Informative) by moondrake on Tuesday February 10 2015, @02:08PM
I am sorry but I think that is a rather short-sighted comment. Calibration is quite prevalent in science, and though I would agree it is often a nuisance and a source of errors, but it is also impossible to do many things without using it.
Contrary to what you may believe, most machines (including thermometers) have actually problems with doing measurements in standardized ways and there are lots of sources for drift, variation, etc, that can and need to be accounted for.
The example I quickly gave was not even correcting for known issues with a device but simply a consequence of the need for standardization when you are pooling data. It has nothing at all to do with guessing, so I am rather annoyed why you would suggest something silly like that in this discussion.
If you would just treat all numbers as-is, the situation would often be worse, as you would induce variation (and possibly bias) into your data. Accounting for this kind of thing, either by taking the measurement in a standardized way or by correcting for deviations from standard conditions is exactly what distinguish a scientist from a person who just reads the thermometer output. I am the first to admit that correcting afterwards is always worse than actually doing the measurement better, but in the real world, this just is not always possible.
And, to be frank, this is also why society need scientists that do their work correctly, because data are rarely 100% made-up, it is exactly in this kind of calibrations that a scientist might err from the "right path". We are still figuring out protocols and ways-of-conducts to prevent the latter (it is far more a problem now than in the past, especially in political sensitive fields). But mindlessly claiming all science that calibrates data is wrong is simply unreasonable.
I am sorry if this does not fit into your personal view how science should be.