Bishop Hill The Haldane principle and global warming
Jan 27, 2011 Bureaucrats Climate: CRU FOI A scientist called Adam Leadbetter has written a thoughtful piece on the Paul Nurse programme. He is writing from a mainstream standpoint and therefore gets some of the Climategate facts wrong, but his conclusions about data openness are worth a look.
In passing he makes reference to the political control of scientific funding:
Science journalism needs to be more responsible
The Daily Express, The Daily Mail and The Guardian were shown by Paul Nurse to have reported the outcomes of the investigation into Climategate in completely different ways. Yes, newspapers have different editorial lines and I will choose to read one newspaper based on how it fits with my political standpoint and you may choose to read another. Fine. It is also true that scientific funding bodies may choose which projects are deserving of their money based on a political agenda set at a national governmental level. Despite that, however, the results of a scientific programme should be apolitical and as such deserve to be disseminated, at what ever level of detail, in an apolitical, factual way and not spun out of all recognition to the tone a newspaper editor finds most appealing.
The idea that politicians direct scientific funding is, I think, at least mainly incorrect. There is a long-standing convention - the Haldance principle - that scientific funding is directed by scientists, or perhaps more accurately by scientific administrators. So while we might be concerned about scientific funding being directed to support the ambitions of politicians, I'm not sure that things are any better with the science bureaucracy running the show. The bureaucrats, like the politicians have little or no incentive to direct funding towards projects that will further the interests of the public. Their economic incentive is simply to get more funding.
We can see the results of these perverse incentives in the pages of New Scientist every week.
Bishop Hill
The original article seems to have disappeared. Adam says he's in the process of moving to a different blogging platform. The copy from the Google cache can be seen here.
Reader Comments (37)
> We can see the results of these perverse incentives in the pages of New Scientist every week.
Not any more I can't. I finally unsubscribed because they can no longer run an overseas subscription service. It worked fine for the first 5 years I was in Italy, but then in October the issues started to come postmarked New Zealand and take between 4 and 8 weeks to arrive. I just received the first 2 issues for December.
This would have been a source of some regret a couple of years ago, but I am completely fed up with their coverage of climate "science" and this has opened my eyes to the fact that a lot of their coverage is now sensational populist BS.
Good riddance to them, I'll see all the important stories reported elsewhere.
Sorry yer Grace, but the "principal" in the title should be "principle", unless there is a pun there that I have been too dim to spot.
[BH adds - I got it right in the text at least! Thanks]
Should be Haldane's principle (from J.B.S.Haldane)
AFAIK science funding in universities is controlled by the Research Councils which report to Sir Adrian Smith, who is a seriously bright statistician and was an effective administrator at Queen Mary London. After a near miss he has kept his job through a change of government so is not overtly political, but needs to be lobbied re the whole climate change/renewable energy business, as no doubt he will have Huhne and many others in his ear.
The Haldane principle does not depoliticise government funding of science. It simply shifts the focus of the politicisation. At the start it no doubt worked reasonably well, since it was administered by people who achieved their positions by scientific achievements. Over time it is surely eroded as these are replaced by successful grant-farmers who are the prey of lobbyists. Ironically this means the people can replace a government that has failed them, but the direction of science funding will stay the same.
The "Haldane" principle
That all changed when Lord Sainsbury of Turville became science minister in the last Labour government.
Sainsbury personally donated money directly to the University of East Anglia.
And together with the University of East Anglia he also helped found the Sainsbury Laboratory near Norwich
As Science Minister he wielded almost untrammelled authority over all aspects of scientific research and development.
I'm with RogerT. I gave up my subscription because of the
global warmingclimate change BS.David S
Take a look at the board of NERC - lots of familar names. These are the people who do the detailed divvying up of money, not RCUK, I think.
Your Grace,
You've been far too kind in your comment to that post. The 60 over a weekend was a DIRECT RESULT of Jones' stonewalling over reasonable data requests.
CRU refused a request for data on the basis of confidentiality which resulted in the 60 requests for the confidentiality agreements. It is monstrous that he was not hauled over the coals for it and he now seems to be getting away with playing the victim card. He must be pulled up on it vigorously and often.
Adam Leadbetter is a data scientist at British Oceanographic Data Centre (BODC). He should really the know the difference between a FOI request and a denial-of-service attack. When you consider that BODC deals with 400 requests each and every day, over 146,000 in a year, the 60 FOI requests that CRU were sent over a weekend are nothing to complain about.
This piece by Adam Leadbetter reveals a conflicted response. Leadbetter's day job is collecting, calibrating, compiling, checking and storing of data, and dealing with a multitude of equiries and requests for data, but offers up a very lame excuse for a former boss, Phil Jones who clearly has issues over requests concerning CRU data.
"Even if WMO agrees, I will still not pass on the data. We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it." - Phil Jones, 2004.
Phil Jones did not slip up as Adam Leadbetter declares, Jones knew exactly what he was doing.
Mr P-G
I said he'd got things wrong. He still makes useful points though. Always good to remember that his being wrong on something doesn't make him a bad person. He almost certainly will not have checked the facts himself - most people don't have time.
Unfortunately, the article seems to have been taken down, or at least I'm not able to get to it any longer.
Adam Leadbetter was at CRU from Feb 2005 to July 2005. A short time maybe but long enough for someone who was professionally interested in data handling (and who eventually became a data scientist) to get to grips with how data was being handled by Phil Jones during that period of growing controversy.
Did he offer up comments or suggestions during that time? If so where they acted upon?
Did he turn a blind eye to what was going on? On reflection should he have said something?
How prevalent are the practices of Phil Jone and CRU in the scientific establishment?
If anyone would know it would be someone like Adam Leadbetter.
Days of NERC innocence are long time passed. It is now the green treasury bursary in the Ministry of Climate Truth.
So Smith needs to be persuaded that if NERC p*** all their research money away on vanity projects and climate related hysteria they should take one for the team on their budget and help reduce the defecit- although no doubt he will struggle to persuade Huhne and shagger Yeo. I will get on the case.
Data scientist gets caught talking out of line ?????????
Are Sky-Sports-like dark-forces at play?
What do climate scientists know about the offside rule anyway!
"Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it." You claimin' my Phil left a question mark aht, Bishop bloody Hill? Wipe yer mouf aht.
"...the Unit had received some sixty Freedom of Information act requests over one weekend from a range of sources, in the parlance of the internet this is a distributed denial of service attack."
Computer security is obviously not Adam Leadbetter's forte as he seems quite clueless as to what is a real DDoS attack, which is certainly not sixty FOI requests over a weekend.
Garth W. Paltridge in the The Climate Caper says:
And I think it is quite true. He gives some more first hand examples on how politics influence the funding in universities and research labs. For everybody in the field, the extremely hyerarquical structure of Academia and the dire results of challenging it does not help a bit.
Coldish
It's confusing, but there are two Haldane principles. Yours, the Haldane's principle (after JBS Haldane), is a zoological principle. The research funding Haldane principle is after his uncle, Viscount Richard Burdon Haldane, polician, who chaired committees and commissions which recommended this policy. Interestingly, JBS Haldane, Marxist and communist supporter, population geneticist, Royal Society Darwin Medalist and one time supporter of Lysenko moved to and became a citizen of India in the belief that the warm climate would do him good and that India offered him freedom and shared socialist dreams.
"the warm climate would do him good"
Ironic, isn't it?
OT, word is coming in that another 700,000 carbon indulgences have been stolen from the Czech registry. This represents a cool 10 million euros, bringing the net proceeds of thefts to dat to somewhere around 40 million.
Indulgence thieves are of course totally bought into the consensus that CAGW is real and needs to be combated. As Christine Keeler observed, they would, wouldn't they?
J4R
No. You're pulling my leg. It's happened again?
Somebody needs their backside kicking.
and one time supporter of Lysenko
O/T I know but that's a little harsh, methinks. Haldane was by any reckoning a fine scientist even if he was coy about Stalin (as was everyone else including Churchill during the war) and politically equivocal early doors about Lysenko. I do not recall reading anything by him that explicitly supported Lysenkoism though I stand to be corrected.
OTOH, I see in Wiki something I didn't know:
"In 1923, in a talk given in Cambridge, Haldane, foreseeing the exhaustion of coal for power generation in Britain, proposed a network of hydrogen-generating windmills."
Oh Dear.
Have to say, I love your description of carbon credits as "indulgences". Looked at from that aspect how long do we have to wait for our own Martin Luther? Job for a Bishop?
Dave B
Haldane must have been a clairvoyant of Nostradamus proportions!
Ed
Ay, right, it's the tabloids what dunnit, not a bunch of panhandling, grant-zombie catastrophists.
Pharos
Haldane also wrote My Friend Mr. Leakey, one of my favourite books wnen I was a kid, so much may be forgiven him. As for supporting Lysenko, here is some (comradely) criticism:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/haldane/works/1940s/lysenko.htm
Thanks Dreadnought. Perhaps I should have said ambivalent.
In a word, naive
Follow the money back to where it comes from and it is the king with the coin in his hand who calls the piper's tune. Always has been, always will be.
@ BBD
There is absolutely naff-all that can be done. The indulgences are dematerialised, and exist only in a registry. Access an account at said registry with one set of the right credentials, and you can move them out. It's less secure than an online bank account - but each registry, 27 of them, holds hundreds of millions rather than a few thousand quid.
The MO is, log in, steal someone else's indulgences, then transfer them through 15 or 20 separate accounts you control, in several secretive jurisdictions, over the course of the next three or four minutes. This fogs the legal picture nicely - can your reverse a stolen indulgence transfer from Estonia back through Poland and Bulgaria and thence back into Liechtenstein? Does Bulgarian law define what an indulgence actually is? Is it like cash, a security, a BACS transfer or is it an intangible asset?Dunno, is there an expert in Bulgaria-Lichtenstein cross-border transaction law in the house?
Having muddied the waters a bit around jurisdiction, the thief then needs to fence them on. He does this by selling them in packages of a few hundred to brokers / aggregators.
The brokers are well used to small companies and individuals trading small parcels in this way. Nothing suspicious about it, they see hundreds of thousands of tonnes of indulgences traded per day.
They buy a few hundred here and a few hundred there - from the thief - pay him and sell them on. This is either to other small users who are short, or - bundled up into 1,000-tonne packages to meet the minimum size - into Bluenext, OMX, ICE, wherever - the various exchanges that host trading of them.
As a result, they have passed through loads of respectable people's hands before they reach an exchange, which passes them on to still more respectable hands. Weeks later someone notices they're gone and squeals. At this point it's discovered that, since the current owner bought them in good faith at fair market value, with no knowledge they had been stolen, from an honest market participant...they're lawfully his (probably)!
So the thieves get their money, the careless owner loses it. If it's the registry that's been penetrated as opposed to the IT security of the rightful owner then the only solution is...a whole new registry. Oh dear!
The real fun is that the EU has refused to take ownership of publishing a definitive list of stolen allowances. They figure it's not their job and the data are confidential. So nobody who delivers an indulgence has any way of knowing if he's delivered something valid or not. Six weeks, maybe six months later, someone may stick his head up and say Oi, those numbers are mine.
Seriously, this could signal the end. If they can't come up with a secure trading mechanism, there's no cap and trade, there's just cap. There's no EU Emissions Trading Scheme there's just a Tax-on-Air Scheme.
J4R
Thanks. My vastly enhanced understanding of this crime is entirely down to what you post here. I scarcely know what to say except that it beggars belief that something so porous and inviting could have been implemented. Naivety is not always charming. Sometimes it is risible.
I wonder about your last paragraph though. Not that I question your logic, simply that so much time, effort and money has already been expended on CAT, and the politicking has been so vast and so far-flung. Can CAT simply be scrapped? Is it possible?
Or will the leaky tub continue to sink, consuming ever-greater sums of
freepublic money?I found this intriguing: New Scientist is hosting a competition in which you can win a trip to the Arctic (quick, while you still can ;). Somewhat ironically, the competition is sponsored by Statoil, the Norwegian oil and gas giant! Maybe they are trying to shake off accusations of bias against "big oil"?!
http://www.newscientist.com/engineeringgreats/competition
@ BBD
The reason why this is so serious for the idea of tradeable allowances is that if the trade repositories are not secure, they can never reopen, meaning no trading.
Also, if title can be retrospectively challenged - by someone who says that an indulgence given up in emissions compliance in 2011 was stolen from them in 2010, say - then potentially the value of an indulgence will collapse. Any of them might turn out to be invalid for compliance purposes, so why pay full whack for them? Why not pay 1 eurocent rather than 1400 euros?
At that point, people might shrug and elect to default on compliance and simply pay the fine, as this will limit their loss. More realistically, someone will challenge the legality of being fined for non compliance on the grounds that compliance is impossible given the insecurity of the registries.
It's an extreme scenario but what is not unlikely is some sort of concerted revolt by the players on the grounds that it is where the road can be seen to lead.
If you think about it, the scheme must collapse at some point; why not this year?
J4R
Well, I always thought the Euro CAT scheme was misconceived and should never have gone ahead. I just didn't know the half of it...
I do hope you are right and that it is not in fact sinking but actually dead in the water.
"...If they can't come up with a secure trading mechanism, there's no cap and trade, there's just cap. There's no EU Emissions Trading Scheme there's just a Tax-on-Air Scheme." --Justice4Rinka
Aha! You've finally figured out the master-plan, which moves ahead, goose-step by goose-step!
Your Grace: "He .. gets some of the Climategate facts wrong. He almost certainly will not have checked the facts himself - most people don't have time."
That may be excusable in the saloon bar -- but not on a blog. If he can't be bothered to check his facts, then he shouldn't bother posting. It is irresponsible, especially for a scientist, to publish things that they have failed to fact check. His post is best left in cache limbo.
"The bureaucrats, like the politicians have little or no incentive to direct funding towards projects that will further the interests of the public. Their economic incentive is simply to get more funding."
I don't know how it works in UK, but this seems an overly broad an cynical untruth. I can understand your cynicism with regard to the IPCC lot, but it does violence to the many (vast majority) of scientists and scientist-bureaucrats in the US who work diligently on NIH, NSF, and FDA study sections in the public interest. Yes, there is far too much cronyism and such, but scientists, even climate scientists, try hard to get it right. The fact that some are blinded by bias and self-promotion does not spoil the whole barrel.