Bishop Hill Hans von Storch interview
Dec 18, 2009 Climate: CRU Climate: von Storch FOI Journals English translation here:
It appears from the so-called CRU-Mails that the cartel has sinned against a basic scientific principle namely the principle of transparency. Science should be practiced openly. All published results should in principle be verifiable, should be open to criticism, also to criticism from people who are not well-meaning. That is something a scientist must accept, that people who are not well-meaning scrutinize him.
The e-mails from CRU indicate that there have been attempts to keep people from publishing
by contacting authors or publishers, that one lead author of the IPPC has at the least expressed the thought of keeping certain persons out of the whole process and lastly, and possibly the worst, that the data on which their research is based has not been put into the open for verification. This is not acceptable.
Reader Comments (7)
As Mr von Storch implies, some islands may be in danger of slipping under sea level - indeed,the rate of sea-level rise was discovered by climate-change "deniers", who were observing the real world instead of rigging computer models to give the desired results. What is also happening is, as Heraclitus said, everything is in a state of flux - Everything flows", including tectonic plates, which in some places are pulling islands downwards. But it would be difficult to ascribe this to climate change...
One wonders if this is a very nice expose of the real errors associated with estimating global average temperature? I'm not convinced, as Cunningham isn't either, that there is not an error in his implementation of the Brohan method. However, it is something that needs to be checked urgently.
www.jgc.org/blog/
Splice
Cunningham? Graham-Cumming?
Is the ocean going up, or is the land going down? Hard to tell without a reference point.
Well if he is identifying the problems with the 'bad science' wouldnt the next step to be to discard policy based on it!
www.twawki.com
Tranparence should start with a clear language, as could be read recently at:
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/11/13/open-letter/:
"Good science can and is required to work with reasonable terms and explanations. The science about the behaviour of the atmosphere should be no exception. But WMO, IPCC and other institutions simply are using the layman’s term of weather and climate not even recognizing that this is very unscientifically. Actually nowadays climate is still defined as average weather, which may be fine for the general public, but nonsense as scientific term. This can be well demonstrated with the most relevant international legal instrument, namely the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, 1992 (FCCC).
Article 1 of the FCCC providing definitions offers none on the term “climate”, and if it had been based on the common explanation on “average weather”, the word “weather” would have required a definition as well. That the drafters failed to do so is a clear indication that they either lacked the scientific competence to do so, or they knew it would make no sense, because ‘average weather’ is statistics, and remain statistics regardless of any name given to the set of statistics.
Instead the FCCC defines in
>>Para. 2. “Climate change” means a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods.
>>Para. 3. “Climate system” means the totality of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere and geosphere and their interactions. "
Could it be that as long the meaning of key climate terms are not clear it could be diffucult to ensure tranparence?
Not verifiable, falsifiable surely. cf. Popper. Scientific method.