I don’t normally link to AP stories because of their somewhat aggressive stance towards bloggers, but they have performed a useful service by doing a detailed and — as as far as I can judge — pretty detached study of the UEA email trove. The overall conclusion:

E-mails stolen from the computer network server of the climate research unit at the university show climate scientists stonewalled skeptics and discussed hiding data, but the messages don't support claims that the science of global warming was faked.

I had thought of going through the trove myself but desisted because (a) they were stolen, (b) they were downloadable only as a zip file from a .ru server and (c) laziness, so it’s interesting to see what a detailed study reveals.

At first sight, the UEA people seem to be too jokily dismissive of climate change ‘sceptics’, and that’s obviously embarrassing. But there’s a context here: what the stolen emails don’t reveal is the level of intrusive, aggressive harassment that climate change researchers can face from sceptics and deniers. The tool of choice of these people (some of whom are clearly obsessives) is FOI requests and these are very blunt and time-consuming instruments. I imagine that the UEA researchers were constantly bombarded with these, and might understandably have developed a siege mentality — traces of which are clearly visible in the emails.

The other thing that’s interesting about the AP analysis is the light it throws on the real — as opposed to the idealised — practice of science. Students of these things will remember that the criterion that Karl Popper proposed for deciding whether an activity is scientific or not is whether its practitioners actively seek ways of falsifying their theories (as distinct from ways of verifying them). This seemed to me to fly in the face of everything we know about science in practice: in order to make real advances in a field one has to be an absolutely passionate advocate for a theory. The last thing one wants to do is pick holes in it; that’s the job of others (and of the peer-review process). Very few scientists are falsificationists in the Popperion sense — at least about their own theories. So it’s hardly surprising that the UEA researchers might express in private emails what might seem, in retrospect, to be a less than detached attitude towards their theoretical findings and beliefs. They’re perfectly normal scientists.

Thanks to Roger Highfield of New Scientist for the original link.

Later: My colleague Joe Smith has a thoughtful blog post about this, in which he says, en passant:

The IPCC has serious limitations, including a gaping hole when it comes to investigating the social, cultural and philosophical dimensions of climate change, but it remains the most ambitious peer review process modern science has undertaken. The truth about climate science is that it is inevitably messy and unfinishable – its a hugely complex system we’re trying to understand – but that hard intellectual work conducted by a very large number of people (who win little publicity and are modestly rewarded) is doggedly narrowing the boundaries of uncertainty. There is, almost all climate science researchers agree, plenty of justification for very urgent and bold action.

From the If-You’re-Really-Desperate Department: some advice.

If you’re giving a presentation, make sure your script is full of tweetable content. Think in terms of 140 characters or less. As you’re preparing, literally write out those tweetable points to ensure they’ll fit with room for retweets to spare (right around 100 characters is about right).

If your goal is to share your story not just to those in the room, but their followers as well, this will ensure you’re getting maximum pass-along for yourself and your message.

The number of dames claiming to have discussed Ugandan affairs with Tiger Woods grows daily and now stands at nine, at least according to ABC News.

I suppose it shows how naive I am, but I’m genuinely astonished by this unfolding story. I’m fascinated by golf but never really warmed to Woods. He always seemed so, well, boring and controlled: a golfing automaton. He’s the last man in the world I’d have suspected of hanging out with porn stars and night-club hostesses.

Francis Bacon had a nice aphorism for Tiger’s current plight: “He doth like the ape, that the higher he climbed the more he showed his arse.”

It’d be interesting to be a fly on the wall at the moment in the ad agency that handles the Accenture account. They made such a big deal of Tiger’s invincible, calm, rational image

LATER: This from the Irish Times:

Companies whose endorsements have helped make Woods perhaps the world’s richest athlete, with a fortune estimated at $1 billion, have said they are standing by him.

Oh yeah?

Two for the price of one!

Thanks to Lorcan Dempsey for spotting it.

Interesting that the laptop is a MacBookPro of the same vintage as mine.