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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.
Woo-hoo!
HAND.
...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.
Who cares?
This ain't rocket surgery.
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.
Fraud you say ? Don't you think your view lacks a bit of perspective ?
From the report, on dendroclimatology:
"Although inappropriate statistical tools with the potential for producing misleading results have been used by some other groups, presumably by accident rather than design, in the CRU papers that we examined we did not come across any inappropriate usage although the methods they used may not have been the best for the purpose. It is not clear, however, that better methods would have produced significantly different results. "
"With very noisy data sets a great deal of judgement has to be used. Decisions have to be made on whether to omit pieces of data that appear to be aberrant. These are all matters of experience and judgement. The potential for misleading results arising from selection bias is very great in this area. It is regrettable that so few professional statisticians have been involved in this work because it is fundamentally statistical."
"After reading publications and interviewing the senior staff of CRU in depth, we are satisfied that the CRU tree-ring work has been carried out with integrity, and that allegations of deliberate misrepresentation and unjustified selection of data are not valid. In the event CRU scientists were able to give convincing answers to our detailed questions about data choice, data handling and statistical methodology. The Unit freely admits that many data analyses they made in the past are superseded and they would not do things that way today."
On historical instruments reports:
"Like the work on tree rings this work is strongly dependent on statistical analysis and our comments are essentially the same. Although there are certainly different ways of handling the data, some of which might be superior, as far as we can judge the methods which CRU has employed are fair and satisfactory. Particular attention was given to records that seemed anomalous and to establishing whether the anomaly was an artefact or the result of some natural process."
"The Unit has demonstrated that at a global and hemispheric scale temperature results are surprisingly insensitive to adjustments made to the data and the number of series included. "
"Recent public discussion of climate change and summaries and popularizations of the work of CRU and others often contain over-simplifications that omit serious discussion of uncertainties emphasized by the original authors."
In the conclusions:
"We saw no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit and had it been there we believe that it is likely that we would have detected it."
The issue was that emails from insiders showed that the CRU was sufficiently politicized that the credibility of the institution was destroyed, and that put the research of the CRU in question. Instead of releasing the data, methods and code for their analysis, we are being asked to believe experts, paid by the institution, that the CRU's work is beyond reproach.
All we are given is a press release and a report that contains little to no real data, but does ironically suggests in conclusion 2 that the CRU should release more data and work with professional statisticians. This is the PR equivalent to the Jedi Mind Trick (tm), and will only result in even more scrutiny, and will result in climate change being questioned by even more people. This is why personal integrity and decorum is important in science: this research could be important to humanity's survival but the public now does not believe the research because the researcher's motives and communications seem questionable. Not because the research was bad, but because the way the CRU carried itself.
-- $G
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?
1. The panel said their conclusions where correct, yet where is the methodology they used to prove this? Or are they relying on the CRUs methodology to confirm the results of the CRU methodology? Sounds like post hoc ergo propter hoc.
.tar/.zip/.rar whatever and upload it to bittorrent/rapidshare/wikileaks whatever so anyone can access it. At the very least, do not become an impediment to the data's release, as has been shown beyond any reasonable doubt here.
2. Why are they suggesting they need professional statisticians if the conclusions were correct? Are they going to become more correct?
3. How can they know if their conclusions are correct without themselves reconstructing the experiments using the raw data that is now lost?
4. How can they on one hand say that there was no fraud, yet there was obviously an effort to subvert the FOA laws? Is this act somehow made ethical because it cannot be prosecuted?
5. And last of all, if this data and program that created the statistics are as "publicly available" as proponents of the CRU believe, then show me the link. This is the internet; just show me the URL to the data that convinced you that this data really is "publicly available".
6. If raw data is missing, how can they, or these auditors, even check their own calculations to see if the statistical models they used are correct?
And to the obvious responses to 5: Don't give me the run around "oh you can download it from the various sources that they got it from" bullshit, it's not my job to prove the CRU's theory, it's the CRU's job to prove it, all anyone else has to do is sit back and poke holes in the abundant logical fallacies. And if it's so damn important, the fate of the world and all, I would expect some talented CRU proponent, hell, the CRU themselves, to have packaged the whole dataset, including the "deleted" parts, into a XXXgb/tb/pb whatever b size
While I may not be a climatologist, I am a computer programmer, and I can tell when someone has written a program that will produce invalid data, for a non programmer to write a complex computer program, and have the countries of the world base their economies on it just seems insane to me. Would you have a stock broker write the code for the stock exchange? What if they are doing something like adding up temperatures as floats e.g.:averageTemp = (75.88+37.77+22.77...+200 more)/203 to get an average. A layman will look at the calculation and say "that looks great to me!" but even a first year CS student will see the huge problem adding so many floats, maybe the climatologist at the CRU didn't see a problem... But then nobody can really check to see if they have a problem, because they won't show anyone their source code, and subsequently how they even arrived at their conclusions, this alone makes this inquiry suspect. I would like to hear people say "You're not a computer programmer, you don't understand" as frequently as I hear people say "You're not a climatologist, you really don't understand..."
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.
And of course Slashdot posts this when I am still asleep.
Not surprisingly, I see a lot of posts from people who didn't bother to read the report and just parrot the standard talking points.
And surprisingly, given the amount of flak he gets, kdawson cleaned up my typos, formatted my URLs a bit better and found a catchier title.
Mart
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
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.
As a footnote, I read this the other night and was quite impressed with it. This will mostly appeal to slashdotters with low digit IDs and mild Aspergers, if such a creature exists.
The Art and Science of Cause and Effect
Note that he takes a long view of science as I do. The key slide that just popped into mind is slide 49 with the text:
However, carve a chunk from it, say the object part, and we can talk about the motion of the hand CAUSING this light ray to change angle.
The precautionary principle is fundamentally interventionist. However, the focus of precaution is necessarily a human construct, which depends upon how the image is sliced. This claim is heavily supported in the presentation as a whole.
This insight courtesy of Judea Pearl, who is becoming known as one of the giants of AI. He's a major influence on the recent work of Daphne Koller. Under no circumstances check out the accomplishments of Daphne Koller if you're feeling low about your productivity in the recent week or decade. She's just polished off a nice 1,200 page tome http://www.amazon.com/Probabilistic-Graphical-Models-Principles-Computation/dp/0262013193/">Probabilistic Graphical Models: Principles and Techniques (Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning). I'd rush out to buy this, but I'm not sure my ego can handle the blow.
OK, so I read the file the parent linked and what a shocker.
Some quotes
OH FUCK THIS. It's Sunday evening, I've worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I'm :
hitting yet another problem that's based on the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform
data integrity, it's just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they're found.
I am seriously close to giving up, again. The history of this is so complex that I can't get far enough
into it before by head hurts and I have to stop. Each parameter has a tortuous history of manual and
semi-automated interventions that I simply cannot just go back to early versions and run the update prog.
I could be throwing away all kinds of corrections - to lat/lons, to WMOs (yes!), and more.
Now, this is a clear indication that the standard deviation limits are not being applied.
Which is extremely bad news. So I had a drains-up on anomauto.for.. and.. yup, my awful
programming strikes again. Because I copied the anomdtb.f90 process, I failed to notice
an extra section where the limit was applied to the whole station - I was only applying
it to the normals period (1961-90)!
Probably the worst story is temperature, particularly for MCDW. Over 1000 new stations! Highly
unlikely. I am tempted to blame the different lat/lon scale, but for now it will have to rest.
If I fix that, I get:...14 stations LESS than the previous exercise. That'll do, surely? It's not going to be easy to find 14 missing stations, is it? Since the anomalies aren't exactly the same. Should I be worried about 14 lost series? Less than 2%. Actually, I noticed something interesting.. look
at the anomalies. The anomdtb ones aren't *rounded* to 1dp, they're *truncated*! So, er - wrong!
The problem is that the synthetics are incorporated at 2.5-degrees, NO IDEA why, so saying they affect ;0)
particular 0.5-degree cells is harder than it should be. So we'll just gloss over that entirely
So, under /cru/cruts/version_3_0/fixing_tmp_and_pre/custom_anom_comparisons, we have a
'manual' directory and an 'automatic' directory, each with twelve 1990 anomaly files. And
how do they compare? NOT AT ALL!!!!!!!!!
46137
Title should be "*second* inquiry wastes more time and research energy legitimising continued intellectually bankrupt sceptic campaign against climate change science". Why are we expending so much energy engaging with people who will not engage with the research, besides to nitpick? The more legitimacy we give to these idiots the more they gain credibility with the public, the more governments lose the political willpower to do anything whatsoever, the more we screw ourselves over.
Sadly, a lot of damage is already done to the climate cause. The idea that these (and therefore, by extension, other) scientists are prone to manipulating their data to get the answers they want is now firmly entrenched in the public mind.
As an example, just he other day some colleagues of mine were discussing climate change, and when someone mentioned climategate, and how "those scientists" had tampered with their data, the response was a chorus of agreeing, everybody-know-THAT kind of nods. And these were all college/university graduates. Pretty depressing.
He who laughs last, thinks slowest.
Probabilistic Graphical Models: Principles and Techniques (Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning)
There, I feel better now.
Here's another postscript. Edge Foundation way back in 1999 ran a question with some historical depth.
EDGE: What Is The Most Important Invention?
From my notes: Joseph Traub, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, David Shaw, David Myers, Milford H. Wolpoff, John McCarthy, Philip Brockman, Howard Rheingold, Samuel Barondes and John Rennie all put forward the scientific method or some variation on scientific progress, alongside all the usual votes for the pill, the printing press, the a-bomb, digital electronics, and hay.
Around the time of that survey, a lot of people convinced themselves that this new model for managing a company (or a software product line) made sense, because that was how the world worked now. No, actually. Even in the dotcom stampede, bad management was bad management. This will hold true of science as well.
The scientific method is way too important in the history of modern civilization to have the IPCC make lite of this tradition in order to win a political grudge match.
Too bad Wolfram used up the title "A New Kind of Science". We could have saved it for IPCC committee reports with 2,500 eminent signatures.
I say this with full conviction that the central human activity of the 21'st century will be paying the piper for high living. I still harbour a dim hope that we'll pay off these days less rashly than we entered into them. Yes, I can see it now. This will all come to pass through a non-contentious political process involving scientific walled gardens, incestuous peer review, and sanctified data hoarding.
in the new york times comment section under the times square blast, i was floored by the number of people seriously believing the bomber was a fall guy, that he was set up, ostensibly by someone with an agenda in the government, to say something malicious about islam, or pakistan, or immigrants, or obama, or whatever
in other words, even when presented with solid evidence contrary to their beliefs, people will still adhere to their beliefs, and invent outrageous hollywood b grade movie plots to explain away solid evidence contrary to their beliefs. in order to preserve their beliefs, even when their beliefs are being directly challenged. instead of rethinking, people push back, even if it means pushing back against reality, with bizarre paranoid schizophrenic conspiracy theories
sometimes i think we're doomed
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"The statistical methods used, though arriving at correct results, are not optimal, and it is recommended futures studies involve professional statisticians if possible"
You would think that given the gravity of their findings, the seriousness they attribute to the situation, the huge nature of the changes they propose, the affect the actions will have on everyone, the potential devastation to the world economy, etc. etc., that they would have bothered to fucking hire a few professional statisticians . Shoddy and careless is what this is.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
That link, HARRY_READ_ME.txt, certainly is a trainwreck of bad organization, bad policy, bad procedure, bad communication, etc., but it's not an example of bad code. We'd have to see the code to say that. What I see from this document is not bad data or incorrect results - just horrific effort getting tools to work.
I see this with developers all the time who don't care enough about their code, its organization and its data - or are ignorant of why that's even important. I can totally see scientists being ignorant of IT and development best practice. Not excusing, just saying it's not as uncommon as many would think.
I agree with the CRU exoneration, however, that likely the results were correct but procedures were horrific. It looks like those guys were hacking around legitimate problems in their tools to produce their data - not manipulating their data.
Selah.ca. Pause, and calmly think on that.
the IPCC reports are the primary driver behind AGW believers. And while there definitely is some peer reviewed science in the IPCC reports, much of it isn't.
one sided?
not peer reviewed?
The one thing climategate did was expose just how "unsettled" the science actually is. The fact that they can't explain the recent temperature decline, and the fact that they've manipulated the presentation of the data to make the 90's heat wave appear drastic, when it actually falls within normal historical bounds, shows us that a much better understanding is required before they can conclude that we're doomed because of CO2 emissions.
The mathematician said, "Never."
The physicist said, "In an infinite amount of time."
The engineer said, "Well... in about a minute and a half, they'll be close enough for all practical purposes."
For example, "chaotic climate" doesn't mean "completely unpredictable climate". It means "prediction precision is limited to a particular range, though maximum and minimum expected values can be derived". Look at the Lorenz Attractor. You can't predict exactly what it'll do, but you can say "It'll be somewhere in this region of phase space."
For some mathematicians, anything less than an exact analytic solution is unacceptable. But engineers and others who have to actually deal with the real world tend to be more accepting of ranges of uncertainty and working heuristics.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Given the gravity of their findings, the seriousness they attribute to the situation, the huge nature of the changes they propose, the affect the actions will have on everyone, the potential devastation to the world economy, etc. etc., the AGW crowd has to meet the Gold Standard of scientific evidence.
They have to document every last fact, provide access to all the data, provide the means and methods they used to draw their conclusions, account for every oddity, inconsistency, and anything else that would cast doubt on their conclusions. Their case must be iron clad. They have answer their critics, no matter who they are, thoroughly and in a timely manner...again and again if necessary.
Every aspect of their work has to be meet the highest level of professional standards and scrutiny. You have a conclusion based on statical analysis? It had better be done by a PhD in Statistics. You have a conclusion based on thermodynamics? Only someone with a PhD in that discipline is acceptable. Preferably with decades of experience and unquestionable standing. Cobbling together a little bit of skills here and there is unacceptable, unprofessional , shoddy and careless. Too much you say? Too bad. The stakes are too high for anything less.
You want to change the world? You better fucking bring your A Game.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Wow. That's the exact opposite of what happened. Rather's methods and papers were reviewed by a panel and found to contain deliberate fraud. That's why he was fired from CBS.
...or are you also skeptical of evolution? Then you're just as gullible; you've likely been fooled by your church, or by the Discovery Institute's media machine.
Perhaps you're skeptical of gravity, also? That might be easy to disprove -- just fly.
Yes, scientists are asked to be skeptical of everything, and never claim to have proven anything. If you're skeptical in the scientific sense, of theories in the scientific sense, that's a good thing. If you're skeptical in the philosophical sense, that's some deep thought. But in a practical sense, if you're skeptical of one theory and not another simply because of personal preference, you're a moron.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
You've obviously never actually done any science.
Present something to a scientific audience and they spend the entire presentation looking for weaknesses. At the end someone, or several someones grill you, and they usually turn out to be eminent experts in the field. The questions they ask are even tougher if you agree with them. Last time I did this was yesterday.
I've heard there are some branches of science that aren't quite like this, but I've never actually seen one first hand, and most such reports are from dubious sources.
I'm not sure what the non-profit/governmental/academic status has to do with anything? Any group can have its own motivations or prejudices. Just because that group is non-profit/governmental/academic doesn't mean it isn't looking out for its own interests or for a larger agenda.