Open v. Closed Source-Climate Change Research

theidocles writes "The ongoing debate over the 'hockey stick' climate graph has an interesting side note. McKitrick & McIntyre (M&M), the critics, have published their complete source code and it's written using the well-known R statistics package (covered by the GPL). Mann, Bradley & Hughes, the defenders, described their algorithm but have only released part of their source code, and refuse to divulge the rest, which really makes it look like they have some errors/omissions to hide (they did publish the data they used). There's an issue of open source vs closed source as well as how much publicly-funded researchers should be required to disclose - should they be allowed to generate 'closed-source' solutions at the taxpayers' expense?"

Comments

The algorithms are the least important things

[Dancin_Santa]

The most important thing is the data. You can even use something simple like the Excel (or Gnumeric) spreadsheet "best fit" plotting algorithm to the data, if you've got it.

But from all the stuff I've seen, there are always huge gaps where they are either assuming much lower average temperatures or are leaving the data out altogether and relying on a very short recent timespan to extrapolate into the future.

While I think that they are full of shit, for the most part, I do admit that having multiple tornados tear apart LA and a giant deep-freeze kill off all the Scots would be pretty cool.

Re:Short answer, no.

[tdemark]

This should be an interesting discussion... three classic Slashdot knee-jerk reaction topics all pitted against each other:

• Open source vs. Closed Source
  
  • Pro Open source: modded up
  • Pro Closed Source: modded down
  
  
• Global warming
• 
  
  • Global warming is occurring/imminent: modded up
  • No global warming: modded down
  
  
• Publically funded research
• 
  
  • Results must be published: modded up
  • Results kept private: modded down
  
  

Let's get ready to rumble!

- Tony

Re:But the Hockey Stick is True!

[Glock27]

That Global Warming is a manmade, real phenomona is accepted by 99.9% of scientists in the fields involved. To trot out the "only a theory", "some experts dispute" etc routine is like getting the Flat Earth Society involved every time someone talks about circumnavigation.

That "99.9% of scientists" agree with the theory doesn't mean much. Scientists are generally as much herd animals as the rest of humanity, sadly enough. Since this particular topic also has a strong political aspect, it is even more prone to group-think issues. What percentage of scientists agreed with evolution the year after "The Origin of Species" was published?

In addition, even if global warming is a real effect, the speed with which it's happening is a highly critical aspect of the problem. There have been some big surprises in this area lately, including "global dimming" and the revelation that one of the biggest sources of pollution globally is Southeast Asian cooking fires, something Kyoto would have ignored. More research is clearly needed before we can claim to understand the current state of affairs and the likely scenario over the next few decades.

It should be obvious to most people that cleaner technologies are better, and it seems highly likely that technology will evolve in that direction over time. How fast we must get to cleaner technologies, and how we are going to disseminate such technologies to poorer, developing countries that will be the big polluters of the future otherwise are the pressing issues.

Personally, I find it sad that the US isn't investing heavily in new nuclear power generation. That would do a lot to ameliorate greenhouse gas generation in this country, as well as stopping many of the other nasty side effects of coal power generation.

"Heads in the sand" is going to be on our culture's gravestone when the next lot of intelligent life evolves here and starts wondering why parts of Nevada are 10,000 times the normal radiation level.

LOL. I doubt any part of Nevada is "10,000 times the normal radiation level" now, and certainly none of it would be hundreds of millions of years from now when some hypothetical intelligent species evolves. Thanks for the laugh though.