The Obama Administration’s new Open Government Directive creates an unprecedented commitment to agency transparency – including release of data. The Directive requires agencies to create a “strategic action plan for transparency” that includes identification of “high value information not yet available and establishes a reasonable timeline for publication….”

The Directive also includes an emphasis on ensuring that “information conforms to OMB guidance on information quality” as required by the Data Quality Act.

The Directive’s transparency requirements are in addition to those created by the Data Access Act which requires agencies to “ensure that all data produced under” federal award be made publicly available. OMB subsequently limited the access requirement to data used “in developing an agency action that has the force…” of law. Any climate change regulations or information collections would likely meet this test.
The triple hammer of the Open Government Directive, Data Quality Act, and Data Access Act establish mechanisms for providing public access to the data and models underlying federal climate change policies, as well as a process for ensuring the quality and reliability of those data and models.

It’s now up to the public to make sure that the federal transparency, access and quality mechanisms are actively used.

Please see http://www.thecre.com/wdw/2009/20091221.html

The Obama Administration’s new Open Government Directive creates an unprecedented commitment to agency transparency – including release of data. The Directive requires agencies to create a “strategic action plan for transparency” that includes identification of “high value information not yet available and establishes a reasonable timeline for publication….”

The Directive also includes an emphasis on ensuring that “information conforms to OMB guidance on information quality” as required by the Data Quality Act.

The Directive’s transparency requirements are in addition to those created by the Data Access Act which requires agencies to “ensure that all data produced under” federal award be made publicly available. OMB subsequently limited the access requirement to data used “in developing an agency action that has the force…” of law. Any climate change regulations or information collections would likely meet this test.

The triple hammer of the Open Government Directive, Data Quality Act, and Data Access Act establish mechanisms for providing public access to the data and models underlying federal climate change policies, as well as a process for ensuring the quality and reliability of those data and models.

It’s now up to the public to make sure that the federal transparency, access and quality mechanisms are actively used.

Please see http://www.thecre.com/wdw/2009/20091221.html

DarkHelmet: Y does not need to do so ["develop a new data set, .. and come up with a different answer"]. He can just as effectively challenge X’s theory by showing:
a) X’s data is incorrect, incomplete or fraudulent or of low reliability
or …

No. The asymptote here is simply a raw theory and no (good) data. You can’t say the theory’s wrong because there’s no data (but OTOH you can’t say it’s right). I think “challeng[ing a] theory” scientifically consists of more that just saying “There’s no data either way; I don’t believe it”. Much stronger to say, “this data shows it cannot be true.”

DarkHelmet:
… or
b) X’s chain of reasoning has serious flaws

This hasn’t been done.

Cheers,

See my other post about the numerous unsolvable problems in attempting to replicate what CRU did with any historical set of land temperature station data. There is just too much noise and too little data to find a signal as small as is suggested.

I’m sorry, good enough records just do not exist. The past cannot be reconstructed to that level of detail by any mechanism known today.

Well, excuse my “kvetching and carping” (nice ad hominem there, btw) but this is simply wrong. Say Scientist X does some research, develops a theory and comes up with data and lines of reasoning that he claims support his theory. Yes, Skeptic Y could develop a new data set, run it through X’s methodology and come up with a different answer that would constitute a challenge to X’s theory. But Y does not need to do so. He can just as effectively challenge X’s theory by showing:

a) X’s data is incorrect, incomplete or fraudulent or of low reliability

or

b) X’s chain of reasoning has serious flaws

In the case of CRU it seems that both a) and b) have been detected. The theory is therefore successfully challenged. AGW may still be true, but CRU’s work does not make the case.

But you know all this and are simply wasting everyone’s time for reasons of your own.

Jed Rothwell:

[Zuch]:
“But for the record: CF died because no one could reproduce it.”

That is incorrect. Cold fusion was reproduced by thousands of scientists in hundreds of labs. The results are often at very high sigma, and the reproducibility is no longer a problem. The NRL recently reported they were able to trigger the reaction hundreds of times in a row without a failure.
I have a collection of 1,200 peer-reviewed journal papers on cold fusion copied from the library at Los Alamos, plus 2,500 others from proceedings national and corporate laboratories. I suggest you review this literature before commenting on the research. See:
http://lenr-canr.org

Wow. Problem solved; we won’t have to burn any fossil fuels (with the additional thermodynamic advantage to fusion at room temperatures). Sing hallelujah, everybody!

Egg on the face of all those nasty JIR folks, handing Pons and Fleischmann that Ig Nobel.

Cheers,

They are better on the daytime side of the globe than the nighttime side, though, so even with satellites the precision is less than we would wish.

The biggest disadvantage of gridding is that as time moves forward, the data gets better.

Actually, the data doesn’t seem to be getting better with time. In fact, in a paper I just read, the number of stations available is going down rapidly.

Likewise, the instrumentation isn’t better – thermometry has been well known for a long time. The instrumentation placement is a big problem, and there are tons of problems, from documented biases (e.g. official stations in the exhaust of air conditioner condensers) to microclimate issues, to distorted records.

Fundamentally, near-surface temperature measurements are a terribly way to determine the earth’s temperature! Satellites offer much better hope (and fail to confirm the hockey stick).

I know this is a lawblog and not the place to find technical analysis of software, but I don’t have any ins with the techblogs to ask for analysis, and I don’t have history with Fortran (just VBA) to do real analysis myself. You folks have any suggestions?

Nice Swiftboating. Well done. Congratulations.

Swiftboating: To hold your betters accountable for their actions.

Has anyone ever actually read, for example, Chapter 9 of WG 1 of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment? It pretends to provide “attribution” for the 1975-1998 temperature rise (if any), but if you study it carefully you find exactly the same evasion used in 1988 — “We can’t account for the warming in our computer models, you see, unless we stuff in something about CO2.” This is idiotic; I’ve been writing computer programs for forty years and could write a financial model — “I can’t account for the Crash of 08, you see, unless I include the parameter for elephant flatulence.”

Jim Hansen is an astronomer who was badly traumatized by studies of Venus early in his career. The trauma obviously unbalanced his mind. All of the IPCC’s “climate models” are hackings of his original model designed to simulate Venus, observed from a hundred million miles away, and to get some idea of the probable quality of the hacking, see HARRY_READ_ME.txt in the FOIA archive.

This whole mess is a fraud, based on a wildly improbable theory that would have seemed silly to anyone who had passed 7th grade Earth Science back when our schools still actually taught anything. And we are still squandering billions on this nonsense while turning precious wilderness and countryside into wind wastelands in some feckless search for perpetual motion.

Scotty, beam me up…

“But for the record: CF died because no one could reproduce it.”

That is incorrect. Cold fusion was reproduced by thousands of scientists in hundreds of labs. The results are often at very high sigma, and the reproducibility is no longer a problem. The NRL recently reported they were able to trigger the reaction hundreds of times in a row without a failure.

I have a collection of 1,200 peer-reviewed journal papers on cold fusion copied from the library at Los Alamos, plus 2,500 others from proceedings national and corporate laboratories. I suggest you review this literature before commenting on the research. See:

http://lenr-canr.org

Nice Swiftboating. Well done. Congratulations.

Cheers,

Duracomm: In other words you should care about the feasibility of carbon reduction because it is vastly more important than what the latest temperature reconstruction or climate model shows.

Oh, I care about it. I just think it’s a bit OT in this thread.

And I do get a little annoyed that comments on the costs of certain policies (w/o any evidence of how those costs were derived, I might add) keep creeping in to the the discussion of the existence of GW, as if it has some relevance to the truth value thereof.

It is true that if mitigation of any putative AGW is impossible for practical or financial reasons, the question of GW becomes just a tad more ‘academic’ … but I’d say that it’s clearly not a very ‘academic’ discussion, no? If you think that the suggested policies are impossible or too expensive, out with your work and argue that. But probably better elsewhere….

Cheers,

Ridiculous? I don’t think it’s even particularly controversial. It’s sort of a basic premise of science that the correctness of a result doesn’t depend on the particular observations made.

Pointing to a huge pile of data that you took pieces of and manipulated and then fed through a computer code and then saying- ‘there, your answer is in there somewhere’ is not making your experiment reproduce-able.

You don’t need Newton’s data about the speed of an block on a inclined plane to determine whether his results are correct.

Not remotely equivalent. It would be more like Einstein pointing to a 100 years of astronomical data and saying ‘everything you need to know about relativity is right there’.

A copy of HadCRUT3 and lots of explanatory information can be found on this page.

We’ve been all over this- none of the intermediate data and metacode is available, and I know because that was what the FOIA request asked for. It was like pulling teeth just to get the station list out of CRU, and they refused to release the data associated with each.

If you can show me where i can find a way to relate HADCRUT3 back to the GISS raw data, congrats, because nobody else on the planet has been able to find that info including CRU.

@Mark Buehner: I stopped reading there because that is a ridiculous assertion. The dataset is critical.

Ridiculous? I don’t think it’s even particularly controversial. It’s sort of a basic premise of science that the correctness of a result doesn’t depend on the particular observations made. You don’t need Newton’s data about the speed of an block on a inclined plane to determine whether his results are correct.

A dataset like HADCRUT3 will have thousands of value added changes to the original data to reflect things like stations that moved, adjusting for seasonal changes like El Nino, all sorts of things. Just what was done to the raw data and why is absolutely crucial. And apparently, that information no longer exists (at least not in any format that is reproducible). That calls into question all the studies done with that dataset, which is a large number of very influential studies.

A copy of HadCRUT3 and lots of explanatory information can be found on this page.

But why TF should I bother addressing the technicalities of carbon reduction feasibility?!?!?

1. Because, as the example I provided shows, not addressing feasibility results in policies that cause massive environmental destruction and increased carbon emissions.

2. If carbon reduction is not feasible policies regarding AGW must switch from Carbon reduction to mitigation of changes caused by AGW.

This will have an enormous impact on how resources are allocated to respond to AGW.

In other words you should care about the feasibility of carbon reduction because it is vastly more important than what the latest temperature reconstruction or climate model shows.

Most of the data used by CRU is publicly available. The nuances of the particular dataset used (e.g., whether you happen to have data for a particular location) shouldn’t matter if the result is robust.

I stopped reading there because that is a ridiculous assertion. The dataset is critical. It includes which stations where used (not all of them by far are used to create a dataset, rather important to know if you want to replicate CRU’s work), how the gridding was done, and what was done to the data of each set to correct for all sorts of things that must be corrected for. This is critical to understanding this scandal.

A dataset like HADCRUT3 will have thousands of value added changes to the original data to reflect things like stations that moved, adjusting for seasonal changes like El Nino, all sorts of things. Just what was done to the raw data and why is absolutely crucial. And apparently, that information no longer exists (at least not in any format that is reproducible). That calls into question all the studies done with that dataset, which is a large number of very influential studies.

Most of the data used by CRU is publicly available. The nuances of the particular dataset used (e.g., whether you happen to have data for a particular location) shouldn’t matter if the result is robust.

Stepping back a bit, it is not correct that as a general matter of modern scientific practice, scientists make their raw data and computer code used to process that data available to anyone who asks. Maybe that should be the practice, but it is not now the practice. Changing to that practice would impose substantial (although perhaps justified) burdens on researchers.

By way of comparison, if someone asked Prof. Volokh for all the drafts and work materials he used or reviewed in writing his most recent law review article, he would probably decline to respond to that request. Would it be of some value to see all those things, so that we could be scrupulous in determining whether Prof. Volokh was being perfectly intellectually honest at all times? Well, perhaps. But the burden on Prof. Volokh of maintaining those records, and of answering questions about them months or years later, would be unreasonably high. If we want to challenge his conclusions, we should gather our own source material — including by looking to the source materials referenced in his published article — and do our own work.

One interesting example of the burden that would be associated with a more demanding standard of scientific transparency: One commenter has pointed to computer code attached to one of the hacked e-mails that applies a “VERY ARTIFICIAL” adjustment to the dataset — the quote comes from the comments to that code — and has argued that this shows that the results published by the author of that code cannot be relied upon. A second commenter looking at the same code noticed that the portion of the code that actually makes that adjustment had been “commented out” (i.e., marked to be inoperative). The original commenter nevertheless argued that at one point the adjustment must have been used in some presentation at some point and suggested that the author of the code should be required to account for that. The impracticality of requiring that level of transparency seems obvious to me.

The problem is that many of the skeptics believe that doing what CRU claimed to have done is impossible (or at least that they strongly doubt there is any way to do it). So how are they supposed to replicate what CRU did?

There is a burden of proof issue here.

Moreover- if CRU did their work correctly it would be easy. CRU would put a link to the raw data, the dataset, and the metadata explaining what was ‘value added’ to the data and why, their code, and when you run the code with that dataset the results will match.

The attitude of the processor is immaterial. Now of course a skeptic could look at the assumption made in the dataset and question it, and that’s fine. If they make a point that is clearly important, enough people (fellow scientists surely) will ask the question until it gets addressed. Or somebody could make that change and run the program again and see if the answer changed materially. People can also look at the code and find out if there is any hand-waving and outright kludging of the type we saw in Harry_read_me.

My understanding is that to the extent material was discarded, that took place in the 1980s, when storage was bulkier and more expensive than it is now.

steve: I would agree that this has done damage to the credibility of the CRU group and AGW in general. However, I am much more interested in knowing if AGW is a problem. Other researchers using other data have come to similar conclusions.

They are working from essentially the same data sets as there is tremendous overlap. Whatever biases have been introduced with “adjustments” will propagate. Then there is the group-think effect. At this point I’m not sure we have any credible evidence of warming at all.

Look the the earth’s temperature is a four-dimensional field. Latitude, longitude, altitude and time. This field is very sparsely sampled in both space and time. We almost no data from the southern hemisphere. From this sparse sampling we a suppose to detect about a 1 degree C change over a century! Very hard to do, if not impossible because the measurements are noisy. Even if we can establish a temperature increase, the cause could easily be natural. This whole business has little to do with science. Follow the money, it’s all about money.

The only people who are able to reach such conclusions are the people who believe we have enough information to reach conclusions. You will not see competing conclusions from the other group. What you will see is a response to each claimed conclusion that it cannot be right because of its various (unfixable) flaws. (And probably some fixable flaws, we’re only human after all.)

You can jump to my comment here and here to see some very simple explanations of some of the reasons why what CRU claimed to have done cannot be done.

Though the last comment is specific to gridding approaches, and gridding is not the only approach, the other approaches are actually worse. CRU was right to choose gridding.

A. Zarkov: Data storage is extremely cheap these days. Note he says he does keep the old and somewhat bulky digital magnetic tapes in his office. Why would anyone keep the tapes, which he doubts he can read, and “toss” the data from the tables which he should have put on DVDs, or have resident somewhere on a hard disk. BTW you can buy a 1 TB (that’s 1,000 giga bytes) hard disk for $180, and this is an expensive source for hard drives.

But then one has to document the procedures used to transfer and back up the data … and waidamminnit, whoah! One has to keep the original tapes so that when some “sceptic” PITA comes by demanding that you reproduce your data from the original records, you can do it all over once again, with him peering over your shoulders to make sure you aren’t making any typos or such or sneaking in some “bad” data after the fact….

Cheers,

steve: We are talking data from the 80s here. He kept some mag tapes, he does not say all, as he notes he deletes stuff that is of no use.

It’s pretty obvious he deletes pretty much nothing he can’t easily recreate. Scientists are pack rats. Look at their offices in places like Los Alamos, Livermore, Oakridge, Brookhaven, Watson, Bell, Sandia. The older guys have card decks, punched paper tape, print outs, microfilm, microfiche, floppies, digital mag tape, and now days CDs and DVDs– clutter everywhere. I have been in hundreds of offices in a lot of the above places.

I simply don’t believe CRU threw away their original data. They were either careless and lost it, or hid it somewhere to avoid a FOI request. Unless a lot of people are willing to lie under oath, this will eventually come out. Of course we might not get an honest investigation for many years because AGW is a big honey pot for a lot of interests.

WB-But this is not running new experiments. This would be collecting old data and running your own models. You dont need to build a collider. Heck, they could just use existing models and correct them where they think they are wrong.

I would agree that this has done damage to the credibility of the CRU group and AGW in general. However, I am much more interested in knowing if AGW is a problem. Other researchers using other data have come to similar conclusions. Suppose, arguendo, that there really is a global conspiracy including the folks at NASA. Suppose they had secret communications with the people at CRU so that it does not show up in the emails. The best way to be sure is present different results in an open, transparent manner.

You do realize part of the problem is just honest differences of opinion on what data to use and what it means? Surely that would be understood on a law blog?

Steve

steve: A brief bit from above. Dr. Nielson-Gamon is a Texas State climatologist.

I know this is going to shock y’all, but there was nothing unethical about CRU throwing away the raw temperature data. This is because CRU IS NOT THE ARCHIVAL SITE FOR THE RAW TEMPERATURE DATA. The individual nations that collected the weather observations are responsible for their archival.

If things proceeded as they normally do, CRU wrote to Burundi, say, and requested copies of their climate of their climate observations. Someone in Burundi made them a magnetic tape or Xerox copies of the data and sent it to CRU. CRU processed the data and got it in the form they wanted. Having no need for the copies of the original data anymore, they tossed them.

This is analogous to me requesting a file containing HCN observations from NCDC, doing my research, and then deleting the file they sent me when I was done with it. Absolutely nothing wrong with it. I do still have in my office about ten reels of mag tape with old research files in them, but I would be very surprised if the mag tapes are even readable at this point.

NCDC (the National Climatic Data Center) IS an archival site, and if they deleted raw data, it would be a big deal. Instead, they’re doing the opposite: scanning in old climate data records so that they are readily available via the Internet

If he deletes his raw data, he’s a fool. There is absolute no reason to “toss” your original data. Data storage is extremely cheap these days. Note he says he does keep the old and somewhat bulky digital magnetic tapes in his office. Why would anyone keep the tapes, which he doubts he can read, and “toss” the data from the tables which he should have put on DVDs, or have resident somewhere on a hard disk. BTW you can buy a 1 TB (that’s 1,000 giga bytes) hard disk for $180, and this is an expensive source for hard drives. Moreover one should note he hasn’t “tossed” his data, he’s kept it all including the bulky tapes. Scientists are pack rats, they don’t toss anything. This whole post is designed to try to defend the indefensible for political reasons– it’s pure propaganda.

So, rather than spend all of their efforts on discrediting the other side, why not gather data, write their own code, make their own model and publish. IOW, do their own research.

When research codes are tens of millions, and computer time requirements on large capacity machines are very large, this is not very possible. The fact is that governments can stack the deck.

Consider the case of high energy physics, doing one’s own experiment is not possible. That is why competing teams get funded and why data sets are available to outside groups, one the box of data is opened. Typically groups do considerable blind or better double blind analysis before “opening the box.”

As to when a group has an obligation to release raw data. That greatly depends on whether selective data adjustment is made. If one cannot compared raw with adjusted sets a referee or skeptic has no way to know if the data was handled in a scientifically ethical fashion.

I was at dinner last night with a dozen internationally known physicists of a wide range of political persuasion and opinion about AGW and what to do about increasing CO2 levels. All were distressed at the grave damage to the credibility of scientists done by the CRU group.