The famous detective Sherlock Holmes will be our guiding light in this noble endeavour. Holmes was a genius that also worked outside of the official channels, represented by the boneheaded Scotland Yard Gestapo officers. If Holmes’s methods could lead to victory against the abominable Professor Moriarty, then they could also aid us in defeating the abominable professors Jones and Mann and Hansen.
The great Sherlock Holmes once said:
How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?
We have eliminated the impossible: we can be certain that the fraudsters are not innocent; that their “science” is not free of manipulations and fudging; that their models are no better than video games. It just like when we reason about what controls the climate: once we have eliminated carbon dioxide, we know that it must be the iron core of the sun, cosmic rays, clouds, a recovery from the LIA, underwater volcanoes, Mars, natural 1500-year cycles, and thousands of undiscovered but significant climate drivers and it is not warming anyhow.
But what is the truth that remains in the case of Climategate? Tricks, lies, cheating, gate-keeping, back-scratching en masse – that is for certain, but we need to determine more exactly what all the crimes and misdemeanours of the Hockey team are.
The great Sherlock Holmes also said:
But what is the truth that remains in the case of Climategate? Tricks, lies, cheating, gate-keeping, back-scratching en masse – that is for certain, but we need to determine more exactly what all the crimes and misdemeanours of the Hockey team are.
The great Sherlock Holmes also said:
To let the brain work without sufficient material is like racing an engine. It racks itself to pieces.
We surely don’t want to rack our minds to pieces, so the first step of our project must be to collect all the relevant material. There are lots of people out there in the internets who have a piece of the truth – they must all be heard! And that is the wonderful thing about blog science – everybody can be heard. You don’t need any fancy titles and white lab coats – you just need a sharp wit and an open mind unsoiled by AGW dogma. Indeed, we have listened to the ivory-tower academics for too long, and look where that has led us! It is time that we listen to the average Joe Sixpack instead. Therefore, I want to say to everybody: anything you know, anything you believe, every hunch you have are pertinent to our investigation. As Sherlock Holmes said:
It is, of course, a trifle, but there is nothing so important as trifles.
Do not fear that what you say would be trivial or irrelevant or speculative or wrong: you still deserve to be heard. How can we otherwise know that we have not missed some important piece of information? Your little piece, however improbable, may still remain after we have eliminated the impossible, and then it will have been proven to be true. So whatever you have seen or read or heard about, whatever rumors and whispers you have come across on the web, whatever emails you have managed to download from some university’s mail server: report it. If it is not impossible, it must be true! If you have received an evasive reply to one of your FOI-requests, report it. And if you haven’t received any reply, it is even more important to report it. Silence is the supreme evidence of a crime:
"Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"
"To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."
"The dog did nothing in the night-time."
"That was the curious incident," remarked Sherlock Holmes.
Finally, we need to do what we do best: we need to think. We need to get down into our basements and lock the door and pour though all our material during endless sleepless nights, with only a pipe and a bottle of whisky and our online fellow auditors and investigators to keep us company, and we need to figure out what it all means. And we need to think unconventionally. Our minds must boldly go were no minds have gone before. As Sherlock Holmes said:
In solving a problem of this sort, the grand thing is to be able to reason backward.
Indeed, we need to think backwards. Not boring, castrated forward thinking like those ivory-tower academics, but bold and imaginative backwards thinking. And upside-down-thinking, and inside-out thinking, and three-impossible-things-before-breakfast-thinking, and all kinds of unconventional thinking, just like the great Holmes did. We will not subject ourselves to Occam’s razor or other medieval instruments of torture. No matter how labyrinthine their machinations are, we will unravel them:
Perhaps, when a man has special knowledge and special powers like my own, it rather encourages him to seek a complex explanation when a simpler one is at hand.
- I urge everybody who has some evidence to report to write it down in the comment section below!
- I invite my colleagues in blog science and auditing to cooperate in this effort and to establish posts were good and honest blog citizens can report and analyze evidence!
- I invite other initiatives, such as the investigation that Andrew Montford is conducting for the Global Warming Policy Foundation, to join our tribunal under my supreme command!
I would like to end with this quote by the Great Detective:
I am not the law, but I represent justice so far as my feeble powers go.
Alone, we might have feeble powers, but together in The Blog-Citizens’ Tribunal to Find Out the Truth about the Climate Fraud we are an unstoppable justice machine!