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Second Inquiry Exonerates Climatic Research Unit
mvdwege writes "After being cleared of charges of misconduct by a parliamentary committee, now the CRU has the results of the inquiry (PDF) by a panel of scientists into their scientific methods. Here is the CRU press release. Criticisms: The statistical methods used, though arriving at correct results, are not optimal, and it is recommended future studies involve professional statisticians if possible; and the CRU scientists are lacking somewhat in organization. A very far cry from the widespread allegations of fraud. It seems 'Climategate' is ending with a whimper."
All the skeptics are just going to cry cover up. All the people who accepted climate change will just go on accepting it. And nobody will do anything about anything because apathy rules.
1. Make all your data available to anybody.
2. Make all your analysis software available to anybody.
The point of science is to let other try to replicate your experiments and analysis to see if they get they same answer. When CRU starts doing these things, wake me up. I'm not really interested in what blue-ribbon committees of politicians think of their science.
...when they're exonerated by a panel of scientists who are NOT connected to renewable energy sources, environmentalist groups, conservation movements, carbon trading etc. That is to say, physicists, statisticians, and real mathematical modellers. In general people who are not doing science because it suits the environmental fancy they picked up in the 1980s and who are not willing to overlook glaring problems with their results (like a disappearing medieval warm period) simply because the results confirm their preconceived notion of impending catastrophe.
No matter how much evidence you provide for the innocence of these researchers, the paranoid will simply decry the people conducting the investigation as "part of the conspiracy".
That's the major problem with the anti-AGW group. If they could point to any legitimate research that was submitted to peer review and survived dissection by experts which punched holes in AGW, they would have done so by now. Instead they rely on simply muddying the waters with screams of deceit and conspiracies, essentially propaganda to confuse the laymen. And unfortunately those who are simply inclined to not want to spend any more money, whether it be to save the environment or provide for the health of the poor, will lap up the lies and spit them out as if they were gospel.
I see the same ridiculous, already debunked arguments used by anti-AGW people on this forum every time one of these articles comes up. They don't read for information. They post and run away. There are many moderators who simply mod informative posts down just because the science completely disagrees with what they want reality to be. There's no pleasing them.
The Panel was not concerned with the question of whether the conclusions of the published research were correct. Rather it was asked to come to a view on the integrity of the Unit's research and whether as far as could be determined the conclusions represented an honest and scientifically justified interpretation of the data. The Panel worked by examining representative publications by members of the Unit and subsequently by making two visits to the University and interviewing and questioning members of the Unit. Not all the panel were present on both occasions but two members were present on both occasions to maintain continuity. About fifteen person/days were spent at the University discussing the Unit's work.
So... we didn't look into whether their numbers were right. We looked over their published papers and chatted with them a couple of times and they seem like forthright folks. We won't tell you who was there each time - that would be too much disclosure.
No whitewash here. Oh, no. Further:
We have not exhaustively reviewed the external criticism of the dendroclimatological work, but it seems that some of these criticisms show a rather selective and uncharitable approach to information made available by CRU.
So people who want hard numbers, underlying datasets and provenance of data are being "uncharitable".
In the latter part of the 20th century CRU pioneered the methods for taking into account a wide range of local influences that can make instrumental records from different locations hard to compare. These methods were very labour intensive and were somewhat subjective.
The methods were subjective? This is science? Maybe it's me. Maybe I don't understand the term "science".
We cannot help remarking that it is very surprising that research in an area that depends so heavily on statistical methods has not been carried out in close collaboration with professional statisticians.
Here we go. That's an axe to the groin there.
We agree with the CRU view that the authority for releasing unpublished raw data to third parties should stay with those who collected it.
Ah, but then they don't need to provide provenance or data. That's so comforting.
I am so mollified by this report I'm left without speech. It seems perfectly reasonable, rational and diligent to me. Let's close this case and begin the Cap&Trade.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Then again CRU could have been one cell in a world wide scientific fraud conspiracy group intent on world domination.
Clearly it was! First it was the environmentalists. We knew they were up to no good because, well there environmentalists!
Then the scientists said the environmentalists were actually correct. Now we knew the scientist (except for the brave few who agree with us) had joined the conspiracy (if they weren't in on it all along.)
Then when our Russian hacker friends in the Kremlin helped us expose these evil conspiring scientists by cracking the email serves. First a UK parliamentary inquiry clears them. So the UK parliament and the independent judges are also clearly in on the conspiracy.
Now an academic inquiry also tries to white wash joins in. So we know all academics (except for the brave few who agree with us), are in on the conspiracy too!
I'm telling you man, this is BIG!
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
Show me a scientific field that *wouldn't* be improved by having professional statisticians. Having done neuroimaging studies, I've often been unsure whether we truly were using the best research methods and statistics available. I did, of course, believe that we were doing the studies well, but improvement is certainly possible - this is true in many fields.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
I don't care about the environment and I don't care about fraud, just stop putting "gate" at the end of everything!
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
It's not surprising that the climategate allegations have been shown to be false on examination.
The whole thing was a manufactured crisis, in exactly the same sinister sense that the 1 year "WMDs hand-wringing" lead-up to the Iraq War was a manufactured crisis.
It's not surprising that this sort of tactic happens, in a high-stakes political battle (there's trillions of oil dollars at stake after all, hmmm. Sound familiar?)
What is lamentable is the rampant gullibility/willful ignorance of the mainstream media, and hence of much of the general public.
Remember when you couldn't fool all the people all the time? Well, fooling people is now a highly paid, highly skilled profession, so maybe you can now at least fool the majority of the electorate for a long enough time to accomplish the goal, whether you are engaged in an illegal war for control of some oil resources, or a global warming denial disinformation campaign, for control of the right to keep burning as much oil as you feel like.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
After wading through a hundred posts I can't help but suspect that if we are honest with ourselves, the vast majority of opinions here are merely expressions of confirmation bias: the majority of people posting or moderating are being skeptical or accepting based entirely on whether or not it agreed with their pre-existing model of the universe.
We agree with the CRU view that the authority for releasing unpublished raw data to third parties should stay with those who collected it.
In the ordinary scheme of things, where science proceeds at a slow and deliberate pace, and the stakes rarely exceed ego and pride and lifetime accomplishment, it would be fine to allow scientists to manage their walled garden as they are accustomed to doing.
In the extraordinary scheme of things where fluctuations so minor they are hard to measure are beating the drum on global policy, and recourse to sober reflection has been staked through the heart with language of imminent "tipping points", this is not good enough.
According to the respected tradition of science, the scientists will soon come to a sober and reliable consensus on AGW 1980-2010, where soon is somewhere between 2050 and 2100.
Cripes, Einstein wasn't awarded a Nobel prize until 1921, sixteen years after his annus mirabilis, roughly the equivalent of winning all four majors in the same year by ten strokes each. Tiger never had a year that good. Gretzky never had a year that good. At the pace that science traditionally moves, Gretzky would be a recent induction to the Hall of Fame, after a sober cooling off period, rather than handing his final game jersey and jockstrap to a burly Scotsman handcuffed to a velvet trunk. The tradition in science is to allow the sweat to dry before inviting posterity to drop in for a look see.
Now that the stakes are so high (apparently), Big Science has slapped 2,500 signatures on a fat report in total contravention of every word of wisdom in Brook's "Mythical Man Month": you can't accelerate solid results by piling on resources or amassing "looks good to me" chits by the basket load. It doesn't work in software, and it doesn't work in science.
If they think this is a viable route to sober consensus, they deserve a level of outside scrutiny that would make NASA blush.
Where did this idea come from that science can function as a miracle short-order chef, just because it has to? I hate to parrot Thomas Kuhn, but he did point out that error in science is weeded out of the system on a generational time scale. Personally, I don't see a huge difference between Harry Markopolous and Stephen McIntyre, Both have a long history of having a sharp eye for dubious claims.
If science thinks they can produce results on a Wall Street time frame, welcome to Wall Street scrutiny, er, I mean the scrutiny we now wish had been in place before it was too late.
Right now we have a natural order and an economic order that are working at cross principals. We can't apply the precautionary principle on both sides of the fence simultaneously. So the debate devolves to which of the two should we F with, and in what proportion? Clamping down on the current economic order out of fear that an effect is major and immediate rather than moderate and mid-horizon has real effects on global standards of living.
It's possible that the environmental scientists are right, which would make their urgency good politics, but still not good science, not until the day that fully disclosed data subjected to the best possible analysis fully supports their conclusions.
Maybe this issue is too important to wait for good science. Nevertheless, under no conditions am I buying into this revisionist agenda as to what good science looks like. If we have to turn to lame science, and that's the best we have, so be it. Meanwhile, I'd be quite pleased to dispense with all this faux identity maintenance by scientists who have clearly overstepped the tradition of sober reflection, no matter if for the best of reasons.
I can answer some of your points:
1) The panel did not say the CRU's conclusions were correct, it said it could find no evidence of deliberate fraud and believed it would have found it if it existed.
2) Yes, they are saying that no clearly inappropriate methods were used, but that in some cases more appropriate methods were available. Repeating the analysis would be unlikely to change the result but might improve confidence.
4) FoI obstruction is not scientific fraud (the main charge that was being investigated), technically anyway, heh.
5) The CRU are supposed to be working towards release of their data. A lot of it comes from other organisations and rights need to be negotiated, apparently. In the meantime, a great deal of climate data is available from many sources.
6) You select a statistical tool based on the type of data and the sort of answer you need rather than on the data itself. The committee could make a fair judgement without seeing all the numbers.
Finally, the CRU's reconstructions broadly agree with other reconstructions (eg. the NASA data) which gives at least some validation of their results.