A few days ago I posted about Correcting Global Warming Data. Some statisticians found mistakes in the US temperature data. Jim Hansen has written two replies. His sentiment is yes there were mistakes, they are corrected, the differences are tiny for the US and "indistinguishable" for the global data (1/1000 of a degree C). He also goes on to discuss how making a big deal about this is a deception by those who prefer short term profits to saving creation.
He makes liberal use of the word usufruct which I had never heard before, fortunately wikipedia did. "Usufruct is as American as the Declaration of Independence, implicit in the Preamble "...to ourselves and our Posterity...". It is explicitly discussed in a famous letter of 6 September 1789 from Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, discussing the proposed Bill of Rights to be added to the Constitution: "The question whether one generation of men has a right to bind another. . . is a question of such consequences as not only to merit decision, but place also among the fundamental principles of every government. . . . I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self-evident, 'that the Earth belongs in usufruct to the living' . . ." Jefferson’s philosophy regarding generational relations was based on this “self-evident” principle. That we have an obligation to preserve Creation for today’s and future generations is a widely held belief."
I gather the data correction is minor. I'm concerned with the claims that the data wasn't available and they had to reverse engineer some of the work to find the flaw. But I'm more interested in the concept of "usufruct".
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