Climate Skeptics See 'Smoking Gun' in Researchers' Leaked E-Mails

How does one research group's old files invalidate every other scientists data? It doesn't. It's another sad attempt by the political skeptics to dismiss science without scientific evidence.

Furthermore the data is just the copies that they collected during their research. The original data still exists at the weather stations that it was collected from. Copies of the data probably exist at many other repositories around the planet as well. Anyone who is formally alleging academic fraud can go back to the sources and get the data and make their case.

But no, they just suggest that a department getting rid of obsolete magnetic tapes and old paper files from projects already formally published long ago is some how improper. The papers withstood scientific challenge when published and all that data was still accessible an readable.

 

Let me tell you. My department has been moved four times in the last 20 years, often into smaller spaces. When it happens, old work from finished projects gets trashed. We dumped probably 25 filing cabinets of draft copies, old correspondence and records that nobody had looked at for 20 years.

We trashed over 100 old tape reels from 1970's era mainframes because we cant read them anymore and it wasn't worth paying the very high price to have them professional conserved because the data was old and had already been published. We just didn't need it any more. Today we've got data on hundreds of Zip and Jaz disks from the 90's that we no longer have a working drive to recover them on. I have to separate all of that into data that it is worth spending the time and money to recover and data that we are not likely to ever need again, which I will happily trash.

Our budget gets cut every year and we have little space or money for storing things that are not part of our current ongoing work. Some documents and records are always kept, of course, and we have archival procedures for the most important records, but much raw data and draft copies and tons of old informal notes already formalized in publications get trashed.

Go to the sources and get the original data and prove them liars if you want to. But getting rid of old files is standard operating procedure just about everywhere. It's not a global conspiracy to falsify data. It's throwing out the friggin' trash.

 

A decade old study that withstood scientific challenge is a finished project.

 

Not even hardly. There has been no scientific challenge to the conclusions. You are grasping at straws.

Emails and old records . . . we call that bullchit.