Why climatologists used the tree-ring data ‘trick’

This is exactly why I choose to avoid the whole global warming climate debate thing. It is so hard to find any sort of unbiased information because everyone who talks about it has an agenda and forces it in your face. An Inconvenient Truth was actually gag worthy, an hour and fifteen minutes of Al Gore masturbating his ego over his crusade, five minutes of ridiculous cartoons, and maybe fifteen minutes of actual statistics. Obviously a station like Fox News or a talking head like Sean Hannity is going to push a right wing viewpoint to the death, so there is really no point bringing them up in any serious debate about basically anything. Even this posting, I just have a hard time taking this particular blog seriously given the "Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal", as the description, whether it is intended to be humorous or not.

The whole global warming debate is not as clear cut (if you can call it that) as something like stem cell research where the issue was basically science vs morality/religion. Both sides have their own statistics, both sides try their hardest to refute the other sides' science, and even the people who actually agree with each other that there is global warming often have different opinions on what can actually be done (if anything) to fix the problem. When something like the climate-gate situation becomes public, it makes it even harder to actually take any of the science seriously, because one can only assume that the studies, experiments, and modeling is being done with the intention of proving one side right or wrong, which will undoubtedly lead to all sorts of unintended cognitive bias.

Also based on your response, I think we now know what "other climate measurements" you were referring to.

On the sidebar: "The Rise of Atheism, Global Atheist Convention".

This guy is some type of Atheist cult member.

Sorry, but that's nonsense. A simple thought experiment: use a blind man to visually measure the location of a rock. Does the fact that his answers are noisy provide evidence the rock is moving around in an unstable manner?

Again and again and again and again there are comments along the lines of, "I did five minutes of Googling about this issue and I've come up with a fatal flaw in climate science!" Do you really think that the tens of thousands of scientists who do their life's work in this area are all fucking idiots? Every last one of them? You are late to the party. How greenhouse gases work has been thoroughly explored. The science of whether we'll get a substantial human-caused climate change from increasing the amount of atmospheric CO2 by 35% is done. It's over. The science now is in determining/predicting just how much it will be, and in predicting the effects.

Every thread about climate science on Hacker News is one giant facepalm. Every thread. Please stop.