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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.
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.
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.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
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 How about doing a bit of homework and finding out why the unpublished graph was labelled VERY ARTIFICIAL?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.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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.
"His name was James Damore."
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.
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.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
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.