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Scientific Journal Nature Finds Nothing Notable In CRU Leak
eldavojohn writes with an update to the CRU email leak story we've been following for the past two weeks. The peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature has published an article saying the emails do not demonstrate any sort of "scientific conspiracy," and that the journal doesn't intend to investigate earlier papers from CRU researchers without "substantive reasons for concern." The article notes, "Whatever the e-mail authors may have said to one another in (supposed) privacy, however, what matters is how they acted. And the fact is that, in the end, neither they nor the IPCC suppressed anything: when the assessment report was published in 2007 it referenced and discussed both papers." Reader lacaprup points out related news that a global warming skeptic plans to sue NASA under the Freedom of Information Act for failing to deliver climate data and correspondence of their own, which he thinks will be "highly damaging." Meanwhile, a United Nations panel will be conducting its own investigation of the CRU emails.
The real smoking gun isn't the emails - it's the source code.
They keep talking about those emails in the hopes that no one will call them out on the "VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline"s applied liberally to the raw data.
Really take a look at the graphs in the link above. Plot that array yourself if you don't believe it. No amount of handwaving will explain away blatant lying.
A few suspect emails do not destroy millions of man hours of research.
They do destroy faithfulness of the research if the premise those millions of hours spent are false.
"A few suspect emails do not destroy millions of man hours of research."
Never mind the quality, feel the weight.
What do you see in these mails? Remember these scientists think they are talking in private and never anticipated being found out. Are there mentions or references to dark projects? Some references to their agents and their handlers? Strong ideological opinions to destroy Capitalism and install a world Government?
What happened is very simple. These scientists are used to one kind of debate and one kind of rules. Where "the conclusions reached by Kogen, et al [8] is not supported by the evidence presented by them [9],[10],[11]" would be considered a grave insult and might cause loss of reputation. In the question and answer session in a seminar someone saying, "But, Dr Kaplansky, with a sample size of 27, the correlation coefficient you have arrived at is less than experimental error" wouild result in a collective gasp and "ole!" from the assembled people, usually about 20 people who could actually understand the paper being presented.
These scientists are encountering the rough and tumble world of popular journalism, spin meistering. They are clueless about how to handle it. They feel they are being gravely insulted and highly manipulated. They think they are being quote mined, quoted out of context. The journalists are giving totally irrelevant and completely debunked theorists equal time for balance. So they go about in their clueless ways to counter it. They over react, they try to be more guarded, they are trying to write sentences that could not be quote mined.
Now that people have glimpse of the actual communications between the scientists, compare that to say, the hacked emails of Sarah Palin, See where you find more smoking guns.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
If data that all those millions of man-hours of research is based on is bogus then the conclusions are worthless.
It's lucky then that the data comes from many different independent sources and is therefore not bogus at all then, isn't it?
If AGW was actually happening, there would be no need to "adjust" numbers and likewise no need to cover up the leaked emails.
So normalization of data should never happen, no matter what? Have you ever taken even the most basic of statistics classes?
This is the problem with the whole argument right here. You have people that don't have the first clue what they're talking about telling people how they're supposed to do their job.
This guy's the limit!
Is that a journal where the hockey team review each others papers anonymously?
No, it's a scientific journal. They don't write about sports.
No surprise that they won't investigate anything.
If you read the article and summary, you'll discover that they did investigate, and found nothing wrong.
Perhaps you should brush up on your reading comprehension skills. Learning a bit about the scientific method would help too.
1) they're guilty of not properly responding to a FOIA request
2) they've said nasty things about certain colleagues work (but still cited it)
3) they've discarded some data for reasons they should have better explained (reasons that were valid -- it wasn't properly calibrated)
Bad for them personally, but utterly irrelevant to the scientific issue, unless you think it's some kind of surprise that scientists are human and sometimes make mistakes. As the Nature article says, it's laughable. Where's the global conspiracy? Where's the outright fraud of substantial masses of crucial data? Nowhere.
It's worth investigating for the possibility of misconduct, but, sheesh, the actual scientific impact is so overblown it's ridiculous. This is why you have many, many other scientists working on the same issues and completely independent ones: so that even if one of them makes an honest or a dishonest mistake, or one method yields incorrect results, the other people and techniques are likely to find the flaw and correct it.
The only "trick" here is the propaganda trick climate-change denialists are using to divert attention from the actual data and results of the last few decades.
Smoking gun? It's like they've (illegally) broken into the house owned by someone they've publicly accused of murder for a decade and found a plastic gun replica that shoots Nerf balls. Aha!! Gotcha!
Personally I think the premise is so obviously false that this stunt will backfire on the coal industry as did similar "scientific" arguments by the tabcoo companies in the 80's.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
To be blunt, here's a list of things that I think need to be done. First, all data and processes need to be made public domain. Simply put, proprietary data that can't be released to the public has no place in scientific research. It doesn't matter if industry-paid hacks attack anything they can find. If we can't duplicate the calculations, using your data and programs that went into your research, then we can't say whether you did it at all in the first place.
Second, there needs to be some degree of separation between the politics and the science. For example, James Hansen who currently heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (which is NASA's group for studying the climate) has engaged in a great deal of politics over the years, throwing away any pretense of objectivity. For example, he says:
In Hansen's view, dealing with climate change allows no room for the compromises that rule the world of elected politics. "This is analagous to the issue of slavery faced by Abraham Lincoln or the issue of Nazism faced by Winston Churchill," he said. "On those kind of issues you cannot compromise. You can't say let's reduce slavery, let's find a compromise and reduce it 50% or reduce it 40%."
Ignoring that carbon emissions can be dealt with through compromise (even in the worst cases) and hence are not like slavery or the spread of totalitarian ideologies, would a person with this sort of viewpoint "cook the books" when it comes to their science? Why not? When I see accusations of NASA data manipulation coupled with refusal to honor FOIA requests and highly ideological, crude public statements like the above of key officials, then it looks like a pattern of unscientific behavior to me. They can at least act like grownups.
The people trying to force carbon emission reduction need to take their time. If they're right, then a little more time will simply solidify their position further, especially since there's no urgency in the matter according to current research. If they're wrong about the need to reduce human carbon emissions, then that'll help humanity collectively. For example, Hanson has been crying "wolf" since 1989. Even if the science is determined now (I still don't believe we've shown that human activity has a significant global warming effect), it wasn't then.
Finally, there needs to be a genuine cost/benefit analysis of the possible choices, including various geoengineering options and procrastination. It doesn't have to be perfect, but I'm tired of the nebulous claims of disaster made by anthropic global warming proponents (Hanson in the linked story above claims "tens of meters" of sea level rise, but doesn't bother to say over what time period this rise occurs).
"must stand up to rigorous scientific questioning" - true, indeed. The problem is that Global Warming has done so convincingly several times over and still some people refuse to bulge. Hence, denialists.
If this was an ordinary scientific issue it really wouldn't matter: graduate students tend to avoid bad scientists and so denialists die out. Unfortunately, this is not a ordinary scientific issue, but one that begets an extremely important current policy issue; one that may require all sorts of weird things, like actual global governance. I, personally, would very much prefer if the lunatics would shut up and let the rest of us get on to figure out what to do.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers - Pablo Picasso
Since when does the right care about science? They can't even get an issue as simple and data-rich as sex education right, but now I'm supposed to believe that it's all about the evidence?
I used to have doubts about AGW because I heard so many skeptics, but now that they've dropped their masks and are trying to move in for the kill I see that the whole thing is just like the evolution "debate". Conspiracy theories ("It's the evil liberals! They want to destroy capitalism!"), quotes out of context, repeating the same tired debunked arguments year after year... The only difference is that the ideology behind it is a little more popular -- the strawman liberal is apparently a more plausible villain to most people than the strawman atheist.
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