Climate Research?
It's not quite that simple as you make it to be
That sounds rather like spin than a different explanation. As they conceded, it initially passed the peer review process. Which means that the editorial board had no problem with it until they started getting harrassed by all the other scientists.
http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/deja_vu_all_over_again/... which is shown in one e-mail, which's context and motives are unknown
Au contraire, good but misguided sir. Several emails posted on this thread discussed evading FOI requests and deleting emails. Here's another one:
When the FOI requests began here, the FOI person said we had to abide
by the requests. It took a couple of half hour sessions - one at a screen, to convince
them otherwise showing them what CA was all about.
I decided to browse the discussion backwards and guess what this all relates to?:
First some bit older emails from the same discussion.
The unfortunate fact is that the 'secret science' meme is an extremely
powerful rallying call to people who have no idea about what is going
on. Claiming (rightly or wrongly) that information is being hidden has a
huge amount of resonance (as you know), much more so than whether
Douglass et al know their statistical elbow from a hole in the ground.
Thus any increase in publicity on this - whether in the pages of Nature
or elsewhere - is much more likely to bring further negative fallout
despite your desire to clear the air. Whatever you say, it will still be
presented as you hiding data.
The contrarians have found that there is actually no limit to what you
can ask people for (raw data, intermediate steps, additional
calculations, residuals, sensitivity calculations, all the code, a
workable version of the code on any platform etc.), and like Somali
pirates they have found that once someone has paid up, they can always
shake them down again.
blaa blaa blaa. This, although very useful to remember in this highly focused and nitpicky debate, has little practical value to arguments at hand. What then, hmm? Let's browse backwards a little. These guys started to talk about McIntyre, big surprise, and how he has demanded some data. Data that is apparently completely available to him.
Thanks for your email regarding Steven McIntyre's twin requests under
the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act. Regarding McIntyre's request (1),
no "monthly time series of output from any of the 47 climate models" was
"sent by Santer and/or other coauthors of Santer et al 2008 to NOAA
employees between 2006 and October 2008".
As I pointed out to Mr. McIntyre in the email I transmitted to him
yesterday, all of the raw (gridded) model and observational data used in
the 2008 Santer et al. International Journal of Climatology (IJoC) paper
are freely available to Mr. McIntyre. If Mr. McIntyre wishes to audit
us, and determine whether the conclusions reached in our paper are
sound, he has all the information necessary to conduct such an audit.
Providing Mr. McIntyre with the quantities that I derived from the raw
model data (spatially-averaged time series of surface temperatures and
synthetic Microwave Sounding Unit [MSU] temperatures) would defeat the
very purpose of an audit.
[Sidenote: these guys absolutely
despise McIntyre]
Seems like certain Someone wants to issue FOI for... some reason, even though the data is apparently freely available, and these guys seem to be pretty pissed off about it. Hey, I just wonder - and these are honest questions, because I do not know at all - are FOI requests handled individually?
And one about withholding data in general:
And the issue of with-holding data is still a hot potato, one that
affects both you and Keith (and Mann). Yes, there are reasons -- but
many *good* scientists appear to be unsympathetic to these. The
trouble here is that with-holding data looks like hiding something,
and hiding means (in some eyes) that it is bogus science that is
being hidden.
So there are "good" scientists and "bad" scientists, in these climatologists' eyes. But even the "good" scientists are unsympathetic to their attempts to withhold data. Gee, I wonder why they would want to withhold data in the first place, seeing as it's so controversial?
There are definitely good and bad scientists in general, that's not a question of personal taste, but a question of rigidity of methods. It certainly has it's all-too-human aura of groundbreaking results, originality of research yadda yadda, but generally it's about how logical and well-argued your conclusions are.
But I wouldn't be surprised that the good scientists would be the guys that generally agree with these people (who do not form the complete click of "prominent climate scientists" completely by themselves, not by a long shot) because catty infighting is a part of academia.
I don't know why Keith chose to withhold data but COME ON, you could read the conversation you linked to:
Keith,
Here's a message from Tom. It might be worth sending anything you've got to him to have
a look through. [...]
Cheers
Phil
"Perhaps these things can be explained clearly and concisely -- but I am not
sure Keith is able to do this
as he is too close to the issue and probably quite pissed of."
That exchange seems to work like Phil is actually encouragind Keith to release something. Why? What is Keith withholding? What are his motives? What are the motives of the people who request this information? Is Keith pissed off? Does Keith have a permission to forward the primary data? Is it his? Is he about to analyze or publish stuff about it? What are the reasons for giving up the primary data? Does FOI require it? Why would Keith give his data freely to everyone who requests it?
That aside, withholding some data is sometimes quite relevant: most of these people get grants for doing some very specific runs, after which they will analyze and publish several studies out of it. Handing out primary data when you're about to publish stuff about it can be suicidial. However, such does not suit them eternally - you
have to release appropriate primary data at some point[/i] or you could just as well be a complete fraud. Maybe some day someone will explain to me why Keith decided to hold the data and what it is and whatever.
But still people publish raw data all the time, because sometime's it's just necesarry, and more than called for. And not all the instances that allow them to use data are British, or publicly funded. I mean, you can just look at IPCC's site and find ****loads of primary data there.
This email might explain it:
From: Kevin Trenberth <[email protected]>
To: Michael Mann <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: BBC U-turn on climate
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 08:57:37 -0600
Cc: Stephen H Schneider <[email protected]>, Myles Allen <[email protected]>, peter stott <[email protected]>, "Philip D. Jones" <[email protected]>, Benjamin Santer <[email protected]>, Tom Wigley <[email protected]>, Thomas R Karl <[email protected]>, Gavin Schmidt <[email protected]>, James Hansen <[email protected]>, Michael Oppenheimer <[email protected]>
Hi all
Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming? We are asking that here in
Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We
had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it
smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a
record low, well below the previous record low. This is January weather (see the Rockies
baseball playoff game was canceled on saturday and then played last night in below freezing
weather).
Trenberth, K. E., 2009: An imperative for climate change planning: tracking Earth's global
energy. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 1, 19-27,
doi:10.1016/j.cosust.2009.06.001. [1][PDF] (A PDF of the published version can be obtained
from the author.)
The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a
travesty that we can't. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008
shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing
system is inadequate.
That said there is a LOT of nonsense about the PDO. People like CPC are tracking PDO on a
monthly basis but it is highly correlated with ENSO. Most of what they are seeing is the
change in ENSO not real PDO. It surely isn't decadal. The PDO is already reversing with
the switch to El Nino. The PDO index became positive in September for first time since
Sept 2007. see
[2]http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/GODAS/ocean_briefing_gif/global_ocean_monitoring_c
urrent.ppt
Kevin
There's climate science for you. They're making hash of the scientific method.
[/quote]
Data has been wrong before, though! (And then someone does similar measurements with different tools and gets results that are roughly similar or have no significance at all) Saying that a particular dataset is in contradiction with another dataset could very well mean that, yes, this set of data is wrong. That does not mean it should be discounted completely, or that is a fraud. Satellites have been calibrated wrong before. The calculations do not work. When some data does not fit the larger empirical evidence (=more data) you should take a closer look. Mind you, I am taking all of these emails at face value, assuming they are completely true.
I am, however, starting to think that people should link this quite damning quote by Treberth with Treberth's article mentioned in the same email. I will take a liberty to post some excerpts. Treberth is
Planned adaptation to climate change requires information about what is happening and why. While a long-term trend is for global warming, short-term periods of cooling can occur and have physical causes associated with natural variability. However, such natural variability means that energy is rearranged or changed within the climate system, and should be traceable. An assessment is given of our ability to track changes in reservoirs and flows of energy within the climate system. Arguments are given that developing the ability to do this is important, as it affects interpretations of global and especially regional climate change, and prospects for the future.
[...]
The stock answer is that natural variability plays a key role1 and there was a major La Niña event early in 2008 that led to the month of January having the lowest anomaly in global temperature since 2000. While this is true, it is an incomplete explanation. In particular, what are the physical processes? From an energy standpoint, there should be an explanation that accounts for where the radiative forcing has gone. Was it compensated for temporarily by changes in clouds or aerosols, or other changes in atmospheric circulation that allowed more radiation to escape to space? Was it because a lot of heat went into melting Arctic sea ice or parts of Greenland and Antarctica, and other glaciers? Was it because the heat was buried in the ocean and sequestered, perhaps well below the surface? Was it because the La Niña led to a change in tropical ocean currents and rearranged the configuration of ocean heat? Perhaps all of these things are going on? But surely we have an adequate system to track whether this is the case or not, don’t we?
Well, it seems that the answer is no, we do not. But we should! Given that global warming is unequivocally happening2 and there has so far been a failure to outline, let alone implement, global plans to mitigate the warming, then adapting to the climate change is an imperative.
Hey, turns out he says that geoengineering isn't possible because we don't know the entire energy budget and climate is too complex - yet he also mentions that overwhelming evidence exists for warming!
And to make this even more weird, I googled and found something which could be fake or not:
http://junkscience.com/FOIA/mail/1255523796.txtHmmmmmmm. Looks like the same guys. Could even be them talking about this?
However, the overall theme is clear: you are taking some emails from one institution and assuming that it means everything about climate science is bogus, though. This is cherrypicking.
You can probably find thirteen blogs and fifteen emails that seem highly suspicous at the first glance the time it took for me to investigate and write this email.
TL:DR: This was a goddamn mammoth of a post and I am completely exhausted right now. And I would rather like if people, instead of simply spamming single-line quotes and excerpts which they apparently pick from some external source, could even do some basic backgrounds research (such as clicking "previous emails" button) before throwing all kinds of quotes - many quite OOC - at the discussion boards. It's like it's the same talking points everywhere.
edit 3 or 6: removed some inappropriate words damnit the edits are FLOWING
