Shoddy Science? You Got that Right

A commentary on the brouhaha about the EPA suppression of an analyst's report calls the report shoddy science and I think with some justification, if for no other reason than that the author was not a climatologist. (To be fair this non-climatologist, Alan Carlin, has an undergraduate physics degree from Cal Tech. That's not chopped liver!) On the other hand the whole climate debate is dominated by shoddy science. Even the notion that we have an adequate database on-hand with which to make these earth shattering claims about climate is highly suspect. We only have temperature data ranging back to the mid-19th century and the surrogates (things like tree rings, ice cores, and other substitutes that may correlated to climate) reveal times in the past when it has been much warmer and much much colder. We don't have an adequate theory for any of that. So all the current furor over CO2 is at best speculative and not in any hard sense, science at all. So maybe the "shoddy science" is as good as the "alarmist science." My general mantra in all this is: "Show me the data." I don't want to hear a lot of nonsense about the sky is falling or the river is rising ... What I want is good hard data together with laboratory or external observational experiment that confirms whatever theories are being tossed about. So far it looks like smoke and mirrors.
Jonathan Hiskes, the fellow who condemned this particular analyst's report, is a Grist staff writer. I'm not sure what Grist even is so I googled it up and searched on Hiskes' name and dredged up a bunch of his other writings. No sign of his credentials, so if he has any it's not clear. He clearly has opinions. I think I'll take the opinion of a Cal Tech physicist before just bending over and accepting Hiskes' critique. The problem is that all this climate nonsense is 99% opinion and about 1% data and based on quite a lot of very tentative and shaky science. When things are dominated by opinion the whole thing becomes a game of "Who do you trust?" I don't trust ideologues with axes to grind. I trust data and well motivated theory that has been validated. Oops, not very much of that in this field. So I themed this piece with Aeolus who I first encountered in the Aeneid. Aeolus is the god of winds (i.e. a blowhard) so he's a particularly appropriate icon for this whole topic. It's mostly hot air, ur wind.