Parsing the police

Here's my reading of the situation.

I first contacted Norfolk constabulary a week ago and was told by a very helpful press officer that there was no further statement at that time, but that I should keep getting in touch for further information. When I asked yesterday if they had at least ascertained if there was a leak or a hacking of the UEA servers, I was sent the statement which has caused so much interest. In the comments that thread, Jeff Id states that he has heard from Norfolk police too.

My reading of this is that the investigation has barely got off the ground, and some action was perhaps prompted by my questions. Six weeks on from the breaking of Climategate, it might be seen as slightly embarrassing for the police that they had yet to determine what it is they are investigating, so they have now leapt into action. Jeff appears to be the only prominent climate blogger contacted directly. As the person who first received the link to the leaked information, he is an obvious first port of call for the police to get some evidence to point them to the answer to the leak/hack question.

The involvement of the Domestic Extremism Police is probably actually predictable. As watchers of the deteriorating civil liberties situation in the UK all know, powers granted to the police in the wake of 9/11 in order to fight terrorism are routinely used in the UK for minor crimes. By bringing in these specialists, Norfolk Police will be able to monitor emails, demand passwords and cryptographic keys and so on. That these powers are out of all proportion to the alleged crime is of course of no concern to law enforcement officers.

Meanwhile, the involvement  of the Information Commissioner is interesting too. The ICO's inquiry probably has two distinct focuses. Firstly they will  be investigating if UEA staff were involved in withholding information subject to requests under the Freedom of Information Act and the Data Protection Act. For the benefit of overseas readers, the latter relates to the maintenance of personal information.

But while there are obvious concerns over the conduct of UEA staff, it is likely that the ICO will also be looking at whether the hack/leak itself also breached the DPA. While the vast majority of the emails are not personal in nature, there are odd snippets of personal information among all the talk of hiding declines and nobbling journals. It is likely that these would concern the ICO.

I wonder how long it will be before we get a determination on the hack/leak question? Perhaps some of my IT-savvy readers can suggest how difficult it is to determine if one's server has been hacked?

++++Statement from Norfolk Police++++

This morning I contacted Norfolk Constabulary with a view to finding out if they had yet ascertained whether the breach at the Climatic Research Unit was a leak or a hack. I have just received a response which is frankly amazing:

Norfolk Constabulary continues its investigations into criminal offences in relation to a data breach at the University of East Anglia.  During the enquiry officers have been working in liaison with the Office of the Information Commissioner and with officers from the National Domestic Extremism Team. The UEA continues to co-operate with the enquiry however major investigations of this nature are of necessity very detailed and as a consequence can take time to reach a conclusion. It would be inappropriate to comment further at this stage.

The National Domestic Extremism Team? Words fail me.

Is this a clue?

Among the recent spate of Freedom of Information requests rejected by CRU is this one, by a gentleman called John Walker, asking for correspondence between Phil Jones and the University of East Anglia FoI officer, Dave Palmer. In the light of the climategate emails hinting that CRU staff conspired with UEA FoI staff to withhold information, this seems eminently sensible.

The reasons for rejecting the request were threefold, but the one that I find interesting is this:

It is our belief that [the FoI exemption for information pertaining to a criminal investigation] applies because pursuant to an investigation carried out by the Norfolk Constabulary, this information is relevant to a current investigation by police forces into a possible criminal offence. Disclosure of any information relevant to that investigation at this point could or would prejudice the ongoing investigation of this matter.

At the moment, we don't know if the police are investigating a hacking of the CRU servers or if it is a case of a leaking of information by someone internal to UEA. But wait! If, as CRU seem to suggest, the information was hacked, what possible relevance could correspondence between Jones and Palmer be to the inquiry? If on the other hand the information was compiled for an FoI request that was subsequently rejected, then it makes perfect sense that the Jones/Palmer correspondence is relevant.

IJoC to institute new data policy

Progess is glacial, but is nevertheless in the right direction - this in today from Professor Hardaker at the Royal Meterological Society in response to my query as to how the RMS publications committee had decided to address the issue of availability of data and code.

The Scientific Publications Committee did agree that the Society should formalise its policy for all of its journals on this and that the spirit of the policy should be to make available supporting information and data where possible within the licensing and copyright rules – we think this follows best practice.  The Committee have asked me to finalise a draft policy for their approval at the next meeting.

The devil will be in the detail of course, but at first sight "supporting information and data" might well be construed as covering data, intermediate results and code. Let's hope so. It will also be interesting to see if they adopt a policy of demanding all this information up front, or if they go for the normal physical science journal approach of making information "available upon request". I hope they don't choose the latter, a sure recipe for conflict in the future, but we will have to wait and see.

Who would be in Professor Hardaker's shoes?

As the Climategate analysis starts to flow from Steve McIntyre's keyboard, it's interesting to note the theme of "climategatekeeping" emerging from the first few posts. It seems clear that there have been multiple instances of attempts to suppress or delay sceptic papers and just as many examples of warmist papers being rushed through to print on the nod. This angle to the climategate affair has been given added impetus in recent days by the extraordinary revelations of Spenser and Christy in their American Thinker article, showing how the journal editor at the International Journal of Climatology (IJoC) conspired with Hockey Team members to delay the appearance in print of a sceptic paper (Douglass et al).

IJoC, which is a journal of the Royal Meteorological Society of the UK,

Click to read more ...

Met Office code

John Graham-Cumming reports that the Met Office has published the code for preparing the land surface records.

This is slightly odd. What appears to have been released is the code for generating the CRUTEM land temperature index, which is actually prepared by CRU. However this does tally with what we know about the data the Met Office released the other day. This was, contrary to the impression given by the Met Office press release actually the corrected data which is used as input into the CRUTEM average and also the HADCRUT global temperature index. It's the latter index that most people are interested in.

If this is confusing you, I've prepared a summary of my understanding of how it all fits together. I'm not promising this is correct

I've made everything but the data and code released by the Met Office semitransparent. As you can see, what we are looking at are intermediates in the preparation of the global temperature index. While this is welcome, the guts of the changes are in the selection of the stations and in the correction of those stations for the plethora of problems with them - urban heat islands, changes in equipment, station moves, changes in observation time and so on. So while there is a feel of increasing openness, in reality, the shutters are only open the barest crack and it's still not possible to make out what's going on inside.

Meanwhile, even this extremely limited attempt at openness is not all it seems to be. John G-C has been looking at the code and running it against the data he has. What he has found is that prior to 1855 there was no southern hemisphere data and that when you run the Met Office's newly released code, this shows up as a gap in the graph of the average. But there is no such gap in the actual CRUTEM index. John's conclusion is that what we're looking at is not the actual code used in CRUTEM, but something written especially for public consumption. In light of the scorn that many programmers have been pouring on the quality of the coding standards at CRU, this might suggest that the original code was just too awful to make available for public inspection.

Searching for Phil Jones

This was rather amusing until environmentalists started to get violent.

Hans von Storch interview

English translation here:

It appears from the so-called CRU-Mails that the cartel has sinned against a basic scientific principle namely the principle of transparency. Science should be practiced openly. All published results should in principle be verifiable, should be open to criticism, also to criticism from people who are not well-meaning. That is something a scientist must accept, that people who are not well-meaning scrutinize him.

The e-mails from CRU indicate that there have been attempts to keep people from publishing
by contacting authors or publishers, that one lead author of the IPPC has at the least  expressed the thought of keeping certain persons out of the whole process and lastly, and possibly the worst, that the data on which their research is based has not been put into the open for verification. This is not acceptable.

Hail to the Chiefio

Chiefio has some more interesting analysis of one of the emails, showing how CRU, NCDC and the IPCC are all in each other's pockets. He also finds more evidence that CRU has been "economic with the actualite" in their responses to FoI requests.

Phil Jones to stand down

AP is reporting that Jones will stand down, at least temporarily, pending an investigation that he overstated climate change.

Fair to say then that UEA is not interested whether he breached the Freedom of Information Act and the Data Protection Act and whether he sought to oust journal editors from their positions then? Mind you, given that the Vice Chancellor of UEA seems to have been implicated in the breach of FoI laws you can imagine why the authorities might want to limit the terms of reference of the investigation.

Update on Dec 1, 2009 by Bishop Hill

It looks like the bit about the terms of reference being related to "overstating climate change" was AP's spin rather than what UEA actually said, which was that the terms of reference will be decided shortly.

Hadley numbers

One of the most annoying things about the Hadley numbers is that if it was, contrary to appearances, an honest oversight then it was all completely avoidable. Hadley is famously secretive about the data behind the HADCRUT index, only releasing the raw data to carefully selected people. They even have even stood firm in the face of Freedom of Information requests.

To that end I've written to Derek Twigg, the minister responsible for the Met Office and Hadley to ask him to do something about it. I wonder if he will try to convince me that it's something to do with national security.

Dear Mr Twigg

I am writing to you in your capacity as minister responsible for the Met Office.

I note that the Met Office’s Hadley Centre has today announced that it has found an error in the way it calculates its important HADCRUT3 global temperature index. I’m sure it will have been very embarrassing to everyone at the Met Office, and to yourself, to find that the figures reported to the public for so long have been erroneous.

For many years now, many members of the public have tried unsuccessfully to obtain the raw data and computer code used in the calculation of the HADCRUT index. As I understand it, all such requests are refused, even when via a FoI request.

I would therefore like to know the answer to three questions:

1. Do you agree that climate change is an issue of overwhelming public importance?
2. Do you agree that making the raw data and code widely available is the best defence against the propagation of errors such as those reported by Hadley?
3. Will you now be telling the Hadley Centre to publish the raw data and code on their website?

I will publish your response on my own website at bishophill.squarespace.com, unless you request otherwise.

Yours sincerely

Bishop Hill 

Update: Thanks to the Adam Smith Insitute for linking to this story. If any readers feel like contacting Mr Twigg too, I'm sure it would help to keep the pressure on. 

Comment from a climate scientist

I've just had a very interesting comment from someone signing themselves "Climate researcher" in response to my piece on the witholding of research data. I reproduce it here in full:

The data used by the overwhelming number of studies is freely available online from government sources. Same with model outputs. I always try to reproduce the results of previous studies to test my algorithms and have yet to find a problem. Climate science is not junk, as you say. The climate system is difficult to model, to observe and to predict. Most climate scientists are trying to understand the system in order to make season ahead predictions so that we may optimize agriculture or water resources systems to support a growing population or to make better flood predictions. Most researchers aren't involved with IPCC. I invite all people who are hostile to climate science to go back to school. You'll find out how fascinating and challenging the field really is. Thanks.

My response was this (again in full)

From the general tone of your comment I'm guessing that you accept the examples I've given, but you are saying that they are not representative of climate science as a whole. That seems credible and it would be hard for anyone to claim otherwise.

I don't mean to be hostile to climate scientists as a whole - only those guilty of withholding data and code and manipulating their results. But you as (presumably) one of the good guys needs to recognise that your professional reputation is being put on the line by the bad guys in your midst.

A professional body can't risk its brand being damaged by allowing miscreants to  get away with unprofessional behaviour. The honest majority are going to have to stand up and condemn the bad guys in no uncertain terms. If they don't, then they risk some of the mud which is being flung around sticking to them instead of its intended target.

(I should add that this article might be misconstrued as some kind of threat. It isn't, and I will be trying to ensure that I make clear who I am criticising in future). 

The hitchhikers guide to the IPCC

The IPCC has finally released the reviewers comments on its recent 4th Assessment Report. If you want to study them they are available in hard copy only at the Littauer Library of Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. You may think that this means that if you are a hard up climatology student from, say, India, you are completely stuffed. But no, the IPCC have thought of everything. The staff at Harvard will arrange to copy up to 100 pages for you at a cost of $34 plus $0.40 per page. If you can afford to employ a researcher they are happy for someone to come in to see which pages might be of interest. Otherwise you will have to make do with 100 pages at random...so maybe the Indians are stuffed after all.

Does this situation remind you of something? 

 

PROSSER
But Mr. Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months.

ARTHUR
Oh, yes, soon as I heard of this plan, I went straight around to see them yesterday afternoon. You hadn’t exactly gone out of your way to call much attention to them, had you? Such as maybe telling someone about them?

PROSSER looks more uncomfortable.

PROSSER
Well, the plans were on display –

ARTHUR
On display? I had to go down to the cellar to find them!

PROSSER
That’s the display department.

ARTHUR
With a flashlight.

PROSSER
Well, the lights had probably gone.

ARTHUR
So had the stairs.

PROSSER
Er – well – you did find them, didn’t you?

ARTHUR
Oh, yes. Yes, I did. The plans were on display, in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet, stuck in a disused lavatory, with a sign on the door reading “Beware of the Leopard.”

It is not known if the Littauer Library has stairs, or whether the Environmental Science and Public Policy Archives are, in fact, located in a disused public convenience.

(Source here. Hitchhikers Guide reference shamelessly ripped from the comments). 

Climate science is not sound science

It's pretty much fundamental that scientific results have to be reproducible in order to be accepted as valid. You have to describe exactly what you did, in sufficient detail for somebody else to be able to reproduce what you say you did. If they can't, and you can't explain  where they went wrong, then the result will be written off as erroneous or even fraudulent.

For many specialisms, statistical manipulation is a normal and necessary part of the  scientific process. In order for the results to be replicated, a number of things are necessary, but chiefly:

• the raw data
• how this was selected
• the statistical manipulations performed

Now obviously, for most studies, the amount of data is too large to reproduce in the printed journal. Because of this many journals try to enforce data availability in their conditions of acceptance for a journal submission. There seem to be two main approaches taken. The "strong" approach is that the data must be available in an online archive at the time of publication. The "weak" approach is a requirement that data is made freely available on request.

It's perhaps surprising that Nature, the premier science journal in the UK if not the world, adopts the weak approach. Their data availability policy is here:

An inherent principle of publication is that others should be able to replicate and build upon the authors' published claims. Therefore, a condition of publication in a Nature journal is that authors are required to make materials, data and associated protocols available to readers promptly on request.Any restrictions on the availability of materials or information must be disclosed at the time of submission of the manuscript, and the methods section of the manuscript itself should include details of how materials and information may be obtained, including any restrictions that may apply.

Compare this to the Journal of Applied Econometrics: 

Authors of accepted papers are expected to deposit in electronic form a complete set of data used onto the Journal's Data Archive, unless they are confidential. In cases where there are restrictions on the dissemination of the data, the responsibility of obtaining the required permission to use the data rests with the interested investigator and not with the author.

Well, so what? 

It matters because the rules are being flouted by scientists - particularly climate scientists - and the journals are struggling to enforce them. Requests for data are being ignored or met by delay and obfuscation. This is unacceptable, particularly for public funded scientists.  Steve McIntyre details just a few of the problems he has encountered in this comment:

[I]f the data is not archived at the time of publication, the authors will typically move on to other things and there is no guarantee that the data will ever archived. Lonnie Thompson had never archived any data from his Himalayan sites, some taken in 1987, until I started raising the issue in 2004 and then archived the least conceivable information. The time when the data is most useful is when you read the article. I like to see what actual data looks like before it's massaged and the best time to do this is when you read the article. So the data should be online contemporary with publication rather than a year later when you may or may not still be interested int he file.

As it happens, many of [dendrochronologist Rob Wilson’s] associates aren’t very prompt about archiving data. None of Luckman’s data is archived; Rob’s ICefields and B.C. data done with Luckman are not archived, other than the reconstruction. None of Esper’s data from Tian Shan is archived. Esper refused to provide data except through repeated requests through Science and even after over 3 years of effort, the data provision is still not quite complete.

This situation stinks, and it may well eventually develop into a full-fledged scandal. No science which is not capable of reproduction should be permitted in the IPCC process, and that means the IPCC should insist that data and methods are fully disclosed, before the paper is considered.

To my mind it's the journals who must take the primary responsibility for putting it right though. If the Journal of Applied Econometrics is able to insist on concurrent data archiving, then there is absolutely no reason why other disciplines cannot insist too. There is certainly no excuse for Nature, whose scientific cachet is so great that they reject 90% of submitted manuscripts, nor indeed for Science.

To my mind the journals who fail to insist on full concurrent disclosure are risking their reputations. If one of these articles is later found to be wrong, or even fraudulent, the journal will certainly get egg on its face. By insisting on concurrent disclosure they will at least concentrate the minds of the authors on ensuring that their data and methodology are flawless.

Let's hope they recognise this and do something about it.

What's going on here then?

One of the most important scientific documents in the global warming debate is Jones et al 1990 on the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect. This was long claimed by sceptics to be a major factor in the apparent rise in global temperatures - essentially they were saying that as urbanisation took place, many formerly rural weather stations ended up surrounded by buildings. These gave off heat and raised the local temperature. In other words it looked like global warming, but wasn't.

Jones' letter to Nature in 1990 was widely claimed to have killed this argument off by presenting three temperature time series from rural weather stations.  By comparing these to another wider set of data, it was possible to show that the wider series had no significant UHI effect.

The story has suddenly come to the fore again because the UHI effect has attracted the interest of Steve McIntyre, a  prominent sceptic and something of a thorn in the side of the mainstream. He has been asking the author, Phil Jones for his raw data - specifically he wants to identify which weather stations were used his work - presumably he means to test if they were genuinely rural or not.

And thus far, Jones has refused to release the information, despite a formal request under the Environmental Information Regulations.

Now to anyone who knows anything about science, this is pretty exciting stuff. It's pretty much a given that you release your data on request so that others can test it. Nature, which published the orginal letter, makes prompt availability of data a condition of publication. So the refusal is likely to be viewed in a pretty dim light by the scientific community, or at least I hope it is.

There are other lines of enquiry for McIntyre to pursue in order to get the data, but in the meantime let's just notice the startling fact of a "real" scientist refusing to release his data to someone who is alleged to be a fake and the equivalent of a creationist.