The Royal Society and openness

Remember how we all cheered the Royal Society when Phil Trans Roy Soc B forced Keith Briffa to release the Yamal data? At last a journal with some integrity, some adherence to the principles of the scientific method, we all said.

This was why Briffa's hand was forced: a policy on openness that had no wriggle room for those who might think about cheating (my bold):

As a condition of acceptance authors agree to honour any reasonable request by other researchers for materials, methods, or data necessary to verify the conclusion of the article.

Interestingly the Royal Society now has a new policy on openness (my bold):

To allow others to verify and build on work published in Royal Society journals; authors must make all reasonable efforts to make materials, data, statistical tools and associated protocols available to readers. Authors must disclose upon submission of the manuscript any restrictions on the availability of materials or information. We recognize that discipline-specific conventions or special circumstances may occasionally apply, and we will consider these in negotiating compliance with requests.

...

After publication, all reasonable requests for data and/or materials must be fulfilled. Authors may charge reasonable costs for time and materials involved in any such transfer.

[Postscript: I was able to retreive the original policy via the Wayback Machine - a wonderful tool for finding lost pages from the web. Interestingly, Royal Society Publishing now appears to have blocked robots.txt, preventing the Wayback Machine from taking snapshots in future.]

Update on Apr 17, 2011 by Bishop Hill

I've edited the main post shortly after posting it as I'd missed the fact that they were still saying that requests had to be complied with. The new policy therefore seems contradictory - on the one hand they are saying that requests have to be complied with and on the other saying that in dodgy fields, they'll consider allowing authors not comply.

Diary dates

A couple of interesting events at the Royal Society later this year:

10-11 October 2011

Warm climates of the past - a lesson for the future?

In several periods in Earth's history, climate has been significantly warmer than present.  What lessons about the future can be learnt from past warm periods?  The answer depends on the quality of reconstructions of past climates, our understanding of their causes, and the validity of climate models which aim to reproduce them.  This meeting will address these exciting and challenging issues.

12-13 October 2011

Reconstructing and understanding CO2 variability in the past

A number of proxy methods are used to infer past atmospheric CO2 concentrations, such as fossilised leaves, paleo soils, and isotopes in ocean sediments.  Each technique has its own strengths and weaknesses and methodological uncertainties. This meeting will aim to compare methods and their available records, leading to a deeper understanding of the processes which influence the proxies and the Cenozoic record of atmospheric CO2.

Paul Nurse on sceptics again

Paul Nurse was interviewed by journalist Charlie Rose recently. The video can be seen here, with a transcript on the same page. Much of the conversation is only of indirect relevance to readers here, but there are parts of the interview - when Nurse revisits the subject of scepticism - which are fascinating.

PAUL NURSE:  Science is important because it’s the most reliable way of gaining knowledge about the world and ourselves.  There’s something about science and the way we do it.  It’s to do with respect for observation and experiment.  So you don’t cherry pick data.  Half the problem with all the climate change debate .

CHARLIE ROSE:  Yes.

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Josh 80

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More Horizon fallout

Updated on Jan 29, 2011 by Bishop Hill

Updated on Jan 31, 2011 by Bishop Hill

There is more fallout from the Horizon programme, some of which is more in the realm of tittle tattle than science and some of which isn't.

The tittle-tattle first. The famous pop-sci author, Simon Singh and the blogger/lawyer/libel reform guru, David Allen Green are trying to pressure James Delingpole into doing another interview, in which Singh gets to bring along a climate scientist to support him. This strikes me as a tad ungentlemanly of Mr Singh. What would be interesting is if Singh and Dellers both got to bring their chosen expert along - given that the Horizon programme majored on Climategate, we could have Phil Jones and Steve McIntyre to discuss the trick to hide the decline, for example.

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Science hype and overprescribing

I was pondering my post yesterday about all the senior members of the scientific establishment who agree with us in the sceptic blogosphere that the science of global warming suffers from a problem of overhyping of the size of the problem. I think it is fair to say that this is probably a relatively uncontroversial observation these days.

It is interesting to have this new consensus in mind when one thinks about the analogy Sir Paul Nurse used in his encounter with James Delingpole on Horizon last night - that of a visit to a cancer specialist. One wonders if a more accurate analogy would have been a visit to a cancer specialist whose hospital has been found to be regularly guilty of operating when there is no medical need.

Hulme on Nurse

Mike Hulme has published some thoughts on the Horizon programme, little of which will be disputed by sceptics. Here's a snippet:

I do not recognise [Nurse's] claim that “climate science is reducing uncertainty all the time”. There remain intractable uncertainties about future predictions of climate change. Whilst Nurse distinguishes between uncertainty arising from incomplete understanding and that arising from irreducible stochastic uncertainty, he gives the impression that all probabilistic knowledge is of the latter kind (e.g. his quote of average rates of success for cancer treatments). In fact with climate change, most of the uncertainty about the future that is expressed in probabilistic terms (e.g. the IPCC) is Bayesian in nature. Bayesian probabilities are of a fundamentally different kind to those quoted in his example. And when defending consensus in climate science – which he clearly does - he should have explained clearly the role of Bayesian (subjective) expert knowledge in forming such consensus.

Goldacre on Nurse

(Well he is a doctor after all) :-)

Ben Goldacre has some interesting comments about the media's treatment of Delingpole today.

delingpole clearly a penis, and he's citing it for wrong reasons, but "peer-to-peer" review is not an insane idea

god, i'm really sorry, i like Nurse, but this is kind of slow, feels like a bit of a duty watch.

[Delingpole] is absolutely a dick. but that was weak, and if it was their killer moment, makes the press activity of today a bit ugly tbh

well, sorry, delingpole didnt do brilliantly on a question, and fumbled, but they say they interviewed him for 3 hours. thats the killer mo?

if that was the killer delingpole moment that the bbc have been crowing about all day then i'm actually quite unimpressed

More Horizon coverage

There are a couple more articles on the Horizon programme doing the rounds. Delingpole says he was done over by the BBC here and the Guardian agrees here.

What's next?

Two interesting days ahead. Firstly I should get my embargoed copy of the House of Commons report on the Climategate inquiries later today, so there will be some reading to do.  The embargo is lifted at midnight, UK time, and I'll time a post to go up shortly thereafter, so those of you in other parts of the Anglosphere may be able to read it at a sensible time.

Then later today we have the BBC Horizon programme on wicked sceptics. I'm really looking forward to this. There is a trailer article here in the Independent, in which the paper's science correspondent Steve Connor manages to get the trick to hide the decline completely wrong. You would think that after all those inquiries, a science journalist would understand what Jones did.

The Royal Society and sea level

WUWT has a guest post looking at sea level rises...and possibly falls:

Based on the most current data it appears that 2010 is going to show the largest drop in global sea level ever recorded in the modern era.  Since many followers of global warming believe that the rate of sea level rise is increasing, a significant drop in the global sea level highlights serious flaws in the IPCC projections.  The oceans are truly the best indicator of climate.

Hat tip then to John Shade (of Climate Lessons fame) who notes the views on sea level rise put forward in the Royal Society's recent paper on climate change:

Because of the thermal expansion of the ocean, it is very likely that for many centuries the rate of global sea-level rise will be at least as large as the rate of 20cm per century that has been observed over the past century. Paragraph 49 discusses the additional, but more uncertain, contribution to sea-level rise from the melting of land ice.'

Oops. As John Shade notes, it woud be instructive to have an annual review of the Royal Society's paper in the light of new data.

The Royal Society and alarmism

A very interesting essay on the Royal Society and its sudden change from a body that promoted science as the antidote to apocalyptic vision, to one that used the same tool to promote the idea of disasters.

It is true that the Society’s president is not proclaiming divine direction and screaming fire-and-brimstone from a high pulpit. Yet behind the sober and reasonable façade there is the horror of imminent annihilation.

H/T GWPF

Political science

Martin Rees appears unable to resist the temptation to ride roughshod over the Royal Society's tradition of avoiding political controversy. His latest contribution is a fairly naked piece of political advocacy - an open letter to media and business leaders, written jointly with Anthony Giddens, a left-wing academic. In it, the two men call for "a renewed impetus to international collaboration", reduced carbon emissions and the like.

It is remarkable to see two such prominent academics demonstrating such a remarkable lack of familiarity with simple logical thinking: they allude first to the floods in Pakistan, then say that they cannot be connected to climate change and then state that they represent "a stark warning".

Strewth.

UEA hearings redux

The big news while I was away was the announcement of a further invitation to a member of staff at UEA to appear before the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee. We have already had Oxburgh's appearance, and knew that Sir Muir Russell was to appear with Sir Edward Acton at the end of this month. However, it now appears that UEA's Trevor Davies will also be making an appearance. Davies, as regular readers know, was not only Phil Jones predecessor as head of CRU but, more importantly, appears to have been a pivotal figure in the organisation of the "independent" inquiries into CRU. All three men will appear on Wednesday 27th October.

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Ben Pile on the Royal Society

A thought provoking post by Ben Pile of Climate Resistance fame, documenting the Royal Society's track record on climate change and presenting some disturbing possibilities about where its attention may be directed next.