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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.
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."
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.
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.