RSS Feed MenuMy latest column for The Week asks what the news about the scandal at the UK’s Climate Research Unit tells us.
On their way to discovering the double helix structure of DNA, James Watson and Francis Crick drew important inspiration from an unauthorized glimpse at the unpublished research of a third scientist, Rosalind Franklin.
Yet when James Watson published his famous memoir in 1968, he made scant mention of Franklin’s contributions—holding her up instead to vicious and misogynistic mockery.
Scientists—even brilliant ones—are not better than other people. They are at least as prone to vanity, malice, groupthink, charlatanism, and outright dishonesty as those in any other line of work. Happily, science is bigger than the scientists. Nobody would respond to Watson’s bad behavior by saying, “See—that proves that DNA does not exist!”
SFTor1 // Nov 29, 2009 at 12:38 am
Here. Read it.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/24/the-people-vs-the-cru-freedom-of-information-my-okole…/
I understand that science is adversarial. The CRU scientists made sure it wasn’t, by working to exclude dissenters from the important fora. I’m not talking about crackpots here, but people like Lindzen, Pielke, McIntyre, Eschenbach, and Christy. Some were outright excluded, some were ignored in the process.
“Requests and re-requests for data?” The data should have been made available at the time the work was published, simple as that.
You are throwing out more red herrings than a Portuguese trawling cutter. Get yourself informed and we can talk.
BoolaBoola // Nov 29, 2009 at 6:29 am
I read your link. It is absolutely consistent with my hypothesis, that some paid “skeptics” are abusing the Freedom of Information law to make nuisance requests, and the authors of the stolen emails are resisting this. In fact your link serves as a nice example, supporting my point. And, the author of your link again posts the joke–”I think I’ll delete my data rather than share it with so-and-so”–as if it were serious. In other words, your link is just a reiteration of Murray’s third fake item, which I have already debunked.
When you argue with me, it is NOT enough for you to make an assertion, and then post a link to any old gossip-site which trumpets agreement with your assertion. I am able to read scienctific papers, having written two or three my ownself, so with me, your link must ACTUALLY SUPPORT your assertion. In particular, any link from an obvious anti-gw cheerleading site like wattsupwiththat should be viewed with suspicion and carefully evaluated for veracity and for “gotcha” tricks BEFORE you post it. I not sure whether you have enough experience with science-wheeling-and-dealing to do such evaluations. Sites like, for instance, freerepublic.com, are not appropriate sources.
You wrote: “The data should have been made available at the time the work was published, simple as that. ”
Have you ever WORKED in a scientific lab? Most don’t make raw data available, nor do authors typically have to give out original computer-code. That would be like asking scientists who publish experimentalist papers to be willing to come to skeptics’ homes and repeat their experiments there upon request. Or, to make a large supply of replicas of every scientific instrument constructed, and send one to every skeptic who asks. In this case, we’re talking about a data set that took 25 years to compile–someone’s lifework. “Disclosure” doesn’t mean giving your work away.
RE: “CRU scientists making sure science isn’t adversarial, by excluding skeptics” –if you were cancer specialist, in the 1950s, would you share a platform with hired “smoking-cancer” skeptics, paid by the tobacco industry? No, you wouldn’t, you’d be too busy conducting adverserial science with REAL scientists. You are just trying to use the old canard “unless you let EVERYONE participate, it’s not real science”. No. We require doctorates as a precondition for applying for grant money, precisely in order to avoid wasting time on cranks and hired nuisances. You can’t put on a football match unless you first choose the teams, and your players must be qualified.
BoolaBoola // Nov 29, 2009 at 7:05 am
SFTor1, one more thing. You wrote: “Dr. Phil Jones, Michael Mann, Keith Briffa, and several other prominent figures must resign or be fired immediately.”
Hee hee! We don’t have enough real meat from the emails yet to even decide whether or not they merit a formal investigation. And you want to fire Jones, Mann, and Briffa before even STARTING an investigation! This suggestion of yours confirms that you are not serious, and/or that you are not familiar with scientific oversight. Rather, you seem to be functioning as a member of the same “maximize-the-noise” crowd that brought us “death-panel” hysteria.
You call youself a climate researcher–you wrote “My research indicates [AGW] isn’t [a threat]“. Elaborate, please. I’m not saying reveal your identity, but do please advise, what research-position and/or academic rank do you hold? Are you a professor, or what? (PREDICTION: you will dodge this question, not because you have something to hide, but because you have nothing to reveal).
cpanza // Nov 29, 2009 at 7:08 am
BoolaBoola:
Thanks for your knowledgeable input here. It is unfortunate that in the hyper-partisan world we live in people feel like they have to have strong opinions (and be duly outraged) by all the things their side tells them they are supposed to have opinions about, even when those persons (and the leading voices on their side) are not qualified to back those opinions/outrage up (that goes for left and right). Frum himself is not innocent of this.
The gw “debate” reminds me of the whole “id/evolution” nonsense, where scientific terms are thrown around regularly in ways that an intro to science text would rule out as ridiculous. Because outrage and not truth is really the aim, however, these basic requirements for having a sensible discussion are completely ignored.
The less they know, the more they think they know it.
SFTor1 // Nov 29, 2009 at 11:50 am
BoolaBoola:
I am fully willing to wait for an investigation, and I should not jump to conclusions. Fully agreed. But a guy like George Monbiot has already called for Phil Jones’s resignation, based on what he has seen. He is not exactly a shill for the oil companies, now is he?
Anyone who can read however sees that these people appear to have engaged in serious offenses against scientific openness, on the public dime.
Let’s have it investigated.
Cpanza, I am a liberal Democrat, so that whole partisan thing doesn’t fly. Your comments about the “id/evolution nonsense” tells me that you are the one who is not interested in a fair discussion.
BoolaBoola: I am not a scientist. When I say research I am talking about my own personal secondary research.
SFTor1 // Nov 29, 2009 at 12:00 pm
Here:
“SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.
It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.
The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.
The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.”
You don’t have to have committed high treason to get fired from a scientific institution. It’s enough to be incompetent.
SFTor1 // Nov 29, 2009 at 12:54 pm
The quote above is from The Telegraph, by the way, July 29 2009.
I read your comments stating that scientists who publish papers are not required to include their data and methods. You are either misinformed, or lying.
Here’s something else I don’t understand: what makes you think Phil Jones was joking, when the critical data were in fact deleted on his watch? Some joke.
Your assertions that “labs don’t give out their data” is cute. When scientists publish, they show their work. Dispute that, please.
BoolaBoola // Nov 29, 2009 at 12:57 pm
SFTor1, I guess you can fault them for not entering the raw data onto a computer alongside of the revised figures, but that’s not a great enough error to be called “incompetence” and certainly not enough to merit firing someone. It’s not as if they had exclusive custody of the raw data. The weather stations haven’t gone anywhere. If other academics want to check the basic calculations, they can go re-gather the raw data themselves! The checkers should want to do that anyway–why take the UEA scientists’ word for what the weather stations told them??? They could be lying, no?
SFTor1 // Nov 29, 2009 at 1:14 pm
Yes, BoolaBoola, and several scientists attempted to do just that. They couldn’t even get the CRU to tell them where the data were coming from.
And you are telling me that the original data were never entered electronically? You think they just read them off the page and adjusted them on the fly?
Are you crazy?
What raw data did they use to produce CRU TS3 and HADCRUT? Stuff they read off a tape and never saved anywhere in a data file?
BoolaBoola // Nov 29, 2009 at 1:15 pm
SFTor1, please, you’re just misquoting me now. When did I say you don’t have to include data and methods? Of course you do. But you don’t (usually) have to give out RAW data. For instance, when you publish data which you measured in a vacuum chamber, you don’t have to include, or distribute, the pressure-readouts during the experiment, or the calibration curves you used to standardize your detectors. The reader assumes your pressure was suitably low and your instruments properly calibrated. If you’re expressing a protein in a particular cell line, you don’t include all the population counts while the cell line was being grown up; you just say you expressed the protein stably and go on and say what you did with it. In other words, you condense your data, and include the meaningful ones.
I’m willing to explain this stuff to you, but please, no more putting words in my mouth, or, if yer gonna put them there, at least don’t be so obvious about it. OF COURSE I never said “labs don’t give out their data” (you left out the critical word “RAW”), and OF COURSE I know that scientists report data and methods, the former in the Results section and the latter in the Materials and Methods section. There is no need for you to pretend to be more obtuse than you are–really, there is no need to do that.
Re: Phil Jones and deleted data–if he were seriously planning do that, he would not have shared his intentions with anyone. No way anyone would write down the intention to do that, except as a joke. Your colleague would not thank you for making him into an accessory.
BoolaBoola // Nov 29, 2009 at 1:24 pm
We are posting on top of each other….RE: storing the raw data. I don’t know enough details and neither do you. But I could easily imagine, say, adjusting the raw data one by one as they come in from the various sources, and only storing the adjusted data, not the raw data, on the big master-list.
sinz54 // Nov 30, 2009 at 9:32 am
SFTor1: And you are telling me that the original data were never entered electronically? You think they just read them off the page and adjusted them on the fly?
I’ve had experience with legacy data, so I’m willing to make a guess what happened:
Most likely the data were entered electronically–but many years ago, in some legacy format like EBCDIC on magnetic tape (or even worse, paper tape), on some ancient mainframe computer that has long since been scrapped or gone to some museum. Such data would have just disappeared unless there was a specific project to save it. They used this raw data just once–to adjust it for differences among reporting stations–and entered the adjusted data on a more modern computer. Then they just forgot about the raw data.
But I can see that climate skeptics won’t be convinced by anything less than a rise in global temperature that is so obvious that no one will be able to deny global warming any longer.
That’s why I have been saying for a long time that the only politically acceptable way to deal with global warming is mitigation of its effects, only after it becomes obvious to all. Trying to prevent it, when all we can show the public is a bunch of mathematical models, is hopeless. The public won’t be convinced by theories to make major changes.
Remember the novel (and movie) “When Worlds Collide”? Despite warnings from the world’s top astronomers, the public refused to believe that a planetoid was on a collision course with Earth until they could see it in the sky with the naked eye. And that’s when the panic really started.
sinz54 // Nov 30, 2009 at 9:36 am
BoolaBoola: The reader assumes your pressure was suitably low and your instruments properly calibrated.
The reader does NOT have to just assume that.
He’s free to conduct his own experiments to try to duplicate or refute your findings.
In this case, the raw data can and should be gathered over again. I have no doubt it will validate the original adjustments. Because there is plenty of confirming evidence for AGW that has nothing to do with the original raw data.
Carney // Nov 30, 2009 at 7:15 pm
BoolaBoola constantly uses the term “paid” to discredit skeptics. Aren’t AGW believers paid, too, or are they all independently wealthy and do their work pro bono? And since they are paid by governments and other institutions, such as the green lobby, that stand to gain more money and power from the “science” they peddle, aren’t they just as compromised, if not more?
BoolaBoola // Nov 30, 2009 at 10:33 pm
Carney, yes the AGW believers are paid, but they are paid by scientific research-granting agencies, not by corporations with a profit-stake in the results turning out one way rather than another.
Sure they stand to gain if their ideas turn out right, but that’s true of everyone.
BoolaBoola // Nov 30, 2009 at 10:34 pm
If you need me to point this out to you, then you don’t know enough about science for your opinion to matter. Would you ask a janitor for medical advice????
BoolaBoola // Dec 1, 2009 at 12:16 am
Sinz54, you wrote: “That’s why I have been saying for a long time that the only politically acceptable way to deal with global warming is mitigation of its effects, only after it becomes obvious to all.”
It is ALREADY obvious to all. All who can read a satallite-map of the polar ice-caps, that is. How much more obvious do you want? You wanna wait until there are no more polar ice caps at all???