Richard Feynman's great 'Carco Cult' speech was a warning to the graduating students to not lie to themselves. in science you are not supposed to 'fool' anyone, and the easiest person to fool is yourself.
climate science needs its own Feynman to come in and clean up the prevailing attitude that seems to pressure its members into distorting the findings to accomodate the 'noble cause'. while there have been sins of commission done, I am much more worried about sins of ommission. it is bad that Michael Mann used the 'upsidedown Tiljander cores' in defense of his hockey stick graph and has thus poisoned numerous downhill papers, but it is worse that the rank and file of climate scientists have not come out publically to denounce it.
here is another example of 'sin of ommission'. just about everybody shades their story to accent the positive evidence and hide the negative but in science you are supposed to be brutally honest and even your own worst critic.
over the last two decades we have had satellite altimetry to study Antarctica and a decade's worth of GRACE. we have been told of ever increasing ice loss by various means and the supposed sea level increase of possibly up to many 10s of metres. hundreds of articles have been written in the media and many others in the Journals. so what would happen if a team was given the job of collating and reaccessing the available data and the results were not what they expected? would they make the findings obvious and inform the media? or would they accentuate the localized ice losses and hide the overall ice mass increase in plain sight by not pointing it out? I think we all know the answer to that question.
http://www.waisworkshop.org/presentations/2011/Session4/Zwally.pdf
first graphic contains-
 1900 Gt/yr approximate total input from
precipitation – evaporation less blowing snow
removal.
 Negligible output from surface melting and
uncertain loss from basal melting.
 1900 Gt/yr approximate output from ice
discharge into ocean.
second graphic contains-
 The wide range of published values of the rate of Antarctic
net mass change (+50 to -250 Gt/yr) showed a large uncertainty
in the current (and recent) contribution to sea level rise (-0.1 to
+0.7 mm/yr). Range is about 15% of input.
 Report s of large and accelerating rate of mass loss since
the early 1990s are unconfirmed. Overview and Assessment of Estimates of the Mass Balance
of the Antarctic Ice Sheet: 1992 to 2009, Zwally and Giovinetto, In
Surveys in Geophysics special issue on Cryosphere and Sea Level Change,
May 2011.
final graphic contains-
Climate warming in Arctic and increasing
ice loss in Greenland (-171 Gt/yr)!
West Antartica (-38 Gt/yr) and Peninsula
(-27 Gt/yr) have a net loss (-65 Gt/yr).
Antarctica: Overall, ice sheet now has
small positive balance (+38 Gt/yr)!
!?! Greenland hadnt been talked about but here it is with bold colouring!
the overall results did not have any highlighted colours
and the text was superimposed over a snowmobile graphic which made the remark about the overall positive balance almost impossible to read!
hide the decline, hide the incline, cherry picking, etc are all very bad for the reputation of science but they seem to be a staple of what passes for research.
postscript- Zwally made another presentation in 2012 where he stated the overall gain in ice was now increased to 49GT/yr but no reference data was presented for public consumption.
