Climategate Inquiry Clearly Ignores Wrongdoing
climateaudit.org
climateaudit.org
I'd love to talk about the science behind climate change. All kinds of technical goodness in there: modeling, thousands of interlocked complex systems, biomass, cloud cover -- the geek factor just goes on and on.
But that's not what this story (or the larger story) is about. It's about scientists who become activists and the politicization of science. This has consequences in all sorts of areas besides Global Warming.
So nope, doesn't impact the science at all. And while people may use this as a club to stereotype all scientists, if you do that you're taking a cheap shot. Lots of folks using all sorts of rhetorical tricks -- that's what political discussions look like.
I'd like to see this entire issue move towards more open accessible, and accountable scientific practices. I'd like to see a code of conduct enacted, putting up some kind of Chinese wall between people lobbying for money and people reporting science. I'd like to see more public involvement, a greater understanding of how real science works, etc.
But this particular article isn't about any of that. If anything, it's just a warning that nothing much has changed, and we're still going to have highly dysfunctional discussions around GW for some time to come. And that sucks.
That is one aspect of it. The much much more important aspect - if climate change is a fact and we are to expect much of the globe under water in 100 years or so - is the almost fundamental damage that this story has done to the science behind climate change in the court of public opinion. The first signs of the damage were the failure of the summit which was held just after the story went mainstream.
No longer is climate change accepted as a fact. There is now resistance not only in the court of public opinion, but perhaps at the higher levels where power is concentrated.
For sure the story is also about the politicisation of scientists, but if in 100 years the world is going to suffer irredeemable damage, that is a very minor story. That is why I think it is crucial that this whole process is not a whitewash and is done independently, impartially and with the aim of finding truth without fear or favour so that the trust can be restored and we can struggle with the real problem.
If you want to do a quick sanity-check, you should play this out in your head using opposite scenarios.
Scenario 1: scientists discover a grave, real, immediate, and imminent threat to mankind. Some persuasion of the population is necessary in order to take needed action.
Scenario 2: scientists without malice exaggerate a threat in order to make their work more relevant. Some facile models are cooked up. Reproducible testing is deemed impossible. Other scientists glom on, hanging their conclusions off shakier and shakier science. Some data is made up. Some data is destroyed. Some data is selectively mangled, Some data is ignored. People who disagree are ostracized. Everybody "knows" that the threat is real, but details, predictions, and assumptions vary widely. Scientists are just another political action group, using propaganda and spinning stories to advance their cause. New research continues to agree with the paradigm -- outliers are shunned.
In scenario 1 the threat is real and scientists need to convince folks to take action. It's something like an asteroid on a collision course with Earth. In scenario 2 the threat may or may not be real, but that's not the point any more. Scientists need to convince the public to take action because they've already emotionally committed to a course of action, no matter what the facts say. People who disagree are either paid shills, idiots, or malcontents.
But here's the kicker: The practice of science and the interface between science and politicians should not be different in either of these two scenarios After all, Joe Public doesn't grok all this shit. One day one talking head is on TV telling him one thing. The other day another talking head is saying something else. It all just looks the same.
The least we can do is get this mess straightened out. The GW folks should be first in line and should be raising all sorts of hell. If there were an asteroid on a collision course with Earth do you think I would keep my algorithms secret, play politics with publishing, name-call, and join some political group? Fuck no. I'd have every scrap of data online, every little thing I did would be public and wide-open. I'd be giving tours of telescopes to look at the asteroid and dropping hammers and pennies from towers to talk about gravity. I'd be squeaky clean, open, humble, direct, and accessible. I sure as shit wouldn't act like these assholes.
(Obviously the truth in this case is somewhere between the two scenarios, but this is about a fucking lot more than just GW) Apologies for the profanity. I really love science, and this story just gets under my skin in a bad way.
They do not perhaps because some scientists have been dogmatic, and perhaps intentionally or otherwise have or have come very close to lying. That of course should not be tolerated at all. However, there are very powerful forces out there which are fighting for the public opinion which is why you may get contradictory views on television. That is fine, we live in a democracy. The scientists have the right to free speech just as much as anyone else and the right to expression through communicating to the world what they believe.
The problem and the reason why this story is so very big, is not because scientists expressed their beliefs, but because they have not been doing science proper. The reason why they have not might be because of some dogmatic belief. But they can hold any belief they wish however dogmatic as long as they do proper science, transparently, openly, peer reviewed and are engaging with facts as they are rather than manipulating them.
AIU your statement, you mean "the actual science [of climate change]". If so, your statement is incorrect.
The unethical actions of these scientists has brought into disrepute not just the study of climate change, but also of biology and pharma research, alternative energy, etc.
In the end, not only does climate change research get damned, but so do all other areas in which we're relying on the ethics of the researchers. That's a superset of the climate research, and thus a much larger and important problem.
I would argue that this statement is misleading in more than one way. Starting with "climate change": do you mean human-induced climate change or the natural cycling? If you mean natural cycling, there's so much evidence that only fringe-dwellers would dispute it. And if you mean human-induced change, you say "no longer" as if it were ever accepted as fact.
Perhaps there is human-induced global warming right now, but I think at this point the track record of scientists attempting to predict future temperatures isn't good enough to structure entire long-term policies on.
I agree this is a bad thing, but it's not like they did that in a vacuum. It was quite clearly in reaction to activists who were already operating in the opposite direction (e.g. American politically-right-leaning Christians, for reasons I really don't understand, suddenly became very interested in climate change of all things).
Wow.
Point to the place in my comment where I said that.
I specifically said "e.g". This means "for example". Nowhere in my comment did I make the claim that all people requesting data were American politically right leaning Christians. I simply observed that they had been involved for a long time.
Are you suggesting that the CRU folks withheld data from two Canadians because they were afraid that some right wing American Christians might, in the future, also request data? You didn't clarify in your previous post that the activists operating in the opposite direction were hypothetical.
No, I did not say that. I should have known better than to participate on this thread - I'm going to stop now. I really don't enjoy being called a bigot.
[Edit: You edited your comment after I replied - my original quoting is correct. Ok, I'm really stopping now].
If I started talking like a racist, I think I'd have to expect some people to make assumptions about me, regardless of my actual feelings on the matter.
[Edit: grammar goofball]
It is only natural that if you say "my computer model predicts that we should rob Peter to pay Paul" that Peter is going to wind up looking more skeptically upon your computer model than Paul is.
It sounds to me like you're working towards an argument of "they escalated to this level, so we had no choice but to follow suit". That is absolutely not a valid argument, either morally or in terms of logic.
The climategate emails prove what Steve has long alleged, that his work and the work of others has been hindered at every turn by climate scientists denying them access to data and access to publication venues. This weakens the case that current years are the hottest in recent history, since alternative views were systematically and unfairly discredited through scientific politics, and not science.
So, yes, I think it matters.
In the long run, Climategate may be very beneficial to environmental science. It will shame those who seek to inject political bias into scientific discussions and encourage more open work practices. This is a good thing! Skeptical observers will be more likely to be convinced by a process that appears dispassionate.
I am not sure what the point is of all these investigation panels, but they seem flawed.
Who are the 'those' you speak of?
I didn't say that women are fiery and dangerous, but that association will be made in most people's brains simply by virtue of me colocating them.
The original commenter was talking about specific scientists then talked about injecting politics in an ambiguous way. This will lead to a similar effect. Most people will take it to mean that he is talking specifically about these scientists. That's why I asked him to clarify. Was he specifically talking about them, and only them?
That's what I thought when I saw that. Maybe I'm not "most people."
Such arguments are sound, the logic behind them is the following: intuitively, we start out believing that if there were evidence against our hypothesis (in this case, unprecedented warming), with a high probability the scientific process would have discovered/published it. Since evidence against this hypothesis has not been published, we conclude with high probability it does not exist. The lack of evidence against it increases our confidence that the hypothesis is true.
Climategate has reduced our estimate of the probability that the scientific process would have discovered/published evidence against the unprecedented warming hypothesis if it existed. Therefore, such evidence may exist, but may not have been discovered due to bad behavior by Mann/Jones/etc.
I'll geek out a little. Let H be a hypothesis and let E be evidence against it. I.e., P(H | !E ) < P(H), and conversely P(H | !E) > P(H). Now let O be the fact of E being observed/published/becoming known to us. We can compute:
P(H | !O) = P(H | E) P(E | !O) + P(H | !E) P(!E | !O)
Bayes rule turns this into:
P(H | !O) = [P(H | E) P(!O | E) P(E) + P(H | !E)P(!O | !E) P(!E) ] / P(!O).
Before climategate, we believed that P(!O | E) is close to zero, so therefore P(H | !O) is approximately P(H | !E) > P(H). After climategate, we must increase our estimate of P(!O | E), which in turn reduces our estimate of P(H | !O).
You are a really smart guy and I have read your blog posts on the subject (As far as I recall you found a small mistake in their data).
I am not that smart, much of the mathematical stuff behind this goes way over my head but even so I get very supessios when some of the leaders who really, really understand this stuff find it necessary to backstab others who work in the same field. It just stink to high heaven that something is wrong.
The best way I can see is that the professor isn't up to the task, so he only did this improve his own situation. But honestly? I doubt that.
Poverty poof gone. Hunger poof gone and so on...
Reality gets in the way, of course, just as it does with GW.
"The investigations thus far are much like having a trial with judge, jury, reporters, spectators, and defendant, but no plaintiff. The plaintiff is locked outside the courtroom sitting in the hall hollering and hoping the jury hears some of what he has to say. Is it any wonder the verdicts keep coming up “not guilty”?"
In other words, this inquiry had nobody there to aggressively put forth the case that the defendant was guilty.