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Climategate and the Need For Greater Scientific Openness
The Guardian follows up on the recent news that CRU climate scientists were cleared of scientific misconduct with an article that focuses on how the controversy could have been avoided, and public trust retained, had the scientists made more of an effort to be open about their research. You may recall our discussion of a report from Pennsylvania State University; that was followed by another review with similar conclusions. Quoting:
"The review, led by Sir Muir Russell, does not mention the media. Instead, it examines the reaction of the scientists at the UEA's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) to the pressure exerted by bloggers: 'An important feature of the blogosphere is the extent to which it demands openness and access to data. A failure to recognize this and to act appropriately can lead to immense reputational damage by feeding allegations of cover-up.' The review adds: 'We found a lack of recognition of the extent to which earlier action to release information might have minimized the problems.' Pressure on the scientists, whose once esoteric work creating records of past temperatures had gained global significance, was intense. In 2005, CRU head Phil Jones replied to a request: 'We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?' But, the review implies, the more they blocked, the more the Freedom of Information requests flooded in."
Popper's notion of science is, frankly, obsolete. It was already obsolete when I was reading Philosophy of Science in the 1970s. He envisages a world in which falsifying an hypothesis invalidates a theory. But modern science - and this includes quantum mechanics as well as climatology - depends on statistical analysis and probability theory. You could almost say that when Schroedinger and Heisenberg defined the Uncertainty Principle and the probabilitistic Wave Equation, physics changed in a way that obsoleted Popper and the whole Victorian idea of science.
Jones is replying to people who don't want to take large amounts of data and mine them, but to find single errors and then claim that this invalidates the lot. He was actually right to tell them to get stuffed - but, because we live in a world dominated by PR and spin, this was misused against him. You are demonstrating the effect of this - you clearly have never read Popper, but you're trying to use a sound-bite as an argument.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
No, he just doesn't want a bunch of people funded by exxon-mobil selectively quoting tiny portions of his data to support bullshit positions,
Funnily enough, none of the people who asked for the data were funded by Exxon-Mobil. Its boring how facts get submerged by a straightforward lie.
Uh, except actually they were. It's not even particualry a secret-- take a look at who funds the "Heartland Institute" (Hint: Exxon Mobil). Google the "American Petroleum Institute".
For a while they were even offering a payment of ten thousand dollars to every scientist who published a paper casting doubt on global warming. (They stopped this when it got publicized in the Guardian.)
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
None of the people who asked for the data were amateurs. But more importantly, the data that Jones was trying to hide had already been lost - by Jones.
From Ars
Data they were trying to hide
"In order to test the principal allegations of withholding data and making inappropriate adjustments, the Review undertook its own trial analysis of land station temperature data. The goal was to determine whether it is possible for an independent researcher to (a) obtain primary data and (b) to analyse it in order to produce independent temperature trend results. This study was intended only to test the feasibility of conducting such a process, and not to generate scientific conclusions." In other words, if we can do it, anyone can.
They found that the data was readily available at at least three different websites. They downloaded the data, selected every station that had an adequate amount of data and performed some smoothing and spatial averaging operations on them. In effect, they replicated the CRU's main research results, producing nearly identical instrumental temperature records, in very little time.
Broken FoIA system
The key findings here are pretty bleak. Basically, the UEA logged FoIA requests, but that was about it. After that, everything was down to the individual researchers figuring out if the data had to be, or, indeed, should be released, and then figuring out how to release it properly. Essentially, the entire system was dysfunctional, and the CRU made no attempt to make life easier for anyone.
In my opinion, it seems like bureaucratic incompetence rather than malice or ideology.
Bullshit to your bullshit. Have you read anything on ClimateAudit? Steve McIntyre is not claiming to be a climatologist, but he had issues with the analysis and handling of proxy data. And none of these "inquiries" ever addressed those issues. In fact, he has had some success in getting corrections made to published work. How many inquires asked him about his complaints? I haven't seen any.
On top of that, Steve McIntyre has never claimed that his requests should be seen as a statement on climate change. Please don't take my word for it. Go to climate audit and read his own words.
The problem is that the tree rings accurately track temperatures until fairly recently, when some of the trees in some of the forests show "divergence," while others continue to correctly track temperature. So the trees do not merely diverge from the temperature record, but from one another.
Obviously, the fact that such divergence can occur limits confidence in the use of tree rings for climate reconstruction. On the other hand, it also shows that such divergence can be detected by comparing results from different forests. The fact that the historical tree ring data does not exhibit this kind of discrepancy between different sets of trees argues against divergence being a problem.
Here is a review that discusses the divergence problem and possible causes.
Bullshit. Steve McIntyre is NOT a climatologist, and neither is Anthony Watts.
Nope. Steve is a statistical analyst with a degree in mathematics and Anthony Watts is a meteorologist. The data was fed into statistical models. They were and are very well qualified and able to analyze what was done.
Which is why the Hockey Team was so mortally afraid of them that Jones and Co destroyed pertinent information requested under FOIA.
Quite what this has to do with politics only your psychiatrist can tell.
The real "problem" here is Steve's writing style. He tends to refer to things like "the divergence problem", and assume that you have read his earlier posts on the subject. He doesn't bother to re-explain them, but instead uses a shorthand way to refer to what he is talking about.
The "hide the decline" and "divergence problem" issues are this: A method was developed to use tree ring data as a proxy for past temperatures for which we have no measured temperature records. The "decline" or "divergence problem" is that the method proved to be unreliable when used to "measure" temperatures in the present - the real temperature record went one way, and the tree ring data went another way.
Rather than take the more scientifically reasonable position that this inconvenient truth invalidated the entire method, the "trick" they used to "hide the decline" was to just splice the actual temperature record onto the end of the proxy data, and present this patched together result as the result of their research. I do not find this scientifically defensible.
Steve McIntyre's area of expertise is in statistics, and the choice of the correct methods to apply to various kinds of data. It was McIntyre who discovered the mistake in Michael Mann's statistical methods that resulted in the now-discredited "hockey stick" graph that shows 20th Century temperature records as something unusual. He found that the statistical method used creates a hockey-stick type graph regardless of the data that is fed into it - tree-ring data, random numbers - it all comes out the same. Again, a valid scientific examination of the methods used. Peer-review did not uncover this fundamental flaw in Mann's research - it was McIntyre.
The material you quoted from Steve's site read perfectly as perfectly reasonable to me, but that is because I am familiar enough with his context to understand what it is he is referring to with his verbal shorthand. If you see the guy being interviewed on video you quickly realize that the only axe he has to grind is that he wants the climate scientists to do their jobs properly.
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