Tuesday, November 26, 2013

The Challenger Disaster Rogers Commission, Climategate, and picking a Whitewash Committee

The other night I was watching a Discovery Channel show about the Roger's Commission and Richard Feynman's struggle with getting to the bottom of the reason the Challenger blew up. Richard Feynman was a great physicist that was born a bit too late to make it to the list of founders of quantum theory or relativity, but he did come up with Quantum Electrodynamics and maybe more importantly Feynman Diagrams. Feynman's greatest asset was his intellectual honesty about models and theories. Particularly this statement:

"First you guess. Don't laugh, this is the most important step. Then you compute the consequences. Compare the consequences to experience. If it disagrees with experience, the guess is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn't matter how beautiful your guess is or how smart you are or what your name is. If it disagrees with experiment, it's wrong. That's all there is to it."

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Richard_Feynman

This might be the most important statement in the name of Science that Feynman ever made. More important than everything else he did, put together. Because more money, time, and politics has been spent on bad research in the last 100 years than on anything else I can think of ignoring this simple rule.

Feynman butted heads with the chairman of the Rodger's Commission, William Rogers, because Rogers wanted to protect the bureaucracy at NASA (you know, the ones that caused the problem(s) in the first place with crappy reliability engineering stats) and Feynman wanted to know what the cause of the explosion actually was. 

Flash forward to 2010 and we have the British House of Commons Science and Technology report on the Climategate fiasco. Graham Stringer wasn't the only member of the committee that had a scientific background, but he was the only one that had a scientific mindset:

http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/phil%20jones%20house%20of%20commons%20report.pdf


While I disagree with Stringer politically, on this issue we're in complete agreement. Stringer said that an independent scientific body not affiliated with the University in question should carry out an investigation and dissented on many of the Committee's findings. 

In the Challenger disaster, Feynman was given a lot of press to state his opinions and embarrass the Commission. Why was that? 

Probably to embarrass Rogers, and the Reagan administration who put together the Rogers Commission.

But the media completely ignored Stringer's dissent in 2010. Stringer's dissent would further embarrass the Cimategate primaries, Al Gore, and everybody associated with the crappy pseudoscience that the Warmists present as irrefutable. Irrefutable as Ptolemy's model of the Solar System maybe. Wikipedia says the Climategate "scientists" were completely exonerated by their reverse-kangaroo court. Good job Wikipedia.

http://www.manchesterconfidential.co.uk/News/Climate-jiggery-pokery

http://www.conservapedia.com/Climategate

http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2011/07/05/michael-mann-and-the-climategate-whitewash-part-ii/

Finally there was a second 'independent investigation' done, and it was hardly non-partial.

http://www.cce-review.org/pdf/FINAL%20REPORT.pdf

 Professor Geoffrey Boulton of the review team, is a Warmist crony:

http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2010/2/17/geoffrey-boulton-and-the-ipcc.html

Professor Peter Clarke whose current research is:

Using global geodesy to observe the seasonal water cycle and climate change.


David Eyton, who in a presentation to the Chinese Academy of Engineering said:

"Climate change remains the most significant potential constraint facing the global energy industry, with fossil fuels accounting for around 60% of CO2 equivalent emissions. However, to date the world has not been willing to place a high enough price on carbon to incentivise significant change."

There was only one member of the commission that wasn't easily listed as on board with the Warmists. This is hardly an impartial team, three out of four of these guys are part of the same camp that produced the psuedoscience and following cover-up,


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