Our extinguished Poet Laureate...

...writes often in the NZ Herald as Jam Hipkins. His witty and self deprecating columns pierce the PC pretence that abounds here in NZ. Hopkins is an iconoclastic rebel with a fortnightly column and produces politically incorrect satire with bite. Today he's at his very best, brightening our Friday mornings with a column headed Dodgy science gets us all off the hook...

...The other (example of monetary muckiness) concerns a gaggle of Newton's heirs, scientific geezers beavering away, recording data, analysing statistics and reporting only what is provable and true. Except these crooks haven't. They've cooked the books. They've lied. They've falsified the facts to induce needless panic and alarum in the bosoms of the groundlings. Along the way, they've blackened the reputations of others who challenged their conclusions, whilst earning for themselves great renown and large amounts of dosh.There's supposed to be an absolute rule in science: if the facts don't fit the theory, the theory must be wrong. But these beneficiaries of massive research grants have adopted a more creative approach. In their world, the First Law of Prestige and Avarice applies; when the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts...But these egregious boffins have done more than remind us that the purest of research is prone to the corruptions of ambition and income. What they've done is wilfully attempt to influence public opinion - and political outcomes - around the world. For these data-bodgers weren't investigating the mating habits of the Lesser Crested Gobsnot. No, they were climate scientists. Or, more precisely, pseudo-scientists, twisting the truth to produce results which they and their employers desired...more here...

As with other MSM, the NZ Herald has reported the scandal around the CRU as a breach of security rather than a gross and grotesque scientific fraud. Jim Hopkins, God bless him and reward him, has shone the spotlight on the elephant in the room. We wait now for further news and comment re NIWA, CRU and Jim Salinger as posted yesterday. The s*** has now hit the fan..

...AND, because it's Thanksgiving...

...and from the usually very unexcitable Bishop Hill...On the code thread, James Smith has just posted this comment:
From the file pl_decline.pro: check what the code is doing! It's reducing the temperatures in the 1930s, and introducing a parabolic trend into the data to make the temperatures in the 1990s look more dramatic.
Could someone else do a double check on this file? Could be dynamite if correct.