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Scientists Step Down After CRU Hack Fallout
An anonymous reader writes "In the wake of the recent release of thousands of private files and emails after a server of the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia was hacked, Prof. Phil Jones is stepping down as head of the CRU. Prof. Michael Mann, another prominent climate scientist, is also under inquiry by Penn State University."
The fact that this story is posted under Politics says a lot about what's wrong with the global warming 'debate' IMO.
Your cause may be correct, but your methods damage all of science as well as your cause.
True science should not hide data or pick data to support predefined conclusions. And dissenting papers with proper methodologies should never be suppressed. This is the only way to do science right.
Prof. Michael Mann, another prominent climate scientist is also under inquiry by Penn State University
Mann? Is he the same guy who said global temperature will go up exponentially like a hockey stick unless we cap and trade right now?
Science is not done by consensus. Science is done by showing your work so that others can see it and confirm that your data and methods make sense... sort of like the Open Source process. Only instead of a few million Windows computers getting botted, our very economy is at stake from the "warmers" and their political machinations.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
I know there are lots of whackjobs who are conviced that GW is a worthless topic, or that the scientists are all on someone's payroll, or that GW science is some kind of master plan to give a certain political party power (and that power will just evaporate if they lose the next election? I've never understood those kinds of consiracy theories). That being said, the issue that I have is more along the lines of scientists trying to "do what's right" to protect the planet (meaning it's not about science anymore for some of them, it's about protecting the planet).
At best, that attitude leads to behaviors like celebrating the death of someone who disagrees with you; at worst it leads to falsifying data to ensure that world sees things the same way you do. We know, for a fact, that the former has happened; the question to me is, how far towards the latter end of the spectrum is their behaviour? Release the raw data and let everyone take a look at it, until then I'll always have my doubts as to what is really going on.
So now we have hard working scientists who have their lives disrupted over this idiocy. This whole matter has been completely overblown. So people ranted and sent intemperate emails on a private mailing list? Wow. Newsflash: Scientists are not vulcans. The only thing that's even more shocking is the email where using a standard statistical technique is referred to as a "trick." If this is the grand conspiracy, it has to be the most pathetic grand conspiracy I've ever seen. A private mailing list of a few scientists that was mostly used productively and with an occasional whiny email or rant simply isn't that big a deal. People backbiting and such is really common. Welcome to academia.
Even the WSJ article they linked to included the key word "temporarily". They relegated it to the subtitle, but it was there. (The WSJ, owned by Rupert Murdoch, also owner of Fox News, can be assumed to to take the climate-denialist position on everything.)
Temporarily stepping down is very different from an admission of guilt. It can be a way of allowing work to go on while investigations are under way, when a controversial figure attracts so much attention as to detract from the real work.
Maybe there are some real failures here, for which the guy does deserve to be removed from his job, but so much of what I've read about the hacked emails is hyped and deliberately misinterpreted that I'm unimpressed by this incident.
FALSE. All accusations of fraud have been addressed by the scientists in question, as well as outside sources. There is a reason this hasn't been getting much mainstream media coverage. For everyone's information: data was not manipulated, dissenting papers were not suppressed
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v462/n7273/full/462545a.html
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/12/cru-hack-more-context/
chillax137
After all Exxon is so broke...
Sadly, they don't have the raw data. They threw it away. Worse, they probably have threw it away much more recently than they originally stated.
We'll never see it because they've deliberately destroyed it.
Based on my reading of the e-mails, which are available on Wikileaks for your own inspection, combined with this more recent information about the destruction of the raw data, I'd have to say they are very far towards that latter end of the spectrum.
My blog
Just because climate changes occurred before humanity existed doesn't mean we can't cause changes as well, or that we shouldn't be concerned and mitigate future changes regardless of whether we are the original trigger.
Our industrial processes are massive. Pretending that this has no effect on the environment or that we shouldn't care about the environment is willfully short sighted.
In a commencement speech at Caltech he said:
It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now
and speak of it explicitly. It's a kind of scientific integrity,
a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of
utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if
you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you
think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right about
it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and
things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other
experiment, and how they worked--to make sure the other fellow can
tell they have been eliminated.
Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be
given, if you know them. You must do the best you can--if you know
anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong--to explain it. If you
make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then
you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well
as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem.
When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate
theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that
those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea
for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else
come out right, in addition.
In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to
help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the
information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or
another.
Unfortunately, many scientists in many disciplines do not follow this. They seek to prove their theories right, and ignore that which might cast doubt on it.
It's a complex issue and there are several opinions:
1) The climate is warming and humans are responsible and the consequences are severe enough to require action.
2) The climate is warming and humans are responsible but the consequences are not severe.
3) The climate is warming and humans are not responsible.
4) The climate is not warming.
5) Whether the climate is warming or not, we should encourage a shift to more renewable energy sources.
There are likely others, but I am sure you will find adherents to all of these at least.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
AGW isn't science, but neither is the competing movement of skeptics. This is all just politics, and the whole thing is awful, and everyone parading around with glee over this controversy is just as guilty of politicizing matters as the people they're lambasting. It's impossible to do proper science when both sides of the argument have become moralistic crusades, and the tainting influence of politics has basically made the entire subject a mish-mash of lies and nonsense on both sides of the equation.
Neither pride nor gloating have any place in science. Global warming needs to be evaluated solely on the evidence. Skepticism should be applauded wherever it's found, but the entire global warming debate has devolved into nothing but gross factionalism.
The motivations are plentiful, not always practiced in concert (until recently) but have found some common ground in some secret unspoken union of so called concerned citizens of the world
1) it began as "scientific speculation"
2) it was then borrowed for enviromental movement and raw political gain
3) it found additional friends in those who seek to destroy successful economies and social
systems which have won against the collectivist/totalitarianist interests who know you
cannot conquer free men and the only way to get over them is to convince them to self
impose their own decline and their rhetoric was spilled into the pond and used over and
over
4) the useful idiot was critical in aiding #3 and proved to be also useful to #1 and 2 and
some of them occupy positions of power and academia as we now see and have known for
some time
5) so called practitioners of science were deluded by their delusions of granduer and self
importance and of course funding streams, some of them present here
6) the media, being the lemmings they are not only willingly promoted the psuedo science but
colluded in the propagation of mis information and intimidation of skeptics
They should all be publicly flogged
Right alongside the other fools that believe the opposite things without using an ounce of reason to come to their conclusions.
Despite your world view, being ignorant is not limited to only those people with whom you disagree.
Suggesting it might be better, based on scientific evidence, if industries didn't pollute in certain ways is NOT going "Pol Pot".
Let me refresh your memory:
Climate scientists suggest that if we reduce the amount of sulfates, we'll have less acid rain. Sulfates reduced; the amount of acid rain shrinks.
Climate scientists suggest that aerosols are hurting the ozone layer, and point to an actual growing hole in the ozone layer. We reduce aerosols, the hole in the ozone layer shrinks.
I'm not at all suggesting climate scientists are infallible - they should be questioned like anyone else.
But to suggest that reasonable restrictions on companies that produce pollution is "going Pol Pot?" FFS.
Maybe you're right, in a way - Midwesterners may tend not to believe pollution can damage the environment, if they live somewhere that's untouched by industrial waste. If that's the case, they should go live in New Jersey for a while.
The Invisible Hand of the Free Market is what punches workers in the nuts.
If it were only that simple. What the emails reveal, and what skeptics have been saying for a long time, is that the science is not independent, not reproducible and relies on the same flawed data sets and models used over and over, not multiple lines of evidence. In reality, the ice caps melt during summer and refreeze during winter and the arctic has increased in the last two years, in spite of the dire predictions of an ice free summer. The last 10 years is not the hottest on any records, not even the flawed ones, and is hardly unprecedented.
The hacked emails/data/code reveal plenty of disturbing things and in reality there is much more that has already come out that points to an even wider and more egregious perversion of science. It takes some serious cojones to use a data set that is known to diverge from the only unequivocal temperature record. You can't just hand wave the skeptics away by saying that the authors gave you a note allowing you to drop the data points that don't match up with your hypothesis ,everything after 1960, and which go a long way in raising doubts about their significance prior to 1960.
Your side is being routed at this point and it is only going to get worse. Wait until the public learns how the current temperature data sets are being massaged, using only a few stations, sometimes hundreds of miles apart, and averaging for the most increase. How the rise in temperature is predominantly in areas that have no thermometers. How one small part of Antarctica that is warming has been overlaid over all of Antarctica to present the worst possible scenario.
You are right about the laws of physics, but you are sadly mistaken if you think this is a tempest in a teapot.