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Congressman Seeks Scientists' Personal Data
jfengel writes "The Washington Post reports that House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Joe Barton (R-TX) has requested raw data and personal financial information on three scientists who published a paper which claimed that temperatures rose precipitously in the 20th century. Colleagues (including other Republicans) are calling the investigation 'misguided and illegitimate.' Barton has long been an opponent of government action on global warming."
I don't think anyone is arguing that Global Warming isn't occurring; the debate is to why it is occuring. The largest of these debates centers around whether or not Global Warming is manmade or not.
HJ
At the time, I laughed when he was elected. Now, I'm not laughing anymore.
For a different perspective on the same news:
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=274#more-274/
The head of the Energy Committee is asking for the source code for the statistical calculations that "prove" we're experiencing global warming. Code that was developed with US Government money.
No more than an open source advocate would expect.
The source has now been released.
You don't need *personal* financial information to find who funded the study.
This space for rent.
Top contributors
Any questions?
The scientists responses. They gave him all he wanted and then some. I don't think he was expecting the answer he got and probably wishes he hadn't asked it now.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I am a scientist (geologist, specifically).
I research global warming (interrelationship of Paleogene temperature and sea-level and how that translates to the present day).
Global warming is real.
The CAUSE is uncertain.
90% Professional Slacker
Some main points that don't seem to have come out so far in the Slashdot discussion so far are that
Anyway, follow the link and read what the main scientific institutions think of this episode before you come to your own conclusions please.
Also, if you don't mind signing in, see the recent editorial in the New York Times. It includes the following:
mt
You will see that what was requested was:
That is not personal financial information - that is information that bears directly on his disclosure responsibilities. NSF grants require disclosure of the resultant products (data and algorithms). Asking about funding serves to establish what disclosure obligations result.
Read the scienists official responses to Barton. The hockey stick has not been discredited and it is not claimed to be "the difinitive proof". It is generally acknowledged that the IPCC report is "the" standard body of Global warming knowledge, undermining the IPCC report is the real target of Barton.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
From another post,
C ID=N00005656&cycle=2004
http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/indus.asp?
Oil&Gas as expected.
http://opensecrets.org/races/indus.asp?ID=TX06&cy
-Stephen Jay Gould
But all that was really asked for was the financing of the research. See Skippy's post for details. Whenever someone claims there is no warming, or no human caused warming, there's always questions by the other side about who funded the research.
So now we have someone asking who funded the research that said warming is happening. Is this so unfair? Full disclosure of funding for ANY research should be mandatory.
Along with that, the research itself should receive the most scrutiny. Too often research is dismissed because of the funding source. Well, maybe, just maybe, someone funds research because they are actually right, and wish to prove a point before vast policy decisions get made based on myth and lies.
In the end, the problem is too much politics and ideology in the sciences.
On the other hand, according to a friend in Texas, Barton is a bit of a tube steak.
Who says you have to pretend that you're "proving" anything (in the mathematical sense)? And anyway, disproving something is proving not-something, so either you can prove things or you can't. (For the record, you can't, in the mathematical sense.)
Rejecting the null hypothesis is a method for gaining confidence that something interesting is happening. If there are other competing hypotheses, you test those too.
I suppose that your characterization of perception is true, but that doesn't mean that science is actually based upon a fallacy--rather, people are given an oversimplification of how and why it works. (It does not help that philosophers of science cannot agree on how and why it works thanks largely to historical philosophical baggage.)
As a practicing scientist, it's pretty clear to me and my colleagues how and why the scientific method works.
In the global warming debate, there was postulation, then announcement, and finally the research.
No, global warming was initially a prediction based on observation "Hmmm - if this effect we're observing in the lab holds true to the wider atmosphere, current artificial gas emissions would affect the global climate".
Then more research followed, and the conclusion was reached. The conclusion predicted climate change. At that point, it was announced. (Not only does this follow "postulate-research-announce", but it would be wrong to not announce the results, since the results predict problems ahead, potentially big ones.
"Judging from our models and lab work (and we may be wrong) climate changes will happen and we would expect to see them start to become noticeable in ten to fifty years, and continue to get worse, becoming problematic or even disasterious"
Fast forward ten to fifteen years, and the predicted effects are appearing as predicted.
You seem to be confusing individual scientific studies with a branch of science. Saying climate science announced before researching is like saying Edison announced (and unveiled) a working lightbulb before making it, since subsequent people are still building better and more definitive lightbulbs. The Final Lightbulb does not yet exist. And if Edison wated until a hundred years from now to announce, he would have still jumped the gun because two hundred years from now, the definitive lightbulb will still not exist. Improvements will be ongoing.
Many climate science studies are complete, and announcement of the results of a study only follows once the study is complete. The fact that the studies so far all paint a pretty comprehensive picture is evidence that they're probably somewhat accurate and should be taken notice of, not that they've jumped the gun because entirely seperate lines of research are ongoing.
global temperature fluctuation is natural.
Uh... that makes everything worse, not better. Remember - climate change didn't come from observing climate change, it was predicted from gas experiments long before any change was expected to be observable, and subsequent studies confirmed man-made gas quanitites were almost certain to be more than sufficient. It is known that man-made changes are going to happen (barring some massive intervention), which means any natural temperature fluctuation on top of our changes just means any problems are likely to be that much worse.
"Maybe the congressman should disclose in who's pocket he is."
He's a Republican from Texas, and is the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. For Timo and our other friends in the UK: put together "Texas" and "Energy" and you have "oil." He worked in the oil industry before he was elected to congress. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the oil industry is his top contributor -- they gave him nearly a quarter million bucks in 2004.
In an interview on NPR, he stated that he wanted to collect the raw data so that he could pass it along to his own "experts" -- that is, scientists in the employ of oil companies. In other words, he wants to use the scientists' own data against them.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
Since I don't actually have all day to reply, here is a quick selection of 'reputable' links and a few recent (05) peer-reviewed journal article abstracts concerning global warming.
I wasn't implying that you should take MY word for it...just that I have experience in this topic and that my (informed) opinion is that GW is underway. Denying global warming is about as futile as denying evolution (I'm also a paleontologist). As I mentioned in the previous post, however, the causes of global warming are still up in the air (although I personally suspect that greenhouse gas emissions play a role in accelerating warming). Of course Fairbanks (Nature 342/89) demonstrated that there was a two meter per century rise in sea level around 14000 years ago, so rapid change can occur even without human influence.
Here are a few references:
Fairbanks, R.G., 1989, A 17,000-year glacio-eustatic sea level record; influence of glacial melting rates on the Younger Dryas event and deep-ocean circulation: Nature, v. 342, no. 6250, p. 637-642.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Library/Aerosols/
http://www.aims.gov.au/pages/research/coral-bleach ing/scr2000/scr-00gcrmn-report.html
http://www4.nas.edu/onpi/webextra.nsf/44bf87db3095 63a0852566f2006d63bb/e4dcc6e935831fc885256a8400588 146?OpenDocument
http://climatechange.gc.ca/english/default.asp
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From: Analysis of mean, maximum, and minimum temperature in Athens from 1897 to 2001 with emphasis on the last decade, trends, warm events, and cold events, Extreme climatic events
The 105-year (1897-2001) surface air temperature record of the National Observatory of Athens (NOA) has been analyzed to determine indications of significant deviations from long-term average features in the city of Athens. The analysis of the whole record reveals a tendency towards warmer years, with significantly warmer summer and spring periods and slightly warmer winters (an increase of 1.23 and 0.34 degrees C has been observed in the mean summer and mean winter temperature, respectively). The tendency is more pronounced for the summer and spring maximum temperature, but marginal for the minimum temperature of the cold season. On a monthly basis, a statistically significant (at the 95th confidence level) warming trend has been observed in the average maximum temperature of May and June. The trend analysis for the last decade of the record (1992-2001) revealed a significant increase for both warm and cold seasons, yet maximum and minimum temperature. Extreme temperatures (high/low temperatures above/below a certain threshold value) and extreme events (prolonged extreme temperatures) have also been studied. The number of hot days as well as the frequency of occurrence and duration of warm events have significantly increased during the last decade, while a negative trend is observed in the frequency of low temperatures and the duration of cold events especially after 1960.
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From: Recent trends from Canadian permafrost thermal monitoring network sites, Permafrost and Periglacial Processes, vol.16, no.1, pp.19-30, Mar 2005
The Geological Survey of Canada (GSC), in collaboration with other government partners, has been developing and maintaining a network of active-layer and permafrost thermal monitoring sites which contribute to the Canadian Permafrost Monitoring Network and the Global Terrestrial Network for Permafrost. Recent results from the thermal monitoring sites maintained by the GSC and other federal government agencies are presented. These results indicate that the response of permafrost temperature to rec
90% Professional Slacker
The resolution to the perplexities of positivism is Bayes' Theorem.
:
Where p(A|X) is "the probability of A given X" and ~A means "not A"
p(A|X) = [ p(X|A)*p(A) ] / [ p(X|A)*p(A) + p(X|~A)*p(~A) ]
Much knowledge can be derived from applying that: quantum mechanics, statistics, AI theory, the scientific method and more.
This article is long, so here's the relevant bit
from "An Intuitive Explanation of Bayesian Reasoning" by Eliezer Yudkowsky
http://yudkowsky.net/bayes/bayes.html
Previously, the most popular philosophy of science was probably Karl Popper's falsificationism - this is the old philosophy that the Bayesian revolution is currently dethroning. Karl Popper's idea that theories can be definitely falsified, but never definitely confirmed, is yet another special case of the Bayesian rules; if p(X|A) ~ 1 - if the theory makes a definite prediction - then observing ~X very strongly falsifies A. On the other hand, if p(X|A) ~ 1, and we observe X, this doesn't definitely confirm the theory; there might be some other condition B such that p(X|B) ~ 1, in which case observing X doesn't favor A over B. For observing X to definitely confirm A, we would have to know, not that p(X|A) ~ 1, but that p(X|~A) ~ 0, which is something that we can't know because we can't range over all possible alternative explanations. For example, when Einstein's theory of General Relativity toppled Newton's incredibly well-confirmed theory of gravity, it turned out that all of Newton's predictions were just a special case of Einstein's predictions.
You can even formalize Popper's philosophy mathematically. The likelihood ratio for X, p(X|A)/p(X|~A), determines how much observing X slides the probability for A; the likelihood ratio is what says how strong X is as evidence. Well, in your theory A, you can predict X with probability 1, if you like; but you can't control the denominator of the likelihood ratio, p(X|~A) - there will always be some alternative theories that also predict X, and while we go with the simplest theory that fits the current evidence, you may someday encounter some evidence that an alternative theory predicts but your theory does not. That's the hidden gotcha that toppled Newton's theory of gravity. So there's a limit on how much mileage you can get from successful predictions; there's a limit on how high the likelihood ratio goes for confirmatory evidence.
On the other hand, if you encounter some piece of evidence Y that is definitely not predicted by your theory, this is enormously strong evidence against your theory. If p(Y|A) is infinitesimal, then the likelihood ratio will also be infinitesimal. For example, if p(Y|A) is 0.0001%, and p(Y|~A) is 1%, then the likelihood ratio p(Y|A)/p(Y|~A) will be 1:10000. -40 decibels of evidence! Or flipping the likelihood ratio, if p(Y|A) is very small, then p(Y|~A)/p(Y|A) will be very large, meaning that observing Y greatly favors ~A over A. Falsification is much stronger than confirmation. This is a consequence of the earlier point that very strong evidence is not the product of a very high probability that A leads to X, but the product of a very low probability that not-A could have led to X. This is the precise Bayesian rule that underlies the heuristic value of Popper's falsificationism.
Similarly, Popper's dictum that an idea must be falsifiable can be interpreted as a manifestation of the Bayesian conservation-of-probability rule; if a result X is positive evidence for the theory, then the result ~X would have disconfirmed the theory to some extent. If you try to interpret both X and ~X as "confirming" the theory, the Bayesian rules say this is impossible! To increase the probability of a theory you must expose it to tests that can potentially decrease its probability; this is not just a rule for detecting would-be cheaters in the social process of science, but a consequence of Bayesian probability theory. On the other hand,
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry