Bishop Hill Can a leopard change its spots?
Feb 24, 2010 Climate: IPCC Fox News reports that the IPCC is on the brink of making major changes to the way it does business.
In the wake of its swift and devastating fall from grace, the panel says it will announce "within the next few days" that it plans to make significant though as yet unexplained changes in how it does business.
Brenda Abrar-Milani, an external relations officer at the IPCC's office in Geneva, Switzerland, said changes have been slow in coming because "we have to inform the governments (all 194 member States) of any planned steps, and they are the ones who eventually take decisions on any revision of procedures."
"We put everything on the table and looked at it," she said, explaining that the panel's reforms would be extensive. She refused to detail any of the changes, but she did confirm that are in response to recent scandals involving the panel.
The article quotes Steve McIntyre, whose reaction seems to have been the same as mine:
Steve McIntyre, who also worked at the IPPC and whose blog, Climate Audit, has been one of the most vocal critics of the panel, says that while cries for reform have become loud, "very little thought has yet been put into what changes have to be made."
"I don't think they plan to change very much," he said. "They just don't know how to reform it."
Reader Comments (11)
The same problems that exist in global-warming science exist in most fields of science. Indeed, my experience is that several fields of science have worse problems than global-warming science. The main thing that is special about global-warming science is that it gets lots of attention from the media and policy makers. What needs to be reformed is not the IPCC, but science.
For real reform, the basic point that needs to be accepted is that scientists are human—which implies that scientific research is a human affair. General prerequisites for integrity in human affairs include transparency and accountability. Yet transparency and accountability are very weak or absent in science: this seems to be due to the belief that scientists are above the normal weaknesses of humans.
Pick any research journal in any field. Pick any paper from that journal. Contact the authors and ask for their data. It is very unlikely that the data will be made available. Transparency is extremely weak almost everywhere.
Or consider that there are tens of thousands of scientists in the UK, and yet none of those have been found guilty of scientific fraud during the past decade, to my knowledge. It is not credible that tens of thousands of people would all act with complete integrity in all of their actions for a decade. Accountability is virtually nonexistent everywhere.
Douglas, Douglas, tut, tut, tut. Seems like you have had a really bad day?
@douglas and @martin
"I am not a Kuhnian!"
-- Thomas Kuhn as attributed by Freeman Dyson.
Reform would involve retro-fitting basic values like integrity and truth into the people and the organisational culture.
It would be simpler to start over with new people, a new name, different goals and a new structure. Or just dump the whole idea.
I mean some fairly clever people have had a long time to find solid evidence of climate meltdown. If they had found any they would be showing it instead of faking and distorting stuff and including weird anecdotal inputs like talking to ski instructors about snow conditions. In a bar.
Suppose that the IPCC has a really good clear out and the new managemant decide that this time we are determined to do the right thing and look at the climate problem even handedly and dispassionately. If they then discover that the problem does not exist they are all going to be out of a job.
I have a feeling that I read somewhere that that is what the panel did at its inception. On finding that there was no evidence of a problem they set out to manufacture one to justify their existence. I admit that I have no source for this story so it may well be false.
I'd like to hear more about this kind of struggle within all scientific disciplines. I have to believe it exists. We would be naive to think otherwise.
I appreciate the work of Kuhn, Feyerabend, Lakatos and Polanyi.
Doug Keenan,
I'm appreciating your comments. My guess is that many may not be ready to hear that this kind of struggle exists in other scientific disciplines. I'd love to read more about this kind of thing.
Time to dial up the "anonymous" hackers... kidding... But given the fall-out of climategate, I'm guessing many institutions are putting all kinds of security in place. I'm sure nobody wants to be next.
So the people who created it, and could find nothing wrong with it, are going to build a new version.
IPCC 2.1?
Patches will be available online in the distant future.
Are they going to re-make it in their own image (again)?
Kevin,
Some other examples in which I have been involved are on my site. For instance, in 2002 I published a paper proposing that radiocarbon dates in the eastern Mediterranean (Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, etc.) are too early. Seven researchers, some of them world leaders in their fields, published a rebuttal: one section was founded on the premise that up and down are the same direction—and there was lots more of similar qualtiy. Some details are here.
Almost all multi-shard tephrochronology is based on a failure to understand what "standard deviation" means in statistics. I published a paper explaining this in 2003. The paper appeared in the leading journal for geochemistry, but it has since been almost entirely ignored.
I filed an allegation of gross fraud in dendroarchaeology with the University of Reading (see here). The university refused to investigate my allegation. I was told by telephone that the university has no procedures to investigate such allegations, because their professors always act with integrity.
The NSF told me that it would not enforce its policies on data availability (see http://climateaudit.org/2007/04/16/nsf-relies-on-social-networks/). That applied to all the research that it funds, not just global-warming research.
Medical research has all the problems of integrity that climatology has, only more severely. It also has problems that do not exist in climatology, such as ghost writing. An example of the latter occurred with Richard Eastell, head of medical school at the University of Sheffield. Eastell published a paper demonstrating the efficacy of a drug used to treat osteoporosis. Later on, a colleague cried foul. Under pressure, Eastell admitted that he had never seen the data used in the study: the paper had been written by the drug company, which put Eastell's name on it so as to make the study seem independent.
Eastell was then asked to present the data. Initially, the drug company refused to give it to him, on the grounds that the data was proprietary. Eventually, under pressure—including media coverage—the data was released: it turns out that the drug does very little, and is unquestionably far worse than its competitor. You can guess the outcome of all this: Eastell continues his research; the whistle blower, Aubrey Blumsohn, no longer has a job and no one will hire him; the university's Pro-Vice Chancellor for Medicine, Tony Weetman, was promoted to head the UK's Medical Schools Council. For links to media coverage and to the main blog, see
http://www.thejabberwock.org/presshw.htm
A huge medical-science scandal is the "Gillberg affair", described on my site.
There have been many exposés published about corruption in medical research. Three book exposés are the following.
Angell M. (2009) The Truth About The Drug Companies.
Kassirer J.P. (2005) On The Take.
Smith R. (2006) The Trouble With Medical Journals.
What makes those books special are their authors. Angell and Kassirer were Editors-in-Chief of the world's most highly-regarded medical-research journal, the New England Journal of Medicine. Smith was Editor and CEO of the British Medical Journal during 1991-2004. When people that senior in medical research publish books like the above, something is seriously wrong. What is worse is what they were able to achieve: virtually nothing.
And many other books could be written.
The only changes the IPCC will be discussing are, "How do we lie more cautiously?"
Doug,
Cool...Looks very interesting. I'll check it all out. Thanks for the tips. Somebody should write one of those books.