Bishop Hill Tobis on Mann
Mar 7, 2012 Climate: Mann Michael Tobis has written an overview of the Hockey Stick story. It's frankly not desperately interesting, reiterating some standard Hockey Team positions without addressing criticisms of them. I thought that this bit was worthy of comment though (emphasis in original):
4) Scientific tradition as it currently stands does not require publication of data. This is a consequence of a competitive environment which traces to the idea that science should run “more like a business”. Expensive data may be collected in an expectation that a given lab’s ownership of the data may give it a competitive advantage in later grant competitions. Although this is an unfortunate turn of the scientific culture, Steve McIntyre seeks to overturn it retroactively by harassment.
This is fine, so long as you are happy for that data not to be used to inform public policy.
Reader Comments (24)
And providing the data hasn't been collected, cherry picked, adjusted, homogenised and any declines hidden all at the taxpayers' expense.
I have no objection to a privately funded lab retaining ownership and also retaining the right of refusal to block access to data. However if that data is used to promote or inform policy decisions then it should be accessible to all and sundry. A simple question: "Is your data to be used to promote or inform policy decsions? (Y/N).. If "Y" then the data must be made available to all. If "N" you can sit on it to your heart's content.
Publicly funded scientific research is not Business.
All of the data should be posted online for free with no caveats, it's not Kentucky Fried Chicken's secret recipe we are talking about.
"Steve McIntyre seeks to overturn it retroactively by harassment."
English primer for climate psyentists:
Polite emails = "harassment"
Getting dissenting editors sacked = "scientific banter"
"a competitive advantage in later grant competitions"
Never mind the original aim of the work!
It seems Mr. Mann's effort will be a rather thin gruel, I may read it, merely to muse on Mann's literary style and prose - the gist however, will not be worth 'touching'. I very much doubt that Mr. Mann whilst attempting to [mis]informing the reader, can entertain and amuse ala Delingpole.
Tobis, another one - who just doesn't 'get it'. Public, or should I say taxpayer funded research and data sets garnered thereof - is the property of everybody and no ifs or buts.
"Scientific tradition as it currently stands does not require publication of data." True, and always has been.
"... data may be collected in an expectation that a given lab’s ownership of the data may give it a competitive advantage in later grant competitions." True, and there always has been competition for resources.
But scientific "tradition" has always required that once you publish your ideas based on those data and thereby claim priority and credit for them, you must provide the data that you claim support your ideas to anyone who asks for it.
The story above this one claimed that meeting the UK's renewables obligation (obligation to whom? - obviously not to the British people!) would cost £120 billion. I think that anyone proposing expenditure on that scale ought to agree that the data used to justify such horrendous expenditure should be freely available so that the arguments for the expenditure can be examined with the utmost rigour.
@ Roy Mar 7, 2012 at 9:56 AM
In one.
The scientist acquires data and tries to interpret it. Usually they publish their conclusions in the hope of getting "credit" for them, largely from their peers.
If politicians and entrepreneurs refer to the scientists' ideas in support of their own agenda, they will cherry pick them to fit. Scientists have only one vote each :)
Have you missed the 'a' out of the name Tobis
Tobis is simply wrong, most journals (aiui) have a policy that the data underlying published articles should be made available if requested. They may not enforce their policies but never the less the policies exist and so the reasonable expectation is that the data is made available when a paper is published.
1. The research is publicly funded.
2. The paper is published.
3. It is being used to inform public policy with enormous negative impact on the poor.
Pick any three you like. In fact, just pick one. The strongest will do nicely. For this isn't a cumulative argument. Even though the first two would be enough on their own, the last clinches it.
Perhaps Mr Tobis would care to explain how the findings can be validated when nobody other than the authors and their pals has seen the data, given Phil Jones' admission that when peer reviewing he doesn't bother to perform any analysis. No data - not science. Simple.
Forgot to say: has Tobis heard of the old saying: nullius in verba?
Michael Tobis
"Once again Shollenberger’s claim here is flat wrong and Mann is right. Search MM03 for the word “noise” and you will find nothing, because there is no mention of the specific claim Mann mentions"
In HOCKEY STICKS, PRINCIPAL COMPONENTS AND SPURIOUS SIGNIFICANCE MM03
http://friendsofscience.org/assets/files/documents/Hockey%20Stick2004GL012750%5B1%5D.pdf
opening of paragraph 3, page 4, in linked pdf version.
"In a network of persistent red noise, there will be some series that randomly “trend” up or down
during the ending sub-segment of the series (as well as other sub-segments). In the next section,
we discuss a Monte Carlo experiment to show that these spurious “trends” in a closing segment
are sufficient for the MBH98 method, when applied to a network of red noise, to yield hockey stick PC1s, even though the underlying data generating process has no trend component"
Tobis = "economical with the actualité"
Sorry all, I made a mistake and linked to the MM05 paper, not the 03 paper.
03 was MM attempt to reconstruct the same plots of Mann, using the same data he had used. This was a criticism of the data selection, mis-location and truncation, and not the methodology.
It is true that the criticism of the methodology occurred 2 years later.
mm03 is here
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/MM03.pdf
and MM state in their conclusion
Without endorsing the MBH98 methodology or choice of source data , we were able to apply the MBH98 methodology to a database with improved quality control and found that their own method, carefully applied to their own intended source data, yielded a Northern Hemisphere temperature index in which the late 20th century is unexceptional compared to the preceding centuries, displaying neither unusually high mean values nor variability. More generally, the extent of errors and defects in the MBH98 data means that the indexes computed from it are unreliable and cannot be used for comparisons between the current climate and that of past centuries, including claims like “temperatures in the latter half of the 20th century were unprecedented,” and “even the warmer intervals in the reconstruction pale in comparison with mid-to-late 20th-century temperatures” (see press release accompanying Mann et al 1999) or that the 1990s was “likely the warmest decade” and 1998 the “warmest year” of the millennium (IPCC 2001).
Okay, let's say a "scientist" had a good reason for not publishing their data. It seems to me that it would be polite and practical for the aforementioned "scientist" to explain their reasoning when people come asking after the data. If the "scientist" were to be whelmed by a large number of requests they could use the copy and paste function and/or forward reply function to spread the word without becoming overwhelmed.
Hiding your data and methodologies from any query only serves to make people including other scientists skeptical of your results and possibly suspicious of your motives.
If your rude intransigence makes you somewhat notorious, you may have to write a book to defend your tel.
Tel = a small hill with all kinds of interesting things buried inside.
Others being able to replicate the work to check it, is very much a corner stone of science , if you can't do it becasue they hind the data , then they not doing 'science' in the first place but marketing and should be treated as such . For if they want to be treated like scientists its perfectly fair to expect them to work to scientific standards , and 'trust me on this ' is not one of them.
DocMartyn, I'm not sure why you attributed that quote to Tobis. It was Frank o'Dwyer who said that. Regardless, his point is pretty lame. It's true MM2003 did not discuss the red noise issue. However, the argument I was referring to was:
Their new, albeit equally erroneous, assertion was that the hockey stick was an artifact of the conventions used in applying principal component analysis
This was clearly stated as a "new assertion." I said it wasn't new. o'Dwyer instead chooses to ignore that part of the quote and solely focus on:
they argued, “manufactured Hockey Sticks” even from pure noise.
Yes, there were new components to the argument. No, the argument that PCA was a source of the hockey stick was not new. You have to really struggle to interpret my comment the way he did.
Brandon, I was trying to point out the lameness. I mixed up MM03 and MM05, as I am getting old. I did remember the explicit 'Without endorsing the MBH98 methodology or choice of source data', which was followed later followed by a critique of the methodology.
It was not a case of a 'new, albeit equally erroneous, assertion was that the hockey stick was an artifact of the conventions used in applying principal component analysis'
Brandon - it's a struggle to get any sense of what Frank O'Dwyer writes. It is strenuous nit-picking at best. I cannot really understand why AMAC thinks that he has a lucid writing style. He strikes me as the Comintern troll of the IPCC...nothing he writes makes any sense on first reading.
Don't worry DocMartyn. Practically everything Mann says about MM2005 actually only applies to MM2003. Given that, it's hard to criticize anyone for confusing the two (actually, there was more than one paper in 2005).
diogenes, I too have no idea why AMac thinks that writing is lucid. That's about the last thing I'd ever call it. I honestly can't imagine how anyone would read his first point and think it makes sense.