Pastilhas Pirata

Concordo com a totalidade deste texto do David Marçal. Já não há pachorra para as teorias da conspiração que negam o aquecimento global. O episódio dos piratas dos computadores da Universidade de East Anglia só mostra o desconhecimento profundo de como funciona a ciência de quem andou ali a rapar para ver se continuava a alimentar as teorias da conspiração. Acreditar que umas informalidades trocadas por email numa única instituição colocam em causa o manancial de observações, experiências e trabalhos teóricos publicados por milhares investigadores dos vários cantos do mundo em revistas científicas de referência de vários domínios científicos (química, física molecular, física da atmosfera, geologia, astrofísica, clima, oceanos, etc.), é não ter a mínima noção do que é a ciência.

Do site Real Climate a passagem abaixo é bem ilustrativa da tretas que andaram a ser vendidas pelos "piratas" (diz que foram hackers...):

"No doubt, instances of cherry-picked and poorly-worded “gotcha” phrases will be pulled out of context. One example is worth mentioning quickly. Phil Jones in discussing the presentation of temperature reconstructions stated that “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction, and the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all. As for the ‘decline’, it is well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence problem”–see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens."