Debates

A Poll About A Debate:

To whit, is there one?

Fifty-nine percent (59%) of Americans now believe there is a significant disagreement within the scientific community over global warming, up seven points from early December just after the so-called “Climategate” scandal involving doctored or deliberately undisclosed scientific evidence first broke.

That seems like an odd thing to ask in a poll question. If you'd like to get a positive answer to the question, however, you can do so at Climate Debate Daily. You won't fail to understand the true answer to that question after perusing it for a while; and if you visit it regularly, you'll be as up to date as most anyone on the topic.

Climate Debate Daily is run by the same people who bring you one of my favorite of all internet sites, Arts & Letters Daily. They track not just the Arts and Humanities, but also quite a bit of science. Today they have a piece on the evolution of childhood play, and how playfulness is linked to high intelligence.

There's even an illustration.

UPDATE: Here's one reason that one might be suspicious of some of the climate change "science."

This week, the Belfast ecologist who collected most of the data, Professor Mike Baillie, described the ruling as "a staggering injustice ... We are the ones who trudged miles over bogs and fields carrying chain saws. We prepared the samples and - using quite a lot of expertise and judgment – we measured the ring patterns. Each ring pattern therefore has strong claims to be our copyright. Now, for the price of a stamp, Keenan feels he is entitled to be given all this data."

Science is not supposed to be about proprietary data. One of the bedrock principles of science is that it is open, so that experiments can be understood and replication can be attempted by anyone who questions your findings. If you "copyright" your source data and refuse to reveal it, you're failing to do science at all.