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.

Comments

Same with newscientist

[Idiomatick]

Same with newscientist
I imagine all scientific journals will be quite clear on this point. A few suspect emails do not destroy millions of man hours of research.

Oh, come on.

[Grendel Drago]

The "VERY ARTIFICIAL correction" you describe is never actually used. It's commented out. You can plot that array, but I'm not sure what you think you're demonstrating.

Re:Oh, come on.

[mrsquid0]

It is not a matter of trust. It is a matter of learning to read IDL code (which is not that hard) and comparing the plotting commands to the published plot.

As for the "hopeless state" comment, that sounds quite plausible, and it is fully consistent with the way the code appears to have been use to experiment with various ways of correcting the data for the various problems in the data. This sort of thing goes on all the time. It is called experimentation, and it is the way that science is done. In real life things do not wok like they do on CSI.

Re:Nice try

[TapeCutter]

Yeah right, the whole "house of cards" has crumbled due to one line of source code that was never published. How about doing a bit of homework and finding out why the unpublished graph was labelled VERY ARTIFICIAL?

As for the so called "missing data" it seems the MET have noted the advice in the Nature editorial and are now petitioning 188 countries for permission to publish the remaining few percent of records still tied up in red tape.

The sad irony here is that Jones has spent most of his carrer making the other 95% of those records easily accesible to the scientific community.

Re:Nice try

[Rockoon]

The researchers did not use certain tree ring data post 1960 because it was not properly calibrated to instrumental data.

This has nothing to do with the data being 'properly calibrated' and everything to do with the faulty assumption that ring width strong correlates with temperature, which is the assumption they use for pre-1960 data. They sold you another lie to explain the first, my friend.

Tree ring width correlates strongly with precipitation, not temperature. Plenty of REAL peer reviewed studies to back this up, along with validated experimental evidence (you know, that whole scientific method shit that Mann doesnt use)

Furthermore, many critics of Mann et al. have ignored the fact that this was a single line of data turning a blind eye to the numerous other data sets and proxies that support the same conclusions.

Which data sets are those? Seriously. Which? Show my a hockey stick that does not use Mann's or Briffa's data. Do it now.

Re:Nice try

[Doormouse]

From looking at the files, this does not seem to be true in all instances. Even if it was uncommented everywhere, we still would not know if it actually made it into published results. Sounds like a job for someone of audit and figure out what actually happened and how outraged to be realistically. I wonder if they have learned their lesson and will actually cooperate instedd of stonewall.

Re:Nice try

[DriedClexler]

I'm not demanding perfection. I'm saying that, as a minimal threshold for using a proxy for past data is that it should match our most solid data. When you're allowed to arbitrarily graft new data at arbitrary points to data sets, you can make any data say anything -- that's not what science is supposed to be.

Are there other proxies that meet this minimum threshold I described? Great. Use those. But you don't get to count these tree rings in question as additional, independent confirmation. That would be like saying, "We manipulated data set B to look like data set A, therefore we have two data sets validating the hypothesis." And it's that kind of information cascade that has allowed the CRU to be held as the gold standard that all the other data sets get adjusted to match, destroying the notion of independence of the data sets.

At best, this data is too unreliable to incorporate. At worst, it's showing that temperatures actually went down. But these scientists are so far off the scientific method that they think it's okay to tweak them to say whatever they want, and call any deviation from what they wanted to see, a "problem" that needs to be corrected.

Re:Nice try

[Rising Ape]

If it is valid before 1960, it is valid after 1960.

Not if there's some environmental factor skewing the results that's significant after 1960 but not before it.

Re:Nice try

[Dobeln]

"Finally, here is a question for all the deniers out there. If the engineering feat required today was to actually warm up the planet, how would we do it? I think that the best answer would be to do what were are already doing today."

Depends on the feedback mechanisms between CO2 and the really potent greenhouse gasses. Which it is now very clear that the researchers in question haven't got a very good handle on.

Finally, about the term "denier" - this little "trick" (sorry) to tie a broad range of "unacceptable" opinions to holocaust denial, etc. is a departure from good science, which is not supposed to be conducted through invective and ostracism against differing viewpoints, etc.

That the AGW club have taken the right to depart from this, in order to behave as assholes when silencing non-conformist voices places an immense burden on them to follow the most stringent scientific protocol imaginable.

I think it's pretty clear by now that they fail to live up even to that standard.

War is Peace: The Exponential Growth of Nonsense

[catchblue22]

On reading many of these posts that show up whenever climate change is mentioned, I am reminded of the following article, which I will quote below in its entirety. I found it in Scientific American.

War Is Peace: Can Science Fight Media Disinformation?
In the 24/7 Internet world, people make lots of claims. Science provides a guide for testing them
By Lawrence M. Krauss

When I saw the statement repeated online that theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking of the University of Cambridge would be dead by now if he lived in the U.K. and had to depend on the National Health Service (he, of course, is alive and working in the U.K., where he always has), I reflected on something I had written a dozen years ago, in one of my first published commentaries:

“The increasingly blatant nature of the nonsense uttered with impunity in public discourse is chilling. Our democratic society is imperiled as much by this as any other single threat, regardless of whether the origins of the nonsense are religious fanaticism, simple ignorance or personal gain.”

As I listen to the manifest nonsense that has been promulgated by the likes of right-wing fanatic radio hosts and moronic ex-governors in response to the effort to bring the U.S. into alignment with other industrial countries in providing reasonable and affordable health care for all its citizens, it seems that things have only gotten worse in the years since I first wrote those words.

English novelist George Orwell was remarkably prescient about many things, and one of the most disturbing aspects of his masterpiece 1984 involved the blatant perversion of objective reality, using constant repetition of propaganda by a militaristic government in control of all the media.

Centrally coordinated and fully effective reinvention of reality has not yet come about in the U.S. (even though a White House aide in the past administration came chillingly close when he said to a New York Times reporter, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality”). I am concerned, however that something equally pernicious, at least to the free exercise of democracy, has.

The rise of a ubiquitous Internet, along with 24-hour news channels has, in some sense, had the opposite effect from what many might have hoped such free and open access to information would have had. It has instead provided free and open access, without the traditional media filters, to a barrage of disinformation. Nonsense claims had more difficulty gaining traction in the days when print journalism held sway and newspaper editors had the final word on what made its way into homes and when television news consisted of a half-hour summary of what a trained producer thought were the most essential stories of the day.

Now fabrications about “death panels” and oxymoronic claims that ”government needs to keep its hands off of Medicare” flow freely on the Internet, driving thousands of zombielike protesters to Washington to argue that access to health care will undermine their fundamental freedom to have their insurance canceled if they get sick. And 24-hour news channels, desperate to provide ”breaking” coverage at all hours, end up serving as public relations vehicles for any celebrity who happens to make an outrageous claim or, worse, decide that the competition for ratings requires them to be anything but ”fair and balanced” in their reporting.

“Fair and balanced,” however, doesn’t mean putting all viewpoints, regardless of their underlying logic or validity, on an equal footing. Discerning the merits of competing claims is where the empirical basis of science should play a role. I cannot stress often enough that what science is all about is not proving things to be true but proving them to be false. What fails the test of empirical reality, as determined by

Re:Nice try

[antibryce]

Jones suggested deleting data (not emails, actually temp data) rather than share it:

http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=490&filename=1107454306.txt

The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear
there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than
send to anyone.

So before filing FOI requests it sounds like they were making requests through normal channels. Of course I'm sure Jones was only joking about deleting the data before he would share it, right? Note that Jones also makes numerous references to "hiding" behind various things (non-publishing agreements, data secrecy acts, etc.) This is hardly the acts of someone who loves to share data.

Also note that the data he was "sharing" is his already "adjusted" numbers. Yes there are perfectly valid reasons to adjust data, however the CRU kept no record (apparently) of how or why the numbers were adjusted. Now they say the raw data was thrown out in the 80's (even though they were discussing how to keep it hidden as recently as this summer.)

Whether you agree or disagree with the whole AGW thing, the fact is these guys were not conducting science so much as politics. Anyone looking at this who loves science and believes fully in the peer-review process should be disgusted by what these guys were up to. We essentially have a giant table of numbers they created and their word that nothing is wrong and we should believe them. That's not science.

Re:Worst case

[khallow]

1) they're guilty of not properly responding to a FOIA request

It's more than that. Phil Jones, the head of the CRU, wrote that he'd delete the data before he'd turn it over to "skeptics". Then they claim that they "lost" the data some time in the 80's. That seems to imply that he deleted the data far more recently than the 80's, say in the last couple of years. That would be a crime, not merely "not properly responding to an 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)

4) they arranged to have a journal editor fired for publishing a peer reviewed article that questioned conclusions reached by AGW promoters.

5) They arranged to have certain research excluded from IPCC's survey of climate science literature. The influence of the CRU on the IPCC process (which in turn provides the primary political justification for carbon emission reduction) was significant.
6) The code comments indicate that much of the data was poor quality, further that much of the "improperly calibrated" data wasn't afterwards "properly calibrated" (at least to the knowledge of the programmer).