I'm really not sure what you mean by this. I would agree that some of the scientists in the East Anglia behaved very unprofessionally. However, there was no proof of improper scientific conduct (e.g., data alteration) in this case. The point of the peer review process is that you don't have to trust an individual scientist (or human) to not succumb to competitiveness, greed, and deception, only that the vast majority of them wont. Given that it is highly unlikely that they will be corrupt in the first place, it is even less likely that they will be corrupt towards the same result. That is, given that scientists are practicing in completely different environments and countries all over the world it is highly unlikely that the incentives and disincentives will align perfectly for everyone. Therefore, when you see a scientific "consensus," the most likely result you should get from that is that there is supporting data, not that there is a massive conspiracy.
They're clearly not. If you wish to make a claim I suggest you cite sources. Here are some[1][2][3].
[1] http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/04/latest-climate-h...
[2] http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/02/no-formal-charge...
[3] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v462/n7273/full/462545a...
A fair reading of the e-mails reveals nothing to support the
denialists' conspiracy theories. In one of the more controversial
exchanges, UEA scientists sharply criticized the quality of two
papers that question the uniqueness of recent global warming
(S. McIntyre and R. McKitrick Energy Environ. 14, 751–771; 2003
and W. Soon and S. Baliunas Clim. Res. 23, 89–110; 2003)
and vowed to keep at least the first paper out of the upcoming
Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC). Whatever the e-mail authors may have said to one
another in (supposed) privacy, however, what matters is how they
acted. And the fact is that, in the end, neither they nor the
IPCC suppressed anything: when the assessment report was published
in 2007 it referenced and discussed both papers.
Global warming will be passed as absolute truth.
It seems similar to the ages when priests would silence people rather than address their scientific assertions. If the global warming deniers are wrong, it would seem to me to encourage their writings, and if the global warming advocates are confidently correct, it would seem, from a traditional scientific method perspective, they would welcome any and all discussion of their topic. Yet, they try to use government agencies to limit freedom of speech of their adversaries, and to hide the discussions they have amongst them selves? This is science?
I don't proclaim to know what is right or wrong when it comes to global warming, but I have a sense of when someone is telling the truth or not. When someone uses the government to stop someone from talking, for reasons of "expediency", I get suspicious. And they don't even seem to care about that. Believe what we tell you, our cause is so important we can skip the traditional scientific process, all evidence to the contrary is conspiracy theories, end of discussion. Or, you'll be talking to our (taxpayer funded) lawyer.
; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!
To give you one example with which I'm familiar, several research groups have attempted to measure the number of fatalities associated with the Iraq War. One of the standard techniques for doing so involves cluster sampling, i.e., picking a small number of locations and conducting multiple interviews near each cluster site. One research group doing this noticed that the mortality rate from their Fallujah cluster was much much much higher than any of the other clusters. So they purposefully excluded it from their analysis although they kept it as part of their raw data and explained why they removed it. As a result, their total death toll was much lower than it would have been. Denialists immediately criticized them for manipulating data so as to inflate the death toll. How did they do that? Very simply: if you omit the outlier, then the spread of the probability distribution shrinks dramatically. If you include the outlier, then the width of the distribution expands so far out that it encompasses zero excess deaths.
Now in either case, the distribution was screaming that there were many excess deaths, but these denialists claimed that scientists were reducing the average fatality count just so they could exclude the minute possibility that the war decreased death rates. Obviously, there is no way these scientists could win: if they include the outlier, then they're deliberately inflating the death toll, but if they exclude the outlier, then they're manipulating data to obscure the possibility that the war saved lives. If the scientists had just quietly dropped their Falujah data, this controversy never would have happened. In this case, releasing data just gave denialists fodor for crazy attacks.
Research groups do spot interviews for fatalities in the iraq war. This data is submitted to the central repository. The government analyzes it, removes outliers emits report A. The ACLU analyzes it with the outliers, emits report B.
Some people throw a fit about A, some people throw a fit about B. If the data were available, independent third parties could analyze it and say - hey ok, Fallujah was actually a valid data point so we present report B or whatever.
You can't argue with data, not and maintain the appearance of sanity. Here's the data. Here's the interpretation. Even laypeople can understand this.
"Imagine that if you took 32 water samples in your child's school and found that arsenic samples were 60% higher than the national standards, and you were 98% sure that you were above the standard. Then you took one more sample that was ten times higher than the standard. The logic endorsed by Michael Fumento is that we do nothing about the water supply because this outlier broadened our statistical confidence interval and we are not sure that we are above the national standard."
If the data were available, independent third parties could analyze it and say - hey ok, Fallujah was actually a valid data point so we present report B or whatever.
So, in the example above, do you really think that anyone claiming "oh, there's no reason to believe the school's water supply is dangerous since the confidence interval has been pushed out far enough that there is a minute possibility that the water is safe" is acting in good faith? I am curious: do you believe that any professional can make such claims in good faith and in accordance with their professional obligations?
If the data were available, independent third parties could analyze it and say - hey ok, Fallujah was actually a valid data point so we present report B or whatever.
This is obviously false. I understand the idea of the confidence interval, I'd say the interpretation is : credible evidence for arsenic levels above standards, high variance in data requires further testing.
Here is how I am saying it should work : All 33 samples are in a public database D. The R script that generates the statistical analysis is in that same database. Company C says because of results from R based on D I conclude X. Similarly for other companies.
The bottom line is if the data is public and competent, unbiased observers exist (many of them do exist) then it becomes much harder to lie with stats.
They are fitting data to expectations, and worse you are telling them to conceal the fact that they do so, just so no one can argue with them.
That is pretty much as far away as you can possibly get from true science.
What they should do is put massive error bars on the numbers and say "We can't." We can't tell you the true number, it's not possible to calculate it.
Eh? This is a war zone that has seen very intense fighting. It is not unreasonable to assume that data from this one site is unreliable for any of a million different reasons, especially given just how far it was from the other sites. Do you generally insist that scientists must never eliminate any outlier data points, no matter how suspect?
you are telling them to conceal the fact that they do so
I'm not telling them to conceal anything. I think they did the correct thing: they published all their data, and they disclosed exactly what data points they removed and why they did so. My point is that because they published their data and disclosed what they did and why they did it, they faced criticisms that never would have seen the light of day otherwise. And to me that suggests that it is unreasonable to believe that deniers are going to become less prevalent in a world where more data is published openly.
What they should do is put massive error bars on the numbers and say "We can't." We can't tell you the true number, it's not possible to calculate it.
I don't understand this at all. "Massive" doesn't mean anything. They calculated appropriate confidence intervals and included them in their analysis. What exactly do you think they did wrong?
this is almost a tautology. if data isn't published, there's nothing to deny. are you suggesting... everybody just shut the data up behind closed doors so people can say whatever they want and at least none of those pesky dissenters can stir up trouble? If the data is out there, more people will see the truth. You really can't argue with #s - if I include studies X,Y,Z the mean is M and if I exclude Z it's N. You may argue about Z but people should make those decisions for themselves.
Absolutely not. And I think you should know that. Do you know why I think you should know that? Because I wrote "I'm not telling them to conceal anything. I think they did the correct thing: they published all their data, and they disclosed exactly what data points they removed and why they did so" in the comment you're replying to. So, why exactly do you think I'm suggesting that any data be hidden? How many times do I have to explicitly write that I think no data should be hidden before you believe me?
You really can't argue with #s - if I include studies X,Y,Z the mean is M and if I exclude Z it's N. You may argue about Z but people should make those decisions for themselves.
You certainly can argue with numbers. Numbers do not burst forth from the head of Zeus; they are always produced in a particular context and that context provides fertile grounds for argument. Here's an example: is the mean temperature of the earth changing? We have datasets from weather stations all over the globe going back centuries. But there are people who claim that many of these weather stations used to be located in rural areas that have become more developed over time and that this development can introduce heat islands that create the illusion of global warming. This is not an obviously false claim. These people can and do argue with the numbers. Later research by scientists has shown that this claim is wrong anyway, but lay people lack the time and training to figure that out on their own. And it seems bizarre to expect them to.
If the data is out there, more people will see the truth.
I don't think this is true at all. People do not generally scrutinize raw data. And if they do, they lack the skilled needed to decipher them.
You're talking about arguing about whether certain experiments were valid and you can do that. Once you agree on a dataset, the mean is the mean and that's it. My point is that if ALL the data is released then some group will analyze it with all the outliers in and publish that.
I don't deny that the climate has gotten warmer on trend for the last 150 years.
I don't deny that humans have increased the c02 concentration through the activities of forestry clearing and fossil fuel burning.
I am skeptical of the proven link between c02 and large temperature rises.
I am extremely skeptical of the climate models developed.
I am extremely skeptical of the climate alarmism promoted through science and quasi-science publications, and on through the regular media. People have made these predictions for 30 years, and not one has come close to being true.
I am extremely skeptical that the current costs associated with ineffective present-day solutions (cap & trade, carbon tax, wind power etc) are going to be less than long-term adaption if climate change proves to be a problem.
Yet, for most of the climate change cheer squad, I am filthy denier who probably believes that cigarettes don't cause cancer and who probably doesn't believe in evolution.
The blanket 'with us or against us' attitude developed by many is the worst thing : denying criticism or outright rejection of alternative views is the worst kind of denial.
Solid scientific concepts don't need to be packaged, managed and sold to the public.
Many people understandably belive that they do need that when such concepts are opposed by well funded industry lobby groups and everyone's preference for not having to change their lifestyle.
There is no evidence, none, that there is a well funded industry lobby group in operation. The large mass of skeptical enquiry into climate science is done by amateurs and/or people with tenure in universities. It is done on low-rent blogs and in pay-per-visit speaking tours, and all done on a comparative shoestring. I remember reading an article somewhere that breathlessly revealed that a climate skeptic had been paid $100,000 for a speaking tour to spread the no global warming line. $100,000 is a drop in the bucket, an absolutely meaningless figure. This was the best they could come up with, when it's quite simple to see, say, $1.4 million dollars being spent to explore the link between malaria and climate change when there have been plenty of scientific papers to say there's no link at all, or such a small link it is drowned out by the noise.
Compared against the billions spent by governments, NGOs, lobby groups, and yes, oil companies, to promote climate alarmism, it is an ocean compared to the bits and pieces of fuding that well known sceptics. You've only got to compare the heartland institute's climate seminar in chicago - a two bit affair, to the grandiose climate-alarmism conferences in Indonesia, Copenhagen, and later this year, Cancun to really see the difference.
I will agree with you that nobody wants to change their lifestyle, and that is a major problem for the adoption of policies. But then, in democracies, the burden of proof lies with the person proposing the changes, and they should be self evident. This is a sup-optimal solution, no doubt, by the inertia involved means that it prevents making too many mistakes. If all of the various scare campaigns of the last 100 years were all enacted straight away, we'd have seen millions of human lives, and billions of man-years of effort wasted making the planet a worse-off place.
By all means continue to argue to your passion, but I would advise coming up with a new meme over the 'industry funded lobby groups' one.
http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/campaigns/global-warming-and-e...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore%27s_Penguin_Army_video_...
http://www2.dailyprogress.com/cdp/news/local/local_govtpolit...
http://www.businessgreen.com/business-green/news/2247933/gre...
Your links contain: -6 forged letters to a congressman -a youtube spoof of Al Gore -lobby group organizing political rallies (up to 1100 people!) -$24 million from Koch's company (link to the greenpeace site, really?)
Again, against the tide of NGO and Government money spent to promote alarmism, it's like a water pistol against a firehose.
If this is the best evidence available, it's a very weak case. If the industry funded lobby groups have managed to sway the opinion of the voting public against climate charge alarmism, then they have gotten very good value for money.
How much money was spend on pure PR to "promote alarmism"?
And yes, industry lobbyism is widely known to give extremely good value for money (especially when, as mentioned before, its aims line up with what the voting public wants to believe out of convenience). That's why there is so much of it.
I think you may be misconstruing what many skeptics believe. No skeptics believe there is a vast conspiracy of scientists working together to pull a fast one on the public even though they know that global warming does not exist. Instead, some skeptics believe a small culture of well meaning scientists have fallen victim to a host of well-known and self-reinforcing biases that make their analysis, and especially their extrapolations, suspect.
uh, isn't that a suspect extrapolation? Just Google what Sen. Inhofe has to say on the subject. Just like the article said, there is a significant overlap between those who deny AGW and those who deny evolution. And if over a century of empirical evidence is not enough to convince them that they're wrong, what good is a few decades worth of data?
This "implausible" (are you fucking kidding?) idea is certainly not without precedent.
But so what? If these scientists have a theory, present it, and deal with critical review. If you are correct, the science will prevail, correct?
The pink elephant in the room is, funding for your scientific theory. If they were truly independent legitimate scientists, they would welcome critical analysis of their theories, that's what real science is all about. But modern science is not so much about "science", it is about funding.
Doing "science" is an enjoyable pursuit, and if you can find someone to fund it for you for say 10 or 20 years, it can be a nice ride.