Guys, since we talk about environmental issues sometimes, you might be interested in this.

Imagine if there were no reliable records of global surface temperature. Raucous policy debates such as cap-and-trade would have no scientific basis, Al Gore would at this point be little more than a historical footnote, and President Obama would not be spending this U.N. session talking up a (likely unattainable) international climate deal in Copenhagen in December.

Steel yourself for the new reality, because the data needed to verify the gloom-and-doom warming forecasts have disappeared.

Or so it seems. Apparently, they were either lost or purged from some discarded computer. Only a very few people know what really happened, and they aren’t talking much. And what little they are saying makes no sense.

…

Warwick Hughes, an Australian scientist … politely wrote Phil Jones in early 2005, asking for the original data. Jones’s response to a fellow scientist attempting to replicate his work was, “We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”

Reread that statement, for it is breathtaking in its anti-scientific thrust.

Aaaaand it goes downhill from there.

This man wrote classical music that moves me. I have always found classical music to be, well, old and not relevant to anything I cared much about. Either it smacks me as being overtly “pretty”, like a pottery barn catalog or a chick flick movie, or simply dated, like last year’s bestseller. Albeit, I’ve not listened to a lot of classical music. I’ve mostly just listened to “the classics”.

But this is different. Give him a try, if you’ve got the time.