Thursday
Mar252010
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill THES article
Mar 25, 2010 Climate: CRU Media I have an article about Climategate in the Times Higher Educational Supplement. See here.
Mar 25, 2010 Climate: CRU Media 
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Reader Comments (19)
BH, would you mind emailing me?
Good article. It helps expose the fact that Climategate has a scope far wider than some indiscreet emails about tricks used in statistical analysis.
Excellent article. I have left a comment but forgot to recommend THI!
There was an editorial in Nature many years ago saying that they would like to adopt stronger policies on data availability, but that they operated in a competitive environment, and were they to so adopt, they would lose papers.
Thus no journal can move first: there would need to be some co-ordinated effort to get such policies enacted. Ideally (implausibly?), there should also be some enforcement mechanism.
I have long thought that there should be some Code of Conduct for journals. Adherence to the Code would be voluntary. Journals that adhered would be able to display a sticker (or whatever) to that effect. Journals would have to pay a nominal fee, and the fees would go to running the oversight committee.
Well done.
Would a commenter advise me of how the Soon & Baliunas was flawed as His Grace stated in the THE article? I ask because I read it and it seemed pretty reasonable to me - but then I am a mathematically-qualified engineer.
[Rob: I used the word "perhaps" advisedly. My understanding is that some of the proxy series used are generally considered as precipitation proxies rather than temperature ones. Of course, such a criticism can be extended to many temperature reconstructions, but the criticism should be applied everywhere.
That said, I haven't made a detailed study of S&B and so I'm open to being corrected on the issue]
re. DJ Keenan- surely papers published with data attached would carry more authority, so any journal insisting on this would come to be viewed as more authoritative than one that didn't?
"Would a commenter advise me of how the Soon & Baliunas [paper] was flawed . . . "
I read it as contrasting the possibility that there were errors in the paper (which would not take it beyond "the boundaries of the scientific method") with an unarguably unacceptable paper such as one pushing ID. As the old quote goes, "ignorance, indifferent to either truth or error". I didn't read it as actual criticism of Soon & Baliunas.
Whatever, it's a first-rate article. (I thought the nit-picking comment about using "paranoid" in a lay context a bit silly - you might as well ban "rate of knots" because "knot" has a precise meaning for sailors.)
The mention of creationism reminded me of comment threads in which some have accused "Deniers" of being like creationists.
Creationists, I believe, are people who start with a conclusion that is totally non negotiable and then only recognise evidence that fits that conclusion as being valid.
I stand by my posted opinion.
'Paranoia' is a symptom of mental illness. 'Excessive, unfounded suspicion' is a subjective, observed behaviour. I might have some sympathy for someone born with a proclivity to, or is afflicted with due to injury or illness by, paranoid tendencies treatable to a greater or lesser degree with therapy and medication. For the principals in the article, none whatsoever!
BTW, I have been a sailor. I do not recall any instance of my fellow servicemen objecting to the use of nautical terminology by non-Naval personnel. A knot, nautical mile, or fathom is defined the same for all... no degree required! (If you are harrassed for daring to describe the right-hand side as 'starboard', please let your assailant know that I gave you permission!)
Excellent article!!
The mention of creationism reminded me of comment threads in which some have accused "Deniers" of being like creationists.
I suppose there can sometimes be a sort of connection - there are some redneck US conservatives who regard the idea of AGW as being on a par with the theory of evolution - things foisted on the world by atheist liberals.
You seem to forget that McI already had the data from the orginal Russian sources.
Or the converse, odd mix of "free-thinking" atheists and humanists attributing climate skepticism to conservative, red-neck, fox-news watching, neo-con, religious freaks as was on display in the Point of Inquiry forums after the Michael Mann interview and other atheist forums such as Atheist Who Love Science!.
BCL
I did want to go into that issue, but word count prevented it.
There's an interesting contrast between the story of McIntyre's Hockey Stick work and what happened with the Yamal data.
For Yamal, having the original data from the Russians was irrelevant because McIntyre needed to have what Briffa had used. Then he could check that it was the same as the archives or what the Russians used or whatever.
For the Hockey Stick, McIntyre did have the original data and was able to check it back to the archives, discovering many issues as he did so (use of obsolete data versions, extrapolations and infilling and so on). This is how it should work - you get the data as used and check it back to the official archives.
If Mann had withheld the data as Briffa did, these issues would have been extraordinarily difficult to uncover.
"The mention of creationism reminded me of comment threads in which some have accused "Deniers" of being like creationists."
This one always annoys me, both in terms of the accusation that the two opinions are similar, but also sometimes with creationists trying to compare their nonsense to AGW scepticism.
I have a simple answer to both. If you were to ask a biological scientist why we should accept that evolution is fact, do you think he will tell you you should believe this because he, a scientists says so, and you couldn't possibly understand the details. Does he say you should believe because the Royal Society, and all the major scientific bodies, have issued statements on it?
Will he hell! He'll tell you about all the different lines of evidence, all pointing to the exact same conclusion. He is able to do this because there is abundant such evidence, which when taken as a whole is utterly compelling to any rational person.
And if climate "scientists" had abundant evidence, that's what they would do too.
http://digg.com/environment/Heated_Discussions_Peer_Review_and_Climate
_Science
"For Yamal, having the original data from the Russians was irrelevant because McIntyre needed to have what Briffa had used. Then he could check that it was the same as the archives or what the Russians used or whatever."
This only makes sense if you assume that Briffa might have altered the Russian data. Since Briffa did not, McI could have done exactly what he did with the data he had from the Russians, got the same result, and not wasted everybody's time. But of course wasting people's time was the point, wasn't it?
"This only makes sense if you assume that Briffa might have altered the Russian data."
No, data can differ for many reasons - version differences, say.