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."

Comments

Doesn't matter.

[Gerafix]

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.

Re:Doesn't matter.

[phantomfive]

My problem with these scientists (as revealed in the leaked emails) was two things:

1) It showed that the scientists have a very real agenda. While I understand that everyone feels strongly about things sometimes and scientists are only human, when a good scientist notices that he favors a hypothesis, he will test it more rigorously, to make sure it is not his feelings that are distorting his view. This seems to be the opposite approach to what these scientists are taking: they are happy when people who disagree with them die. They show a willingness to try to suppress contrary evidence, even if it means changing the peer review process. Not good stuff, and it makes it hard to trust them.

2) The presentation to the general public is different than the presentation to scientists. When they publish in peer reviewed publications, they are careful to qualify their statements and not make unsupported conjectures (at least according to the review mentioned here, which I have no reason to doubt). When they speak to the public, the statements are often more dire, and not necessarily supported by the science. You see the results of this kind of stuff a lot, like with the Himalayan glaciers melting completely within the next 30 years (which turned out to be false) or if you talk to the average person about global warming, they will think that New York is going to be submerged, which is not supported by any peer reviewed research.

In essence, these scientists have lost my trust, even if they have not crossed the line into fraud (which I am happy they didn't: this field of science would have been a real mess if they had).

Re:Doesn't matter.

[gtbritishskull]

Your response makes it obvious that you are an academic. Academics don't have to produce anything (besides words). I am an Engineer at a private company. I have to put a product out that works. There are time limits. If I am not sure how it works, I can't say "well, lets just look at this for another 30 years and make sure we get the math correct". I have to take the facts that I do know, make assumptions, and act on them.

The science is never going to be good enough for you, because everything is based on assumptions. The "Theory of Gravity" is wrong. It breaks down at very small distances. But, in the real world, I have to assume that it is good enough and use it to get my work done. Other people have told me, "Well, we can't prove global warming correct, so we should just wait another 30 years until the science works itself out." This is very convenient because you don't have to do anything. If in 30 years the earth is screwed, you can just say that now we have the science. If it is not, you can say you are right. But I will not accept that. Don't tell me why I am wrong, tell me why you are right. What is your alternate theory, and where is your supporting evidence. PROVE that my theory is worse than yours. But, you can't. All you are is an obstructionist. You don't have a proposal that you are willing to put anything behind (your career, your reputation, your future). All you have is your proposal that we don't know anything, so we shouldn't do anything. That proposal I do not accept.

This is also apparent from your comment about the big bang. You just say it is wrong. What is your alternative? It is not so easy when you have to support something instead of just sitting back and telling everyone else why they are wrong.

I am going to modify an age old adage...

"Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. And then tell the people who are 'doing' why they are wrong."

Here is how you do science.

[dbc]

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.

Re:Here is how you do science.

[Sarten-X]

Meanwhile, that smart kid at a competing lab who has the intelligence to make an even better discovery doesn't see the data and can't run the experiment/analysis until it's far too late, and the world has committed itself to bad policies based on bad science. Fifty years later, they correct the mistake at great expense, and say it was all based on the best we could do at the time.

Closed research considered harmful.

I'm not going to comment on whether this specific case is valid or not, but openness is requisite!

Re:Here is how you do science.

[Daniel Dvorkin]

We're lucky in biology to have funding agencies which regularly kick out rather large amounts of money specifically for the purpose of building and maintaining public data repositories. Most other branches of science, including climatology, don't have that. Now, you'd think that with all the billions of dollars that the deniers insist environmentalists are making on climate change, someone could find a few bucks here and there for a server farm, but so far it doesn't seem to be happening.

Sadly...

[sonicmerlin]

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.

Re:Sadly...

[hsthompson69]

The real problem here is that the pro-AGW group is going about science all wrong -> they're trying to prove their point with more data that buttresses their theory. They look around, find scads of data that fits their model, and with enough data, declare the "debate is over".

Except that's not science. It's not even bad science, it's just simply not science. You don't prove your point by finding more data that agrees with you, you prove your point by looking hard for data that does *not* agree with you, and not finding it. It's a subtle point, but one that is profoundly misunderstood by the masses. You can always find more data to support your theory, if you're willing to ignore data that does not support it.

So the anti-AGW folk have it easy -> they just need to "cherry pick" data that refutes the AGW theory. Their search for data has a much, much lower bar because they don't need to have 10,000 refutations, or a million refutations, they just need one refutation. Just one bit of data that breaks the model, and the model must be changed, or abandoned.

The bigger problem of all this is that when it comes right down to it, the pro-AGW folks haven't really stated a falsifiable theory. They have in fact scrupulously avoided a falsifiable theory (warm winter? Global warming! cold winter? Global warming!), and have instead created a political movement rather than a scientific discussion.

For those pro-AGWers who want to mod down, fine. But do me a favor and come up with a falsifiable hypothesis while you're at it.

Re:Sadly...

[DKalkin]

The real problem here is that the pro-AGW group is going about science all wrong -> they're trying to prove their point with more data that buttresses their theory. They look around, find scads of data that fits their model, and with enough data, declare the "debate is over".

Except that's not science. It's not even bad science, it's just simply not science. You don't prove your point by finding more data that agrees with you, you prove your point by looking hard for data that does *not* agree with you, and not finding it...

The bigger problem of all this is that when it comes right down to it, the pro-AGW folks haven't really stated a falsifiable theory. They have in fact scrupulously avoided a falsifiable theory (warm winter? Global warming! cold winter? Global warming!), and have instead created a political movement rather than a scientific discussion.

For those pro-AGWers who want to mod down, fine. But do me a favor and come up with a falsifiable hypothesis while you're at it.

I really wish Slashdotters would stop making arguments premised on a mish-mash of different "definitions" of science half-remembered from one source or another. Defining the scientific method in general terms is actually a really hard problem, which philosophers of science, and practicing scientists with an interest in philosophy, have struggled with for a century without coming to any sort of consensus. (It's known as the "demarcation problem", meaning the demarcation of science and pseudo-science.) There are no easy applications.

The parent - like many people - refers to Popper's "falsifiability" criterion, but nobody who specializes in the subject accepts this criterion anymore in any simple fashion (Popper himself was more complex than most of his internet would-be followers). These are the problems: Every real scientific theory, from physics to biology, has to deal with one or more falsifiers throughout its existence; there are always unresolved problems, apparent pieces of counter-evidence, inexplicable observations, mathematical inconsistencies or unwarranted assumptions. But on the other hand, for any given falsifier, someone can always come up with some sort of explanation which preserves the original theory, in the worst case by either dismissing the evidence as necessarily instrument error, or by modifying the theory in an ad-hoc, one-off way. And more careful, less idealized studies of actual scientific practice have shown all kinds of complications; for example, for a century after Copernicus the Ptolemaic model fit observations better.

So the assertion that climate modeling is "not science", because, given the unsupported assertion that climate modelers don't look for counter-evidence, it doesn't fit some abstract idea of what science should be, is worth pretty much nothing. In general, anyone who writes that they can dismiss some field of study practiced in research universities and published in peer-reviewed journals as "not really science" on the basis of a one-paragraph description of what science really is, is talking out of their ass.

On the specific question of anthropogenic global warming. As anyone who pays any attention to what climate researchers actually write knows, neither "warm winter" nor "cold winter" is a claimed prediction of the models. The predictions take the form of an average global temperature rise over a period of years, or a set of possible average temperatures given various possible levels of carbon dioxide emissions. And James Hansen's models from the 1980s are looking pretty good today.

Let's go ahead and quote from the report:

[symbolset]

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.

Re:Let's go ahead and quote from the report:

[hsthompson69]

Mod parent up. Claiming exoneration at this point, or insisting that with enough context one can possibly explain the malfeasance behind the climategate emails, is wishful thinking and simply talking points handed out by realclimate.org.

Look, if all the CRU well wishers would just read the code itself (http://www.anenglishmanscastle.com/HARRY_READ_ME.txt), maybe your inner geek can overcome your outer AGW supporter. These guys have been cooking the numbers with crappy code for years, period. I've got more faith in the code quality of Duke Nuke'm Forever than the garbage these guys have been spewing.

Anyway, mod this troll/flamebait/whatever, but the parent deserves at least informative for quoting TFR.

Scientific rigor in debates about scientific rigor

[Fractal Dice]

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.

Re:The unanswerable questions

[jcupitt65]

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.