just be honest

Shoothouse Barbie completely wins the internet with this comment on the recent anthropogenic global warming debacle (though I will warn those with sensitive eyes that the comment is not exactly “G”-rated):

To further emphasize my disgust as a scientist, I’m going to write this in all caps. REFUSAL TO DISCLOSE THE CODES USED TO MASSAGE DATA, MERELY SAYING IN YOUR PUBLISHED RESEARCH YOU THAT USED A COMPLEX COMPUTER ALGORITHM AND NOT DISCLOSING WHAT THAT ALGORITHM WAS, IS A GODDAMN MOTHERFUCKING AWEFUL PIECE OF SHIT SHITTY FUCKING PRACTICE AND IS 100% UNSCIENTIFIC.

ASSHOLE.

Truth.
I am not a scientist. I never had aspirations of being a scientist. But in my quest for that now-framed-and-hanging-on-my-wall document indicating that I might know something about engineering, I had to do a fair bit of delving into statistical modelling (far more than I ever really wanted, honestly), and the simple truth about most modelling (at least in terms of the really complicated systems that people care about) is that you are not likely to ever be able/willing to 100% accurately model the system in question (not that it is impossible, just typically beyond most people’s cost-benefit curves). Oh, sure, you can show off how it should work, and you can throw some (P)RNGs at it to simulate random failures/weather/occurrences/etc., but little random things always seem to happen that throw your model just a little out of whack. But real scientists (and engineers… especially engineers) approximate as best they can where they have/need to, document where the approximation took place and why they did it, and keep moving. That is called “honesty”, “ethical practices”, or, if nothing else, “having a gorramed spine”.
Lying, unethical scumbags who are only trying to push their own agenda (or someone else’s) in order to make a quick buck, however, will do the kinds of things that the folks at Climate Research Unit appear to have done: removing old, inconvenient data; rearranging current data in a more salutory fashion; cutting-and-pasting from various data sets to make things “look” better; and, worst of all, not disclosing what they did, why they did it, or even that they did it at all, and then lying about it and trying to cover up the evidence when directly questioned.
Let me make this very simple, and very plain: if you are unwilling to openly disclose and discuss how you reached a certain conclusion, you are already admitting that there is a very high probability that the conclusion and/or method(s) are flawed, and cannot hold up under scrutiny. But, hey, if the political bandwagon is on your side, you do not have to trouble yourself with those little details, do you?