Climategate and HADCRUT

I'm sure most readers are aware of Steve McIntyre's post on the Myles Allen video. The comments thread is also very interesting. I was particularly taken with Lucia Liljegren's response to a comment made by Myles on the subject of the relevance of the temperature records to CRUTEM. This is what Myles said:

I stand by the assertion that, thanks to the sloppy coverage the affair received in the media, it wasn’t just Sarah Palin who got the impression that the instrumental temperature record was seriously compromised: The Times opened the relevant story with “A science blogger has uncovered a catalogue of errors in Met Office records…”

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'Ello, 'ello, 'ello

From Scottish Sceptic:

So, it is with deep regret that I feel I have:

• Informed the Norfolk police of a likely crime at the UEA.
• Asked my MP (Jo Swinson) to inform the appropriate parliamentary authorities that they appear to have been lied to.
• Written to Sir Muir Russell (by way of the judicial appointments board) making him aware of these allegations.
• Initiated a complaint with the UK civil service against Sir John Beddington.

Interesting. Particularly the first point. I wonder what crime is alleged?

The cost of the Climategate

Reiner Grundmann looks at different evaluations of Climategate and considers the costs of trying to brush the affair under the carpet.

In conclusion, we see a variety of approaches and evaluations of the climategate affair, emphasizing different aspects and taking care how to take a stance in this highly politicized debate. What I find most interesting is how authors have dealt with the problem of reflexivity (or not!), given that their intellectual heritage is rooted in [Science and Technology Studies] and varieties of constructivism. While this approach broadly informs Wynne and Jasanoff’s papers, they have not really examined the affair as ‘science in the making’ in any detailed way. Ryghaug and Skjølsvold provide such detail but shrink back from an evaluation in the light of what has been seen as a loss of credibility and a scandal. Van der Sluijs and Beck’s call for institutional reform of the IPCC and more openness in climate science goes further. And Ravetz steps up to the challenge of reflexivity giving a very personal account, looking into the mirror and describing the powerful social mechanisms of being coopted by the dominant discourse, which led him to suspend critical reflection for a while. If social scientists want to avoid the dilemma sketched by Wynne of either denying the authority of IPCC science or faithfully following its conventional wisdom down the corresponding technocratic policy, they had better examine climategate more deeply and ponder the lessons. We need much more reflection on this case which should not be closed off because of political expediency. The debate has only just begun.

No consequences

Jon Snow, the veteran British newsreader opines on the case of Rupert Murdoch's appearances before the Media Select Committee:

One of the most hard hitting reports of recent times, resulting from one of the intensive investigations will result in almost no Parliamentary action. Not because, on essential elements, there was a split on the Committee, but because even where there was no dissent – in finding that the Committee had in effect been lied to – there is no current consequence of worth. MPs can open the window on wrongdoing, but they can do all but nothing when they find it. Exposing it has little direct effect...

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Outside again

Some time ago, Graham Stringer MP tried to ascertain from the University of East Anglia how much was paid to its PR advisers, the Outside Organisation. Readers may remember that the boss of this company was arrested as part of the phone hacking scandal.

The university, not unexpectedly, refused to release the data, citing commercial interests and confidentiality, and in due course Stringer's request was passed to the Information Commissioner. Last week, in the face of a preliminary finding from the commissioner's office that they would find against the university, Professor Acton et al took a step back and finally released the requested information.

£112,870.71 was paid to the Outside Organisation for their services

It's an expensive business running a cover-up.

I have an outstanding appeal of my own with the commissioner, which with a bit of luck will reveal the related correspondence. The decision of the commissioner gives me at least reasonable hope of success.

Update on Apr 23, 2012 by Bishop Hill

The letter to Stringer is here.

Update on Apr 24, 2012 by Bishop Hill

Leo Hickman picks up on the story here.

SciTech III

I hear on the grapevine that Professor Edward Acton of UEA was back in front of the Science and Technology Committee last week. Apparently there was a private hearing.

No details as yet.

A surprise from Norfolk Constabulary

Norfolk Constabulary have previously released details of their spend on the UEA emails investigation - Operation Cabin. This showed that no money had been spent on the investigation since February 2011, something that strongly suggested that the investigation was in fact closed. Despite this, the Constabulary insisted that the investigation was ongoing.

In order to probe this a little further, I requested details of man-hours spent on the investigation by month. If no man hours had been actually been clocked up over the same period then it would amount to pretty much incontrovertible evidence that everything had ground to a halt.

Today I had a response:

Norfolk Constabulary does not hold information relevant to your request.
...
Our Major Investigations Team have advised that whilst we have previously been able to provide details of expenditure which includes non-basic salary costs for example overtime costs, we do not record the time spent by officers and police staff on a specific investigation.
Officers and staff engaged on the investigation will have been involved in a number of other enquiries at the same time. Police officers may record details of specific activities relating to investigations within their pocket note book or their enquiry officers rough book. However, officers would not record all time spent on a particular enquiry therefore Norfolk Constabulary does not hold total hours worked by officers and staff on this investigation.

It looks to me as if there is some lawyerly wording here. If I understand correctly, they are saying that because they cannot provide accurate figures, they cannot answer my request.

I've asked them to send any details they do have.

More learned analysis of Climategate

Another academic paper on the meaning of CLimategate comes in the shape of this study, by Marianne Ryghaug and Tomas Moe Skjølsvold.

This article analyzes 1073 emails that were hacked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in November, 2009. The incident was popularly dubbed “Climate Gate”, indicating that the emails reveal a scientific scandal. Here we analyze them differently. Rather than objecting to the exchanges based on some idea about proper scientific conduct, we see them as a rare glimpse into a situation where scientists collectively prepare for participation in heated controversy, with much focus on methodology. This allows us to study how scientists communicate informally about framing propositions of facts in the best possible way. Through the eyes of Science and Technology studies (STS) the emails provide an opportunity to study communication as part of science in the making across disciplines and laboratories. Analysed as “written conversation” the emails provide information about processes of consensus formation through ‘agonistic evaluations’ of other scientists work and persuasion of others to support ones own work. Also, the emails contain judgements about other groups and individual scientists. Consensus-forming appeared as a precarious activity. Controversies could be quite resilient in the course of this decade-long exchange, probably reflecting the complexity of the methodological challenges involved.

The paper is also being discussed at Klimazwiebel.

(H/T Messenger)

Irony fail

Readers will be amused by the outpourings of Lawrence Souder and Furrah Qureshi of Drexel University. Their latest paper appears in the Journal of Scientific Communication.

Most accounts of an ideal scientific discourse proscribe ad hominem appeals as one way to distinguish it from public discourse. Because of their frequent use of ad hominem attacks, the Climategate email messages provoked strong criticisms of climate scientists and climate science. This study asks whether the distinction between public and scientific discourse holds in this case and thus whether the exclusion of ad hominem arguments from scientific discourse is valid. The method of analysis comes from the field of informal logic in which argument fallacies like the ad hominem are classified and assessed. The approach in this study focuses on a functional analysis of ad hominem—their uses rather than their classification. The analysis suggests three distinct functional uses of ad hominem remarks among the Climategate emails: (1) indirect, (2) tactical, and (3) meta-. Consistent with previous research on ad hominem arguments in both public and scientific discourse, these results reinforce the common opinion of their fallacious character. Only the remarks of the last type, the meta- ad hominem, seemed to be non-fallacious in that they might help to preempt the very use of ad hominem attacks in scientific discourse.

Throughout their paper, Souder and Qureshi refer to anyone who questions any aspect of the AGW hypothesis as "deniers". Perhaps irony hasn't made its way to the top of the ivory tower yet.

The paper is quite interesting though.

MSNBC on Climategate and the inquiries

There is a very interesting, if rather toe-curling, segment about Climategate and the inquiries on the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC.

Although she kicks off with the normal straw man about hiding declines in global temperature, she soon moves on to something that is closer to the truth, explaining that hide the decline was about hiding the failure of the proxies to track temperatures in the period after 1960. This is good, but she then elides into an important piece of misinformation, by suggesting that this is an issue that only affects the post-1960 period. This is of course, not the case. Since nobody knows what causes the divergence, nobody knows whether it affects earlier periods or not, although of course there are strong suggestions that it does.

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Jo Nova on Richard Black

BBC watchers will want to take a look at Jo Nova's analysis of how the corporation reported Climategate as compared to how it reported Fakegate.

A must-read.

Flood and drought

Charlie Flindt is a farmer, who has written a rather funny piece at Farmer's Weekly wondering about the antics of DEFRA and the climatologists. Flindt doesn't like conferences but, he says:

...there was one meeting the other day that I would have given anything to attend, even at breakfast time: the DEFRA drought summit.

All the great and the good were there: Mrs Spelman, the Environment Agency, Natural England, British Waterways, the Met Office, and representatives from the agricultural sector and environmental NGOs.

Reports suggest that there was much earnest discussion of this year's drought, the problems it brings, and measures that can be taken. These measures ranged from the bleeding obvious, like stopping leaks, to the fairly major, like suggesting that farmers consider on-farm storage of water.

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Pathological mendacity

A few months back, Steve McIntyre said something that stuck in my memory:

Never under-estimate the capacity for institutional mendacity.

Today he writes in similar vein about the extraordinary range of mutually inconsistent stories put forward by the University of East Anglia in its various pronouncements on the availability of the CRU emails. Institutional mendacity indeed.

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What trend would you like with your graph sir?

Thanks to reader William for pointing out Climategate 2 email 4578. The context seems to be a discussion of how to present temperature trends, and it is worth reading the full email thread. But Jones' contribution to the thread looks a bit problematic.

date: Mon Jul 18 14:25:52 2005
from: Phil Jones <p.jones@uea.ac.uk>
subject: Re: Text and CQ stuff
to: "Parker, David (Met Office)" <david.parker@metoffice.gov.uk>, Kevin Trenberth <trenbert@ucar.edu>

Kevin,

Even without smoothing it is possible to get a trend of nearer 0.75 if the trend starts around 1920 (especially if the cold year of 1917 is at the start). The periods chosen for Table 3.2.2 had some justification, so we need to be a little careful. As a schematic for CQ2 though, it will be a different way of showing the same data.

I'll talk it over with David.

Cheers

A major FOI victory

This post is a jointly written effort by myself and Don Keiller.

Readers may remember the Information Commissioner's ruling last year that UEA had to release the CRUTEM data sent by Phil Jones to Peter Webster at Georgia Tech. This had been requested by Jonathan Jones and Don Keiller.

This ruling was obviously very welcome, but in fact it was not the end of the story. UEA had put forward an argument that CRUTEM data was held under agreements with national meteorological services and could not therefore be disclosed to outsiders. Along with his request for the data, Keiller had therefore also requested the covering email that Phil Jones had sent to Webster, which should presumably contain caveats about reuse and disclosure. However, when the Information Commissioner ordered UEA to release the data,  UEA's non-disclosure of the email was upheld, on the grounds that the information was, on the balance of probablilities, 'not held'.

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