Rajendra K. Pachauri, Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, responds to the leak of e-mails and other documents from the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit with a statement (posted on Dot Earth). He writes in part:
The unfortunate incident that has taken place through illegal hacking of the private communications of individual scientists only highlights the importance of I.P.C.C. procedures and practices and the thoroughness by which the Panel carries out its assessment. This thoroughness and the duration of the process followed in every assessment ensure the elimination of any possibility of omissions or distortions, intentional or accidental.
The statement does not really address the contents of the revealed documents nor adequately respond to the resulting charges. Like those from the CRU, this response will do little if anything to quiet the controversy. Megan McArdle is similarly underwhelmed by Pachauri’s defense in an interview.
Meanwhile, Dr. Judith Curry has an open letter to climate researchers which, like her prior posting, is far more responsive and productive. She writes in part:
If climate science is to uphold core research values and be credible to public, we need to respond to any critique of data or methodology that emerges from analysis by other scientists. Ignoring skeptics coming from outside the field is inappropriate; Einstein did not start his research career at Princeton, but rather at a post office. I’m not implying that climate researchers need to keep defending against the same arguments over and over again. Scientists claim that they would never get any research done if they had to continuously respond to skeptics. The counter to that argument is to make all of your data, metadata, and code openly available. Doing this will minimize the time spent responding to skeptics; try it! If anyone identifies an actual error in your data or methodology, acknowledge it and fix the problem. Doing this would keep molehills from growing into mountains that involve congressional hearings, lawyers, etc.
MIT’s Michael Schrage has more thoughts on the corrosive effect of secrecy on science.
The malice, mischief and Machiavellian manoeuvrings revealed in the illegally hacked megabytes of emails from the University of East Anglia’s prestigious Climate Research Unit, for example, offers a useful paradigm of contemporary scientific conflict. Science may be objective; scientists emphatically are not. This episode illustrates what too many universities, professional societies, and research funders have irresponsibly allowed their scientists to become. Shame on them all.
Flash Gordon says:
When Pachauri says “This unfortunate incident” he means the leaking of the email and other documents, not the fraud of the “scientists” who were cooking the books.
I guess it is “unfortunate” when you get caught. It would be fortunate to get away with it.
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November 27, 2009, 11:56 pmEvilDave says:
Note the “illegally hacked” and “illegal hacking” comments.
An attempt to shift the focus from the crimes committed by the “scientists” and shift the focus to the means by which their crimes were exposed.
I am not concerned with the illegality of the leaked emails, etc. I am concerned with the fraud performed by these “scientists” with apparent malicious intent.
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November 28, 2009, 12:06 amOperationCounterstrike says:
Hey, where can I find the emails themselves?
So far every thing I’ve seen seems to be consistent with the following hypothesis: H1. A clique of oil-industry-funded warming-deniers has taken over an academic journal’s editorial board, and is publishing bad papers by choosing which peers do the peer reviewing according to a bias. The emails’ authors are responding to this with justified outrage, and rightly threatening to oppose it in every way, including submissions-boycott.
Can someone who has followed it better than I please say if anything contradicts H1, and if so, what?
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November 28, 2009, 12:14 amMike G in Corvallis says:
Regarding claims that CRU’s computers were “illegally hacked” ... According to an article in ComputerWorld,
Is it still “breaking and entering” if you hand the thief your house keys?
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November 28, 2009, 12:26 amJSinAZ says:
OC, I struggle to understand your question. Are you asking what the motive of the apparent ‘whistleblower’ was in this ugly situation? Perhaps a sudden attack of integrity, or would that violate Occam’s Razor?
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November 28, 2009, 12:33 amBrett says:
But that’s what happens. The “they predicted global cooling argument in the 1970s” argument has been refuted on countless occasions, but it absolutely refuses to die, and continues to get used against climate research.
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November 28, 2009, 1:29 amDavid Schwartz says:
Are you serious? Every single public statement of the scientists involved states exactly the opposite of this. This would be an incredibly bizarre conspiracy that has absolutely no evidence whatsoever to support it. In fact, this is the first I’ve ever heard anybody even suggest such a thing.
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November 28, 2009, 1:30 amOperationCounterstrike says:
Whistleblower? What are you talking about? The hacker was not a whistleblower; he was a hacker.
But that’s not what I was asking about anyway. I’m asking whether anyone can tell me how to find the emails themselves, in a searchable format, and, whether anyone knows of anything in them which would contradict H1.
The sites you all have provided so far seem to be reporting gossip and response–precisely what makes it so hard to filter the tangibles out of the noise! I want either the emails themselves, or something that clearly and directly contradicts H1. It’s way too easy to take quotations out of context. To cite a scientist describing a hypothetical situation as if (s)he were stating his/her own position.
So please, if you have a site that DOESN’T include either the emails themselves or a clear contradition of H1, I don’t need to see your link.
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November 28, 2009, 2:07 amDishman says:
Here is a searchable reference. The complete file set is here.
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November 28, 2009, 2:30 amJones' Cell Mate says:
You got to love a guy heading the most important scientific panel in the world who can’t get through his first sentence without tossing out a completely unsupported assumption. This guy is going to make it big in climatology.
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November 28, 2009, 2:32 amDishman says:
Eh, if someone is dubious and wants to look at the source material, I’d just as soon hand it to them and let them make their own decision. I think the material is clear enough that most people who look at it will find at least some common ground with me.
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November 28, 2009, 2:53 amstacked and loaded says:
this is like the discovery institute whining that its latest insights into intelligent design or creationism have not made it into Nature and Science. And when there is a cabal of people funding those who keep throwing garbage and jamming the system, is it that much of a surprise that those in the system express extreme frustration at having to deal with these knuckleheads who take advantage of obfuscation to pass off junky half-baked selective analysis as science?
you know what? the peer review process IS stacked. against deniers and creationists and assorted idiots. this IS a good thing.
i bet the peer review process in law review journals is stacked against those who yearn fondly for the rightness of plessy v ferguson. most would agree that would be ok, i assume.
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November 28, 2009, 3:30 amstacked and loaded says:
the illegal hacking is neither here nor there, but it is a fact, not an unsupported assumption.
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November 28, 2009, 3:32 amDavid Schwartz says:
If that view wins, then the peer review process will utterly fail to do its job. The peer review process, whether for science or law review, is supposed to be neutral to your conclusion. It’s supposed to be concerned only with how well your arguments justify your conclusion and how important your conclusions are.
In fact, it is precisely that the CRU emails indicate this upside down view of the peer review process that they are so serious.
See this link for more on this.
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November 28, 2009, 3:40 ambuck says:
That’s right! And if flat-earthers demand a response to their arguments, they should get a calm, complete response too. NOT!
Ignorant puerile prattle should be ignored–not merely because it’s ignorant nonsense, but because responding to it only encourages more of it. One does not respond to a begging dog by giving him something else to make him go away–the dog learns from that that he can come back later and get another treat.
More to the point–Einstein never worked in a post office! He got a job at a patent office because he could not get a university job–and he already had a math and physics degree by the time he started working and completed his PhD before moving on. The analogy fails completely.
Really? And what “crimes” did these scientists commit?
Perhaps not, but it would still be a burglary if you tried to carry off anything from the house without explicit permission.
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November 28, 2009, 4:06 amDavid Schwartz says:
That’s why the emails about manipulating the peer review process are so damning. In science, it’s not supposed to be the conclusion that determines whether the argument deserves a response or not. A high-quality, well-reasoned argument that leads to a conclusion that contradicts what you maintain as scientific truth deserves a response regardless of the beliefs of the person advancing the argument.
In fact, it is even important to publish such papers where the conclusion is clearly erroneous. If the same type of reasoning and methodology that leads to valid results can also lead to invalid ones, the valid results are not longer substantiated by that methodology.
What happened in this case is extremely interesting. Every time a paper that contradicted the AGW consensus passed peer review, certain crazies latched onto it as definitive proof that AGW was dead (often by misinterpreting the results or claiming one minor error invalidated the entire field). As a result, it became important to some to make sure these papers — even if scientifically valid — did not pass peer review. This was done not for scientific reasons but for political ones. As a result, the peer review process failed to serve its scientific purpose and instead served a political purpose.
For science to work, the peer review threshold need to be not too low nor too high and, most importantly, to be politically-neutral. It was not.
The CRU emails prove that the same people who politically manipulated the peer review process insisted it could still serve its proper scientific function — even when they knew it could not possibly do so.
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November 28, 2009, 4:37 amDishman says:
If you can’t distinguish between someone who gets different results from you, or who questions your data or analysis, and a flat-earther, I suspect you’ve been blinded by zealousy.
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November 28, 2009, 6:34 amguy in the veal calf office says:
I reccomend the Arts and Letters Daily spin off Climate Debate Daily. I’ve been using it since its debut to find links to both doubters and, er, convincers whenever a new development occurs. (My impression after much reading is the two sides are entrenched, bitter and find little common ground. The tone is even ruder than a David Bernstein comment thread.)
As far as rejected articles, one that CRU wanted rejected by journals is by Vincent Courtillot, and discussed in this article. The article claims that Courtillot asked Phil Jones (a CRU scientist) for his temperature measurement data so Courtillot could map it against solar activity, but
Realclimate (website of one of the CRU guys, I think) dismisses Courtillot’s article, saying:
The first article argues that CRU errs by “normalizing” its data using 1961–1990 as the “normal” period. RealClimate says Courtillot’s measurements conform to theirs when “normalized”. Can someone explain why CRU normalizes and specifically why that period? Temperature measurements are available for the whole century.
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November 28, 2009, 6:44 ambill says:
If your starting point is that there is no doubt that AGW is happening then obviously any paper which in any way disagrees with that is either not properly peer reviewed — because peer review would necessarily eliminate such patently wrong papers — and so can be ignored; or is published in a ‘junk science’ journal, so also can be ignored. If something is true, what is the point of engaging with critics?
The logic of that position is coherent, but it hardly seems to reflect the scientific method.
The whole emphasis on peer review is odd, the insistence that all our work is peer reviewed (so must be OK) and that the work of the sceptics necessarily can not have been peer reviewed, or not properly peer reviewed. It smacks of dissembling, or disingenuousness, attempting to fool the fools, be they politicians or the public, not the rest of the scientific community.
Outside medicine, peer review is generally a light touch exercise: is the argument coherent — do the objective, method, conclusion hang together; is the author familiar with recent work that might affect his paper; then on to details of the paper, its use of language, its presentation etc. The reviewer is addressing the question, ‘is this paper worth publishing’, not ‘is this paper right’, or, ‘is this paper good’. Reviewers do not re-do authors work; reviewers are reviewers, not examiners. And thenn the real peer review comesw post publication, as others try to replicate the work published. I think most people in science know this is the normal condition; I wonder if others are disturbed as I am by the AGW claim that having passed peer review counts as a guarantee of the paper’s worth ( and even more disturbing that that the reviewing was done by a gang of mates, all validating eadh others work in this curiously over-stated way)?
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November 28, 2009, 7:22 amPersonFromPorlock says:
Well, if we assume H2, that control of the relevant journals has been secretly seized by warmists, then the hack/leak, followed by your H1, is clearly an attempt by the warmists to discredit AGW sceptics. ;^)
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November 28, 2009, 8:46 amRichard Aubrey says:
As to global cooling.
I read the book. “The Coming Ice Age” published, iirc, 1976, meaning the data were probably no later than 1975.
Sen. Malcolm Wallop, head of the Senate science committee or whatever they had then, gave it a good jacket blurb.
And I happened to be watching the old “In Search Of” when they had Stephen Schneider pitching the difficulties of getting run over by a glacier.
Additionally, in the late Sixties between college and the Army I did some substitute teaching in high school. Found myself in a science class where the lesson plan covered CO2 and warming, and albedo and cooling, and feedback, looking at cooling as most likely in the near future.
And, of course, as has been said many times, the last several interglacials lasted a couple of thousand years less than this one. Who says the current state is stable? Prove it?
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November 28, 2009, 9:05 amzuch says:
Care to show where they were “fraud[ulently ...] cooking the books”? Or should we just take your assertion as true without any argument or evidence?
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 9:06 amzuch says:
Jones’ Cell Mate says:You got to love a guy heading the most important scientific panel in the world who can’t get through his first sentence without tossing out a completely unsupported assumption.You were trying to be intentionally ironic here ... weren’t you?!?!?
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 9:11 amwb says:
As an editor of a scientific journal, I must second the comment made above by bill with a small proviso. Occasionally a review will find a gross error in a paper or a major flaw in the experimental method used. This may happen in as many as 5% of the papers rejected. Typically papers are rejected because they offer nothing new of significance. As for the accepted papers, the review confirms the significance of the claim, the citation of relevant significant work, and the general appropriateness of the analysis (from the point of view of the reviewer). It would be a mistake to think that the reviewer has confirmed the “truth” of the manuscript. Indeed even for high impact journals, a large fraction of the published papers are eventually found to be incorrect of seriously lacking in their analysis and conclusions. Thus there is certainly a basis for claiming that the peer review process has a tendency to generate “consensus science.” Is it better than alternatives? In this age of electronic publishing, the system of the Arxiv may be better. Put the paper out and let the reputation of the authors rise or fall with the views of readers. This is an experiment in progress. In any case, withholding primary data under some claim of confidentiality certainly undermines the classic scientific method as well as the completeness of a review and assessment by the readers.
I would further note that some journals do use a relatively small number of review teams to handle all papers in specified areas. It in not unusual that a paper will be rejected on the grounds that the method is novel and not the way the review team does it.
With respect to this thread, I’d note that the accuracy of climate models and their predictions and the claims of academic misconduct are quite separate and need to be considered independently.
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November 28, 2009, 9:13 amzuch says:
Academic mathematicians have the unfortunate duty to wade through unsolicited mails that trisect the angle and square the circle all the time. And the patent law specifically forbids patenting perpetual motion machines (which just causes the “inventors” to dress up the claims a bit).
True, you do have an occasional Ramanunjan letter arriving on Hardy’s desk, or an Einstein, but things seem to work out pretty well even with the standard gate keepers. Do you really think that it would work better if no gate keepers were in place?
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 9:18 amfsfsfsfsfsfsfs says:
The IPCC’s position appears hypocritical, or at any rate inconsistent with that of prominent British global warming advocates.
In the Kingsnorth trial in Britain last year, Greenpeace activists were acquitted of vandalism after they spray painted graffiti on a smokestack.
The defense successfully argued the doctrine of “necessity”. James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the most prominent proponents of global warming theory gave a statement for the defense where he argued that the graffiti was necessary because of the defendants’
This attitude was widely echoed by other global warming activists at the time (just last year).
Global warming activists thus believe that vandalism of smokestacks is justifiable to protect life and property of future generations.
But if James Hansen and is supporters are correct, shouldn’t they also believe that action to expose improper scientific research should be legal? After all doing so similarly protects the life and property of present and future generations by preventing the waste of trillions of dollars that would have been expended on fraudulent scientific theories.
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November 28, 2009, 9:26 amRobbo says:
I wish this were not always called a ‘hack’. The internal evidence (relevance, redaction of email addresses) is that the data released was all or part of a file which had been collated in order to fulfil a request under the UK Freedom of Information law. Whether the release was accidental, or by an internal whistleblower, or possibly done to pe-empt an inevitable disclosure under FOI, well whoever knows isn’t telling the world yet, but it is most unlikely to be some teenager running a password-cracking algorithm from his bedroom.
The content of the emails is in some cases looks bad, but the contents of some other files looks to me worse — Google HARRY_READ_ME and then ask yourself if you would bet $10 on the output of such a procedure, let alone 5% of the world economy. Then there is the data itself, which the blogosphere is still working on, with some ‘interesting’ intermediate results — see for example http://camirror.wordpress.com/2009/11/26/new-the-deleted-data/
My opinion is that the Hockey Stick guys stumbled on something that looked very important, and managed to get a lot of political attention for it. Unfortunately, in response to scepticism about their findings, they circled the waggons, in a way that readers of C S Lewis’s ‘The Inner Ring’ will understand. Now thanks to the data release, and the blogosphere, everything has changed. The ideal final result will be open and clean data, open and clean code, validated models, and political action based on facts and logic rather than speculation. However, it seems to me that as well as requiring a new cleaned-up climate science, it also needs a new kind of politics — but still one may dream....
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November 28, 2009, 9:34 amSG says:
Typically papers are rejected because they offer nothing new of significance.
This is true, but unfortunate I think. I wish there was an outlet for people who were largely reproducing/confirming other results. As this current scandal shows, science thrives on reproducibility, but the current publication model is centered around novelty.
Which is not to say that novelty is not highly desirable, but if that’s the only way you can get published there will be no one do the hard work of independently validating the novel results. It also presents a (strong) incentive for somebody to goose their results.
Given web publishing, there’s no incentive not to put all the stuff out there — even the things that aren’t novel but only serve to reconfirm others results. Maybe it’s published in a web-only annex, but knowing that result A was reproduced once (or twice or the hundredth time) still adds to the sum of human knowledge, and some grad student can get something on their CV.
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November 28, 2009, 9:35 amzuch says:
Ask Jack Pettigrew about that. He didn’t like our (mostly my) review of one of his papers (and knew enough to know who did it, and blasted us when he saw the review). It did get published, but with revisions. Don’t get me wrong; Jack’s a brilliant guy, and has been on the forefront of very interesting and innovative experiments, but sometimes you have to ask them to dot their “i“s and cross their “t“s once they’ve made their big leap.
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 9:37 amwb says:
SG,
You raise a good point, I can say with respect to my journal that confirmatory papers are accepted when they represent the the first or second confirmation or when they provide a confirmation with far different systematics that the original results. When I refer to “nothing new of significance,” I mean that the result, method or instrument has been well tested many times, by many researchers.
This is prudential balancing issue that is an obligation of the editors.
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November 28, 2009, 9:49 amDavid Schwartz says:
Before the anthrax scares, I had done quite a bit of research on anthrax for a completely different purpose. During and after the anthrax scares, numerous papers were published that had been sitting around for years with no interest. It was quite surprising to find out how much was known about anthrax but not available because there was insufficient interest to justify disseminating the information. Many things that I specifically had thought were not known were in fact known, just not readily available.
That is something the Internet can fix, and quite possibly something it has mostly fixed already.
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November 28, 2009, 9:58 amSG says:
This is prudential balancing issue that is an obligation of the editors.
I don’t disagree, but I’m wondering if because of changing technology, the balance needs to be reexamined.
As an example, at one point I was trying to duplicate the procedure defined in a paper and found a minor error in one of the equations (a missing exponent). Not a big deal, and an honest mistake, but there was no easy way to correct the record — it wasn’t something that was even going to make it in as a letter. That’s the kind of feedback that I think the current journal process lacks because there’s no incentive to provide it.
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November 28, 2009, 10:01 amObeliskToucher says:
Perhaps in some fields, but the peer review for the two papers I co-authored in Chemical Engineering Communications felt pretty brutal. I can still remember opening up one of the markups (this was back in 1980, when people still bought red pens for this purpose) and seeing all of that red. Once I got over the “ego-nic” shock, though, the comments helped made the final paper much, much better.
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November 28, 2009, 10:18 amRicardo says:
Who indeed? The AGW argument is that our climate is highly unstable so that small shocks to the system (like the 20% increase over the past 50 years in atmospheric CO2 concentration from 315 ppm to 380 ppm) can be magnified through positive feedback loops that will magnify both the end-result CO2 concentration and the warming effect. In a “stable” climate, a doubling of CO2 would increase global temperature by about 1 degree Celcius give or take. It is precisely climate instability that tells us the actual temperature increase could be much greater than 1 degree.
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November 28, 2009, 10:28 amFub says:
Rajendra K. Pachauri, quoted above:
My computer models demonstrate beyond any doubt that Mr. Pachauri could have a great career in standup comedy. But I won’t reveal the data or the source code.
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November 28, 2009, 10:33 amSunTzu's Nephew says:
Great. The UN’s guy in charge of the IPCC says that the data is good, because it’s peer reviewed. Except the peer-review process has been corrupted by Jones, Mann et al. The corrupt foxes are guarding the IPCC/AGW henhouse.
Oh, and that UN guy? By supporting the corrupted data and process, he gets to keep his cushy UN job, at UN (ie really good) money and expense accounts, and jet around the world being feted by other true believers....And beat up on the US especially, and the rest of the productive world.
No, no conflict of interest there at all.
Remember: You can’t have Unnecessary without UN.
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November 28, 2009, 10:59 amagesilaus says:
I’d like to address the qualitfications of the the realists vs the warmists:
“Now his list includes nearly 32,000 American man-made warming skeptics with science qualifications. More than 9,000 hold scientific PhDs. Almost 32,000 thousand skeptics happens to be twelve times as many scientists as the 2,500 scientific reviewers claimed by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to form a scientific consensus.”
This is referring to a petition signed at the time of the article by 32,000 people with science degrees.
Petition
Now this does not sound like a group of flat earth believers to me. If you look at the qualifications of the 2500 ‘scientists’ who signed the IPCC report you’ll find that most of them do not have science degrees.
“Myth: 2,500 of the world’s leading scientists agree that human-induced global warming is underway.
Fact: Contrary to numerous press reports, there has never been a group of 2,500 scientists claiming that human-induced global warming is underway. Several thousand people did endorse the findings of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 1995 report that found a “discernable” human influence on climate change. But most of these endorsers were not scientists, but social scientists, economists, public relations experts and government functionaries. In fact, no more than 100 climate scientists are listed among the IPCC report’s signers. Even fewer climate scientists would have been listed as endorsers of the report, however, if they had known their views were going to be misrepresented. Significant changes were made to the report after these scientists endorsed it.”
IPCC signers
and this is given further confirmation here:
20% have something to do with climate studys, maybe
The truth of the matter is that a tiny group of 50 or fewer scientists have been controlling this process all along. They decide who gets published and who gets grants and money.
BK
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November 28, 2009, 11:13 amgeokstr says:
Given that the more common state of the climate over recent geologic history seems to have been lots colder, perhaps the alarmists of the 1970’s had it exactly right, and that the coming change in climate was actually back into another glacial period.
Let’s assume for a minute that is the case. Then whatever man has been doing has actually been to forestall a much greater calamity, and the reason it’s not getting colder right now is because of our “pollution”. Now Obama and the rest of the industrial world is about to commit to many trillions of dollars in order to make it easier for the planet to get colder.
It has been obvious for a long time that what we have more of than scientific knowledge is a monumental supply of hubris, thinking we can understand the choatic inticacies of something like the climate of the entire planet. I have been a skeptic of the absolute certainty that the alarmists have been claiming more than anything else.
If this planet ever goes into another glacial period, it will be one hell of a lot more devastating to life than the scenarios being painted by the alarmists, where we will at least have vast new farmland where we now have tundra. In a glacial period, the land that we have available for tilling shrinks alarmingly all over the globe, and Soylent Green may become the new culinary fad in our underground cities.
Let’s take a deep collective breath and fund much more science on climate issues, but objectively this time, not in only one direction. Then, if in 50 years we still think the planet will warm, let’s see if simply responding to the effects (by moving population centers, etc) isn’t cheaper than trying to do things whose unintended consequences to a system we only vaguely understand may only make matters worse.
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November 28, 2009, 11:17 amgeokstr says:
But, dontcha know? They found one whole entire scientist out of the 32,000 who says that he never signed the petition and that means that the entire list is invalid and now can be simply ignored, and better yet ridiculed?
That’s the response I got here when I brought up that petition a long time ago.
And to those who said that the list includes medical doctors, and others who aren’t in the field, there is a page that breaks down the degrees by field of study. My calculation back then was that there were well over 6,000 signatories that were in fields directly relevant to the climate, weather, atmospherics or computer modeling and other related fields. Irrelevant because of that one guy who says he didn’t sign though.
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November 28, 2009, 11:31 amR U Kidding? says:
zuch says:
Care to show where they were “fraud[ulently ...] cooking the books”?
R U Kidding? If you would read the emails they discuss cooking the books. The leading scientists talk about taking the most important climate data that exists and fudging it to make it fit their theory. And then illegally destroy it in case of a FOIA request.
It’s all over. There is no evidence for global warming. None. Nada. Zilch.
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November 28, 2009, 11:38 amAgesilaus says:
Even more incriminating is the read_me_harry.txt file where the poor programmer spells out exactly what he had to do to hammer the data enough that it would fit the “climate models” that produced the desired warming. A lot of people suspect Harry was the whistle blower here.
It seem unlikely that a fly by hacker would know enough about the science to pick the most incriminating files to leak. I think that someone inside got upset enough to push this material into the public arena.
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November 28, 2009, 11:47 amzuch says:
“Popular” accounts of science are not exactly peer-reviewed science, and tends towards the spectacular (which is what tends to get the interest of the non-professionals as well). Watch out for such.
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 11:59 amMPS says:
The IPCC response is unsatisfying I presume in large part because you refuse to acknowledge that the revelations of those emails do not change any of the assessments of the IPCC reports.
RealClimage.org explains that references to “tricks” is standard in-house scientific lingo (we use the term similarly in physics) and that the email about “hiding” a data trend refers to anomalous data that has been discussed extensively in the literature — there is nothing secretive about this practice to anyone familiar with the field.
So far as I can tell, the only other “damaging” aspects of these emails is their defamation of certain contrarians and efforts to privatize data. If the contrarians are indeed hacks, the condescending tone of these emails is appropriate (keeping in mind they were intended as private messages). I don’t know the details about restricting access to data in this case, but I know this is common practice in science in general — one wants to protect the competitive advantage of holding raw data, and one also wants to avoid the misuse of data (whether by accident or not). Just try getting your hands on the raw LHC data.
At the same time, climate scientists have reason to want to restrict access to data. Mcintyre caused a media sensation (at least in right-wing media) and still holds sway over skeptics due to what has been demonstrated to be a faulty analysis of climate data. I don’t blame them from wanting to prevent a repeat.
These emails, so far as I can tell, change none of the facts: all of the overwhelming evidence in support of global warming is intact, and no successful alternative to human CO2 emissions as being the underlying source has been proposed. As such they support the derogatory treatment of certain contrarians, justifying similar treatment to how other scientific disciplines might treat young-earth creationists.
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November 28, 2009, 12:10 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Denial is not a river in Egypt.
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November 28, 2009, 12:17 pmzuch says:
OIC. I have to go look it up myself. No links, no quotes, no cites. Just a repetitive assertion that they had “fraud[ulently] ... cook[ed] the books”. Even if they had outright said that they’d changed actual data to better support their model (which they didn’t, if you’d paid attention), that doesn’t mean they actually did so. I’d note that decisions on what data to include in data sets is a not uncommon problem in science, and attributing illegal motives to such decisions absent any showing of malice is unwarranted. And AFAIK, the business about “destroy[ing]” things was about e-mails, not data.
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 12:32 pmLarryA says:
1] A “submissions-boycott” would look like “Don’t send the publication your articles.” It would not include “Tell the publication not to publish other people’s papers.”
2] Isn’t part of science observing what’s really happening? If “A clique of oil-industry-funded warming-deniers has taken over an academic journal’s editorial board, and is publishing bad papers” where are the “bad papers” the email’s authors are outraged over?
IOW treat them like the Catholic Church treated Galileo when he came up with the stupid idea the Earth wasn’t the center of the universe?
The way to refute an argument is to refute it. Ignoring a theory allows its true believers to say, “They can’t contradict us.” A “calm complete response” can be devastating. And if you’re really a scientist you have to consider the possibility that your own opinion is wrong. The history of science consists almost exclusively of discovering that what we thought we knew, was false. (Including flat-earth.)
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November 28, 2009, 12:33 pmAgesilaus says:
Ok straight from the teams code, one of a number of smoking cannons:
; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!
;
yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,- 0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,$
2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor
if n_elements(yrloc) ne n_elements(valadj) then message,’Oooops!’
;
yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,timey)
—————————-
For those of you who don’t know what a fudge factor is, that is a number that you multiply an inconvenient result with, to make it come out as the predetermined value. This is how they generated the hockey stick.
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November 28, 2009, 12:57 pmHarry Eagar says:
buck asks: ‘what “crimes” did these scientists commit?’
This one.
And, very likely, the UK FOIA statutes, but the one I link has no climate policy implications. It’s just a plain old law.
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November 28, 2009, 1:03 pmHarry Eagar says:
guy in the veal calf office sez: ‘Temperature measurements are available for the whole century.’
No, they’re not. Global surface temperature measurements do not start before the 21st c.
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November 28, 2009, 1:07 pmFub says:
The corpus of consistent evidence and unfalsified theory underlying AGW hypotheses is as persuasive and thoroughly tested as the corpus underlying radiometric dating?
I, for one, welcome our new data fudging, self-selected peer reviewing overlords.
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November 28, 2009, 1:12 pmJones' Cell Mate says:
the illegal hacking is neither here nor there, but it is a fact, not an unsupported assumption.
Really Doctor. You have proof it wasn’t inadvertently released, as information from this body has been previously. You also must have proof that the information wasn’t released by someone within the organization, a whistleblower perhaps. Let me guess, you have that proof, but you can’t disclose it because of contracts with third parties that you can’t produce.
Currently, there is zero legitimate evidence that this was a “hack.” If you have some, please provide it.
Toodles,
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November 28, 2009, 1:17 pmHarry Eagar says:
Ricardo sez: ‘It is precisely climate instability that tells us the actual temperature increase could be much greater than 1 degree.’
What climate instability are you talking about? Over the past 600 million years (and probably a lot longer than that), earth temperature has not varied outside a small range of a few degrees, even though atmospheric chemistry has varied by (in the case of molecular oxygen) perhaps 2 orders of magnitude.
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November 28, 2009, 1:18 pmzuch says:
I tend to have a fair number of variables that end up being labeled “foo” or “foobar”. Does that mean my code is completely fouled up beyond repair?
Just the snippet here doesn’t tell you what the code is doing (it seems to be an adjustment to some time measurement, but how could I know?), how the interpolation vector data was generated or derived, or much of anything else. Without an analysis of the whole processing, it’s not obvious that this is wrong.
For instance, one might well do such an interpolated “fudge” on strain gauge resistance versus load, thermocouple voltage, etc.
I think others have mentioned that this adjustment [in tree-ring data, IIRC] is known, stated, and discussed in the literature. If so, not obvious that this is a “fraud”.
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 1:32 pmHan Solo says:
Pretty good coverage of the climategate story at the Strata-Sphere blog. It does get a little technical sometimes but its interesting.
http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/11578
http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/11542
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November 28, 2009, 1:52 pmMike G in Corvallis says:
Yeah, you gotta watch out for those irresponsible sensationalists who spread the idea back in the 1970s that an ice age was likely in our immediate future.
People like presidential science advisor John Holdren.
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November 28, 2009, 2:16 pmTrofim Lysenko says:
The derogatory treatment of certain contrarians is justified, similar to how other scientific disciplines might treat young-earth creationists. The denialists who support the so-called Mendelian view of biological inheritance do not publish their supposed research in peer-reviewed Soviet scientific journals. Nor are they to be trusted, since we know that they are bankrolled by decadent capitalist fat cats. All of the overwhelming evidence in support of the inheritance of acquired characteristics is intact, and no successful alternative for increasing the annual wheat harvest has been proposed.
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November 28, 2009, 2:37 pmzuch says:
Scientists are allowed to be wrong. The mark of a good scientist is to look at the evidence and change one’s mind if warranted. If you can show that Holdren still holds this view about impending ice ages, good on ya. You’d probably give him a medal, though.
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 3:08 pmRichard Aubrey says:
zuch. Was Holdren “wrong” or did he pick the most useful bandwagon of the day, switching when there was a more useful bandwagon?
ricardo.
You can’t have “popular” science without some science.
Note how much popular hysteria has been accepted as legitimate while built on BS.
The point was whether scientists were trying to sell global cooling at the time. Some scientists. Not all.
And they were.
One caveat with huge lists of signatories to something or other. I recall during the first attempts at SDI, there was a petition against it signed by shoals of scientists, which was supposed to give it heft. I read a few of them. One, which sticks in mind, was employed at Woods Hole. Implicitly, I was supposed to trust an oceanographer instead of my year in Air Defense (Nike Hercules with info on Nike X, Nike Zeus, and Sprint)
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November 28, 2009, 3:39 pmMike G in Corvallis says:
Heh. And if the evidence can’t be seen because it isn’t released, what is a good scientist to do?
Did you bother to read the linked article? At the time, Holdren also was pushing the possibility of global warming, and claiming an urgent need for The Right People to control his fellow humans ... but according to him climate change inevitably would come about because the waste heat from fossil fuel and nuclear power generation will significantly warm the planet:
You don’t have to take a second look at the evidence to rule this out as absurd — any competent scientist who took a first look at the evidence or scrawled a back-of-the-envelope calculation would have realized how ridiculous the premise was.
Please tell me you don’t believe that Holdren’s scenario is plausible.
That depends on the code, doesn’t it? Have you made it available for evaluation?
There’s an interesting discussion of the osborn-tree6/briffa_sep98_d.pro comment over at Eric S. Raymond’s blog:
You might also want to read the HARRY_READ_ME text file. My hat is off to Ian “Harry” Harris — he seems to have made a magnificent effort to impart some sense and order into the programs and data that were thrust upon him after he joined CRU in 1996. And the readability of his comments should serve as an inspiration to anyone who has to comment code. But what he had to endure ... Oh, Harry, I feel for ya!
zuch, see whether you can read Harry’s text file without screaming out in frustration and sympathy ...
Then there are things like this:
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November 28, 2009, 5:13 pmGaryC says:
Scientific journals make it much too hard to publish a critical comment on a published paper, even if it is clearly erroneous. This description gives an extreme example, but it is not too far out of the normal range.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/18773744/How-to-Publish-a-Scientific-Comment-in-1–2-3-Easy-Steps
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November 28, 2009, 6:02 pmGaryC says:
In Holdren’s world the crisis may change, but the solution is always the same. The fact that he is anywhere close to people with actual power is terrifying.
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November 28, 2009, 6:16 pmguy in the veal calf office says:
Thats wrong in multiple ways.
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November 28, 2009, 7:11 pmzuch says:
Wanna bet? Particularly nowadays when science education in the Yoo Ess of Effin’ Aye is declining compared to the rest of the world. You just need to be a good writer (or story teller). The execrable “In Search Of...” and other such creations is just icing on the cake.
What’s most annoying is that the typical Republican strategery here of “discredit [or slime] the messenger, and you can cast doubt on the whole thing” type attack seems to be working (they kept pounding the drums until the SCLM said, “maybe we’d better take note, just as we did with the two gazillion, give or take a few, teabaggers). Just keep circulating the memes: “They forged data.” [False] “All the data is thus corrupt. [A logical non sequitur] “They’re naaaassssttyy people too!!!” [Wow, they’re human. Look at the lawyers here...] They’re driven by politics and money [Talk about “projection”....]. And it works. Worst of all, it cheapens overall respect for science in general (and that’s not a good thing; you RWers ought to think about how many babies you’re throwing out with the bath water here).
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 7:24 pmzuch says:
Things are easier if you use a nuke with a nice kill radius. But some folks complained that nukes in the atmosphere (or worse, exosphere with EMP) are not nice to children and other living things. Thus “Brilliant Pebbles” type EKV, where we’re not talking horse shoes....
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 7:29 pmzuch says:
We never published the raw data back in my research days. Maybe a sign of the times that the deep politicisation of public policy has infected science to such an extent so that such is demanded. But FWIW, most of the data sets are available. Why do people keep insisting that the data is not available? Polemic reasons, I suppose....
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 7:33 pmzuch says:
I’d rather read what Holdren wrote, in context than what someone else, snipping and pasting, says he said. But you didn’t address my point, bolded above. As Carrie Prejean said [repeatedly] , “It was the worst mistake of my life [so far....] And I was only 17 [even if I was 20]. Can’t we just move on?.... [or if not, can I get the residuals?]” On the Hannnity show, she expressed sincere regret [repeatedly] for her ancient [though recent] lapse of judgement [in retrospect]. But we’re supposed to judge her now, in her wiser, more enlightened, more mature status. Right?
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 7:44 pmzuch says:
<*zing*> Avoiding my point, are you? The significance of a label is not what it’s called (or what the comments say), but rather how it’s used in the actual program. The ‘fact’, seized on by the foaming anti-AGW crowd, that this is a “fudge” variable, is much overblown. As I’ve pointed out, an actual “fudge” based on observed deviations in tree-ring/temperature correlations, may well be warranted. And that such is termed a “fudge” doesn’t make it the crime of fraud, despite the 110 dB hysterics of the anti-AGW crowd.
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 7:51 pmzuch says:
You have got to be kidding. Better than some (see, e.g., the abstruse DEC comments I’d mentioned on other AGW threads), but far from what I’d practise or accept myself. Comments aren’t a place to vent (even if warranted). Really. I mean it.
Cheers,
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November 28, 2009, 7:58 pmHarry Eagar says:
guy in the veal calf office, if I am wrong in many ways, how about telling me one?
Better yet, just give us a reference to pre-21st c. global surface temperature observations.
Betcha can’t do it!
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November 28, 2009, 8:01 pmAgesilaus says:
Satellite temperature reading began in 1978. Those would be global temperatures.
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November 28, 2009, 8:28 pmAgesilaus says:
I suspect you have a sly play on words to counter this.
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November 28, 2009, 8:29 pmHarry Eagar says:
Nothing sly about it, but those are not surface temps.
They are troposphere temps, and if you examine the climate research papers, you will discover that how to relate those to surface temps is a vexed issue, giving the modelers great trouble. One thing is sure, the relationship isn’t linear.
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November 28, 2009, 9:09 pmAgesilaus says:
They aren’t even troposphere temps they are microwave measurements assumed to be a proxy for the temps. Roger Pielke has been making a point for years that the best measurement of the global thermometer is the ocean heat content or enthalpy. I’m not sure that you could say that the heat content has been measured until recently with the Argo buoy system.
Of course that has been a controversy all on its own since the original set of measurements failed to find what the team expected, the heat content was too low, and some suspicious fudge factors were applied to those measurements too.
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November 28, 2009, 9:19 pmRichard Aubrey says:
zuch. My point about having zillions of scientists signing a petition about something is that it may have less significance than it’s supposed to.
Yeah, I know, we do ABM better now. Point is, I, not being a Woods Hole oceanographer, was supposed to have nothing to say about SDI.
Stephen Schneider was on In Search Of. Was he lying then or now?
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November 28, 2009, 9:47 pmMike G in Corvallis says:
I provided text that, according to the New York Times column, was a direct quote from Holdren’s book:
The quote stands on its own. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and the meaning of “is” is “is” ...
So, I ask you again: Do you think the scenario stated in that text is plausible, or not? Is that something a serious “scientist” would warn the public about as a significant threat to the planet’s environment?
“Still”? This isn’t something he currently talks about. Perhaps he still holds this view, perhaps he doesn’t. I’m not telepathic, so I don’t know. I suppose could query him in an e-mail, but I don’t think it’s worth the effort, I doubt that he’d answer, and even if he did I’d have no way to determine whether he was telling the truth. Feel free to ask him yourself if you’re really dying to know the answer.
My point was that in my opinion the technical pronouncements, then or now, of any “scientist” who would advance that scenario would not be valuable except as entertainment. For all I know, over the years he has changed his hypothesis from waste heat from nuclear power plants will bring on global warming to Alien Space Bats will raise the Earth’s temperature by bombarding the planet with mutant neutrinos. The problem isn’t his ignorance of the facts, it’s ludicrously poor judgment.
WTF? I mean, WTFF? I don’t claim to be Carrie Prejean’s spokesperson, and as far as I know she doesn’t claim to be mine. Why should I care one way or the other about her opinion, or her judgment, or your judgment of her? Has she expressed any opinion at all on climate change? Have you been skipping your meds?
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November 29, 2009, 12:31 amMike G in Corvallis says:
Hmm. “In Search of ...” was produced from 1976 to 1982. You’re a quarter-century out of date.
I gather from the way you spell certain words that you are not an American, or at least that you didn’t receive your education here. True, public schools in the U.S. don’t do a good job of educating their students about science — due in part to the actions of the teachers’ unions in protecting the jobs of ineffective and incompetent teachers and to selection effects in determining which people decide to become teachers, which people graduate from college with a degree in Education, and which people decide to stay in the profession after they’ve contended with the realities of teaching in a public school.
But the U.S. does not depend entirely on public schools. There are many fine private schools that turn out scientifically literate graduates. For that matter, a significant number of each year’s national science fair winners and high achievers on college admission exams are home-schooled. Some years ago the Los Angeles Times surveyed teachers in the L.A. city school system and found that a significant percentage of them sent their own children to private schools or home-schooled them.
Caltech and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are private entities. So are Yale, Harvard, and Stanford. So is Sidwell Friends School, which the Obama children attend.
So, where did you acquire your education, zuch? How are the schools there? I don’t suppose there’s be even the slightest trace of a hint of a whiff of pseudoscience in that culture, would there?
“Teabaggers,” huh? Glad to see that left-wingers don’t “slime” people ... BTW, shouldn’t you use “RethugliKKKan” to keep a consistent tone?
They contaminated data with “adjustments” that are no longer documented. They contaminated tree-ring data with “adjustments” based on temperature data to “correct” a divergence between the two that arises from completely unknown causes ... and yet they didn’t apply “corrections” elsewhere in the same data set because they assumed that the unknown causes were not in effect. Do you claim otherwise?
All of the data sets for which we do not have trustworthy information regarding their provenance are now suspect. Do you contend otherwise?
Jebus! I wish I had a dollar for each comment I’ve read in the past week by an AGW True Believer that contends “denialists” are corrupt and/or untrustworthy because they supposedly are funded by the Eeeeevilll Oil Companies. (E.g., “A clique of oil-industry-funded warming-deniers has taken over an academic journal’s editorial board, and is publishing bad papers by choosing which peers do the peer reviewing according to a bias.”)
I wish I had another dollar [yes, I’m “driven by money”!] for each comment I’ve read in the past week by an AGW True Believer that tags all skeptics and “lukewarmers” as “denialists.” Even people who believe in AGW but also believe (as George Monbiot does) that the actions of The Team have set back legitmate research are being tarred with the “denialist” brush.
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November 29, 2009, 1:42 amHarry Eagar says:
‘They aren’t even troposphere temps they are microwave measurements assumed to be a proxy for the temps.’
If you’re going to object to ‘proxification,’ we can save a lot of money and time.
Yes, I understand that the sat temp series has been ‘adjusted’ 4 times since 1979.
My point is that there are NO global surface temp series earlier than the 21st c., so that all statements (by anybody) of the form ‘it was X cooler/warmer 100 years ago’ are necessarily telling you not only more than the speaker does know but more than he can know.
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November 29, 2009, 2:31 pmzuch says:
Ummmm, the Massachusetts Institute of Technolgy, for one. But public schools for pre-college and public schools for graduate work. Does this answer your question?
Cheers,
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November 29, 2009, 3:28 pmzuch says:
Ummmm, the Massachusetts Institute of Technolgy, for one. But public schools for pre-college and public schools for graduate work. Does this answer your question?
Not exactly. They provided corrections based on the Briffa work. You can criticise this work if you’d like, but there it is. And the corrections were noted as well (along with cites to the Briffa paper).
They didn’t correct the earlier data [or to be more accurate, the correction coefficients were very small], because the Briffa work showed a stronger and stricter correlation for these times for tree-ring temperature proxies. True, the reason for the divergence is not known ... but the fact of the divergence is. Ignoring this fact is probably a greater potential source of error.
Argumentum ad ignorantiam.
No. Their hired guns go out and put out papers through their captive think tanks and such ... and not peer-reviewed.
They’re effectively (and probably in most cases actually the same. The policies [pr lack thereof] they end up advocating are the same: “Do nothing.” Either because there’s no need ... or because we caaaannnnn’t do anything until we know for suuurrrrreeeeee. Just like asking for more “debate” on health care. The aim is to kill any action ... for as long as possible.
I do know a AGW sceptic (and a Nobel laureate at that). I wish he didn’t say what he said. But his basic claim is that we simply don’t know. But then again, he’s a SS physicist, not a climatologist. I think he truly is an honest sceptic and not an obstructionist. But there are times when the proper null hypothesis (and the proper default action) is not “no effect, do nothing”. It has to do with the cost of Type I and Type II errors (and any actions based on them). That being said, the mass of studies so far, taken as a whole, are sufficient to reject even a standard zero-effect null hypothesis convincingly.
Cheers,
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November 29, 2009, 3:46 pmHarryEagar says:
He’s right, we don’t know. Haven’t any reason to think that today is warmer/cooler than 50 years ago, globally speaking. Because nobody measured then, and the proxies are no good.
Don’t even have a theory. As Edwards Deming used to say (this is free to you, zuch, he used to charge $10,000 to hear it in person), ‘You have to have a theory. If you don’t have a theory, how do you know when you’re wrong?’
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November 29, 2009, 7:21 pmMike G in Corvallis says:
Um, no. In this case, suspect data sets are defined as those for which we do not have trustworthy information regarding their provenance. You can’t prove or disprove an axiom.
Tell you what, zuch. I’ll give you a data set, a text file of advice and instructions on how to live your life. I won’t tell you its provenance, other than to give you the filename: From_the_desk_of_Karl-The_Word_of_Hank.txt ... and convey the claim that Hank knows what’s best for you. Do you trust the information in this file? Do you act on it?
Argumentum ad baculum. Also an ad hominem attack and a straw man argument. Delightful.
Your call to action reminds me of Sir Humphrey’s syllogism in Yes, Minister:
Ah, well. To a True Believer, everyone who disagrees with or even questions the Revealed Truth is either ignorant or willfully evil. Enjoy your life, zuch.
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November 29, 2009, 11:35 pm