Climate Scientists refuse subpoena from Congress | Hacker News Reader

Climate Scientists refuse subpoena from Congress

washingtonpost.com

55 pointsstillsut69 comments

Why would emails be more important than the data? The data should speak for itself, only a politician is looking for "gotcha" phrases they can print in huge letters for a poster board that they put up while making speeches denying global warming. It's not that these politicians don't understand how science works, they understand how to manipulate people to favor legislation that is actually against their interests.

Edit: For those that are suggesting that you need the emails to verify that scientists aren't making up the data, the data itself includes information on its providence. All the information you need to trust the data come from independent verification of the data and from information in the data itself. You don't need emails to verify research, but if you did then there's a problem with how research is published.

The data should speak for themselves. Unfortunately people who don't know statistics think they can't, because as we found out from emails, the data were "manipulated" via statistical methods: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_c... Honestly I'd rather we press scientists of all sorts for all their source code and modeling tool configurations including the raw data that hasn't been post-processed to hell in an "acceptable" way (recalling that the statistics involved in generating p-values were "acceptable" for psych journals until recently).

Any science based on simulation, any member of the public should be able to download, compile and run on their PC and get exactly the same results. It's the only way to be completely transparent. C and FORTRAN compilers are free.

It's important to recognise that a lot of the model runs are done on super-computers, and the runs themselves aren't always easy to replicate from a practical point of view, because of things like resource limitations and configuration issues.

I certainly agree that things should be open sourced, probably allowing for some kind of embargo system for publication, but we shouldn't allow a rhetoric to develop suggesting that people should be making things easily replicable, because that essentially means making very portable and resource-flexible code, which is not trivial, even in less complex domains, as I'm sure many people on this forum recognise.

As an example, many models make use hundreds of cores via MPI (along with preposterous amounts of RAM), and whilst I am no expert, I get the impression that porting such things to more commodity hardware is essentially impossible.

As an aside, I have seen more bad-faith practice (i.e. manipulation of results) in industry than in science, and have spent approximately equal periods of time in both.

Today's supercomputer is a GPU in 5 years time.

Maybe in terms of various metrics (though I'm not so certain things are progressing that quickly), but not in terms of source compatibility, which was the point I was trying to make.

You can find NOAA's current climate model here, with source code, compile scripts, and sample data:

http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/cm2-5-and-flor

However, as mrow84 points out, you will need a supercomputer, unless you have a lot of time on your hands.

No evidence was found of wrong-doing at the Climate Research Unit. The only result was it provided a source of comments to be taken out of context by climate sceptics. Which is exactly what Lamar Smith is hoping to achieve here.

In theory, yes. Among ideal rational agents, yes.

But in practice, science depends on the trust that scientists aren't actively subverting the process: failing to consider alternate hypothesis, fabricating data, ignoring data, deliberately filtering for confirmatory data, groupthink, etc.

So an import safeguard is the ability to detect when someone is doing the above, even if the detector doesn't know the literature well enough to refute it.

With that said, that doesn't mean there's enough evidence of misconduct to justify a subpoena in this case; I'm just saying, it's not simply a matter of "just look at the data rather than the people".

Then have a separate group of scientists reproduce the results and review the methodology used. Their publication should provide all the information necessary to reproduce and evaluate their findings. All the possible 'evidence' of misconduct will be there in the data.

Using a subpoena to threaten scientists for finding results you don't agree with is a form of censorship.

Unless the data collection itself is biased. The solution to that is to have another team collect its own data and compare its findings. But now you once again have scientists doing science, and if those scientists confirm the other findings, then they might also have used biased methods, so you once again have to either trust them, or not. So to build trust, yet more scientists have to collect and analyze yet more data. But what if those scientists are also in on the bias? So maybe at this point, you hire your own scientists that you trust implicitly because you're the one paying them. Maybe their findings contradict all the earlier findings, and so you trust that. But now nobody else trusts their findings, because you paid them for the study, so people think they are probably biased toward your perspective. This is literally what has been going on for years.

So now what? How do you collect and analyze data when trust in those doing the collection and analysis is not a given?

One approach is to implicitly trust scientists, because they are experts in their field, while you are a novice. This is what a lot of us do, and I think it's a perfectly fine solution, but it is a trade-off; you might misplace your trust.

Another approach is to train up on the science yourself, so that you can independently verify things. This is a great solution, but it isn't scalable. Most people have other jobs and other interests, and in any case, you can never be an expert in everything that matters.

Another approach might be to try to build trust using out-of-band signals, like transparent communication. Transparency often sounds nice, but it also has a major chilling effect, because people communicate more efficiently in the sorts of candid conversations that are hard to have publicly.

Personally, I think the witch hunt for biased climate scientists is disgusting and beside the point, but I also find it distasteful to suggest that it isn't a really hard problem to disseminate trusted information about complex subjects in a highly specialized society.

Congress had a solution to this problem, in the Office of Technology Assessment. Quoting from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessmen... :

> The Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) was an office of the United States Congress from 1972 to 1995. OTA's purpose was to provide Congressional members and committees with objective and authoritative analysis of the complex scientific and technical issues of the late 20th century, i.e. technology assessment. It was a leader in practicing and encouraging delivery of public services in innovative and inexpensive ways, including early involvement in the distribution of government documents through electronic publishing. Its model was widely copied around the world.

It was de-funded "Contract with America" period of the 1990s.

Very interesting. I wasn't aware of that! I'm still skeptical of the ability for anything to be completely "objective and authoritative", but that still seems like a good thing to have, and it's unfortunate that it was eliminated.

It's called "peer review," and it doesn't require a subpoena.

While it would certainly make science more efficient, science as a whole does not depend on colleagues within one program working perfectly.

Science is global endeavour based on data. If one scientists is lax or fraudulent, there are numerous incentives for competing scientists to prove so.

A subpoena doesn't require evidence of misconduct. As I understand it congress asked one of their agencies to provide information and they refused. I think subpoena is the legal way of saying, your refusal is invalid. Give us the information

>The data should speak for itself

Are you serious ? Not only is there multiple way to interpret same data (after all there are so many competing models to explain it) and at best you can debate confidence intervals and models - it's far beyond non-experts expecting them to review the data directly is ridiculous - the only way they can work with experts is based on trust and credibility.

Wrong. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to repeat most of the basic calculations which give similar results.

Who cares if I can run a formula/program that tells me Y from X if I can't understand/trust the program/formula ?

If you think that stuff like economics/climatology/etc. has the same level of rigor and validation applied to it as established and verified theories from hard science then boy do I have some bad news for you (struggling for SD 2 as ideal vs SD 5 for eg.).

I see you don't want to trust even yourself in actually learning the formulas and the basic principles of physics behind them, but that's how it is. Physics works. Humans produce immense amounts of CO2, CO2 in the atmosphere increases the temperature of the planet. It's as simple as that.

Reading other people's mails won't refute the physics.

And no, other factors aren't the answer:

http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-whats-warming-the-wor...

>Humans produce immense amounts of CO2, CO2 in the atmosphere increases the temperature of the planet. It's as simple as that.

CO2 is a green house gas - good job mr. high-school physicist - now show me the temperature projections along with human CO2 production graphs and estimated impacts and error margins and past model prediction performances vs measured data. You know the actual things that matter for policy implications. See that's where things go beyond high school.

There they are, they are agreed by the scientists of the whole world, so again no need to worry about the e-mails of one country's organization:

http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/index.shtml

There are other countries among those who took part in making the reports who would be more than eager to point on anything that's wrong there. And nobody did find anything significant against.

>There are other countries among those who took part in making the reports who would be more than eager to point on anything that's wrong there. And nobody did find anything significant against.

Wait - but you didn't verify it your self ? After all :

>You don't have to be a rocket scientist to repeat most of the basic calculations which give similar results.

Or does it all boil down to trust and your original argument is nonsense.

Why does it matter what I have personally done or not done? Science works. E-mails are irrelevant. That's what we're discussing. If you claim that science doesn't work, you can prove that, but you have to know the science, or nobody will believe your claim. The major problem you'd have in order to prove that the current findings are wrong is that even the simplest formulas are against you. So you'd have to accept 99% of the existing results at the end and then to discover something completely new that amazingly nobody discovered up to now but that makes bigger influence on the results than everything known up to now. Good luck with that, as the data already add up now, as you can see in these graphs on the Bloomberg.

Physics works, but that's because physicists don't even try to address large-scale phenomena like weather. Sufficient application of physics will let you know who's going to win the Super Bowl. And yet, nobody can do that.

But we don't ask who's going to win the Super Bowl. It's that we know that if we let 100 people in one isolated room to watch Super Bowl the room will be always warmer as long as people actually live in it and are allowed to eat (life also involves more heat from the food, assume we add them food all the time). The doubters claim that it doesn't have to happen. It does. We can calculate how much warmer approximately even if we can't be 100% sure for every minute, on the average the curve will match.

It's the same with the Earth. It's as isolated as the isolated room would be -- we know exactly how much heat can dissipate and how much must contribute to the increase of the temperature for the room, and we have quite good estimates for Earth too (less heat dissipates to the space when CO2 increases, and the Sun shines the heat nevertheless - we can nicely calculate even the contributions of the changes in orbit and some clever scientist did that even before the computers were available, it took years of calculations by hand then but it was done). We can be wrong for some particular year, but the direction and the average increase match.

The room is of course simpler than the Earth. Imagine having some water pumps, some fans and some chunks of ice in the room. You know the formulas for the water and ice but you have more to calculate for short term effects. But you still know there will be less ice as the time goes by and more water. And still always a bit warmer.

"Work with experts" the way you already work with accountants, lawyers, etc. Hire two and have one check the other.

And no, it's not unreasonable to expect a non-technical person to review the data or the methods either. Many people don't want to put the time in to try but it's well within the reach of any high-school grad.

>Hire two and have one check the other.

Not if you don't trust the field. It's like saying if you don't like your numerology readings hire a different numerologist and compare the results.

Not saying I agree with the view but science is a lot less convincing when when you can't setup repeatable experiments.

>And no, it's not unreasonable to expect a non-technical person to review the data or the methods either.

You're going to review PHD level work that ran weather simulations on supercomputers and compiled various data sources with highschool level knowledge in your spare time ?

Perhaps you could do a security audit of OpenSSL if you have some free time on your hands - I'm sure people will even pay you if you manage to find security issues and you' be doing the community a big favor. Maybe we should hire some highschool grads to do it - start a kickstarter campaign and I'll pitch in.

> It's like saying if you don't like your numerology readings hire a different numerologist and compare the results.

To be fair, this is excellent advice, much better than "your numerologist knows what he's talking about, and you'd better follow his recommendations".

No real reason to compare the results afterwards, though.

Fwiw, not trusting climate science is like not trusting geological sciences.

But sure, if you don't trust someone from the 'warming' camp, get a 'status-quo' camp person to check their work.

And as for numerologists - try looking for another person skilled in your actual problem, relationships, work, etc...

When a mathematician checks their work they do so by a different method, not just repeating the same steps to reach the same potentially flawed answer.

The emails aren't more important than the data, but that doesn't matter: these are government employees communicating on government servers about government work, and whether we like it or not (in this instance, I don't!), Congress is entitled to the messages.

"Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) wants thousands of e-mails among scientists and NOAA’s staff of political appointees that he thinks will show that the researchers had something to hide when they refuted claims that global warming had “paused” or slowed over the past decade."

Apparently climate change science is not in the published research itself, but can only be found by going through someone's email. What bald-faced douchebaggery.

It's indeed an exercise in douchebaggery, but the fact is, Smith has the right to subpoena the emails. They're public property.

If you saw The Martian, you might remember the arguments among NASA managers about how much information on Watney's predicament should be revealed to the public. It was pointed out that their only legal option was to lay it all out there. That's pretty much how government agencies actually work, and it's not a bad thing.

The actual power being used here, the Congressional subpoena power, doesn't have anything to do with whether something is public property or not, so that isn't the basis they're claiming. It's a general quasi-judicial investigatory power, which can be used to compel any person to both appear physically, and turn over any documents in their possession that Congress, in their sole discretion, believes might be important to decisions made by Congress. That obviously has significant scope for abuse, which is why Congressional subpoenas tend to be controversial, especially if they're fishing expeditions.

Regardless of the legal details, they don't get to keep their .gov emails private if someone with the proper authority requests them. That's part of the deal when you sign on with Uncle Sam.

> Smith has the right to subpoena the emails. They're public property.

Not necessarily -- they might be, ianal, but it's not the case that all government e-mails are automatically part of the public record. I recall from back in my journalism days that government workers have some assurance of confidentiality w/r/t e-mail communications if that assurance is needed to effectively carry out their job.

I dislike the idea of government secrecy at all, but the scientists have a better case for keeping their emails secret than negotiators did to keep the TPP treaty details secret.

Agreed. But Smith is using a legal process in an attempt to subvert a scientific one. In my humble opinion, that's the crux of the douchebaggery.

> Smith has the right to subpoena the emails.

Government officials, exercising their office, do not have "rights" from their office, they have "powers". Its important to distinguish between those concepts.

Smith has the power to issue subpoenas, and Congress has the power to impose consequences if it believes that valid subpoenas from its officers have been denied (there are some options for judicial enforcement as well, but they are both less likely to be legally available and more practically difficult to apply if they are available against executive officers, so are mostly irrelevant.)

I generally agree. Climate science (among other research topics) are really politically charged. Those scientists will get death threats.

I don't believe the good congressman Smith is actually trying to get people killed. There is no indication he's making a good faith effort to understand their findings, he's looking to justify his beliefs. And that's ok, i guess. The good people of texas have a lot riding on oil being safe to burn. They should do everything they can to keep that oil flowing. But they shouldn't be endangering the researchers specifically.

The only acceptable risk to impose on the scientists, is the same risk we all face collectively. We collectively need to make decisions about climate change based on NOAA's findings. Don't shoot the messenger.

As a reminder, Lamar Smith was the creator of SOPA in the House. After that whole mess, they let this guy be in charge of the Science Committee in the House...

This is really dirty politics. Even if Lamar can't find anything that actually supports his argument he can drop embarrassing or out-of-context emails to the press in an attempt to discredit scientists.

The existence of fifty peer-reviewed articles supporting intelligent design (http://www.discovery.org/id/peer-review/) suggests to me that peer-review is not always the be-all and end-all of a scientific investigation.

There have been numerous accusations that raw climate data is 'processed' using questionable assumptions. I can’t judge that but I would that thought it's better to get to the truth rather than dismissing such claims out of hand with a demeaning personalized epithet. This is especially so given that truly enormous sums of money are at stake.

Getting to the truth might well involve examining professional communications between people people supported by taxpayers' cash.

Good. The only purpose to reviewing internal communications was to find a red herring to use as a lever to undermine the scientific method. Providing details about the research and the methods presented is reasonable for a peer review, but this is someone with a political axe to grind.

I will avoid the cliche about how sites like HN have one opinion.

But I do find myself wondering how many people here frothing at the mouth have, in other contexts, sung the praise of heavy government funding of science research. Or how many sing praises of government oversight.

This is it. This is government funding in science research, and government oversight. The oversight committee has the right to perform oversight. In any healthy country, eventually, politicians you don't like will be in charge of the oversight levers, as naturally as day follows night. (Unless you live under eternal single-party control, in which case you've got bigger problems than science oversight committees.)

There's no world where the government funds science research but just ships out the dollars with no regard for what happens afterwards.

Lamar Smith is going after others too.

"Representative Lamar Smith (R–TX), the chairman of the science panel of the House of Representatives, announced plans to investigate a nonprofit research group led by climate scientist Jagadish Shukla of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. He is the lead signer of a letter to White House officials that urges the use of an antiracketeering law to crack down on energy firms that have funded efforts to raise doubts about climate science."

http://news.sciencemag.org/policy/2015/10/turnabout-house-re...

I think the scientists should release all of their personal emails if these politicians are willing to submit themselves to the same level of transparency.

Wikileaks them both. Problem solved.

These Republicans are shameful. The sad part is that they will all be dead when their grandkids are cursing their names for assisting in the destruction of the environment.

Most likely, their obstinant attitude will be whitewashed in history by those on their side.

These Republicans are shameful

You know, the left has their own variety of anti-science denialism.

Is your point that when criticizing politicians one is required to criticize other political groups at the same time?

That subpoena is fairly damning evidence that these politicians don't understand how science works. Instead of scrutinizing the published data they have to dig into communications - where all sorts of theories might be floated and dismissed - so they can find something to take out of context.

An important detail of the story that the headline doesn't highlight is that these scientists are employees of the government, and the communications being subpoenaed are work emails. It's hard to see from where NOAA gets the authority to turn Congress down on this.

Politics and science really have no place together. Politics is about pushing the most favorable agenda, and science is about the pursuit of truth. Politicians and liars have always had close association. Politics and science are thus inherently at odds.

That said, I have seen, on more than one occasion, scientists become untruthful for the sake of grants and political agendas (and this is not necessarily referring to global warming). The FDA is one example where money often trumps science. http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/10/common-decongestant-m...

Grants, careers and reputations aside there are fields like Mathematics where there can be no political agenda because the findings are not input to political decisions. Climate change is definitely not such a field and people are wary of agendas in either direction. Given the huge interests involved it is impossible for even the most well-intentioned layman to arrive at a safe conclusion without spending an unreasonable amount of energy (pun intended).

http://i.imgur.com/axlcWY1.jpg

The above graph is the source data for the famous "Hockey Stick" graph. The one below it is similar data taken from another location (IIRC one was taken in Arizona, the other California). Why they chose to use one and not both is beyond me. So, there are some types of science that are more based on perception. (Note, I'm not saying that this instance invalidates anthropogenic global warming, just that sometimes people present the data that favors their hypothesis).

The distribution of primes, on the other hand, relies on one set of data. We don't know everything about primes, and have some theories that may be invalid, but the data is isolated and irrefutable. This is how math is different IMO - it has a tendency to revolve around the nature of numbers rather than ever-changing real world measurements.

There is a lot of money in climate science and green tech. A friend of my parents got a multibillion dollar grant from the government to develop a clean energy solution, for example.

My usual disclaimer - I dont care one way or the other to what degree humans are warming the earth - I say act environmentally friendly either way.

> The above graph is the source data for the famous "Hockey Stick" graph. The one below it is similar data taken from another location (IIRC one was taken in Arizona, the other California). Why they chose to use one and not both is beyond me.

The hockey stick graph is based on a aggregation of global or hemispherical temperature records. It is most certainly not based on a single temperature record from Arizona.

http://a-sceptical-mind.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-hockey-...

It turns out the data was blended, but it was weighted in an odd way to favor the spikey outcome at the end. This is just one source, so take it with a grain of salt.

The (in)famous hockey stick graph was not of temperature at one location, it's of global mean temperature.

> “We are just trying to fully understand the full context of the decision-making process,” a Republican committee aide said of the demand for correspondence.

I look forward to the day when all email between members of Congress are public by default, to fully understand the representation process that they conduct on our behalf.

It's perfectly okay to say all communication on a particular project of public interest should be open. Fine, set up a public mailing list and tell people to use that instead of private email.

It's a lot less okay to lead people to believe their communications are private and then demand to read their email after the fact. What if Alice, in what she believed to be a private email to Bob, truthfully criticised Carol for being a vindictive jerk, and in the meantime Carol has climbed the political ladder and now has the power to sabotage Alice's career?

If Congress or whoever wanted that sort of oversight, they should have said so upfront, not to try to apply it retroactively.

On one hand, the aims of the politicos here are bald-facedly wrong.

On the other hand, good luck with that whole "refusing a subpoena" thing - courts don't generally look upon that with favor, and besides, NOAA is a public institution, so the emails are public record, regardless of the aims of the people seeking them.

Being in a contentious field is not free license to ignore the law, and it tends to make people think you're hiding something when you do this.

Following your logic the emails of politicans should be public record also, shouldn't it?

Who on the NOAA part does ignore a law?

And if you don't let complete strangers in your house, do you hide something?

Of course they should - at least the ones pertaining to their official duties.

I do not understand your next two questions.

You know Congress is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, right? They just happened to exclude themselves from that one.

Yes, but I'm saying they shouldn't be excluded :)

> On the other hand, good luck with that whole "refusing a subpoena" thing - courts don't generally look upon that with favor

Courts generally (there are rare circumstances in which there are exceptions) aren't more than minimally involved in dealing with Congressional subpoenas to the executive branch, so how favorably they look on something generally is probably irrelevant here. Of course, Congress on its own can impose consequences if it so chooses, so there's that.

Yes. Congress has, in the past, sent U.S. Marshals out to physically arrest witnesses who refused to respond to a subpoena. That action was upheld by the Supreme Court, too.

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