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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."
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."
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
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 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.
But the data IS available and it WAS available, they didn't even fudge the data. The only accusation made against them was that they started getting obstinate and refusing to give the data to climate doubters and the chart they had in the WMO report was misleading if you didn't read the report carefully.
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.
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."
I don't see where your link says anything about giving highly technical raw data to bloggers who know nothing and couldn't care less whether what they say is actually true.
There seem to be many assumptions here that bloggers are equivalent to the scientific community. I believe these assumptions are ill-considered.
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."
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
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
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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
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
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.
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
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
Who funds the process of replying?
Generally the requester is charged, however, it depends upon the FOIA request. There are some exemptions for certain types of data and certain types of requests. For example, news media are given extra leeway under FOIA.
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.
Especially since Co2 is immaterial to global warming since the primary mediator of heat in the atmosphere... wait for it... is WATER!
Closing open windows is immaterial to temperature inside a house because the primary mediator for heat in a house... wait for it... is WALLS!
There is indeed a huge quantity of water vapor in the atmosphere, and it is indeed the gas with the single largest impact on trapping thermal radiation. However there are two key points. The first point is that the existing warming effect is 50 degrees F. So yes water is the "primary mediator" towards the existing 50 degree greenhouse effect. Without water and other natural natural level greenhouse gases the earth would be 50 degrees colder than current temperatures. Without the natural existing 50 degree greenhouse effect most of the planet would be covered in ice. The second key point is that there are different frequencies of thermal radiation, like different colors of light. At certain "colors" of heat radiation water is completely "black". The vast quantity of water vapor traps that portion of heat energy almost completely. Increasing or decreasing the amount of water vapor has little effect because the quantity of water vapor already traps that heat energy almost completely. At those frequencies the water vapor acts like the walls of a house. However at other frequencies, other "colors" of thermal radiation, water vapor is completely transparent to heat energy. Those frequencies are like holes in the walls, they are like open windows in the walls. Heat energy does freely escape and allow the earth to cool back down at those frequencies, through those open windows. This issue is that CO2 is "black" at those frequencies. Dumping CO2 into the atmosphere covers up those "open windows" that exist in H20. Dumping CO2 into the atmosphere is like closing the windows in a house and nailing an extra plywood wall over them.
So yes H20 is the gas with the single largest greenhouse effect, and that effect is already 50 degrees. H20 has "open windows" and H2O has zero ability to trap heat at certain frequencies. Dumping CO2 into the atmosphere and closing those open windows WILL have a very real effect increasing the greenhouse warming several degrees about the existing 50 degree greenhouse warming.
This is basic physics. There is absolutely no scientific dispute over the physics. There is absolutely no scientific dispute that increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere does have the effect of trapping heat in this manner. None. This Anthropogenic Global Warming effect is absolutely indisputable basic physics. This effect absolutely is significant because CO2 is trapping frequencies of thermal radiation that water doesn't affect at all.
Global Warming is a social controversy and a political controversy. The fundamental facts of Global Warming are not a scientific controversy.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
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.