Colby Cosh: ‘Norwich, we still have a problem’

Cosh is, of course, correct in his observations of media spin coming from political and ideological biases of the activist-scribe being focused less on fact and more on confirming/validating the prejudices of his readership. Very true – modern journalism has devolved from polished writers who post first hand reports and impressions of current events to mass media outlets for public information, to what is now essentially a personality cult gimmick to sell papers to people with the same political biases as the editorial staff – it is tribalist advocacy journalism, which borders on blatant propaganda.

The climategate events and revelations point out more about MSM’s prejudice-affirming nature and the tribal reflex of AGW absolutists than it does about the corruption of science.

As Always the real treat in a Cosh article is in the commentary and when climategate vs AGW is on the plate it brings all the misanthopic Gaia tribesmen out like skeeters to a bug light. I read through much of their deluded reasoning, circular argument and fallacious logic presented in a mirthful bemusement. All the old debate ploys from the Frankfurt school kindergarten where dredged up and spattered on the wall or logic: Fallacious argument from authority, non-sequitur, false analogy, assumptive fallacies, circular argument and of course their favorite – the snide innuendo. Even though the argumentation has been polished though 1000s of contrarian troll posts at ‘denier’ blogs, anyone with a modicum of critical reasoning can plainly see the deception, evasion and distortion from these anti-climategate disinfo warriors.

Other than the pathological misanthopes like RM and TJ who reflexively take an obnoxious contrarian line, ( to vindictively hit back at the well adjusted majority who’s rejection of their morbid antisocial thinking has made them into the insecure basement-dwelling misanthropes they are today), the general pro-AGW argumentation took on an air of depleted logic and desperate denialism not unlike the pro-creationists at the scopes trial.

The one argument from the climate doom moonies who want to dismiss the climategate findings is; “if you aren’t a climate scientist you can’t possibly know the truth of the matter”. This is farcical authoritative fallacy which is inconveniently double edged – if they are not climate scientists they, by their own twisted logic, also are not qualified to confirm or deny AGW or climategate data

But I love this dodge because, although I’m not a scientist, I have designed and used statistical process control systems for a couple of decades. The integrity of data sets is paramount in this discipline and from what I have read of the code set from the e-mails, there is little doubt the corrective adjustment of data reveals only one logical conclusion – the data source was unreliable – using unreliable data sources negates any conclusion from the data sets. Essentially corrective measures based in some undefined formulae renders the data collected so much incoherent meaningless refuse.

This will eventually be confirmed by peer review but for now, I get my daily snicker watching the humiliating contortions of objectivity AGW tribalists will resort to in attempts to dismiss the damning hard evidence in the climategate code strings.