Bishop Hill UKRIO on retractions
Oct 21, 2010 Climate: Jones Journals The UK Research Integrity Office has issued new guidelines on retractions of journal articles (H/T COPE). I thought it was interesting to compare the guidelines to the events surrounding Phil Jones' 1990 paper on urban heat islands, which is now of course the subject of a fraud allegation from Doug Keenan. Keenan's claim is that Jones continued to cite the paper even when he knew that some of the underlying data could not be relied upon. Jones' defence is that a subsequent paper he published has shown the findings to be broadly correct.
UKRIO says that papers should be retracted
when there is clear evidence that the reported findings are unreliable, either as a result of misconduct, such as fabrication of data, or honest error, for example. miscalculation or experimental error;
I think on the basis of this statement, Jones would still argue that the findings were reliable since they were backed up by his later study. However AFAIK, there was a gap of several years in the middle when Jones knew of the problems with his 1990 paper, but hadn't yet published his new findings. This suggests that his conduct at the time was not up to the standards required by these new guidelines (although I am not aware of what rules applied at the time).
The guidelines also make the interesting point that one of the reasons for retraction is so as not to bias future meta-analyses:
A retraction can help reduce the number of researchers who cite an erroneous article, act on its findings or draw incorrect conclusions, such as from ‘double counting’ redundant publications in meta-analyses.
It is therefore interesting to consider the effect of Jones 1990 on any metaanalysis of UHI papers. One assumes that such a study would still pick up Jones 1990 because it has never been retracted. It therefore seems to me that it is incumbent upon Jones to retract the paper, even at this late stage.
Reader Comments (22)
Guidelines or not, the proper thing to do has always been to either correct the error through an erratum or retract the articles.
Phil Jones cited this, his own 1990 paper in 1995, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009.
This frankly throws doubt on Jones' paper where he 'finds' that the study he likes was actually OK.
In my line of work, if an error was found in a report, then an immediate investigation would be performed to determine any knock-on effects, lessons would be learned and disseminated and the corrected report would be reissued.
But that was in the real world, not the virtual world of climate science.
How about a Bishop Hill meet at this.....
Reading University: Climate change - the science explained
Wednesday 10 November 2010, 8pm
Palmer Building, Whiteknights
Professor Nigel Arnell, Walker Institute Director
http://www.walker-institute.ac.uk/people/index.htm
With all the media attention on climate change, it can be hard to separate media hype from scientific fact. So what is the science behind climate change? How are people warming the climate and to what extent does it vary naturally? This talk will describe the risks posed by climate change for water, food, and biodiversity focusing on what we know and, importantly, what we don't know. There will also be a chance to put your questions to a panel of experts.
http://www.reading.ac.uk/publiclectureseries/
http://www.reading.ac.uk/web/FILES/publiclectureseries/2010ClimateChange.pdf
---------
I just rang them up, and the panel of experts is from within the university,
as at least one of these people was co-editor along with Sir John Houghton, of the 2001 IPCC report with 'The Hockey Stick' in it,
and, Arnell is an IPCC lead author in the second, third and fourth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessments, he has also contributed to the recent Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change.
It should be very interesting...
I rang them up, and had a chat with a young person there, and they even thought/had doubts on man made global warming!. Put through to someone organising it, and had an interesting conversation..
This is event is being put on BECAUSE of what has happened in the media (or not) in the last year.. So I think Climategate questions will be fair game..
ONLY 400 seats, and they expect it to be FULL, first come first served.
BE nice if anybody goes I have lots of friends at Reading...
If I go, I will probably be reasonably quiet. I'll try to arrange some back up physicists.
It turns out a family friend, from the toddler group, of the church where Houghton gave a Transitions town speech -( I'm an honourary toddler group 'mum') is an astrophyscisist. She was fast tracked in the European Space Centre Programs, and was a Operations Director - for the European Space Centre.... then onto satellite consultancy to various heads of state.
Not a man made global warming fan. She couldn't get a baby sitter for Houghton's speech.
Hopefully she can for this one......
" the risks posed by climate change for water, food, and biodiversity "
good to see they got biodiversity in there, the new excuse to fly around the world attending conferences.
I don't think it is necessary to keep beating up on Prof Jones, he's had his day in the sun and under the grill.
An interesting take on Osborne's cuts:
http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/70393,news-comment,news-politics,austerity-hypocrites-have-no-right-to-attack-osborne
Jone's is irrlevant.. It would be interesting to have a debate with such senior IPCC people, present.
plus, ask did they actually read any of the emails....
Mike's Nature Trick, etc...
Please Delete, should be a concern to any scientist though, another concern should be an unwillingness to share code & data to reproduce results as, at least a few scientist (by Phil's response) were saying.
Professor Azar:
Department of physical resource theory
Chalmers University of Technology
"If not,then the source code is warranted.
Also, even if there is no compelling need to make the
source code public, doing it anyway would clearly be beneficial for the entire debate."
The problem for Jones is that he already stated in Feb 2010 that he is 'considering' correcting the 1990 paper because the problems with the movement of the Chinese stations means that the results of the 1990 cannot be verified.
Since that statement at least another 3 papers have cited Jones 1990 paper.
Any further delay to this consideration on Jones' part will lead to accusations that he is deliberately stalling and so is acting in an unprofessional manner. The excuses have ran out, the science is becoming more tainted by the day.
Somewhat off topic...but is there any more news about the police investigation into the "Mystery of the Purloined Emails"?
Or has this been completely kicked into the long grass by Plod?
"It therefore seems to me that it is incumbent upon Jones to retract the paper, even at this late stage."
Don't hold your breath for that to happen !!!!
Re Jack Savage
I was chatting with the police this morning and there's still very long delays for IT forensics. Still odd given the sensitivity that we're almost up to the first anniversary of the leak, and there's been no announcement. I'm thinking it's useful to have the data in police custody were it can't be FOI'd.
It also reminded me about another curious comment in the Russell docs-
The material has been given a very high level of security classification which requires that I work at secure facilities and follow particular protocols which, for example, preclude computers being left to run unattended or overnight and at weekends.
which suggests it's been classified as Top Secret, or at least Secret. Yet nothing in the other IT related discussions in the Russell report suggest it was ever originally considered to need that classification. If it had, the architecture would have been different and it would have been much harder to hack. At least from outside. Then again, one reason for classifying is to prevent damage to UK national interests, like being made to look very stupid for believing in CAGW.
Can we FOI the security classification of the data, either from UEA, Norfolk Plod, or a central government department?
Any further delay to this consideration on Jones' part will lead to accusations that he is deliberately stalling and so is acting in an unprofessional manner. The excuses have ran out, the science is becoming more tainted by the day.
You will be waiting a long time, its under that mound of paperwork still needing sorting in his office, or the cat has eaten it.
More than a few mentions of 'bio-diversity loss' here. I know the Bish likes us to stay on topic but the fact that the likes of the Moonbat and the Snufkin have folded their tents and stolen away in the night leaving us with all those bills, is cause for concern.
In 1990 , few knew and fewer cared what work Jones was doing , so of course outside of what was a very small group there was no one around to check on the validity of this paper. It all went wrong when Jones and others started play the advocacy game and to enjoy the public limelight, then people cared. And in caring they started to look at past work and ask question Jones and co would rather they did not get ask. Mistakes happen in research, in ones sense this should not have been a big deal, but they you hit the ‘settled science’ approach used in climate science, were no mistake can readily be admitted to. So all the problem Jones is having on this front, are very much of his own making as he went out actively to find the limelight and he was activity involved in the creation of ‘settled climate science’ idea.
"The UK Research Integrity Office": is this a recent introduction? I had - indeed still have - a lengthy research career without ever having heard of it.
@dearieme...
According to its website (www.ukrio.org) "The UK Research Integrity Office (UKRIO) is an independent advisory body, hosted by Universities UK. Launched in 2006, we offer support to researchers, research organisations and members of the public in order to further integrity in research and promote good practice in addressing misconduct in research."
I'd never heard of it either.
Is the name "UK Research Integrity Office" an oxymoron a la military intelligence?
“The studies were biased,” he says. “Sometimes they were overtly biased. Sometimes it was difficult to see the bias, but it was there.” Researchers headed into their studies wanting certain results—and, lo and behold, they were getting them. We think of the scientific process as being objective, rigorous, and even ruthless in separating out what is true from what we merely wish to be true, but in fact it’s easy to manipulate results, even unintentionally or unconsciously. “At every step in the process, there is room to distort results, a way to make a stronger claim or to select what is going to be concluded,” says Ioannidis. “There is an intellectual conflict of interest that pressures researchers to find whatever it is that is most likely to get them funded.”
“Even when the evidence shows that a particular research idea is wrong, if you have thousands of scientists who have invested their careers in it, they’ll continue to publish papers on it,” he says. “It’s like an epidemic, in the sense that they’re infected with these wrong ideas, and they’re spreading it to other researchers through journals.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/8269/
From the Atlantic, of all places. Everything this article says about biased research in medicine applies to climate science. I saw it at Maggie's Farm, but it fit into this theme well.
"Perhaps worse, Ioannidis found that even when a research error is outed, it typically persists for years or even decades. He looked at three prominent health studies from the 1980s and 1990s that were each later soundly refuted, and discovered that researchers continued to cite the original results as correct more often than as flawed—in one case for at least 12 years after the results were discredited."
Jones follow-up work on China in 2009 I believe showed that as much as half of the warming in China since 1950 was UHI. Does NOT confirm his 1990 work. New work proves Keenan was right.
re Slowjoe
I doubt it. It's protected at the moment while the investigation is ongoing and there may well be some classified data on the server, eg work done for the MoD. Once released from custody, people can send in (reasonable) FOI or EIR requests and if they're rejected due to classification, that could be appealed via the ICO. The UEA has a bit of a problem, Climategate raised awareness that what we've seen so far is just a small sample of what CRU holds. Once the server is back, they could be spammed with a whole lot more requests. I hope that doesn't happen because it'll give the UEA more ammunition to push back on disclosure on cost or vexation grounds.