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What's illegal about torturing data?

It may or may not be illegal (it probably would be in the case of fraudulently obtained grant funding), but academic fraud is career-ending. It is a very serious accusation. Besides, you are completely misunderstanding how defamation works. Defamation does not require that an allegation of a crime. Heck, there's even a term for this kind of thing: defamation of character.

https://www.alllaw.com/articles/nolo/civil-litigation/defama...

Another term you might want to look up is "Dunning-Kruger."

Really? What about Francesca Gino who is at Harvard https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/profile.aspx?facId=271812 and has even fraud and retractions on her Wikipedia? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesca_Gino Still a teacher at Harvard and filed a frivolous suit of defamation to the detriment of data conda.

I see no evidence that data fraud is "career ending" and the snark about dunning Kruger is fitting for your comment.

Indeed. It seems fraud is table stakes at this point.

Typically however, climate 'scientists' abstract their fraud. They take raw data, fit it to their 'model', and then produce a conclusion. Sometimes they get over zealous, and manipulate the raw data, like the NOAA was caught doing.

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