Slashdot Mirror
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."
I think this demonstrates that the idealized version of the scientific method isn't always followed.
"Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?"
Because that is how science works. Any decent scientist would rather say "here is my data, please help me find something wrong with it."
"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?"
Because that's how science works, but you wouldn't know anything about that now would you?
Hey, I've got a response for you: Fuck the blogosphere.
There is sufficient transparency in the scientific community, but you know what? People have opinions in the community as well. They don't claim its science, they argue, they piss each other off behind closed doors, and they deserve to have their personal e-mails kept private. They aren't politicians -- they aren't accountable to the public, though they often do perform public services. But then they set it all aside, they publish their work to peer reviewed journals, and move towards some kind of consensus using common criterion. Demanding greater transparency (ie reduced privacy) because a small number of people from a much, much larger community made a poor judgement call (at best) is uncalled for.
And the blogosphere is not exactly what I would call a bastion of unbiased requests! For shame...
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
So the group that is at the center of the scandal performed an "independent" review of itself, and said we're all good here? Then they hype the press release letting everyone know they can be trusted again.
"Move along people, nothing to see here." Officer Barbrady
"These aren't the droids you're looking for". Obi Wan.
Um, that is precisely why. Do you even know how to spell the word "science", Phil?
From the Independent Climate Change E-mails Review Final Report pdf:
Intentionally supplying misleading figures is scientific misconduct. It may be commonplace, but that's no excuse.
Personally, that doesn't bother me much; science has always been politicized between factions who behave unethically in order to further their own theories. What does bother me is the attempt to pass off the results of incompetent software engineering as valid science.
The leaked communication, the content, and the attempts to delete them before they were found all indicate there was an attempt to cover up problems with the data. The problem now is that so many in the scientific community are vested in this process as a result of the funding competition, there's little room to trust at this point.
The ONLY way to have credibility is to make all the data available. However, now that we know they'll play games with the data I fear now that all we'll see is people more careful about laundering their data before releasing it.
To apply it to everyday life, how can the spouse of someone who has betrayed them ever really trust them again? These guys didn't even kiss us first, and they're free to continue doing what they've been doing again!
the research must be public as well. Anyone can claim anything, but without the proof to back up that claim it cannot be taken seriously.
In the case of climate research the data and finding are being used to form worldwide governmental policy, and as such it has an effect on every single person in the world. Therefore every person in the world has a right to view the data. It is critical that transparency throughout is maintained so that credibility does not suffer. Once credibility has been damaged, the research is no longer valid regardless of the factual content, as was the case of the boy who cried wolf.
The Guardian is having a debate on Climategate this Wednesday. Leading protagonists from the two sides of the debate are on the panel. Details are at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jun/30/guardian-debate-climate-science-emails
It was only a big deal to the paid US shills, there was no "loss of public trust".
Reasonable people listen to scientific consensus.
Sometimes People Say More Than They Mean To
As Dr Johnson almost said, a black intellectual is like a dog walking on its hind legs: it’s not done well, but you’re surprised to find it done at all. One of Britain’s most prominent black intellectuals is Trevor Phillips, the Chair of the Commission for Triangular Squares and Flying Pigs – better known as the Commission for Racial Equality. If Phillips’ intelligence matched his self-regard and self-righteousness, he’d be pushing back the frontiers of physics or computer science somewhere. But he’s black and it doesn’t, which means that he sometimes says more than he means to.
He recently wrote an article for The Independent, one of Britain’s two big liberal newspapers, arguing for the economic benefits of mass immigration and describing a recent trip he had made to the United States and Canada. One city he visited was failing, another was flourishing, and he explained the difference using immigration. The failing city hadn’t been blessed by it, the flourishing city had. This is how he put it – see if you can spot the blatantly racist conclusion he drew without realizing it:
Immigration in North America is really about economics. I spent much of last week there, starting on the banks of the Mississippi. In the small, African-American district of East St Louis, the only businesses that thrive are fast-food outlets and beauty parlours; the tax base is so low that 80 per cent of the city’s education spending comes from federal handouts. By contrast the city in which I ended my trip, Vancouver, lies at the heart of a dazzling growth surge in western Canada. One thing above all accounts for the transformation of this Pacific coast backwater into an economic success story: immigration. Nearly half of those who live in the city centre are immigrants, among them over 300,000 Chinese and 200,000 Indians.
Did you spot it? That’s right: Trevor Phillips, black head of the British Commission for Racial Equality, was complaining in one of Britain’s big liberal newspapers about lazy, dumb, good-fer-nothing niggers. A city with lots of blacks fails, because blacks are lazy and stupid and just want to fill their guts fast and look good so they can get sex. But a city with lots of Chinese and Indians flourishes, according to Phillips, because they’re clever and materialistic and work hard for themselves and for their children. And what would happen if East St Louis got lots of Chinese and Indian immigrants? The blacks would still be lazy and stupid, but now they’d have two new groups to feel envy and resentment towards, and two new groups would learn to hate and despise blacks. Something similar will already be happening in Canada: Vancouver’s surface glitter will hide a lot of racial tension, and when that glitter fades, as it inevitably will, the racial tension is going to turn nasty.
That’s a part of why White nations don’t need Chinese and Indian immigrants. Even if they “help the economy” in the short term, it’s better to be poor and racially healthy than rich and racially diseased. We can survive on our own; we cannot survive in company with other races. What Phillips and other blacks are asking us to do is build our own funeral pyre, soak it in kerosene, and then hand them the matches. Phillips & Co are on the funeral pyre too and they’re going to go up with us when they strike the match, but they’re dumb niggers and don’t quite get that part.
The people pulling their strings aren’t dumb though. White nations never voted for mass immigration and with the exception of greedy, selfish businessmen, never wanted it. Only the small Jewish minority wanted it, but Jews aren’t stupid and they got what they wanted.
You can see them regularly gloating over their success in The Independent and The Guardian, the other big liberal paper in Britain. In the latter, one David Aaronovitch wrote o
One of the problems that I see with the blogsphere is that it is a never ending trap. How much time will people who work on controversial topics now have to spend working on dealing with unending requests for data, of which very few people will understand either the facts or sometimes more importantly the context of the conclusions reached.
If I was one of the scientists putting my life and soul into researching something this important; and yes, the conclusions can go either way, but the research IS important; the last thing I would do is spend more than half my time to respond to useless requests by bloggers pretending to be journalists. Bloggers are opinion, not news. They need to be treated as such.
Bottom line - the reviewer ignores a very important point. If you're sitting on a scandal, the last thing you want to do is release all the gory details. You may catch flak for not being 'open', but that's better than being open AND giving your critics the ammunition they need to sink you. The current state of academic research has drifted farther and farther from what we call the 'scientific method'. Peer review is often a joke, and politics has way too much to do with things. We have people in academia producing research that is beyond bogus, but so long as they can find a few other bogus researchers to pat them on the back for it, the charade continues. It gets even worse when the people doling out the money have fiercely political agendas and encourage the bullshit with a paycheck. Newton, Hooke, et al are rolling over in their graves...
The scientists are going "why should I be releasing all this data which I spent 25 years on"... it's partly because of a "pride of ownership" and a desire to be first publisher (= status in the "community").. but there's several financial reasons why, too. These folks don't get huge budgets to do their work, and responding to those FOIA and similar requests takes some non-zero amount of time and effort, for which someone has to be paid. It's particularly grating to have to respond when some number of the recipients are not going to understand and either ask MORE questions (which need time and money to answer) or worse, to use the data incorrectly to try and get your already limited funding cut.
No wonder they go "bleh.. just ignore it and hope it goes away.. it's lose/lose"
This is particularly the case with older research. Today, many grants have a "must release raw data within (some small number of months)" and explicitly ask for your budget to do so as part of the application. But you still have the "do I spend my time doing research or doing explanations for the general public" resource allocation problem. There's also the cultural problem (as shown in the recent AAAS report) that many scientists consider "explaining" to be beneath them. Look at the scorn heaped upon "science popularizers". It used to be that there were dedicated science journalists with good writing skills and science knowledge who filled the gap between esoteric journal pubs and general public, but the budget for them has gone by the wayside. Science rarely fits in the "if it bleeds it leads" category, nor does it fit in the "watching the train wreck" voyeurism of the antics of Paris, Britney, and LiLo.
The three inquiries into the fraudulent science by Phil Jones, Michael Mann and others have all been political whitewashes. The alleged climate scientists involved in Climategate need to spend some quality time behind bars for they have perpetrated a number of obvious frauds and continue to do so, they used political methods to silence other scientists who had different results, they pass off poor statistical correlations as settled science (no such thing) when the Natural Null Hypothesis has better statistical correlation, even worse they have unnecessarily scared the global population with their doomsday soothsaying all driven by their own political agenda to secure additional funding (which they succeed at quite well for fear works to extract money from politicians who don't think critically especially those who live life basking in the internal brain drugged up endarkened ignorance of faith based beliefs).
It is a sad era for science. Richard Feynman would be rocking in his grave if he knew about this (and if dead people could rock in their graves but unfortunately biology tells us that dead parrots stay dead, oh wait that was monty python that tells us that, anyway I digress so back to the colorful expression of dead scientists rocking in their graves at a political white wash).
Richard Feynman had this to say on the topic of integrity of scientists:
"But this long history of learning how not to fool ourselves-of having utter scientific integrity-is, I'm sorry to say, something that we haven't specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope you've caught on by osmosis.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself-and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.
I would like to add something that's not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you're talking as a scientist. I am not trying to tell you what to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your girlfriend, or something like that, when you're not trying to be a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being. We'll leave those problems up to you and your rabbi. I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you are maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.
For example, I was a little surprised when I was talking to a friend who was going to go on the radio. He does work on cosmology and astronomy, and he wondered how he would explain what the applications of this work were. "Well," I said, "there aren't any." He said, "Yes, but then we won't get support for more research of this kind." I think that's kind of dishonest. If you're representing yourself as a scientist, then you should explain to the layman what you're doing-and if they don't want to support you under those circumstances, then that's their decision.
One example of the principle is this: If you've made up your mind to test a theory, or you want to explain some idea, you should always decide to publish it whichever way it comes out. If we only publish results of a certain kind, we can make the argument look good. We must publish both kinds of results.
I say that's also important in giving certain types of government advice. Supposing a senator asked you for advice about whether drilling a hole should be done in his state; and you decide it would be better in some other state. If you don't publish such a result, it seems to me you're not giving scientific advice. You're being used. If your answer happens to come out in the direction the government or the politicians like, they can use it as an argument in their favor; if it comes out the other way, they don't publish it at all. That's
Although this article esquire.com - marc morano is admittedly pop-media, it demonstrates that most of the fault here lies with reporting, not the science or even the scientists. The researchers at UEA have been doing the best job of measuring and analyzing that anyone can, yet when they are harassed by payed pundits and gadflys the objectivity of the media is completely lost. Even now that the researchers have been cleared of any professional wrongdoing, they are still being criticized (or apologized for) because they expressed frustration that their work was being misrepresented. If we should take away any message from this incident, it should be concern about how easily information can be corrupted in the public mind, even at times when clear public debate is critically important. Case in point: The Guardian is not the most balanced news outlet, and often has a sensationalist agenda of it's own.
It's easy to respond to such requests - just publish your raw data in the same place you publish your conclusions. This is *not* a budget thing.
Up until the time of Galileo in Europe, the Pope pretty much got to say what was and was not true. If the Pope said that moon was made of shit, that was the truth. Galileo , and the scientist that followed, OTOH, pretty much said that Goad made the world, and an average person could know the world and the nature of god by careful observation, and even formulate that nature through mathematics. Since the creator and creation were the same, any discrepancy between previous writing ad observations had to be in the interpretation of the writing, since god and the creation were the same, and words were subject to error. Note that this was the same thing that was being said by the emerging protestant. That the pope was not infallible.
The problem was that the Pope and the Church were political institutions, so were not interested in reality, only power, so they could not let the scientists take the power. This is pretty much is happening today with various religious institutions. There is too much money to be made in telling people what to believe. This is why they catholic church lies about condoms. This is why many protestant churches lie about the nature of evolution of people. God and the Creation are one. God is not going to lie to us, only men born of original sin are going to do that. No matter how holy a man thinks he is, there is still original sin that prevents him from being as honest as the observable fact and repeatable experiment. When I tell a child that he acceleration is proportional to force applied, that is knowledge given to us directly from the creation. When the church says the earth is only a few thousand years old, that is lie given directly from corrupt men who would rather have a ignorant laborer that will tithe to the church and let the priest hire gigolos than a productive creative person who can make all our lives better.
This is no says anything about the various religions as an institution, merely the corrupt men who cannot see the sin within themselves.
Then there is the secular side of greed and corruption. The people who put money and wordily goods in front of everything else, including annoying facts based in reality. These are the people who say smoking causes no significant damage. Or oil is not fossil-fuel and therefore there will be an endless supply. Or that McDonalds is food. Of that the Germans in WWII did not kill nearly as many people as some say. These lies are often wrapped in religion, because a lie wrapped in a perceived truth is easier to swallow, and because the church is always willing to form alliances that will increase it's power, but this has nothing to do with religion. This has to do with people who want money at any cost. If we are affecting climate, then we should do something about, which could put the powerful out of business. Other people will become wealthy, but the current aristocracy will but put in jeopardy. If is just like when people no longer believed that King was chosen by god. We all benefited, but the King suffered. This is the nature of the world. The few in power will lie and cheat and steal and watch the peasant suffer, all the while claiming devine intervention.
Which is not to say that human has any significant influence over climate change, only more research will show the validity of that. No, this is just to say that the church and the cooperate aristocracy have a lot to lose anything there is shift in social norms, and therefore they will go to any means to stop it, and they have many more resources, in form of brainwashed people and money, than the few that are simply trying to study and understand the creation.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Let's have a cutsie-wootsie name for EVERYTHING. First, twitter and now CLIMATEGATE!!! Mod me up.
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."
The inquests were largely carried out by the university. They focused on studies that were specifically chosen to be investigated by the university.
What's more the entire scope of the article was changed (at the request of the university again) from studying the science behind the reports (and if the scientific process was subverted) to looking simply looking at the conduct of the people writing the report.
You can charge cost for responding to requests. Both for the man power and any physical costs. It's for cases like this where there's a risk of them being harrassed through FOIA requests this clause was put it.
Rather than exercise their legal right, they thought they could just pick and choose who they could give information to.
This is like what, the third time they have had to come out and tell us that the Phil Jones and crew are cleared of all wrong doing?
Why aren't they back at their posts then?
I predicted they would do, none other than 3 very public "Nothing to see here...move along" sort of PR stunts like this back in October when I posted my response on slashdot when this whole scam was blow by an insider who followed the money trail.
Rubbish all of it.
If anyone is really interested, take a look at the work most of the scientists that were Black Balled in the Emails that were leaked (Jones lists them) (which you can get anywhere on the internet) and look at the research they are doing.
I think you will find some problems with the idea of man made warming, although they do find a slight warming trend that is consistent with Historical Solar flux. (11 Year Sun Spot Cycles) and the gradual changes in the earths orbital and processional characteristics.
It is a MONEY SCAM. Al Gore is a partner in one of the firms that setup the entire idea of a Global Tax on carbon.
The best way to start cleaning up this planet, is to start giving the damn Nobel Prize to people who actually contribute something to the science to protect this planet.
Not some idiot like Al Gore.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Of course there's the problem of those private emails revealing naked attempts to massage what qualifies for peer review and who qualifies as a peer to do the reviewing.
You're aware that the papers that Jones was referring to when he said he would "keep them out somehow" from the IPCC report were, in fact, not kept out, and did appear in the report?
This was, basically, a frustrated scientist blowing off steam in a private conversation. Out of a thousand stolen e-mail messages, one of them was frustrated and hot-tempered. Turns out, scientists actually are human.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
One of their columnists (George Monbiot, with a degree in biology), wrote an article demanding Jones's resignation before any proper investigation of the leaked emails had taken place. He has subsequently written what I consider to be a very grudging retraction. I myself feel rather strongly that the Guardian has, on this issue, a poor record of balance and has shown a serious lack of understanding of science and scientists, and a failure to explain the background properly to its readers. More worrying still, it appears to be printing what look like advertorials for Apple products without labelling them as such, which also looks somewhat unbalanced. Much as I hate to say it, being a Brit (not really - I'm very willing to admit it) the NYT has a much better record on this.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
They won't be asked to give the grant money back. After all, the findings were in line with the sponsors of the research, so it was money well spent. In fact, preserving the value of that investment requires a whitewash that negates the need to ask for a refund. How convenient.
Spin or no spin, we still have those pesky little e-mails. And the miscalculations and misrepresentations (the hockey stick). And the publishing of baseless blogs as proven research (the Himalayan melting debacle). You would think that with all these errors, at least one of them would understate climate change instead of overstate it. What an incredible coincidence that all of the errors fall one way.
The whitewash works well enough to serve its purpose. Nobody gets fired and they can keep the money. But the unintended side effect is that credibility will not be restored anytime soon.
I don't think either side of the climate debate has "clean hands". There is no shortage of biased research on either side. The question is: What (if anything) should be done about climate change if the proof is less than absolute and the fastest growing economies (China and India) are preparing to pick up the slack for any voluntary reductions that might take place elsewhere? In other words: How stupid to they think we are?
No amount of research will change the fact that we are globally on course to do nothing, regardless of what the North America and Europe decide to do or not do. The developing world will not participate without handouts, which they will ultimately use for activities that generate CO2.
Climate change might be a total scam. I sure hope so, because I have yet to see a solution that can overcome the political/economic obstacles. Anyone who thinks the answer is a whitewash followed by a money grab is sure to be disappointed.
Its always about $$$ and the false idea that money will solve the problem. Lets just tax everyone to death and we can solve global climate change. This turns me sceptical to the point that I want nothing else to do with climate change. You have the Al Gores of the world setting themselves up to cash in on the climate change movement together with many of the large corporations, all frothing at the bit to cash in on climate change. While this remains the focus of climate change I'm not having anything to do with it. I'd really appreciate it if some of these top scientist can focus on demonstrating to the general public in a way that is understandable by the general public how they have proven that the climate change is the result of MANS interference with nature and not some cyclical climatic movement that has been going on for millions of years. Is this so hard for them to do, to clearly just give us the proof in a way we can understand and accept.
Transparency is the rule in well-done science. But having done university research, it is not like a research group has a compliance department to make sure everything is stored in just-and-so a form and archived in storage media good for at least 20 years. But when science is being done for the purposes of enlightenment of scientists the degree of searching inquiry is fairly low. Now, when someone takes their science and invites worldwide scrutiny by insisting that the world economy has to turn on his results, those ordinary processes fail. If this science is going to be steering trillons of dollars it has to be subject to vetting sufficient to show that decisions of that magnitude should rest on those results. Probably a level to make what FDA does to review potential drugs and inspect manufacturing facilities look like child's play. But let's face it. These guys were doing a lot of work when their mothers didn't care. Much less the world. And, yes, people are going to be disappointed when the research gets audited. Gosh knows my research would have looked bad with that level of scrutiny. Whatever happened was within the ordinary range of scientific research. And I am sure certain of the involved players look back in retrospect and see that they could have done better. But that is 20/20 hindsight, not prior misbehavior. All that doesn't answer the question of whether all of this is good enough to make multi-trillion dollar decisions. But it explains why the things that are happening are happening.
From the section titled Reasons Why This Is Bad, Even If You're Not a Troll:, ninth bullet point:
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
So all of their private conversations are suddenly public record because they get paid with tax dollars?
And you are saying ALL emails sent by the president should not be public record?
Or in fact should we be allowed to see emails pertaining to the tax dollars spent?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It was only a big deal to the paid US shills
Says the paid Warmist shill (after all, if anyone who disagrees with you is paid then anyone who disagrees with them must be paid. Makes as much sense as your theory).
So rather than taking the word of you, the handsomely paid shill, ahow about we poll the public?
Oh, somebody did.
Looks like in fact public trust took a giant hit. But then as a paid shill one of your favorite past-times is "hiding the decline", apparently in any form.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"I was classed as a madman, a charlatan, outlawed in a world of science that previously honored me as a genius! Now here in this forsaken jungle hell, I have proven that I am all right!"
Video excerpt of his discussion with Prof. Vladimir Strowski:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZPI2Z0Pv_A
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Or even worse, amateurs who do not know how to read the data using it to 'prove' nonsense.
As opposed to those using the data for public reports with an amateur understanding of statistics doing statistical analysis of data?
Why is that OK with you? And why is it NOT OK to lat "amateurs" like Richard Feynman who may not be amateur at all in some tangentially related field access to the data? Because that is who you are blocking along with the rest of the "amateurs".
People like you are going to have to get used to true experts who simply lack a degree in the field in question. The small blip of time where the presence of a degree is the end-all of understanding of a topic is a historical aberration. And it's not even like "climatologists" as a degree has been around very long at all.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
.
Another feature of the blogsphere is that it gives a loud megaphone to anyone who has the intelligence to type, and many who do not.
Internal communications of the IPCC to authors of the scientific review now say the following:
As a climate scientist and a computer scientist and an advocate for openness and replicability my position is greatly weakened by people using "openness" as an excuse for harrassment and witch-hunting.
The inevitable short result of this approach to openness is going to be that scientists will do as much work as possible on their laptops and their yahoo email accounts. Using their funded platforms will be only for production runs and final drafts of publications; this will minimize the amount of exposure of their actual work to hostile parties. We will also see far fewer really good people getting into work with any controversy, lest they be subjected to public abuse; eventually only work of little consequence will attract the intellectually adventurous.
I really want the open science movement to be about making science more accessible and more appealing and more part of the culture. This subversion of the open science movement in the name of derailing climate science, which in turn hides the real intent of delaying climate policy until all the fossil reserves are cashed in, is a disaster on more fronts than one. One unfortunate aspect is that it drives important segments of the scientific community to treat the open science movement as a threat to science. Advocates of open science would do well to think twice about the motivations and actions of this gang.
mt
Anybody still thinking that the global warming crap is about the environment is freakin' stupid. Follow the money, suckers.
The Problems with Al Gore
By David Deming, geophysicist and associate professor of arts and sciences at the University of Oklahoma
"After declaring that temperatures inside the Earth are 'several million degrees,' Gore claimed that we have 'new drill bits that don't melt in that heat.' How can anyone be so remarkably ignorant as to think we have metallurgical techniques capable of producing drill bits that don't melt in temperatures of 'several million degrees'"?
Gore's TV appearance and whole article here:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/05/the_problems_with_al_gore.html
Woman Who Invented Credit Default Swaps is One of the Key Architects of Carbon Derivatives, Which Would Be at the Very CENTER of Cap and Trade
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/12/woman-who-invented-credit-default-swaps.html
Could it be that 3 independent enquires came to a conclusion, upon examining the evidence, that did not validate your gut reaction?
"Reasonable people listen to scientific consensus."
There are two types of scientific results:
1. FACT: data and calculations that are verifiable
2. THEORY: hypothesis which allows people to take data and come up with answers based on the theory.
"Consensus" seems to be a % vote on the results of THEORY, where 51% is allowed to be defined as calling THEORY = FACT.
Something is HORRIBLY wrong with "consensus".
Here's a question that's never answered: the Climate Research Unit's email server was hacked, correct?
So where are the hackers?
Where's the outcry, the calls for the guilty party to be found and punished? What about the blog that received stolen property and leaked it without first going to the authorities? All the "heh heh, manbearpig" comments aside, the media sure was quick to blow some cranky comments by stressed out, human scientists out of proportion while conveniently ignoring this part of the whole sequence of events. You know, the hacking part of hacked emails?
But anyways, correct decision here. Of course, does anyone wonder why scientists are reluctant to open their findings in this environment?
I'll be honest, we're throwing science against the wall to see what sticks. -Cave Johnson
Fine idea. In fact, the data sets are publicly available for download from multiple sources. Which raises the fascinating question of "why an FOIA request?"
However, let's assume that sending a letter with an FOIA request by snail mail has some practical merit (or even just satisfies a fetish). Who funds the process of replying? FOIA requires quite a bit of paperwork, if nothing else. "Here are some Google search terms, download it yourself" doesn't cut it. I suppose you could demand that those same tax dollars have a blank check attached for replying to FOIA requests, but if not then you're in "unfunded mandate" territory.
How do you feel about unfunded mandates?
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
When I read the summary, I was wondering just how in the comments those who have been making excuses for the "scientists" who would not let anyone review data. I mean, with a quote so plain, bold and absurd how could anyone possibly make excuses for the "scientists" who would not let real peer-review happen?
Well thanks to your post, now we know. It's apparently because only the "right" kind of peer can see the data. I can see a mind like yours, a century prior, arguing that the data shouldn't be released because women might try to look at it and get all confused.
And as a side note, "Fuck You" is never a valid response to any question covering scientific study. Lest the students here be confused and a new era of obscenity in response to criticism is tolerated or becomes the new norm.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's an interesting exercise. Bring up Feynman in a climate change discussion and watch Feynman and you get beaten up.
They really hate Feynman.
Ideals are just that: goals for which to strive. They are not standards expected to be met.
Right, because there should be no "standards" in science.
I've taken the liberty of correcting the rest of your post to reflect what actually happened:
"However, as we've seen with this recent hoax that was perpetrated by climate "scientists" (a field hardly yet formed) and then promoted heavily by the corporate media, there are those that would act in bad faith in order to protect their grants or political agenda, no matter the cost to the people of the world.
The least I would have expected, though, in light of the evidence showing that this climate-gate scandal was scientists trumped-up attacks on other scientists perpetrated by the alternative-energy industry and those with related financial interests, faux-conservatives and the left-wing media, was that MSM would have taken the time to clarify for their viewers the problems with scientists not allowing other scientists to review data, and the many forms that scientific "falsification" can take when you are trying to prove a pre-concieved point rather than do real scientific research. After all the air time they spent on this story trying to pretend there was no story, The MSM owes those men and women (and their own viewers) an apology for having misled them and trying to cover up the scandal as long as possible (and even now continues to make excuses for them)."
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The blogosphere needs to stuff it. If they really think they can understand anything in the world without subject-specific training and education, if they think their arguments should be taken as seriously and responded to with the same frequency as in-channel discussion, and if they think reputation in their sphere is the most important kind of reputation, they're deluded. You find the same idiots digging out a law book, arguing about terms of art as if they were common-speak versions of the term, ignoring the weight of history and legal philosophy that governs the sphere, and thinking they have some great insight. It's a good thing they don't crack medical books, or we'd have the geeks following the homeopaths into placebo-land.
In academia, science is open. It's not perfect, but it works, and the fringe science is kept roughly at the right distance where on the one time in ten thousand they have a good idea, it can be tested by the mainstream and maybe eventually join the broad scientific consensus. If you want a publication, you can get it. If you want data, you can probably get that too. If you don't think a study is valid, reproduce it under the same or slightly different circumstances. You have to know what you're doing or the journals will weed you out.
People outside of the research community should tone down their hubris and get comfortable with the fact that to be qualified to talk about something, they should become educated about it first and be prepared to deal with the way the scientific community works. Until then, they're best off relying on the broadest scientific consensus they can find on whatever topic is at hand.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
How about starting with the total decommissioning of our nuclear weapons? We spend about 8 billion dollars on each nuclear submarine. Has anyone been asked to present a post-Cold War case for ever having one of those?
Considering the use they are seeing around Iran right now and the obvious to all usefulness as a result, that was probably the poorest analogy you could make. Not to mention you jumped suddenly between nuclear WEAPONS and submarines POWERED BY NUCLEAR ENERGY, which may also have nuclear weapons onboard...
You come off rather unhinged, arguing that instead of clean nuclear submarines we should instead be using noisy polluting diesel submarines instead. And in an article on climate change no less! Those Nuclear Submarines you wish had never bee made have done more to reduce carbon emissions than you ever will.
If you don't think that's worth 8 billion dollars, then you really are not going to like what is coming down the pike...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
which is why everything the police do is completely transparent and open to the public.
Just to be clear, you are saying in this instance it's OK "because other people are doing it".
And you fully approve of people like the police not being transparent too as a result..
I invite you to consider a word definition that may be of some relevance to you since I doubt you truly hold that stance on the police in general being closed.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Real science, as Feynman accurately pointed out, is a process of TRYING to prove you are wrong. You come up with a theory that explains the relationships you seen in nature. You then think "Ok, what could make this wrong?" You start testing that. Each time you try to prove it wrong and fail, well looks more like maybe the theory is right. Or, if a test does prove your theory is wrong, then maybe you discover that you need to alter they theory, or perhaps the theory only works in some circumstances and another, more detailed theory is needed to cover everything. No matter how venerated the theory is, it needs to be tested. That's the point.
An example I like to use is Newton's Laws. They are wrong, we know this. They make predictions that are incorrect... Ok but they are still used. Why? Well because more accurately what we discovered isn't they they are wrong, just that they are a simplification. If you put some constraints on their use, like anything less than a planet in size and larger than an atom, it turns out they are dead on accurate. You can go out and to as much precision as you care to measure, find that they are correct here on Earth. So through further observation and testing we found out that Newton's laws are an extremely useful simplification, that works on the scale human usually work on. However more detailed laws, like say, General Relativity, are needed to explain everything. Even that now proves to be inadequate hence things like quantum gravitation.
The only reason we are discovering this is because we keep seeking new knowledge, and testing existing theory. Newton's Laws are not held as immutable fact. So we discover new things, test the laws against them and say "Huh, that doesn't work. They predict X but we are getting Y." Test some more and sure as shit, they don't work for this case. A new explanation is needed.
So any time a scientist whines that what you are trying to do is disprove their stuff, well that makes me question if they really are a scientist. Con men are the kind of people who don't want their assertions tested. They want to show you some information and then based on that you accept everything they tell you, no questioning. They are resistant and even hostile to any attempt to disprove it. Generally, because they know they are conning you and it'll come out.
A scientist should welcome those that seek to examine their research and challenge it. Either the challenge will fail, in which case you can be more certain you've got a correct theory, or it'll succeed and give you new avenues to look down to try and find the correct theory. No matter what, you get additional useful information.
Real science is all about questioning and reexamining accepted fact. As such it needs to be welcomed, not feared.
Some of the data that was FOIA'd was from third parties, under license (eg the Russian weather records) and so wasn't CRU's to release.
From the very same article you linked to:
Ross McKitrick, an environmental economist at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, argues the review missed the point of criticisms regarding the deletion of tree-ring data after the 1960s. "It gave the false impression that all proxy graphs follow the twentieth-century records," he says. "But given that they do not, the question is how accurate were they in tracking temperatures in past centuries -- did they miss warming in the past too?"
Couldn't you even be bothered to read to the end of the article?
If they were intentionally misleading the public, why had the same graph already been published with the missing information?
"If they were intentionally misleading the public, why would they omit the data from a later publication with much wider circulation?"
Do you realize how silly you sound when in context?
The evidence of your post tells me that the misrepresentation of facts doesn't seem to bother you at all..
Given your selective quoting of the article you gave and careful spin of publishing graphs later with important data omitted, Pot Meet Kettle is about all I have to say about you.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Publishing raw data attracts little public attention as numbers are boring. Most web-based user interfaces (that I have found) for examining climate data cater to climate scientists and researchers. The results (typically streams of numbers) are great for further analysis, but not so great for the general public.
Exacerbating the problem is that influences on the data are complex, and rarely explained in detail for the layperson.
Such problems make it difficult to explore the data and understand the results. The following web site is my entry for a government-sponsored contest where I have attempted to address both those issues:
http://www.whitemagicsoftware.com/software/climate/
I would greatly appreciate your feedback.
They don't want the "guilty party" found and punished. They want the controversy to die away without ever having to discuss the material in detail. The *last* thing they want is an impartial look at the *entire* contents of the data of which the "leak" was only a small extract. Note that the so-called "inquest" never examined the data, nor the processes. Nor did they take testimony from any skeptics, however qualified. There is absolutely no excuse for not opening their findings, regardless of the environment, and regardless of the nature or motives of any possible skeptics who might want to look at it.
Science isn't a priesthood where you must reach a certain level of trust, experience, or whatever to be allowed in. It is open to all, and all have the potential to contribute. My favorite story along those lines is a 9 year old girl that debunked aura readers. The people said "I can feel your aura!" She said "Ok then you stuck your hands through this partition and I'll put my hand over one of yours, you tell me which." Results were taken and tabulated, readers couldn't do it (did a bit worse than chance actually). It was a complete, valid, experiment, has been referenced later and retested, and an elementary student came up with it.
Now that doesn't mean anyone will have USEFUL commentary, but it doesn't mean that people should be excluded just because they aren't an "expert".
In particular, someone may not be an expert at the given science, but might be an expert at something related that is important. So you have a document on climate and a mathematician wants to examine it. He knows jack and shit about climate, he usually doesn't even know what the weather is. However he knows math inside and out. He goes, examines your research and says "Wait a sec, this is wrong. The math here doesn't work. These numbers do not come out right." He can't analyze the climactic theories, but found out that the conclusion was incorrect because the data had been processed wrong. Or perhaps a philosopher who is very skilled at formal logic and analyzing arguments reads the research and says "Ok hang on, you have a gap in your logic. The conclusion does not follow the premises as stated here." Again he not an expert in the field, but he's an expert in logic.
It is highly important that people of different disciplines be allowed to look at research, in particular when said research is very complex. When you are talking about something that is based off of a lot of math conducted on thousands of points of raw data, that is the sort of thing that is ideal to being in "non-experts" on. Get mathematicians, statisticians, probably some cryptography experts (recognizing patterns in randomness is their thing) to look at the data. They might not be able to understand the climate science, but they can analyze the data and the math and say "This calculation is solid," or "This calculation is incorrect." Looking at the parts of the whose with their given expertise can be as or more valuable than trying to look at the whole thing. The climate scientist might look at the whole thing and say "Ya, all the science fits," but only because they assume all the math is right. If the math is wrong then they might say "Oh, well this no longer shows what it says it does."
Ten grand per paper? And this compares to the government funding of warmist science by what, a factor of 1 to 1000? 1 to 100,000?
We don't get paid by paper. We get funding to research a specific things. And a whole lab might get a funding of a few million for a subject, over a few years, but nobody PERSONALLY get that much money as a scientist. That's not even counting the TIME spent on doing that paper. So take your 1 to 1000 factor and stuff it. 10 grand per paper is an ENORMOUS sum of money for the average scientist.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
What's really disturbing about this whole thing is that the very methods of science are under attack. Peer review is reduced to an "ol'-boys" network in the minds of the willfully ignorant.
And those who have political, ideological reasons--not genuine, well-considered scientifically empirical doubts--are screaming the loudest.
While I wouldn't necessarily compare Jones or Mann to the brilliance of Einstein, we've been down this road before.
http://www.mathpages.com/home/kmath627/kmath627.htm
How to respond?
I suppose you could define it that way locally, but in general "consensus-driven" processes (for instance standards work) require supermajorities. The ones I'm familiar with start with "2/3 of the votes" and then require that all opposing views be addressed. In extreme cases, it's defined as "no substantive objections," or in other words practically unanimous. The only reason they're not "everyone gets a veto" is because that's just too open to abuse, so you get the "all objections fairly addressed."
Now, the question is how close the "climate science consensus" is to the latter vs. your 50% + 1 vote. Do you have anything to add on that point?
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
They weren't "cleared" at all, they where declared cleared by the same jerks who keep pushing their political agenda. Anyone who has honestly followed this story knows full well about the malfeasance and bad science that went on.
These people at the very top have a political and economic agenda that they will and are pushing regardless of any science, part of that is to institute some global carbon cap and trade conjob, and segue into some heinous global government, using that as part of the excuse. It's a pure scam, another wall street and city of london bailout, a huge grand theft in the making of money and power. It's worth trillion$, and that influences a lot of politicians and institutions who get grants, let alone individual scientists.
The science is *not* settled. The science was tainted and needs to be thrown out and a new effort started from scratch, totally open this time. Until then, the bulk of us, the people who pay taxes, are highly suspicious of these dubious claims, especially now with such obvious whitewashing of events.
I was a fence sitter, completely content to look at the evidence, with a bias towards wanting cleaner energy anyway, but i really wanted more proof about CO2 levels and so on. When it became very clear the evidence was massaged left right up and down and sideways, that they completely wanted to eliminate any solar influences, or ignore typical long term cycles, and that that scam cap and trade deal was the main part of it, that this was going to be the grand "solution" for AGW, well, forget it, I can spot a conjob and lie, and millions of others can and did as well. Busted! They should be ashamed of this, it's an obvious cover up and spin damage control effort. I have zero respect for the parties involved any longer, typical high level corruption, white lab coats or not. Liars and crooks are liars and crooks, it matters not a bit if they have some letters next to their name, they can't keep hiding behind that forever.
I'm far removed from the climate debate, relatively uninformed on it, and rarely think about it. But the one part that did get my attention was the leaked email in which the head of the research unit told other researchers that data should be deleted rather than released as required by FOIA laws. Has there ever been an adequate explanation for this? To me, this directive sounds much more compatible with a white collar criminal than with someone who should continue to be respected and funded with public money.
None of this tells me anything about the validity of climate research findings as a whole, but my layman's opinion is that it does tell me this particular researcher has lost his perspective and needs either to be helped to refind it, or removed from any further continued public financing.
The deniers should be open about the spources of their funding, for example.
It's worth noting that the committee cleared CRU of charges that they improperly destroyed or manipulated the data, or withheld data or computer code needed to check their conclusions. In fact the committee went to the unusual extreme of actually independently requesting the data from public archives and national weather services, recreating CRU's analysis based upon the published description, and reproducing CRU's conclusions.
In the process, the committee proved that the accusations of certain bloggers that CRU was withholding critical data and code required to check their conclusions were false. From the report:
In this respect, the report supports Jones's view that the repeated Freedom of Information demands were abusive and unnecessary for any legitimate scientific review of his work. However, the committee also found that "CRU was unhelpful and defensive and should have responded throughout to requests for this information in a more timely way." However justified Jones may have been in his sense of outrage, his decision to stonewall played into the hands of his critics, and helped them to create a false impression that CRU had something to hide.
If you have someone who claims to be an expert in mathematics, atmospheric science, oceanography, meteorology, physics, and the many other fields involved in something like this I call bullshit. You can't be an expert in everything, there isn't time nor do humans have the capacity. We specialize.
So if you go and say that only "climate scientists," something that I might add is a new term and none of the major ones have a degree in as there weren't degrees in it, can participate, well then you've gone and created a priesthood. If you say "You have to be a climate scientist to participate and we get to decide what a climate scientist is," then it is a priesthood, a "good old boys club" or what not. You are internally saying who can and can't participate, it will not be objective.
You have to remember that many of the "non-experts" who were asking for the data were people like Anthony Watts (a meteorologist) and Steve McIntyre (a mathematician). Now I'm not saying these guys don't have an agenda (but you are kidding yourself if you think the climate scientists don't as well) I am just saying they have relevant expertise. Saying "They aren't climate scientists," is disingenuous at best.
Also, in any free and open exchange of information, as science is supposed to be, you have to deal with the fact that there is going to be noise, there are going to be people who comment without understanding, etc. However that is necessary to prevent the greater problem of a closed system where a group decides what is "right," what they should and shouldn't know, and tells everyone else. We've seen that, it is called the Catholic Church and it doesn't work so well.
Finally, when you start talking something with massive public policy implications, something that could impact everyone in a major way, well then everyone has a right to know. Their opinions on it may not be informed, but they have a right to learn about it, if they choose, and come to their own conclusions. You don't have a right, at least not in any free culture, to say "No, you have to accept our conclusions, you may not reexamine how we came to them, this is right and you cannot argue with that."
Hey, moron, if you had read the report, you would have noticed that the commission independently recreated the research and arrived at substantially similar conclusions as the CRU.
Mart
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
I would not call it a megaphone. It's more like a narcissist's microphone. I had never heard of some of these blogs before the climategate scandal broke, due probably to the fact that most of them are so batshit-crazy-insane that they couldn't convince a reasonable person the sky was blue.
I'm not sure why any reasonable scientist would consider these bloggers their peers. They aren't. The only people who pay attention to the anti-AGW bloggers are the press, and only when they need a story to sell. Most people, even those skeptical of AGW (such as myself), do not consider any of the arguments bloggers put forth to be worth the time spent reading them. Even though there are merits to skepticism of AGW, you'll seldom find a reasonable, intelligent, or informed discussion in the blogosphere. For that, you actually have to read what the scientists have published, and work with the data yourself.
I do follow a blog. However, it's only because the blogger - Bruce Schneier, is already a recognized authority on security. Yet some people think if they post something online that:
I don't have a blog. I know better; I know there are problems and solutions in software engineering, and I like to think myself rather accomplished in the field. Yet for all this, I recognize that posting my day to day reflections on my experiences with software engineering, while perhaps entertaining, would bring very little new or insightful to the field. If I do have something insightful to say, I'll write a book and publish it. Maybe online. But honestly, nobody's going to think me an authority on software engineering because I complain about the same problems that have plagued the industry for years. When I have a solution, I'll let you know. Until then, I'm not going to waste your time. Yet the aforementioned points seem lost on most bloggers.
No one cares to hear what I would post on a blog. No one cares about what you would post, either - unless, of course, you are already an authority in your field. A blog is much more often a sign of the author's personal narcissism than a medium for the intelligent exchange of ideas.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Jones should take a lesson from Richard Lenski (see)
http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2008/06/lenski-gives-co.html
There is an answer that makes a lot of sense. He too has spent 20+ years generating data.
There is legitimate concern that the data would be 'misquoted'. However Jones' answer leaves a lot to be desired.
Compare to Lenski's answer where he does agree to provide data (and perhaps samples?) to legitimate requests.
Even if the request is from a news organization you suspect is out to disprove your conclusions, that is not in itself a valid reason to refuse. If you want your conclusions to be put into action in the real world (i.e. political decisions regarding car emissions, carbon taxes etc.) you should be prepared to go through the political process. Messy perhaps, but necessary.
softcoder.
Indeed, either they now have it wrong, or they did less than a century ago, when they concluded that the trend was towards "cooling".
Myth: In the '70s, the best scientific knowledge indicated that the Earth's climate was headed for a trend of long-term cooling, rather than warming.
Fact: The 1970s global cooling scare was little more than a runaway media circle jerk.
The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus (PDF)
A more TL;DR-friendly article on the topic
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
No, they didn't. And I quote from the Muir Russell report, Introduction, paragraph 8: "It is important to note that we offer no opinion on the validity of their scientific work." Furthermore, upon re-reading the report, I find nowhere that they indicate that they even attempted to independently analyse or recreate the research done by the CRU.
How about a review on the fuckers who feel entitled to crack systems and steal communique?
You could almost say that when Schroedinger and Heisenberg defined the Uncertainty Principle and the probabilistic Wave Equation, physics changed in a way that obsoleted Popper and the whole Victorian idea of science.
Er, no, you couldn't.
Popper did indeed err: Science cannot be so black-and-white. Popper thought that all theories should be such that you could point to some conceivable event such that it flips the theory from "not disproved" to "false".
Okay, that's clumsy. Instead, he should have said that theories should be such that you can point to conceivable events that reduce (or increase) the probability we assign to them. You don't toss out General Relativity because some newbie did a klutzy experiment, in other words.
The basic point nonetheless holds: real science -- the science we should care about for purposes of predicting the future -- can be refuted by reality. Yet people -- like you -- seem to think that the refinement of his position to a probabilistic one somehow means we get to ditch the idea of falsifiability altogether, and that they're so smart because they can nitpick Popper and -- hooray! -- show off their little knowledge of quantum mechanics.
Um, no. To the extent that Popper was wrong, it doesn't affect the point about the scientific method being made here: other people need to be able to look at your data and see if it has the probabilistic relationship with your theory that you claim it does. And sure, if you make a prediction and a few points are off, we don't get to toss our your theory. But the skeptics weren't claiming any such thing, or thinking that one tiny error necessarily invalidates everything related to climate research.
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.
Yeah, I sure hate when people make sound-bites out of complex topics, don't you? Like if they said that the probabilistic nature of QM predictions invalidates the whole concept of falsifiability.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
why is it NOT OK to lat "amateurs" like Richard Feynman
He's been dead for twenty fucking years hasn't he? Oh the scandal! How dare they deny Zombie Richard Feynman access to data from beyond the grave?
Just what the hell planet are you on where the CRU at UAE somehow travelled back in time to deny RF access to data that wasn't gathered until after he died? How dare you present such a pathetic failure of logic and reasoning and then demand for your puerile idiocy to be taken seriously? It's actually an insult to present someone with that kind of argument and then expect them to respect you for it; do you hope that we are all stupid? What kind of idiot must you expect everyone else in the world to be in order to say that to us and expect us to believe it? You can't just make shit up completely out of your imagination without any reference to the world outside your head and then demand everyone bow down to it, how massively narcissistic is that?
In short: your argument is based on making something up that never happened, then observing how wrong it would have been, and trying to draw a conclusion from this imaginary event that never happened. However, since it never happened, you are just a bullshitter trying to trick us. And failing.
All we have is technology and PR.
It's easy to respond to such requests - just publish your raw data in the same place you publish your conclusions. This is *not* a budget thing.
I would like you to publish your raw data supporting this assertion.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
How about the need for *ANY* openness?
The problem with intellectuals, at least the more vocal ones, are that they're often hypocrites. They tell other people how to live their lives, but will never lead by example. Al Gore comes to mind. I mean, people like him (and his social bubble) are given a complete pass while he jets around the world and rides in a caravan of SUVs. Also, how much CO2 does that 9 million dollar mansion emit? Carbon neutral my ass...
The message of "do as i say not as i do" has always cast doubt into the hearts and minds of men. It's ageless.
Life is not for the lazy.
The brilliant thing about conspiracy theories is that they don't actually need to be rational, verifiable or even possible. So long as you throw enough emotionally weighted language and loaded terms like "political" or "Garbage" you don't need to prove anything.
Oddly enough, your theory falls victim to the same "sin" you accuse the scientists of, perhaps you should spend some "quality time" behind bars for having "perpetrated some obvious frauds".
P.S. you didn't say political enough times, people saw through that.
P.P.S you should have bolded "Garbage In Garbage Out" as that would have helped to detract from the lack of actual fact in your post.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
It helps to actually read the report, instead of parroting cherry-picked quotations:
Now go and shut up until you've actually read the report. Given the level of literacy you've shown so far, that ought to keep you out of this discussion for the next twenty years of so.
Mart
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
But if someone was asking me the equivalent of "hand me that shovel so I can start hitting you with it" I might be hesitant too.
If I had the data that supported what I said I'd hand over the shovel without delay, because all they could do would be to hit themselves with it.
That's why IF THEY ARE RIGHT it's even more important they had over the data, because int not doing so they simply make themselves look guilty of hiding something. And again, that's the case even if they are not guilty at all.
The whole issue is too important to hand leverage like "hiding data" to anyone over - if they are right and not simply afraid of what others might uncover when they can review the data and processing techniques used.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The data they used is publicly available for anyone else to analyze
Oh really? Where is it?
Link please.
Since after all, even Jones admits he lost the data. Turns out you had it all along and just were waiting for someone to ask!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Why would they take testimony from "skeptics", when all the "skeptics" have done is to quote-mine the e-mails?
Never mind the fact that the research has been independently verified by researchers all over the world. But who cares about actual science when there's a controversy to manufacture, right?
Clever signature text goes here.
Honestly mods, how can the parent get any closer to a school book example of a flamebait? He doesn't respond to anything the GP said, nor give any arguments of his own. The fact that it was modded insightful shows how politicized the global warming debate is.
None of this actually matters. It doesn't matter if we "trust" the scientists or not. We know what is going on. We aren't stupid. The oil companies, tire companies, steel companies, etc. are out to maximize profits. They have covered the earth with roads, crushed the "small is beautiful" idea, used advertising to make us demand and buy more... we're heating up the earth by burning fossil fuels, but it makes businessmen money. It makes perfect sense for Conservatives and so-called "Libertarian" capitalist right-wingers to tell us all its a lie and just natural stuff or whatever for as long as possible. The longer they tell us its not really happening, or were not the cause, the longer the money rolls in. It is happening no matter what the scientists do or say, it is happening no matter how you look at the data, trust this or that person, think this or that. It is happening, and the humans who make money off it are acting perfectly "rational" in doing everything they can to deny it as long as possible. It's obvious as the nose on anyone face that this would happen. It doesn't matter what Al Gore or Rush Limbaugh or anyone else says. It's happening, we're causing it with our oil based economy, and all that really, really matters is when the average, ordinary people will say "enough". It looks like they won't, and we will keep going "Drill baby drill", and millions will be displaced, and millions will die. But it doesn't really matter, because life for most of us isn't real. it is just a dream. People in far off undemocratic or dictatorship countries make all our goods now. We don't feel the sting of our economy, of our products we use... we have no real unions to speak of, no real democratic or even libertarian (in the anarchist/socialist sense) power. There is just people playing these games, and us complaining about the weather which gets crazier all the time because of more and more moisture in the atmosphere.
The damage was done. The timing of the hack and selective release of the CRU emails was to sabotage Copenhagen. And it helped to derail it. Those who are vested in doing nothing about climate change don't give a rat's ass that the scientists were cleared of misconduct or that there was nothing wrong with their data or science. There is a huge disconnect between the science of climate change and the public. This isn't a war about facts. It's a propaganda war.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Many comments here are along the line : "how could the scientists *not* release the data, how rude and unscientific". I basically agree that data should eventually be public, however I also understand the scientists who spend decades obtaining data and want it to fructify in the form of publications before others can do whatever they want with it.
Basically competing scientists are told to walk and get their own data. From the efficiency point of view this sounds stupid, but in fact in many case, the act of getting data is itself science. Think of all the effort spent in trying to get a Higgs boson trace! In many cases it makes sense for different teams to collect, analyze and publish based on their own data. It may well be that the analysis in one paper is correct but the data flawed in some ways. In something as complex as climate, this is in fact extremely likely.
What must definitely be made public as soon as one publication it out is the acquisition protocol and enough data to reproduce the results, but maybe not before.
The audience that evaluates scientific arguments for validity are typically peers of some stature. However, anyone may present an alternate hypothesis, perhaps also backed by separate experiments/data. In general, the theory that survives being reviewed is a fitter theory than the others, and therefore lives to be incorporated into further research.
In general, all science is a good faith effort among people who share the respect for the discipline. What some rednecks or some vested interest may think is of course relevant to how the theories are received in the world *today*, but they have preciously little influence on the evolution of the science.
The problem is that when scientists refrain from a complete and open sharing of how they reached their conclusions, this evolution grinds to a halt. How can anyone refute a theory, or present an alternate theory that better fits the facts if the facts aren't known? It could be that these climate scientists' theories are brilliant. However, when they start playing some sort of spin game by evading any kind of criticism of the theories as such, who can trust them? Who can improve on or dispute their theories? As important, who can agree with their theories?
Criticism is the (carbon-neutral) fuel that drives science and human knowledge forward.
Simple : because you claim its flawless.
Furthermore, lets not call each other dummies here : the data is the foundation-layer from which you assumed the right to make certain conclusions. If we do not have the same data to work with we have no way of checking if your specific interpretation of that data is solid, or just a pipe-dream.
And alas, history shows that people who claim to have the only real source of information to base certain ideas on are often no more than power-moguls (reference: quite a few religious believes)
Apart from that, a *lot* of money and effort (let alone putting peoples lives upside-down) is involved in it. That warrants a bit more scrutination than "I believe you because you say I should".
A review by one's peers, ie by people of comparable standing (training, abilities) to oneself. It's not trivial to define that group in any particular case, but it's certainly smaller than 'everybody'. And no, being a scientist doesn't imply having to provide and defend your data and conclusions to anyone who asks, otherwise one would never get around to doing the actual research. http://despair.com/cluelessness.html
"More light!"
There is a lot more heat than light observable in this discussion.
My own 2 cents worth:
(1) The system is too complex to model. Perhaps the planet will get hotter for a while.
(2) AGW may contribute to that warming. Should the early European explorers have taken the Amerind attitudes home and converted Eurasia back to neolithic hunter-gathering? Perhaps the industrial revolution has contributed to the issue. Perhaps slash and burn agriculture could be implicated a bit father back.
(3) We can't fix it. To these egomaniacs that think destroying our technological civilization will make a difference: let me see you stop ONE hurricane, ONE tornado. You have no grasp of the energy levels involved in the system. You cannot placate the climate gods.
(4) We should focus on surviving any possible warming/climate change. We might have that capability, if we stop the placation nonsense.
end rant.
Why must everything vaguely scandalous acquire the suffix "gate"? Was there a gate anywhere in this event? The original "Watergate" was a proper name but ever since then there is this compulsion to use the suffix as if it meant "scandal". All too often -- as in this case -- there is no scandal. A crime was committed by people who stole private emails and made them public to make a political point. If those people don't end up in jail then there is the scandal.
Don't make me laugh. A "trial analysis" of cherry-picked data does not "independently" confirm the CRU's results. Now go and shut up until you learn the difference between science and propaganda.
Typical denialist nonsense. First make a completely bogus claim, then, when faced with evidence to the contrary, ignore that you were just caugt lying, and move the goalpost. Propaganda? That's what you are spewing.
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Yes, it is a budget thing, because the data is often licensed from someone else, so you don't have the right to publish it in the first place.
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There is an important distinction between scientific openness and FOI requests. The scientific community expects you to release the information that is relevant to judging the validity of your work. FOI would apply only to government financed research and can ask for far more than the scientific community would consider relevant or necessary. Think of all the stuff you can generate that isn't necessary to justify the final paper, not to mention accounting and government paperwork. Responding to extensive requests of this kind can burn up a lot of time. Either through ignorance or malice, politically motivated fanatics can subject researchers to a lot of harassment about things that are not scientifically relevant. If governments think it is important to respond to this kind of request, they should provide funding and support for doing so.
Why was this modded funny? It's sarcastic, sure, but pretty much describes the mentality you have to adhere to if you want to justify nondisclosure of data, like a lot of posters seem to want.
Frankly, there was no excuse. Put it on a server, describe your methodology in enough detail for someone else to do the same thing, and you're done. But just say, "The data's out there, man, trust me" and people will rightly demand a little more.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
With all due respect (ha) to WWF and Sierra Club propaganda, those of you who are of this persuasion may be interested in looking a little further than the latest issue of the "Weekly Weenie".
See, for example
http://www.prisonplanet.com/oil-companies-support-global-warming-alarmists-not-skeptics.html
A common charge leveled against global warming skeptics is that they are on the payroll of transnational oil companies, when in fact the opposite is true, oil companies are amongst the biggest promoters of climate change propaganda, emphasized recently by Exxon Mobil's call for a global carbon tax.
According to Exxon Mobil chief executive Rex Tillerson, the cap and trade nightmare being primed for passage in the Senate doesn't go far enough - Tillerson wants a direct tax on carbon dioxide emissions, essentially a tax on breathing since we all exhale this life-giving gas.
In a speech last month, Tillerson brazenly called out the cap and trade agenda for what it was, an effort to impose a carbon tax camouflaged only by a slick sales pitch and deceptive rhetoric. "It is easier and more politically expedient to support a cap-and-trade approach, because the public will never figure out where it is hitting them," said Tillerson. "They will just know they hurt somewhere in their pocketbook," he added, pointing out that he disagreed with this convoluted method of introducing a carbon tax, arguing instead that it would be more successful to openly propose a straight carbon tax.
Tillerson firmly expressed Exxon's support for climate change alarmists in stating, "I firmly believe it is not too late for Congress to consider a carbon tax as the better policy approach for addressing the risks of climate change."
"There is one feature I notice that is generally missing in "cargo cult science." It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty -- a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid -- not only what you think is right about it; other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked -- to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.
Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can -- if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong -- to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition. In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another. "
Key phrase: not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another
People also seem to forget that it's not consensus that leads to theories becoming scientific fact. The skeptic or heretic is often proven right in science throughout history by being the one whose results are reproducable in nature. Nature's a bitch on consensus science.
If you're basing your arguments on theories that certain provably biased individuals (actually take the time and read the Climategate emails, those involved have a bias that is both unfortunate and obvious) and putting your faith in consensus science - you're not a scientist, you're a religious zealot.
Enjoy your carbon tax idiots.
Yawn. Typical alarmist nonsense. All bluster, and no facts. I have read the Russell report, and the others, and I stand behind what I said about them. They did not "independently recreate the research". They don't claim to have done so, because they did not do so. What they did do was to whitewash the problems with the "climategate emails", and to "analyse" some irrelevant issues which do not relate to the problems which skeptics have identified with the CRU's published results.
You would profit greatly from reading some of Pielke's or McIntyre's work, but of course they are "skeptics" and you will simply demonize them so as not to have to deal with their arguments.
Climatology has a bad reputation in part because there is the appearance of secrecy and insufficiently rigorous methodology, but also because there is self-evident inconsistent behaviour. We're told that there is a world-wide consensus among climatologists about how horrible this problem is, how we're all doomed, and how urgent it is to take immediate action. However, it's clear that they don't think it's serious enough to justify showing their work, warts and all. This leads people to conclude that they aren't all that serious about their soothsaying. They are still putting their own interests first, just like everyone else.
The world is full of people who say false things, why should we believe these claims? If their actions are inconsistent with their words, so much more reason to dismiss them. It's easy to dismiss climatologists as yet another false voice screaming for our attention. This is the age of scepticism.
If there were really a true consensus among tens of thousands of scientists, all in agreement that this was the single most important issue facing humanity, if they really all thought it needed immediate attention, they could pool their money, and walk us through the data on national television, graphs and all, like Ross Perot. If they were sure of their data, they could offer it up for free, beg us to look at it, and hold workshops every week at the public library to explain it, all in a selfless effort to bring climate literacy to the world. That's not happening, so it's natural to doubt the sincerity of their alleged consensus, and the claims that immediate action must be taken. Yeah yeah, we've heard it all before. Next?
Also, nature is full of self-regulating systems. Negative feedback cycles dominate all around us. Claims about runaway climate change or tipping points are extraordinary. Where is the extraordinary proof? If it is possible for the sky to fall, why didn't it happen some time millions of years ago? What makes right now so damned special?
Then there's all the abuse heaped on sceptics. If the climatologists are so damned sure of their science, why do they respond with such hate?
If the climatologists want to be taken seriously, they need to understand that doubt is natural, and act accordingly. This means they would need to hold themselves to a higher standard then those they disagree with, and avoid the damned shouting matches. If the issue is important to them, that's the cost of entry. We aren't going to retool the world economy overnight without getting massive bye-in, and that's not happening with the methods that have been attempted so far. What they propose would require widespread culture shift, which cannot be force.
When you are trash talking all those who oppose and silencing them. And then your "Science Fu" is bad.
Don't expect not to get some backlash. These guys were a combination of arrogant twits and political hacks.
Finally, it's quite pathetic to call someone an "alarmist" just because they expose your denialist lies.
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'Cherry-picked'? Prove it. Quote the report and show where they cherry-pick. Go on, I dare you.
Given that you apparently still have to learn to read above basic level, I am not going to hold my breath though.
Mart
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?