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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.
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.
"A few suspect emails do not destroy millions of man hours of research."
Never mind the quality, feel the weight.
This video explains quite clearly how these leaks and the reactions on it should be placed in their correct context:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nnVQ2fROOg
Dependency hell? =>
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
... will be bamboozled. There is nothing new in that. It lies behind all political folly.
The data that was adjusted was paleoclimate data, and what it was being adjusted to was temperature data (i.e., the more reliable modern temperature data). As far as I can tell, they neither could nor did adjust the measured temperature data.
The OP did not quote the really important part of the Nature piece :
Nothing in the e-mails undermines the scientific case that global warming is real — or that human activities are almost certainly the cause. That case is supported by multiple, robust lines of evidence, including several that are completely independent of the climate reconstructions debated in the e-mails.
The evidence for this is literally all around us. Throw all of the CRU data out if you want. It won't change a thing.
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!
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
Dude, you're not just talking about any journal here. You're talking about THE journal for the physical sciences. This journal has more than a century of scientific reporting as testament to its quality. It predates the Nobel price. It predates the work of Einstein and Schrödinger. Interestingly though it is not older than the discovery of the atmospheric greenhouse effect, which was first described by Fourier in 1824.
Just to give you a clue what you're actually implying in your post...
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.
Two points.
1) That paper is nearly a year old so the logic that "Now finally counter arguments can be heard" seems a bit specious.
2) That paper is a complete crock of unrefereed shit. I read 92-94 which are the conclusions and was so confused I went and read the earlier portions. There are numerous fallacies in their assumptions and they get some pretty fundamental thermo issues flat wrong.
If you'd like to read physicists (not climatologist) opinion of the paper go here:
http://www.physicsforums.com/archive/index.php/t-300667.html
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!
"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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