Scientists don't hide evidence

The news of the digital break-in at the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU) is now all over the blogosphere. The climate realists are finding lots of what looks like seriously incriminating evidence of malfeasance, whilst the climate alarmists are scurrying around putting fingers in holes in the dyke.

For now I just want to make a brief observation about one of the most controversial passages:

"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) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline." (From: Phil Jones, 16 Nov 1999)

That's temperature decline, of course. The alarmist site RealClimate points out that "trick" is science jargon and isn't at all referring to dishonesty. Some realists disagree with that, but the point is perfectly correct. It refers to applying what is usually a short, well-defined operation on the data to make it more tractable for further analysis, or to reveal certain characteristics, and so on. However, when paired with "to hide", it ceases to be legitimate. Scientists don't hide things, they advertise the key points that disagree with their own position and then show how their ideas can handle it. Everyone from Newton to Hawking draws attention to the toughest issues. Hiding is anti-science. Even legitimate scientific techniques are illegitimate if used to mislead people about the evidence or the explanatory power of a theory.