It appears RyanO has requested data from NCAR/UCAR, the request has been refused, and RyanO may now be embarked on dealing with the same sort of run-around treatment exhibited by CRU. (See Data Stonewalling Resumes.) In light of these recent events, it’s worth reviewing some of the findings vis-a-vis CRU’s intransigence with respect to disseminating data documented in the Muir Russell report (PDF). The relevent findings appear to consistently criticize scientists for lack of openness, defying statutory requirements and for risking damage to the reputation of climate scientists as a result of their lack of openness:
But we do find that there has been a consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness, both on the part of the CRU scientists and on the part of the UEA, who failed to recognise not only the significance of statutory requirements but also the risk to the reputation of the University and, indeed, to the credibility of UK climate science.
On the allegation of withholding station identifiers we find that CRU should have made available an unambiguous list of the stations used in each of the versions of the Climatic Research Unit Land Temperature Record (CRUTEM) at the time of publication. We find that CRU‟s responses to reasonable requests for information were unhelpful and defensive.
On the allegations in relation to withholding data, in particular concerning the small sample size of the tree ring data from the Yamal peninsula, CRU did not withhold the underlying raw data (having correctly directed the single request to the owners). But it is evidently true that access to the raw data was not simple until it was archived in 2009 and that this delay can rightly be criticized on general principles. In the interests of transparency, we believe that CRU should have ensured that the data they did not own, but on which their publications relied, was archived in a more timely way.
On the allegation that CRU does not appear to have acted in a way consistent with the spirit and intent of the FoIA or EIR, we find that there was unhelpfulness in responding to requests and evidence that e-mails might have been deleted in order to make them unavailable should a subsequent request be made for them. University senior management should have accepted more responsibility for implementing the required processes for FoIA and EIR compliance.
Given the significance of the work of CRU, UEA management failed to recognise in their risk management the potential for damage to the University‟s reputation fuelled by the controversy over data access.
Under “broader Issues”:
Openness and Reputation. An important feature of the blogosphere is the extent to which it demands openness and access to data. A failure to recognise this and to act appropriately, can lead to immense reputational damage by feeding allegations of cover up. Being part of a like minded group may provide no defence. Like it or not, this indicates a transformation in the way science has to be conducted in this century.
Role of Research Sponsors. One of the issues facing the Review was the release of data. At various points in the report we have commented on the formal requirements for this. We consider that it would make for clarity for researchers if funders were to be completely clear upfront in their requirements for the release of data (as well as its archiving, curation etc).
I think it is fair to say that Muir Russell bent over backwards to interpret things as favorably as possible for scientists at CRU. Nevertheless, they slammed them for their consistent lack of openness toward data finding it indefensible, and advised that this sort of behavior feeds allegations of cover ups and risks the reputation of the scientists.
Refuse to share data and reputational damage will occur: This is a simple fact. It would be darn shame if scientists at UCAR and NCAR damage their own reputations by imitating the behavior for which CRU was justly criticized.
Even if it turns out NCAR is not subject to FOI, with some luck, NSF– the funding agency– will take Muir Russell’s recommendations to heart andstep in and save some scientists from further damaging the reputation of all climate scientists by indulging in what appears to be their own worst inclinations: not sharing data with people who might disagree with their findings.
Lesson didn’t take?
Bend me over the barrel.
Fall Niagara.
=============
“not sharing data with people who might disagree with their findings.”
More like… not sharing data with people who will find critical errors in their findings
MikeC– We don’t know what RyanO will find. Presumably, Amman doesn’t believe critical errors would be found– if he thought that, he should correct them himself!
They come silently
But with a rush and power.
How pretty the clouds.
=============
Lucia, I was talking more in general…
… I get the feeling that all of the AGW fanatics will be hiding and denying all they can from now on… their science cannot hold up to scrutiny.
I am surprised that sod or bugs have not yet weighed in with the usual argument that (a) Scientists should never have to share data with bad people and because (b) only bad people would request data to check the Scientists’ work, data-sharing is thus never required.
The only remaining issue, of course, is why does lucia hate the good people at NCAR/UCAR. Exxon must have hit the tip jar yet again.
Because they are in a tough spot… think about it, George, the only way they could make the cover up any worse is if Michael Mann combed his hair from the side of his head and over the bald spot.
Re: MikeC (Jul 24 09:34),
“AGW fanatics will be hiding and denying…”
That’s a riff on the all-too-common argument, “All who disagree with me are either Knaves or Fools–perhaps both.”
In real life, we have all encountered wrong-headed people of various sorts. However, in my experience, it is very rare to discover that most of those who differ from me on a particular issue are, indeed, evil and/or stupid.
Unsurprisingly, the targets of these remarks take exception to them. One result is that most people harden their positions, often seeking solace in a tribe of like-minded thinkers. This makes reasoned debate much more difficult than would otherwise be the case.
As far as Climate Change, The Blackboard has been an oasis, of sorts. Or maybe a Neutral Zone. Actually, it has served that role only in a faute de mieux sense. Still, it would be better to strive to do better, rather than add to the cacophony.
My two cents.
Two cents more, I agree with Amac. None of these people wake up in the morning, look in the mirror, twirl their moustaches and say “It’s great to be the villain.”
AMac,
Don’t worry. I usually just ignore rants like that. They’re less common here than elsewhere, so life is too short to worry about the ones that do show up here.
To the topic at hand: so what is being asked for? Gridded results of a millennium-scale model run, I take it?
In e.g. physics, chemistry and all of the biological sciences, any research paper submitted without a comprehensive “materials and methods” section is rejected out of hand. Simply because without it, it impossible to verify and duplicate the results and conclusions. By way of example, the Svensmark, et. al. experiment showing the effect of solar activity on cloud formation can be duplicated at any facility that has a cloud chamber.
Why is it that this very, very elementary scientific requirement somehow does not apply to climate “science”? Because until it does and is systematically enforced, whatever “research” CRU, UCAR, NCAR, Mann, or any of the Team produce, will be just that: “research” and “science” with multiple quotation marks around it.
Carrot–
Initially, the request seems to have been:
This is the more complete request sent in after NSF’s reply:
We’ll see what happens. I’ll laugh my hind-quarters off if after some intrasigence, NCAR finally announces that they had been planning to make this available all along, and then belatedly posts it on the web. (That’s what happened with the Santer tropical troposphere data. Of course… they weren’t planning to make the data available all along, were they?)
I hope he gets his data (I think*).
That said, this movie is getting really old. We’re over 5 years into the McI -driven auditing and haven’t seen a paper since 2005 January. (And very interesting how all kinds of blog posts are piublic, but the figures here do not show their preprints and white papers! Opposite of real scientists.) Last real aha, I remember was the minor point of the Y2K adjustment catch. Other than that it has been a lot of side stuff (climategate) and/or stream of consciousness stuff like the Antarctica (Id) and trend analysis (Lucia) with a lot of huff and puff, but no good summations and a lot of early PR, that doesn’t pan out. way too much bread, too little beef.
I admire guys like Huybers and Zorita…much more than the “let’s put on a show” types.
And I don’t think it justifies failure to share data…but…the naked pants cartoons and snark from McI and half-assed analyses by Id and McI are a real turn off.
And, at least with McI, I have found that he takes several months and repeated requests to supply detaiuls of methodology. In some cases, he could easily engage in discussions of the details and it would be right in vein (and much more technical than the hoi polloi games), but he is reticent when it is something like standard deviation dividoing or over-red noise where he overstates an opponent’s flaws. Also note that Wegman never sent the information to Ritalin Ritson…how about skeptics getting amped up about that…4 years later…
*I haven’t and won’t read up on the details of those papers and see if the request is source data or something unreasonable.
OK, so they want some model results that were apparently used in a couple papers. I haven’t the time to read those and see if the request makes sense or not.
There are model results from the community model people on the web; http://www.cesm.ucar.edu/experiments/
I haven’t the time to see if what they want is already online somewhere. People tend to focus on the instances where the scientists are slow or resistant to handing over some materials, but I’d say in general, there’s a surprising amount of computer code, model results and raw data available online to all comers. Sometimes you have to register, sometimes you don’t. I get the idea that this has longer been the norm in some other fields (economics and some aspects of biology/medicine, I think?), but this is not generally the case across the physical sciences, in my opinion.
tetris
Those are in climate papers, just as they’re in any other kind of paper.
Carrot–
That you might find the amount of info made available is irrelevant if the information required to test the specific thing RyanO wants to test is unavailable. Of course people focus on the data that is requested and refused rather than the data that– quite possibly interests no one and was voluntered. This focus on utterly unjustified refusals is appropraite and the almost constant replies of “You can’t expect us to give you X, but look Y and Z (which are utterly useless to your objective is available), we think you should be content with that!” is just silly.
If X is available, the answer should simply be: “X is available at [link]”. If X is unavailable, but NSF policies, DOE or any policy imposed by the funding agency require it to be available on request, it should be made available.
It varies a lot in the physical sciences.
For things like chemistry and condensed matter physics, my impression is that a lot of the data is not routinely shared and/or reanalyzed. It would not be unusual for an old paper to have lost data (especially with students really dooing the work, but not being corresponding authors). And physical samples are saved often, but after a while get thrown out or lost or mislabeled…and one could argue the saftey aspect of old samples often of unknown composition is more the danger than not being able to go back to sources info. For that matter apparatus may be broken down.
It’s certainly not unknown to find some aspects of experimental work incorrect and if working in the field, is a good idea to do some experiment repeating especially if a broader program depends on preliminary results or a report just seems strange.
The one area with very good reporting is X-ray crystallography. Absolutely required to archive info before publication. Data is often actually reveiewd by reviewers, etc. That said, it is still not unusual (rare, but happens) to find mistaken structures in the archived databases.
—————–
I think the real way forward would be for a specialty journal in either climate statistics or in paleoclimate physical results to get ALL OVER a policy of database archiving and strong methodolgy reporting (sorta like Acta Cryst is with crystalloagraphy). This will NOT immediatley transform the field as there are a lot of bad practices and also as people publish at places like Science and Nature and PNAS and AGU journals. But with time, if a “grade A” practice is created, I bet the rest of the journals jump on. for instance Science did not create the strong practices in genomics or crystallography, but the got on board pretty fast after they were developed.
Lucia
I was making a general statement for context. Because people harp on these instances of dispute, they don’t see the big picture that an amazing amount of material is available online in climate science. And then the laymen start getting the idea that nothing is available online, when in fact huge amounts of material is there, and they just don’t know it. For example, GISS has been totally open for some years now, and still it seems that a lot of people don’t realise this. (and opening all the sources and code didn’t stop the FOI requests, mind you).
No, that doesn’t help Ryan, whoever that is, in this particular case. I’m just giving wider context.
No, you just went far, far off the tracks there. The climate-related data that are available are indeed interesting to many people. It just seems that some people don’t stop to reflect on that.
Unless you want to label all the land station data (with the exception of a handful of CRU-specific ones), SST data, thousands of paleo proxies, paleo scripts, TSI data, CO2 data, IPCC model runs, code for at least some of the IPCC models, GISS code, USHCN and soon GHCN code, etc, etc to all “interest no one”.
I’m a little surprised somebody’s having trouble with this particular model; the ‘c’ does stand for ‘community’ after all; it’s supposed to function as something that different researchers can work with, and there is a lot of material online, if not whatever specific thing this guy wants (assuming that it indeed isn’t there, and that it’s something that would exist, and that it’s a reasonable thing to expect to find online – I haven’t looked into any of that)
I’m reading between the lines, and guessing this is a shot at CRU. I’ve said many times that CRU should have made a station list and station data available, even without being asked. They were clearly laggards in this respect, behind NCDC, GISS and JMA. Now, if all they did was take the stations in the GHCN and apply a fairly straightforward processing to them (as does GISS), then I’d be OK with them saying, go here, take it, and do this arithmetic on it. But their processing is not so simple or uniform.
“I think it is fair to say that Muir Russell bent over backwards to interpret things as favorably as possible for scientists at CRU.”
Based upon what? It seems to me they held them to a very high standard — criticizing them for not creating a user-friendly system for disseminating data that didn’t belong to them. What are you doing to make my data easily available to people who want to see it? Bearing in mind that if you violate my intellectual property, I’ll sue you.
Transparency is something virtually every organization is criticized for not having enough of. It’s easy to prescribe but hard to implement. The committee found no evidence of falsification or distortion of the evidence. They could have stopped right there, rather than give a lecture on customer relations.
That’s the one part where I thought the Russell report was a bit harsh – knocking them for not nagging the guys (hantemirov, was it?) who provided them with some data, to put their data online. Especially since the data were apparently available on request anyway, as McI had it all along anyway.
The other criticisms highlighted above seem reasonable.
But while this fulfills Lucia’s complaints about CRU, it’s clearly a far cry from fulfilling the fantasies of other people out there – that global warming isn’t actually happening, etc. That’s why people say the report vindicates CRU, and then why Lucia says it doesn’t.
Robert–
Based on Muir limiting interviews to those at CRU and UEA only, not seeking additional emails to get further context, adding things like “we did not find any evidence of behaviour that might undermine the conclusions of the IPCC assessments.” when in fact, they did not investigate the science. Ordinarily, a panel should simply be silent on points they did not investigate. That they did otherwise suggests a desire to include statements that sound exculpatory for no particularly good reason.
CRU didn’t merely fail to implement transparency; they took active measure to maximize opacity.
Had they done so, they would have failed in to fulfill their mandate. See page 10 of Muir Russel
You may not like their making recommendations as required but it was still their mandate.
carrot eater [49740]
No carrot eater, climate science papers do not have material and methods sections as they are understood in the other disciplines. If they did, that’s precisely where we would find the raw data and the code that we need to reconstruct and verify the papers findings and conclusions. This is what this entire sorry puppet show is all about: the fellows at CRU, UCAR/NCAR, GISS, etc, etc., do NOT want us to have that info because, to paraphrase Phil Jones, someone might use it to find something wrong with the research. But is what science is all about, isn’t it? Except of course in climate “science”.
The UCAR/NCAR argument that their research is somehow privately funded and that the data therefore is not subject to FOI, is unadulterated bullshit. Just imagine researchers at say Roche submitting a study to the New England Journal of Medicine, leaving the materials and methods section blank, arguing its private property. Not in a million years. Only in climate “science”.
Lucia,
Some meaningless talking points in there, and they seem to be commonly repeated.
McIntyre had ample opportunity to make submissions, and he did, and they were discussed. Unless McIntyre was holding back something groundbreaking from his submissions, under the self-important assumption that he of course would be personally interviewed, I don’t see how simply repeating this makes a difference.
The wording is exactly correct the way it is. it is in fact quite precise. When the emails broke, some people saw in the emails the possibility of misconduct that would have affected the science. Turns out, there was not.
This was not a commission or an opportunity for a supreme “audit” of every little detail of every paper that McIntyre does not understand or like. Those were pre-existing conditions and academic disputes, and were not the object here.
I was tickled and happy that they went ahead and did their own instrumental temperature record. Though even that wasn’t done to check CRU’s results as a matter of science, so much as it was done to see if the information required to do it was available.
carrot eater (Comment#49755) July 24th, 2010 at 2:34 pm
“they don’t see the big picture that an amazing amount of material is available online in climate science.”
Big Tobacco regularly delivered tractor trailer trucks full of documents to various litigants. They absolutely perfected the art of burying ones opponents in useless information.
Carrot–
You may think observing that Muir Russel did not interview people outside CRU or UEA is a meaningless talking point. I think this demonstrates that they kept the investigation narrow, thereby favoring the scientists. That they permitted people to make written submissions doesn’t change my view because written documents always carry less weight than spending face time in interviews.
Why are you bringing up McIntyre specifically? No critics were interviewed. No other emails were sought. No broadening was attempted to investigate many of the claims on which the scientists were “exonerated”.
And I haven’t suggested this. I suggested that they kept the scope of the investigation extremely narrow and this favored the finding little or nothing. Yet, their findings sound fairly broad.
harrywr2
Thanks for the completely irrelevant analogy.
So you think that “all the land station data (with the exception of a handful of CRU-specific ones), SST data, thousands of paleo proxies, paleo scripts, TSI data, CO2 data, IPCC model runs, code for at least some of the IPCC models, GISS code, USHCN and soon GHCN code, etc, etc” are useless, and sitting hidden someplace is the actual information.
Get real.
“So you think that “all the land station data (with the exception of a handful of CRU-specific ones), SST data, thousands of paleo proxies, paleo scripts, TSI data, CO2 data, IPCC model runs, code for at least some of the IPCC models, GISS code, USHCN and soon GHCN code, etc, etc†are useless…”
Yes
Andrew
“It appears RyanO has requested data from NCAR/UCAR, the request has been refused, and RyanO may now be embarked on dealing with the same sort of run-around treatment exihibited by CRU”
I’m confused.
Have they actually said “No?
Did they actually say something like “Write the request properly and we will deal with it in the appropriate way”,
From your post at Comment#49736 it looks like you don’t actually know the details, but it certainly could be something like I suggested above.
Oh, and did RyanO ever finish his paper on Steig’s Antarctic Reconstructions?
Nathan–
Evidently, Amman just ignored the request. So, technically, there is no “No”, just utter failure to responde.
So, given that he couldn’t get a response, RyanO had to resort to FOI– there really isn’t an alternative. Then UCAR/NCAR responded that FOI doesn’t apply so he went to NSF, who seems to suggest writing it in the proper legalese language. So, NSF the funding agency– not the scientists– appears to be responsive. (I think my main blog post captures this by suggesing NSF may save the scientists form themselves.)
Given that NSF appear to be helping, Ryan is now dealing with them. However, the requests require legalise since it’s now through FOI.
Ordinarly, people aren’t required to resort to legalese. Scientists don’t ignore requests.
BTW: I know the story on the Antartic reconstructions, but it’s not mine to tell. Some people don’t want to discuss ever step of what happens during peer review. Others do. Evidently, you can be criticized for discussing (as SteveM is) or for not discussing (as some are criticizing RyanO here in comments.) Well…
Lucia
“Evidently, Amman just ignored the request. So, technically, there is no “Noâ€, just utter failure to responde.”
Perhaps RyanO had the wrong address? Is Amman away?
“Ordinarly, people aren’t required to resort to legalese. Scientists don’t ignore requests. ”
Well that’s the case in your imagination I am sure…
“Given that NSF appear to be helping, Ryan is now dealing with them. ”
So this is nothing more than an opportunity to point the nasty stick at Amman?
So RyanO’s Antartic paper did’t get up?
That’s sad.
Obviously Peer review doesn’t work properly… Just there to squash alternate opinion.
Hey did you see Judith Curry’s drive by and RealClimate? BIZARRE!
Oh and this
“Evidently, Amman just ignored the request. So, technically, there is no “Noâ€, just utter failure to responde.â€
Was there a long time between the two requests? The one to Amman and the FOI?
And how many times did RyanO attemtp communication with Amman?
Could he not make his own data using this:
http://www.cesm.ucar.edu/models/ccsm1.4/csm1.4.ug.html
I don’t need to hear the peer review issues, but let’s just see the preprint. What does it mean if people share all kinds of in progress work, mix in some rabble rousing…but then won’t show their synthesize work? Other scientists do share it. It would be a lot easier to read than the disassembled blog posts (many with poorly drawn figures and lacking a lit review, etc.)
Lucia
…
I’ve emailed people asking for data or clarifications before, gotten no response, and not thought to file an FOI. Sometimes emails just get lost in the mix, forgotten.
nathan
I thought about that. One would have to read the papers in question, to understand precisely what’s needed here.
Lucia
…
I’ve emailed people asking for data or clarifications before, gotten no response, and not thought to file an FOI, nor assumed evil intent. Sometimes emails just get lost in the mix, forgotten. Inertia can kill something like that, too – you want to format a spreadsheet before you send it out to somebody; that’ll take some time.. and then it never happens.
Nathan
I thought about that. One would have to read the papers in question, to understand precisely what’s needed here.
Carrot–
Sure. But NCAR/UCAR sent a response to the FOI. If Amman wished, he could send the data even now and expedite. Or maybe he got hit by a bus. Or maybe he’ll send it. We’ll see.
PolyTCO
And that’s part of the problem. People can only speak to their own experience. For me, I think climate science is unusually open and sharing with raw data and codes. For somebody else, it is maybe different. Different fields have different norms.
To some extent this is just a necessity since it isn’t an experimental field; you can’t just go into the lab, and come out a couple days later with your own results. Everybody’s got to share the same observational data, for stuff like weather stations and satellite data.
Figuring out how to archive the files of previous grad students probably doesn’t get the attention it deserves. And when new software comes out that isn’t backwards compatible, things are just lost, if nobody thought to save txt files. I’m assuming txt files are like cockroaches; we’ll be able to open them in 100 years, assuming its stored someplace useful. Which is itself a bad assumption – try finding a zip drive or 5 1/4 drive these days.
Maybe in your world..
This is probably most relevant to paleo proxies.
It can also be relevant to raw data from climate models. Sure, one can run their own model, but questions might arise based on a specific ensemble that was used by the IPCC.
I think this issue is recognized, and it may be what motivated archives like PCMDI. But nothing is ever going to replace people being willing to share data that the author actually saved on request. (Of course it’s fair to say data are lost or destroyed when that has actually happened. It has in the past and will in the future. But in that case, it will strike people as odd if you later “find” the data and share it with people who you “like” but insist it is “lost” when people you “don’t like” ask for it. This is where some degree of public archiving is useful.)
On its own, yes. It’s empty. It’s a nothing. Suppose they had interviewed me, the King of Spain, and Diego Maradona. There, they interviewed some people outside CRU. Now what? To take it from nothing to something, you have to give some inkling of who should be interviewed, and what extra useful information they may have gained.
Generally speaking I know what you’re trying to say, but see how it operates here. People had the chance to give detailed written submissions. If they had matters of substance, written is actually the better form.
So again, to take this from empty fluff to something with meaning, you have to show that some meaningful written submissions were not considered.
Otherwise, leaving these vague statements allows you to say into perpetuity that it wasn’t a complete investigation, without ever being able to say what was actually missing. And I’m sorry, but that’s horse***. Cheap talk, empty talk.
Who else? Most of the issues flying around here are his bugaboos. Most of the sceptic narrative is being written by him or his friends. And I think therefore the panel spent time with his submission.
Their finding was precisely and perfectly worded. I stand by that strongly. They were tasked with finding whether there was misconduct – it was an investigation into behavior, and what implications that might have had. You’re basically just saying that maybe if they’d looked harder, they’d have found something. Well, I suppose I could say that if the police looked harder, they’d find drugs in your house. I could say that; doesn’t mean it’s meaningful for me to say it unless I can show some real basis for it.
Carrot
They interviewed absolutely no one outside of CRU. No… one….
Oh? Interesting bald claim. So why does the US Supreme court review written and oral submission?
Holland? Eschembach? Any of the people who submitted FOIs? So what if you think these people are McIntire’s “friends”? Most have never met Mc in person. You deem them “friends” only by virtue of their having experienced similar issues vis-a-vis CRU.
If there are serious allegations and the police don’t investigate or barely do so, then yes, I say that’s in favor of the people who were not really investigated. You may not like this but, yes, I will observe that if the police barely look, then they will not find stuff. Had they looked harder.. who knows? But if we observe that they were instructed to look, and still they barely looked, I think it’s fair to note that they barely looked and point out that’s in favor of those being investigated.
You may well feel they shouldn’t have even been looking. But that doesn’t turn there barely looking into something thorough that would uncover stuff if it is there.
See, this is perhaps an example of somebody extrapolating from their own limited niche and assuming anything not like their niche is not science. That takes quite some lack of self-awareness. Or, it’s somebody inventing standards out of thin air, I can’t tell.
tetris
Speak for your own field, not all science. You’re saying you want raw data and a listing of code in the materials/methods section of a paper? That’s downright bizarre – in what field is that done? When is it even remotely possible to put a listing of tens of thousands of lines of code in the text of a paper?
You might find such things in the SI. Or such things might be available on request. But in the paper itself?
Lucia,
Yet more empty nothingness.
Have the basic decency to put some meat on those bones.
You are familiar with what allegations have been spun out of those emails.
What specific allegation was not addressed? Which one? In what way was the treatment of that allegation not adequate?
Carrot–
I don’t think actual code is archived be engineering journals. Stuff like that would be made available on request. This is not to say things might not change in the future– but still, no. This stuff is not normally archived by journals except in certain fields. Historically, journals don’t usually under take hosting very large archives. They are rarely into policing behavior either.
The difficulty is when the answer starts being “no. unless you are on our team”. Even that might not matter so much if the results didn’t have political impact. It would be dealt with informally as those who consistently refused were gossiped about by those who requested data– this is a powerful mechanism in small sub-specialties.
But climate science now has a political impact, and the “no’s” seem to be reserved for those who might criticize.
Scientists might have gotten away with this before members of the public had mechanisms to easily communicate how they were treated with each other. But now that people who are mistreated can easily communicate with each other, treating people unfairly by refusing reasonable requests (or even borderline unreasonable ones) will cause climate scientists to earn a very poor reputation. And they will deserve this poor reputation. People suggesting climate scientists somehow have a right to act like butt-heads really won’t help here.
It’s both politically and practically much better to follow the pre-existing standards which was always to provide information on request rather than trying to guess in advance what some hypothetical person wanted and archive that.
Carrot–
What I said was that the panel made pronouncements based on having only interviewed CRU and UEA. That method favors CRU and UEA and not those alleging wrong doing. If you want to count this as addressing the allegations– fine. I’m just saying that method favors CRU and UEA.
Why you want to argue by asking seeming rhetorical questions about which questions were not addressed—- as if I’d suggested they weren’t addressed at all, fine. They were addressed: in a cursory fashion that is designed to favor CRU and UEA. Period.
That’s been my position, and your saying this is “empty nothingness” or asking rhetorical questions doesn’t provide any basis for suggesting there is anything inadequate or inaccurate in my view.
Lucia,
It was not clear in the first place that code even had to be handed over on request. Some norms evolved as we watched these things drag on. Wasn’t it the NAS that opined that code was the IP of the author, back when the hockey stick broke out into a mess that Congress got into?
In some fields (see how I’m not speaking for all of science here), it would be somewhat unusual to request somebody else’s codes. Nor would you necessarily want it; for many things it’s better and even faster to write your own code than to understand somebody else’s. GISTEMP being a good example, actually. Who is going to sort out that mess? (Well, Nick Barnes and friends, that’s who.). But it’d be a lot faster to just do your own thing, as so many have done now.
Still more nothingness.
If you can’t say something specific, then in this case you’ve really got nothing to say. Because all the allegations here are out there in blogs you might read; heck people are peddling books about it. Or they’re in the submissions. So if you wanted to put the time into it, you could identify what were the best argued allegations. And therefore you could actually discuss that allegation, and how it was treated by the panel, and specifically what you thought was weak about it.
By the way, I’m not saying I wouldn’t have interviewed outside people. I’d have called up von Storch, Ed Cook, and other such relevant people who did not appear to give submissions.
Holland is the one possible missing person that might have merited an interview. I hope Lucia will agree that McI has been trying to insert his nose in and run all kinds of stories on climategate (to the detetriment of resolving very old assertions of his). McI is not a real expert and does a lot of PR blog writing. He doesn’t rank an interview and he’s just being touchy with wanting one. He wants to have an impact, he can write papers and finish up his allegations from 4 years ago or answer the questions thta Zorita or I or Berger challenged him with a long time ago.
An interview with VS or Zorita would have been interesrting. They are rivals of the Team, sure. But are real princes of men and know what it is to do science. They examplify the ethic of fairness. Mcuh more than Gavin or Mike foaming at the mouth in RC comments…
What I first noticed when the emails broke was that this was finally the means by which ordinary scientists could understand how they’d been fooled by the AGW machina, and that has been borne out by numerous testimonies I’ve read on the innertubes. And yet, Carrot Eater defends the conduct documented by the emails.
What’s in the carrots?
============
Bugs would say that Ryan O should not get the data because
steve mcintyre is snarky
carrot:
“for many things it’s better and even faster to write your own code than to understand somebody else’s. ”
you keep saying this as if it were a fact. I’ve never found it to be the case. I suspect you have never done any substantial work with other people’s code. One of the biggest advantages in having OPC is being able to run it to get intermediate files. In fact, I’ve worked with OPC without trying to understand it at all! Just having it to run the cases I wanted to run told me volumes.
I have never found having OPC to be a HARM. I have never found it to slow me down. I have never found it to impact code quality. There are no negatives that I have ever experienced. The key is how you USE OPC.
So, what’s your EXACT experiences. languages, typical project size, research code or production code. etc.
Steven Mosher
RyanO can make his own data using the link I posted above. It was put on the net on the 11 of July this year, perhaps when RyanO made his first enquiry?
The code is available, just looks like no one bothered to look.
http://www.cesm.ucar.edu/models/ccsm1.4/csm1.4.ug.html
Surely if RyanO was serious about this he could just run the model as many times as he liked and calculate his own monthly gridded data.
No one seems to be able to say how many times he asked Amman, do you know? As far as I can tell the OP here is basically an attempt tp paint Amman as a recalcitrant… It’s in pretty poor taste, and there seems to be no substance to the claim that Amman is just ignoring RyanO.
Lucia
“Sure. But NCAR/UCAR sent a response to the FOI. If Amman wished, he could send the data even now and expedite. Or maybe he got hit by a bus. Or maybe he’ll send it. We’ll see.”
If you lok at the link I posted above, it was dated 11th July 2010. Is this around the time RyanO made his request? Could be that Amman got this all online, then forgot to tell RyanO.
Lucian, the difference between your contributions to this blog an Zeke’s are significant in their tone and focus.
Nathan–
Scientists finally putting things on line when bloggers ask and then not telling the blogger there are any such plans or that they have been implemented is hardly unprecedented. It also doesn’t reflect well on the scientists.
But you, of course, you may be correct that Amman is exhibiting the same sort of silliness we’ve seen before. We’ll see– right?
Carrot
Well, you don’t seem to be saying anything specific here in comments. In contrast I am: I am specifically saying that setting up inquires where one narrows the inquiry rather than broadens it favors those who are being investigated. Interviewing only one side of the story favors the side being interviewed. That Muir Russel did this is a fact. It’s not just blog talking points.
You aren’t rebutting that these are facts. You are just going on and on about “allegations” or complaining about SteveMc or the fact that people have written books. The existence of Tom Fuller and Mosher’s book doesn’t change the fact that Muir Russell decided on the narrowest possible investigation given their charge. This favors those being investigated.
Lucia
“Scientists finally putting things on line when bloggers ask and then not telling the blogger there are any such plans or that they have been implemented is hardly unprecedented. It also doesn’t reflect well on the scientists. ”
Oh boo hoo hooo… Seriously? I mean it took me less than fives minutes to find that.
Did you try and help RyanO find what he wanted? Seems like you would rather say inflammatory stuff like “It also doesn’t reflect well on the scientists. ”
Shame on you.
Nathan (Comment#49800),
Gee, maybe Ryan looked at length before the material was on line and couldn’t find it. Are you suggesting that Ryan should have to look continuously for the same information, based on the assumption that it could be posted at any moment? Come on Nathan, if the material went up as a result of Ryan’s request, then Amman should have informed Ryan of that fact; something like:
“Ryan O: The requested information is at: http://www.abc_xyz.net”
Might have actually taken 30 seconds… if Amman is slow with his keyboard.
SteveF
No, not suggesting that.
But if he went to other people and said he was having trouble finding stuff, why didn’t they help? It’s been there about three weeks.
If Lucia had used a tiny slice of the skepticism she’s known for, she could have found it in a jiffy.
But that wouldn’t serve her narrative…
Nathan,
Sure wish you would address the real issue: if the material went up as a result of Ryan’s request, then Amman should have informed Ryan of that fact. Do you really disagree with this?
SteveF
Of course Amman should have notified him, I agree. But it’s also perfectly normal and human for busy people to forget stuff like that.
What’s not normal is writing blog posts about how people have refused to share data, or claim that RyanO was ignored, without even the most basic check first. Surely it’s up to Lucia to check what she’s saying has even a small basis in truth.
Up above I asked her a series of questions about the events and it was pretty clear she only had a very basic understanding of what transpired… It’s because she’s trying to feed a narrative.
SteveF
If the upshot of this is that Amman forgot to notify RyanO… then it’s a pretty shallow ‘story’ isn’t it.
Nathan,
If that were all it was, sure. But the effort to post new material on line is certainly far greater than a one sentence email message. If Amman could take the time to put the material up as a result of a request, he certainly could have replied in some fashion to Ryan. “We will be posting this in the next 5 days” or “We are considering your request”, or “we do not want to share this data because we believe it is proprietary”… or anything. But to react to a request for information with a posting on line, while not even replying to the person who prompted you to post the information, has a very specific technical description, at least in chemical engineering: “pure chickenshit”.
Looking at the site, it doesn’t say who put it up.
More likely would be he asked for it to be put online.
“But tho react to a request for information with a posting on line, while not even replying to the person who prompted you to post the information, has a very specific technical description, at least in chemical engineering: “pure chickenshitâ€.”
So I guess you subscribe to the “Lucia” line that a failure to communicate is meant to be offensive. You, like her, have failed to be skeptical. Based on almost no information, you have decided that Capser Amman is chickenshit. It’s incredible.
Nathan,
“you have decided that Capser Amman is chickenshit.”
Nope, I did not say that. If, in this specific case, he purposely did not reply (out of spite or distaste for Ryan or feeling angry with skeptics in general, or whatever), then that is chickenshit behavior.
For what it is worth, I have several times sent (respectful) email messages to climate scientist with questions/doubts about a paper, and so far I have never yet received any kind of reply. And yes, I do find this to be very strange, and more than a bit rude.
Look RyanO can use the CCSM 1.4 model, follow the instruction laid out here:
http://www.pnas.org/content/104/10/3713/suppl/DC1#ST
And voila…
“For what it is worth, I have several times sent (respectful) email messages to climate scientist with questions/doubts about a paper, and so far I have never yet received any kind of reply. And yes, I do find this to be very strange, and more than a bit rude.”
Well, that is sad, yes… But pretty meaningless.
SteveF
“Nope, I did not say that. If, in this specific case, he purposely did not reply (out of spite or distaste for Ryan or feeling angry with skeptics in general, or whatever), then that is chickenshit behavior.”
fair enough. I don’t see how we’ll ever know.
As it happens, I see they sought out comment (written) from the coordinating lead authors of a relevant chapter of the IPCC AR4, as well as the technical support unit, and they did a phone interview with a review editor, John Mitchell, to get his take on procedure and practice. His affiliation is the met office, not CRU, unless I’m mistaken.
Nathan #49810,
“fair enough. I don’t see how we’ll ever know.”
.
Perhaps not. But sure I hope someone who knows Amman asks him. And if the lack of a brief reply to Ryan was intentional, then I hope Amman understands how terribly counterproductive that is. If it was in fact a simple error, then a brief note like “Ryan, sorry, I forgot to tell you this was posted” would be in order. If it was willful, then Amman needs to do some careful reflection, no matter how busy he feels he is.
Before the UEA emails were released, people could (and did!) come up with innocent explanations for actions that appeared on their face to be nothing more than childish, petulant, behavior. The emails simply confirmed that the appearance was exactly the reality: just childish, petulant behavior. My experience is that childish, petulant behavior does not add much to science.
SteveF
You know what would be good? If RyanO actually did his experiments now, and then published the results.
” My experience is that childish, petulant behavior does not add much to science.”
Or rather, it is irrelevant except to people who are trying to create a narrative that the scientists are bad.
Who cares if scientists are petulant… Seriously, who the hell cares?
Nathan–
In your comment, you indicated the material you found went up around the time RyanO posted and that it may have been made available as a result of the request. If so, when Ryan made the request, it was not posted and no amount of Google-fu would have resulted in it being found.
Is RyanO– or anyone who request data that is unavailable at the time of the request supposed to be write a script to google every day afterwards just in case i some info was after the sending a request which received no reply?
In any case, I don’t happen to know if that link provides the data. If it does, and was posted in response to RyanO’s request, the un-foolish thing for Amman to do would be respond to RyanO’s email and tell RyanO that the material had been made available.
Nathan,
“Who cares if scientists are petulant… Seriously, who the hell cares?”
.
I do. I suspect there are lots of others who also do. And since climate science is almost 100% funded by the public, it seems to me unwise for climate scientists to behave in ways that are viewed by people outside climate science as willfully offensive. Really bad for their credibility. Perhaps really bad for future public funding. Just really dumb.
Carrot–
a) As I already said, written is not oral.
b) I said they interviewed no-one out outside CRU or UEA. John Mitchell is an honorary professor at UEA and has been since 2003, see his “UEA staff page” at http://www.uea.ac.uk/env/people/People/Honorary+Staff/John+Mitchell .
Lucia
I’m not blaming RyanO for not knowing it was there. I don’t know if it’s what he wants, but certainly he should be able to get what he wants. And yes, of course Amman should have replied… but why speculate about why that didn’t happen. Surely the most important thing here is that the data probably can be obtained, and has been there about 3 weeks.
Why didn’t you look when RyanO told you he couldn’t find it? I know it’s possibly not your responsibility to help RyanO, but obviously youwere moved enough by his story to write this post.
This is simply an example of your larger problem, you have one-way, one-sided version of skepticism. As soon as RyanO said he’d submitted a FOI you assumed the data was unavailable… But you never actually looked.
When you write blog posts, shouldn’t you at least do the very basic fact checking? I mean, It doesn’t even sound as if you know what RyanO wants…
Also, if the data was put up on the 11th (around the time he wrote to Amman, it sounds). Why is he writing an FOI after not hearing back for 3 weeks? Why not email again, or try asking another author… There’s heaps of ways to get data.
SteveF
So you judge people’s ability by how petulant they are? Good for you.
Lucia
No, what you are doing is hiding behind statements of process, to avoid making any statement of substance.
This will allow you to perpetually basically call it a whitewash (if not actually using that word, yet while still happily trotting out the parts you like), without ever saying what’s actually missing. And I think that’s ***.
I did not complain somebody wrote a book. I said the existence of the book, as well as the submissions and blogs of everybody should make it very easily apparent to you, if you care, what were the allegations. So you would then be easily able to discuss whether those allegations were adequately represented in the report, if not resolved to your liking. But you refuse to do so.
It’s as simple as picking a specific section, X.Y, quoting the report’s summary of the allegations, showing that the summary is or is not adequately representative of the submissions and/or allegations made elsewhere (and really, if your submission is not a good representation of your statements made elsewhere, that’s your own fault), and then showing whether the panel ignored certain facts or factors while making its judgment.
Lucia
for pete’s sake the server is crazy.. delete if duplicate.
No, what you are doing is hiding behind statements of process, to avoid making any statement of substance.
This will allow you to perpetually basically call it a whitewash (if not actually using that word, yet while still happily trotting out the parts you like), without ever saying what’s actually missing. And I think that’s ***.
I did not complain somebody wrote a book. I said the existence of the book, as well as the submissions and blogs of everybody should make it very easily apparent to you, if you care, what were the allegations. So you would then be easily able to discuss whether those allegations were adequately represented in the report, if not resolved to your liking. But you refuse to do so.
It’s as simple as picking a specific section, X.Y, quoting the report’s summary of the allegations, showing that the summary is or is not adequately representative of the submissions and/or allegations made elsewhere (and really, if your submission is not a good representation of your statements made elsewhere, that’s your own fault), and then showing whether the panel ignored certain facts or factors while making its judgment.
Re: Nathan (Jul 25 03:24),
Ok– It was Sat. night, I just woke up this morning and I’d been giving you the benefit of the doubt that there was something remotely responsive to RyanO’s request at your link.
But of course.. nope.
Yah’ know. Suggesting that if he were serious he’d run the code is just silly and displays your utter lack of understanding of what’s involved in running these codes or the purpose of requesting output from codes.
RyanO didn’t ask for the code. He requested the output. So, your “discovery” of code is meaningless.
If you don’t understand the distinction between asking for code vs output, and you don’t understand why output is valuable, then you should be complaining about funding agencies wasting their time supporting PCMDI, which archives the output of codes. This site exists because people in the field understand the value of archiving the specific output of code for various re-uses.
Serious scientists do post processing available archived output from runs, and this exercise is recognized as valuable. No one in the field thinks that the only valuable contributions are by people who re-run these codes and create their own code output.
This reason technically competent people think one need not rerun code to create your own output to be “serious” about something is that this is technically competent people are not idiots.
Let us hope that NSF helps out on this.
And no, I don’t think the cure for intransigence on the part of a communicating author is for “the world” to spend their time helping RyanO google to find information the corresponding author could simply supply by answering a freakin’ email.
I really think people should read the papers first to understand what it was that Ryan wanted, or thought he wanted, before deciding whether it’s already available, or if it’s reasonable/unreasonable to expect it to be available.
edit: Lucia, I agree that providing a particular model run output is not the same as providing the model code.
Nathan,
“So you judge people’s ability by how petulant they are?”
I have found that petulant people usually overstate their case, often refuse to engage honest critiques, and very often turn out to be quite spectacularly wrong. So yes, I have observed petulant people to be considerably less able in general (in any field!). Can a miserable SOB be a good scientist? Sure, but the correlation of bad behavior with good science seems strongly negative, at least based on my personal experience.
Lucia
“RyanO didn’t ask for the code. He requested the output. So, your “discovery†of code is meaningless. ”
I can see you didn’t actually read my posts. I never claimed it was ‘data’. It is the model he asked for. I said in my first post after I found it that he could run the model and create HIS OWN DATA. That is certainly NOT meaningless.
“Suggesting that if he were serious he’d run the code is just silly”
Not it’s not, no one even knows why he wants the data. Certainly you have no idea, so how can you say it’s silly?
“Serious scientists do post processing available archived output from runs, and this exercise is recognized as valuable. No one in the field thinks that the only valuable contributions are by people who re-run these codes and create their own code output. ”
Sure, but he could still do it with data he created on his own.
Serious scientists also publish their results.
I think it DOES, however, demonstrate your lack of skepticism. You wrote this whole post with no idea what RyanO was after, you didn’t check if you could get it either. You don’t know how many times he contacted Amman (once is not enough). And if he’s writing FOI’s after three weeks, then really he needs to try a bit harder.
‘And no, I don’t think the cure for intransigence on the part of a communicating author is for “the world†to spend their time helping RyanO google to find information the corresponding author could simply supply by answering a freakin’ email.”
Goodness me. This is about YOU not checking anything… When RyanO came to you with this problem (or maybe you just heard about it elsewhere), you did NOTHING to check if it was true.
Lucia,
“I’d been giving you the benefit of the doubt that there was something remotely responsive to RyanO’s request at your link.
But of course.. nope. ”
I did the same. My bad.
Nathan, there is no way Ryan has a supercompuer available to rerun the code and generate his own outputs. And it would be insane for him to do so, even if he happened to have one available. Amman should just post what Ryan wants on an FTP site and be done with it. You should be a bit more careful about suggesting a web site contains information it clearly does not have.
SteveF
“I have found that petulant people usually overstate their case, often refuse to engage honest critiques, and very often turn out to be quite spectacularly wrong. So yes, I have observed petulant people to be considerably less able in general (in any field!). Can a miserable SOB be a good scientist? Sure, but the correlation of bad behavior with good science seems strongly negative, at least based on my personal experience.”
Have you ever thought that perhaps your personal intuition about people’s behaviour may not be the best way to judge them? To me it sounds poor and irrational.
Well, I didn’t notice you needed a Cray supercomputer..
So no, probably not that useful for RyanO
SteveF
“You should be a bit more careful about suggesting a web site contains information it clearly does not have.”
I never suggested it contained data, it certainly is the model he was talking about.
Nathan (Comment#49826),
Have you actually enough experience in any technical field to say that people who behave badly towards others are just as competent as those who behave reasonably? If so, then what field is that? And how long have you worked in that field? It would be interesting to hear of a technical field that is so contrary to my own experience.
Nathan–
Yes. I read that. And what you are suggesting is entirely non-responsive to the request RyanO actually sent and your “discovery” is meaningless. Yet you complain that the world did not activate their google-fu to find this material which is utterly unresponsive to what RyanO asked for.
He didn’t ask for the code. He asked for the data. One can assume he wants that which he asked for. You seem to want to second guess and imagine that he should really want something he did not ask for, and that the world should somehow jump in, waste their own time and his by making endless suggestions about how he should do some other time wasting activity like generating his own data. You are being silly.
What lack of skepticism? RyanO asked for this:
You are suggesting substituting something else.
If someone asked me for my home made ice cream , and I ignored their request, and then you Nathan came along and pointed out that if they googled they could find other peoples own recipes, so maybe they could make their own ice cream, a person with reasonable observational skills would point out that that wasn’t what they asked for.
Making that observations is not an indication that one is insufficiently “skeptical”!
SteveF
Yes, yours is bigger than mine.
However, if your judgement of people’s ability is based on their ‘petulance’, you seriously need to work on that.
Mozart was pretty petulant.
Newton was a ass.
Re: carrot eater #49822 (Jul 25 07:00),
Fair enough. I’ll go first.
From the ClimateAudit post that Lucia linked, the entire scope of RyanO’s FOI is –
(1) What RyanO wanted: The output of the NCAR CSM 1.4 experiments that formed input data for three peer-reviewed papers that, in turn, were used to support an EPA regulatory finding. In scope, this request is for a text file that contains about 18 million temperature anomalies, organized so as to be retrievable. ( 1150 yr * 12 mo/yr * 36 * 36 = 17,884,800 ). The gridcells are 5 degrees latitude by 5 degrees longitude, thus 36×36.
(2) Is it already available: No.
(3) Is the request reasonable: Yes. As described above, (a) the request is modest in scope; (b) the data have already been generated, (c) the data were already shared by Ammann, (d) the data are needed to for a purpose which is recognized in FOI law and is a public good. That is, to validate peer-reviewed literature which formed part of the basis of a regulatory finding by the federal government.
.
Who’s next? How about Nathan? (He wrote in #49824, “I never claimed it was ‘data’. It is the model he [RyanO] asked for.”)
.
[Edit: To respond to CE’s “should read the papers” — in this case, that seems unnecessary. I’ve read Mann07 and Mann08, and the requested data aren’t in the SIs. I assume they aren’t in Amman07 either. RyanO’s statement of purpose is clear.]
Nathan (Comment#49831),
Thank you for your non-responsive reply.
But I got a good laugh out of your implicit comparison of petulant climate scientists with Mozart and Newton. Maybe you have a gift for comedy if not technical experience.
Lucia
I wrote at the time, that it wasn’t EXACTLY what RyanO wanted. So screeching at me that I wasn’t providing exactly what he wanted is not particularly interesting. I know it’s not exactly what he wants.
“What lack of skepticism?”
Your lack of skepticism. You did no checking to see if the data was available. You didn’t actually go into detail with RyanO about what went on. It did reveal your very limited understanding of what it was that he was after, and the events surrounding his attempts to find the data.
Do you yet know how many times RyanO tried asking Amman? Do you think it’s reasonable to submit an FOI after 3 weeks of no response? Did he email any of the other authors? did he try calling on the telephone?
SteveF
It doesn’t matter what my expertise is, remember? You judge people on their petulance.
Amac
Has RyanO tried to contact Amman more than once?
Perhaps RyanO could try posting on the forum?
http://bb.cgd.ucar.edu/index.php
Radical thought: Maybe it’s better these policy critical studies have their data brought into the public domain via FOI; this would ensure penalties for failure, from ill intent, to provide the necessary data.
Hi CE. I’m trying to work motive into comments now. What is the motivation? Er, frequency?
============
Re: Nathan #49836 (Jul 25 07:43),
> Has RyanO tried to contact Amman more than once?
Barring a RyanOgate release of his emails, I have no way of knowing. I assume the answer is >1.
What’s your hypothesis?
Meanwhile, I asked.
Also meanwhile, are you going to take up Carrot Eater’s challenge to characterize RyanO’s request in terms of What he wants, Whether it’s availabile, and Whether it’s reasonable?
Nathan,
Seems like you do not bother to read the back ground, just straight into finding fault with the requester. How about reading the links that Lucia has posted and then attempt an informed discussion rather than tossing everything you can think of to see what sticks and can derail the actual discussion.
Nathan, #49835,
“You judge people on their petulance.”
No, I don’t. But bad behavior is not a good sign.
Let me give you a specific example: one of my sons is preparing for his PhD defense (which takes place on August 3). Last night we were discussing this, and he told me that he felt completely confident about everything except his inability to duplicate one relevant result, which happened to have been published by a post-doc who worked in the same research group up until 2 years ago. (The experiment was the inactivation, or knock-out, of a specific DNA sequence via addition of a short RNA strand.) After several attempts with no success, my son looked for the original lab notebooks… they were ‘lost’. So he contacted the post doc at his new laboratory, requesting information about the lab books, and/or the details of the procedures used. The entire reply was “I followed the RNA supplier’s recommendations.” Well, it turned out the supplier did not have any detailed recommendations. So my son contacted the post doc a second time for explanation, and a then a third time. No replies at all. Very strange, very rude, and not at all expected.
Finally, my son said “He was a funny guy, he never said much about his work, and became defensive whenever someone asked him.” Now, my son can’t prove this post-doc fabricated results to get a paper completed before his funding went away, but my experience tells me, almost certainly, this is in fact what happened. Could this all be an innocent error? Sure, but people with lots of experience would probably not believe that is likely. And I don’t have to be an expert in molecular biology or personally question the post doc to rationally come to that conclusion.
OK, reading through Ammann 2007.
They ran CSM 1.4 for two separate long integrations (1150 years) and a medium integration (450 years) corresponding to three different possibilities of solar forcings. They then did 3 additional shorter runs from 1870 onwards, branching off from the longer runs. There’s also a long control run.
The forcings used in the model are given, via the SI, here
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/ccr/ammann/millennium/csm/csm_forcing_series.html
{Amac, I see your comment now; the model has a tighter gridding at 3.75×3.75; Mann et al re-gridded it to 5×5}
Regardless, some model output is clearly archivable because there is tons of it on their web page and particularly on the Earth System Grid webpage.
http://www.cesm.ucar.edu/experiments/
For what it’s worth, it isn’t obvious to me which run Mann 07 used – if it was one of the ones in Ammann 07 or not. In any case, I wasn’t able to find anything matching the right description among all the archived data.
So, I don’t know what to make of it. It looks like they normally archive model outputs, if not always in the form Ryan wants. But for this particular paper, I don’t see it.
Carrot
If Amman ultimately responds with “Here is the data, but in the somewhat different format I used”, I’d call that responsive enough to Ryan’s request for data. I don’t think anyone would expect him to reprocess for the purpose of achieving the requested format.
Re: SteveF (Jul 25 08:23),
You and your son might be interested in this 1993 article by Serge Lang, Questions of Scientific Responsibility: The Baltimore Case. It is a synopsis of one of the most prominent cases of research misconduct in biology: The dispute within David Baltimore’s laboratory between Dr. Margot O’Toole and Dr. Thereza Imanishi-Kari.
I followed the story at the time, via the mainstream scientific press–though not closely. Reading Lang’s lookback earlier this year was a shock: how different my recollections are, from what are now known as the facts.
The treatment of whistleblower O’Toole by the scientific establshment should make your son pause, given your description of what has transpired in his lab.
Found it (!)
At least, I found what was used for Mann 07. I’m not sure which paper Ryan is most interested in, Mann or Ammann.
It’s on Mann’s webspace in converted.man
You get there if you read Mann 07, follow the link, and read the readme.
http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/PseudoproxyJGR06/data/csm/
In that file is a 2-d array, 1150×2592
1150 is the years of the CSM run. That’s why I was worried about format above – Ryan asked for monthly, but monthly is not terribly meaningful in paleo. You might look at seasonal. Here, they used annual.
So quite possibly, exactly what Ryan asked for does not actually exist anywhere.
2592 must be the number of grid cells; 180/5 * 360/5 = 2592
Plotting the data at any gridpoint over time, I get hockeysticks, so that makes sense.
Amac
Tease you a bit there: it took me about 10 minutes to find, once I followed the link given in the paper.
addendum: in the off chance that not everybody has a matlab license.. then, you might have a bit of trouble. I tried opening the file in a text editor, and that wasn’t happening.
But if you do have matlab, it’s great. It loads the data directly into memory, with the variable names that Mann’s code uses, so you’ll be good to go.
Carrot–
Huh? I made a statement about the process. That is: I think it was devised to bend over backwards in favor of the CRU scientists. I was asked to justify this statement perception. I then make statements about the process. How is this avoiding making a statement of substance?
There is nothing non-substantive about discussing features of a process. For example: if we wished, we could have a substantive discussion of the differences between American and French trials and debate which is more favorable to defendents. This would be substantive. This might not be the topic you wish I would discuss, but it’s perfectly substantive to discuss those features of processes and to observed whether they favor or disfavor certain outcomes.
Huh? I didn’t say it was a whitewash. I pointed out that despite deciding on a very narrow investigation– i.e. process that favors the accused relative to the accusers– the group found plenty to criticize.
What does this have to do with anything I have said? I didn’t say I didn’t know what the allegations were.
I am saying the process devised by Muir inherently narrows the investigation in a way that limits their opportunity for uncovering evidence to support some of the allegations. Muir Russell could have widened the investigation had they wished, and they did not do so. Relative to the range of proceedures the panel might have chosen, this favors those being investigated being “cleared”.
My liking? What does my liking have to do with anything? I’ve said that I I think not investigating other emails, not interviewing people outside CRU and UEA, and basically failing to investigate means that the process was devised in a way that will not uncover information if it exists and that this favors the accused and not the accusors. I characterize that as a narrow investigation. I don’t see how my (or your) liking or not liking, the procedures Muir Russell chose for their investiation would modify the obvious fact that it was narrow. Maybe you like that it was narrow. Or not. Maybe you want to tell me so. Fine.
I’m pointing out that, irrespective of who “likes” the process followed, it was narrow and favored those investigated. You want to tell me it would be “easy” for me to discuss how I “feel” about this. Sure. But it’s also utterly pointless. I think there is no more point in explaining how I “feel” about this than to explain how I “feel” about the fact that 2+2=4.
Nathan, thanks for posting the link for the UCAR code. Now if you just could find a Cray super computer that I could run it on, there are some things I would like to test.
Carrot-
Ahh… annual is not transformable into monthly. So, that format difference would be responsive to the request actually made. If the format was daily, then that could be transformed to monthly.
Except… you didn’t find the monthly data– that is, you didn’t find what RyanO actually asked for. 🙂
Mind you, one could speculate that RyanO shouldn’t want “chocolate” and instead ask for “vanilla”. But he asked for “chocolate”, not vanilla. Even if you turn out to be right about what he “should” prefer, it will still be the case that he actually asked for “chocolate”. If, instead, you give him “vanilla” because it was easy to find and vanilla is also yummy, is also often used in desserts, and you speculate that based on his purpose, all he really needs is a flavoring for dessert and so vanilla may be just as useful to him as chocolate, you will still not have provided him with “chocolate”.
And of course, Amac is pointing out that he didn’t find “chocolate”– which, it appears you have also not found. (Not to say you can’t. Maybe with some hunting one could find it. )
carrot eater
With reference to SteveF’s comment at [49842]: Skepticism is one of the key underpinnings of the scientific method and research results that for whatever reason can not be verified and duplicated must be treated as suspect. Please note the need to verify AND duplicate. It was the very inability of any of the large number of labs around the world to duplicate the results outlined in a peer reviewed paper published in a reputable journal that put an end to the “cold fusion” hoax a couple of decades ago.
Depending on how important the post-doc’s “research” is to SteveF’s son thesis, his son potentially has a real problem and it would be interesting to learn what his thesis supervisor thinks about this.
To clarify the relationship between what I found, and what RyanO requested:
In Ammann 2007, there were two runs done of 1150 years. One had a shallow Maunder minimum, the other had a deep Maunder minimum.
I guess one of these two runs was used in Mann 2007, though I don’t see where that’s explicitly written; maybe in the SI that I haven’t read yet. Also keep in mind that Ammann was a coauthor of Mann 07. Since the grid spacing was tighter than what Mann needed, Mann re-gridded it to a coarser grid. And that’s what’s on his webpage.
It isn’t obvious to me whether I’m looking at the weak Maunder set or the strong Maunder set. I suppose I could figure it out by comparing against the graphs in Ammann. And also, again, its annual, not monthly.
I’m guessing that RyanO is more interested in the Ammann paper, because it relevant for attribution. Mann’s paper is about testing his paleo methods. So this doesn’t complete the puzzle, but it’s something. I have no idea whether Ryan is aware that Mann’s set is available; I’m not going to go trawling through CA looking for discussion.
Carrot
I also don’t know and similarly am not going to go trawling. I merely note that he asked for monthly as follows:
I make no assumptions about why he wants monthly and not annual data, nor do I make any assumptions about what he plans to do with it. I merely observe that he requested monthly and you can’t create monthly data out of annual data.
I can forward him what you found.
Re: carrot eater (Jul 25 09:22),
Nice detecting. I put a pointer to your comment in the thread at CA (in the moderation queue at the moment).
It would be nice if this satisified RyanO’s request. Might, or might not: monthly/annual, 5 deg/3.75 deg, Ammann/Mann.
But mainly, nice detecting.
[Re: chocolate/vanilla — RyanO asked for monthly; it’s possible that annual would suffice for his purposes. I don’t know. I didn’t go back and look at what’s in the papers and CE did, and he found something relevant–even if not exactly what RyanO had in mind. So, kudos to him.]
Ugh, Lucia. Just ugh.
I was tweaking Amac because he said the data for Mann weren’t in Mann’s SI. But it’s there on the webpage, easily found. If Amac actually meant to say “Mann has data up there but it’s annual not monthly”, somehow, just somehow I suspect he’d have actually said that.
That was insulting and pointless. I said up front that he wanted monthly, and this was annual. I also said up front that it’s quite possible that what Ryan asked for *does not exist*. You must have missed that part. So you can make up all the stupid stories about ice cream you want, but if the modeling group didn’t archive it at that temporal resolution back in 2007, then it won’t be available now unless they re-run the model.
The reason I was worried about this before I found the data was that on the NCAR page, it looked like some of the long-term runs were archived at seasonal resolution. I didn’t look closely though, to see if there was monthly.
Now, if they do have higher time res data lying around somewhere, then they can give it. But they might not.
Anyway, even your ice cream thing doesn’t make any sense. If RyanO had asked for hourly data for the last millenium, would NCAR be compelled to somehow produce that?
If you never want to leave the security blanket of process, which allows you to not actually open up the report and criticise its substance, then fine. Whatever you want.
Here is the NSF statement on data sharing:
Amman does not seem to be in compliance with this directive, which I understand applies to any research funded fully or in part by NSF, the public, private or commercial nature of the institute notwithstanding.
Amac,
It comes down to what RyanO wants to do with it. If he just wants to look at what Ammann looked at, while coming up with the analysis and conclusions of that paper, then he would only need the temporal resolution that Ammann himself used. Which is almost certainly annual.
And I don’t know, but I’m guessing a FOI would be unreasonable if it asked for something that Ammann did not use in his paper. I don’t know.
But in any event, the comparison between the strong Maunder series and the weak Maunder series is an interesting feature of the Amman paper, so we’re only half way, and I haven’t figured out which half I have yet. Assuming it even is one of those.
Carrot-
Amac wrote:
The requested data are monthly. You found annual. So, Amac was right: The requested data were not in the SI.
Sorry– it was not my intention to insult.
I know you know the requested data is monthly and you found annual. In your “tweak” to Amac, you appeared to be suggesting that with regard to correcting him, the SI pointing to annual data means the “requested” (i.e. monthly) data are available if you look. It’s not– right? So, why “tweak” him for saying so?
Or am I missing something?
Nope. NCAR could respond that they never processed anything into hourly data and don’t have it. If that statement is true, the reply would be perfectly justified.
But if they did have hourly data, and RyanO requested it and the data are subject to FOI, then they would be required to provide that and not insist that he must accept courser data just because someone at NCAR thinks that’s what he should be asking for.
Of course, RyanO asked for monthly data. If it turns out they don’t have monthly because that never existed, they won’t have to provide monthly data. Then, if it can be shown that data is required to do some check or another, RyanO can post more details about why he needed that particular data — if he so desires.
From
Solar influence on climate during the past millennium: Results from transient simulations with the NCAR Climate System Model
1. Caspar M. Ammann*,
2. Fortunat Joos*,†,‡,
3. David S. Schimel*,
4. Bette L. Otto-Bliesner*, and
5. Robert A. Tomas*
http://www.pnas.org/content/104/10/3713.full
Performing a spline fit to data for individual months of the annual cycle requires monthly data. This would suggest monthly data once existed and that’s what RyanO is asking for.
Re: lucia (Jul 25 10:47),
> Or am I missing something?
I was working off memory, having looked extensively at Mann08’s SI, less so with Mann07. I should have made that clear. Carrot Eater actually went back, checked the links, and found the — annual — data. So, his tweak is fair. I accept it, and will try to be clearer in the future.
The reference to the Amann et al. PNAS paper’s use of monthly data is intriguing. I imagine RyanO will clarify his interest in monthly data; maybe it relates to that?
I came over to hear a discussion of RyanO’s FOI request and what I get is a back-and-forth showing that those coming here with a countervailing POV will repeat over and over again the arguments that I have heard a thousand times defending the consensus makers. They will not change nor will their defense(s). (TCO’s is a little more personal based on his dislike of what Steve M is doing and that mantra has not changed in years – even the comment on how Zorita, Burger and he (the anonymous poster TCO) were not properly answered by Steve M).
I say a blog should get the information surrounding these issues out there for discussion and then proceed to the bigger and more general issues the specific ones imply. At some point (and this is my point here) without repetitious attempts to make the same point over and over, a thinking person is able to make their own judgments about the issue at hand – even though those judgments might differ
I think Lucia has an excellent blog and like how she approaches these issues/problems, but I think blogs like hers suffer from a waste of band length on the back-and-forth of these repetitions whereas, at least for my taste and interest, it would be better to discuss and analyze the factual information and what the issue means in the bigger picture. I certainly realize that posters and bloggers can attempt to sharpen their arguments on a particular issue with these exchanges but at some point they became almost lawyerly and a bit pedantic.
To me the bigger issue here is what is the expected and proper approach to providing requested information by scientists and never mind the processes that they can hide behind to rationalize not providing the information. If the scientist cannot provide the information because it is lost or improperly or inefficiently archived should that scientist admit to the state of the data requested? Does not data that a scientist used to make conclusions and/or even conjectures became less authoritative with misplaced data that would be required to conveniently repeat the work?
I see the hesitancy on the part of some of these climate scientists as an indication of a reaction more related to their advocacy position, and one that falls into the current consensus, than as what we would expect from the pure scientists. The non-consensus climate scientists, on the other hand, are going to be more naturally motivated to get their works out there to the public and to other scientists even if that means it will subject to more critical analyses.
@lucia
“You may not like their making recommendations as required but it was still their mandate.”
It’s not that I don’t like it; I am making the point that they could have been far less critical than they were. Your assertion is that they “bent over backwards” to be nice, but I don’t see anything in their behavior that supports that.
“Based on Muir limiting interviews to those at CRU and UEA only,”
I know there were psuedoskeptics who wanted a platform to denounce AGW, but absent them, who really had something to contribute?
If the emails do not show prima facie evidence of distortion, falsification, or suppression, then with what rationale would you demand more emails? If Muir had found evidence of any of those things, I agree, they would need as much information as they could get to characterize the malfeasance. Since the allegation of malfeasance was based on the emails, if there is no evidence to support it there, it would not be a good practice to just go fishing, a la Ken Starr, for some wrongdoing somewhere to justify the investigation.
“[A]dding things like ‘we did not find any evidence of behaviour that might undermine the conclusions of the IPCC assessments.’ when in fact, they did not investigate the science.”
They didn’t claim that they did. They investigated the emails, which had been alleged to be a “smoking gun” of falsification of evidence to show global warming. It is entirely within the scope of their mandate to say that there is no evidence found in the investigation that would undermine the conclusions of the IPCC — i.e., no fraud, no falsification of data.
Had there been SOME fraud, they might have had to examine the science of the IPCC to determine if it was materially affected. Since there was NO fraud, that they did not find any evidence to undermine the IPCC is a simple fact, absolutely true. They did not claim that everything the IPCC says is true or that no evidence to undermine its conclusions exists anywhere. They said they didn’t find any, which is germane because such evidence was repeatedly alleged to be there in the emails (and obvious and unmistakable.) It wasn’t seen in the course of the investigation, which included the emails upon which the slander was based. True statement.
“CRU didn’t merely fail to implement transparency; they took active measure to maximize opacity.”
For example? What easily available information did they actively hide?
OK, so that means when they ran the integration, they did record it for monthly, so monthly data did exist.
I have no idea what Ryan wants to do, but I’m guessing the bigger stumbling block is that this is only one of six runs that are in Ammann 2007. And even that is an assumption.
So regardless, finding 1 out of 6 runs on Mann’s page doesn’t help you. You still want the other 5. And Mann re-gridded, so you’ll want to get all 6 again from Ammann.
I think my comment got eaten, but it was a dumbed down version of Robert’s post anyway.
OK, assuming I didn’t flip the coordinates of Mann’s file (which would have caused me to do the area weighting wrong), Mann’s file looks very much like the red (medium solar) series in Ammann 2007 Fig 2.
For however little or much that is worth.
Amac
Fair enough. Sorry Carrot.
Based on SteveMc’s article, the first RyonO request was made to Amann (not Mann) and mentioned Amann’s PNAS paper (Not the Mann papers). The discussion of methodology would indicate one needs data at monthly or finer resolution data to verify, check, replicate or perform any equivalent analysis.
The later FOI requet to NSF mentions additional papers– but still inlcudes the Amann paper.
RyanO closes his NSF request with:
The data I request is the complete time series of monthly gridded gridded monthly temperature anomalies over the 850 – 2000 AD period from the NCAR CSM 1.4 experiments used directly in Refs. A and B, and indirectly in Ref. C above. I require no specific format for the data; however, if it is available in text format using a common delimiting scheme (such as space, tab, comma, or fixed-width delimitation) I would prefer those formats.
Ref A is:
Ammann, M. C., F. Joos, D. S. Schimel, B. L. Otto-Bleisner, and R. A. Tomas (2007): Solar influence on climate during the past millennium: Results from transient simulations with the NCAR Climate System Model. PNAS, 104, 3713-3718, doi:10.1073/pnas.0605064103
So, the requested data has consistently been for the monthy data used directly in this Amman paper. It also happens to have been used directly or indirectly in two other published papers.
Robert (Comment#49863)
It is extremely odd to claim no evidence of malfeasance was found in the emails when Muir Russell did find evidence of malfeasance vis-a-vis the FOI process and communicated that in their findings. Moreover, the procedure was designed before the investigation began, so you are getting things a bit backwards. They devised a procedure that limited the duration and scope of the investigation to the minimum possible interpretation of their mandate. If you think this is not bending over backwards in favor of those investigated, we are just going to have to agree to disagree.
The fact that the panel did manage to find things to criticize in the scientists behavior is hardly proof that they did not bend over backwards to interpret everything in the most favorable possible light for the scientists.
No offense, CE, L, SF, etc.:
But I just read all the exchanges this morning and there wasn’t much content.
How about putting Zeke to work? I can give him all kinds of problems to finish off with skeptic claims, allusions, “might be a problems” from blog posts going back to 2005. The skeptics don’t like to follow things up when it starts to look like they won’t get any blood, so I value Zek finishing things off and showing how those reading old blog posts get the wrong impression…
Lucia,
The FOI itself says that Ryan wants to be able to validate both papers. Well, everything you need for Mann 07 was always on Mann’s webpage, so that’s moot.
So it’s really just Ammann 2007. Talking about monthly/annual is an absolute waste of time that you’ve latched on to. There are 6 series in Ammann, and you only get 1 of them from Mann. So no matter what, the data at Mann’s is not enough if you want to play around with Ammann 2007. Assuming they haven’t lost it, I assume Ryan will get the model output eventually.
PolyTCO:
I agree. The gossip topics tend not to generate any substance. And yet I participate.
That’s ok, CE. Have fun storming the castle. Just turn over the data analysis bi…workhorse! 😉
How so? Amman’s method discussion requires monthly data and that’s what RyanO specifically asked for. Both his requests include Amman and the first is Amman exclusively. Whatever you find, it’s not monthly, it’s not what was requested. We don’t need all these other details about only 1 of 6 runs etc.
But anyway, we seem to agree: That’s not the data RyanO asked for. It seems the data he asked for likely existed at one time. Presumably he will eventually get it. It’s a shame this is requiring FOI’s to obtain.
As does PolyTCO who cannot now and has never been able to stay away from gossip topics and whose comments on non-gossip topics usually injects gossip where there previously was none.
PolyisTCOandbanned (Comment#49870),
Thanks. Orthogonal and bizarre, as always.
Lucia,
This is getting really boring.
Whether you want to harp on the ‘monthly’ part or the plural in ‘experiments’, Mann’s data alone does not fulfill the FOI request for Ammann 2007 data.
You think one factor is more important. Me, having read the paper and seeing what’s critical to the results and discussion, I think the other factor is more important. But either way, he doesn’t have all that he wants, so it doesn’t matter.
Actually, the request is horribly vague. There are 6 runs in the paper, along with 1 control. Does he want those originals? Does he also want the control? Because what’s actually used in the analysis is those 6 runs, but with the control’s trends removed (the part you quoted). Does he want those processed series, the ones which are actually plotted and analysed and discussed? Does he want all of the above? Who knows.
“It is extremely odd to claim no evidence of malfeasance was found in the emails when Muir Russell did find evidence of malfeasance vis-a-vis the FOI process and communicated that in their findings.”
That is factually incorrect. They neither alleged malfeasance nor did they describe behavior which meets the definition of malfeasance. Again, virtually no organization subject to FOI reports has escaped criticism for their handling of what are the often very onerous requirements of the law. That’s not malfeasance and it’s extremely odd to claim that it is.
“The fact that the panel did manage to find things to criticize in the scientists behavior is hardly proof that they did not bend over backwards to interpret everything in the most favorable possible light for the scientists.”
You did not and have not provided evidence for the assertion that they “bent over backwards” to show the CRU in a good light. I provided one example of criticism which easily could have been omitted and seemingly would have been if they were bending over backwards to exonerate the CRU. Rather than provide evidence for your assertion, you are resorting to the classic fallacy of arguing that I haven’t proved that your baseless assertion is false. Answer: I wasn’t trying to and don’t need to. You need to provide some positive evidence for the assertion you made.
I would also really like you to provide some evidence that the CRU “actively obfuscated” data. That would seem to imply that they took data that was freely available to the public and hid it, rather than, as the committee found, sometimes having failed to act to make OTHER PEOPLE’S DATA freely accessible in an easy-to-use format with no big words, as the “skeptics” demand.
So where’s the evidence they took data available to the public and actively hid it?
carrot eater [49877]
Ever been through a venture capital investment due diligence grinder? By the sounds of it, not. It makes peer review look like a Sunday School outing…
The VCs would want everything you enumerated above, and then some. If you can’t or refuse to provide it, it’s generally game over right there. If the VCs however still think the deal has merit, they will find whatever is missing, share it with you and ask you for your comments. As well as stuff you didn’t even know about, also for comment. Then they may give the results to their experts and ask them to duplicate them. If that works out, they may do the deal, but since you refused to come clean the first time around, you’ll not be part of it because they don’t trust you anymore.
How much light do you think Mann, Amman, Jones, Hansen, CRU, UCAR, etc. can handle if scrutinized that way?
“How much light do you think Mann, Amman, Jones, Hansen, CRU, UCAR, etc. can handle if scrutinized that way?”
Far more than their accusers, to be sure. But it’s really a moot point, given that climate scientists are not start-up CEOs seeking investors. They’re scientists. The relevant question, then, is whether they can “handle” their own profession’s standards, since those are the only ones which apply to them.
Robert
Could you provide your definition of malfeasance? The dictionaries I read include these:
and
Violating the statutory requirements of FOI would appear to qualify or the term “malfeasance”. But if it does not, it’s difficult to imagine anything anyone did as amounting to malfeasance.
Sure I did. They narrowed the scope investigation to the absolutely minimum possible given their mandate thus limiting the amount of evidence they could possible find against the CRU and they also only interviewed people from CRU and UEA. You may disagree with this– and if so, say why.
Which? I recall you wrote this “They could have stopped right there, rather than give a lecture on customer relations.” To which I responded that their mandate required them to give lectures on how to behave in future. So, not doing that would result in failing to fulfill even the most minimal requirements of their mandate.
And you wrote this:
“It seems to me they held them to a very high standard — criticizing them for not creating a user-friendly system for disseminating data that didn’t belong to them. What are you doing to make my data easily available to people who want to see it?”
The criticism appears to be no more than this
First– you mischaracterize what Muir Russel said they ought to do. They observe that accessing the data was not simple until it was archived– this is manifestly true version of the historical episode. But relating the history doesn’t mean Muir Russle criticized anyone for not creating a “user-friendly system for disseminating data that didn’t belong to them.” The authors had used some data. They seem to have taken no steps to encourage anyone to make the data available, done nothing to facilitate making it available, written no emails to their co-authors requesting it be shared with those requesting it, did bupkiss to encourage their co-authors to archive and so on. Bupkiss. Muir Russel didn’t bring up your claim of “easy to use”, nor did they insist CRU create the archive. They only advise that CRU should have ensured that it was archived– this could have been achieved by nagging their co-authors.
I’d say the CRU guys appear to have failed to uphold normal level standards which could have involved nothing more than sending emails to their co-authors and reminding them that data that had been used in a publication should be archived, or failing that, at least shared. Muir Russel could hardly fail to criticize them for this lapse in standards.
I can’t recall ever using the words “actively obfuscated” data, nor did I recall every suggesting “they took data available to the public and actively hid it”. It has nothing to do with my claim in this blog post. Why in the world would I provide evidence of things I’ve never claimed and which have nothing to do with anything I’ve ever claimed. (BTW: Are you quoting someone when writing “actively obfuscated” data?)
But you repeat yourself, and once again mis-characterize what Muir Russell advized… Please refer back to what Muir Russell actually said– no one said they needed to make anything accessible in an “easy-to-use format” or “freely accessible”. They merely suggested an archive. Seems to me a semi-private, password protected archive that the authors could access to obtain data would seem suitable– provided the authors were willing to send data when it was requested. That method has been pretty common in the past and there is no reason CRU couldn’t do that. Had they done so, they would not have been criticized for
Lucia
Why don’t you get more details from RyanO, then re-write this post.
It’s obvious you did no background reading here and failed to actually have a go at finding the data for yourself. You don’t know how manytimes RyanO emailed Amman, nor how many other methods he tried at getting the data. It’s starting to look more like a stunt than anything, as CE pointed out there’s a lot of data he COULD be asking for.
Rather than use these situations as an opportunity to whine about how nasty scientists are, why not do some actual investigations hmmm???
Robert [49880]
There is nothing moot about what I wrote. When scientists want to turn their knowledge/results into a product or service in the private sector they are put through the due diligence grinder I described forwards and backwards. The “normal” standards of academic peer review no longer apply and the maze of the net gets very, very much finer. That’s why so many academics who thought they were god’s gift to mankind have found this to be a singularly and disconcerting sobering experience.
So why would we the not subject Mann, Jones, CRU, NCAR, etc., etc., to the same level of scrutiny, since their findings are turned into IPCC reports on the basis of which governments have been spending billions of dollars to “combat” a problem most of which we barely understand?
I would have thought that given the vast difference in economic and social implications of the science being scrutinized between a $5million star-up financing for a better mousetrap and say a Euro 200 billion, 10 year tax-payer funded German solar subsidies, the “science” that underpins the latter should at least be a the subject of the same level of scrutiny as the first. We all know It isn’t. In fact it is subject very little scrutiny at all.
As far as your comment about “accusers” is concerned, let me remind you that if any private or public sector senior official were caught writing something like Jones’ infamous “destroy the emails” email, he/she would be in jail presto. And rightfully so.
Given Lucia’s question to you about your definition of malfeasance, could you please tell us why that should not be the case for Jones, Mann and the rest of their lot as well?
Nathan-
Uhmmm.. the post doesn’t appear to inaccuracies. Why would I rewrite it?
First: I never claimed I looked for the data and my post makes no conclusions about whether or not it can be found. As it happens: I did not look for it. I don’t think seeking it is required to report that RyanO requested it, the request was ignored, he filed an FOI and so on.
Second: There appears to be general agreement the data that have been requested has not been located by you, Carrot or anyone else. In particular, the link you provided was utterly irrelevant.
So what if I don’t know a detail that is not a subject of my post and which I did not claim to know? So what if there lots of data that cannot substitute for the data RyanO requested has been made available?
Would you like me to post a second post reporting that based on your search, and Carrots, the monthly data requested by RyanO appear “not findable” on the web? This comments thread is long, maybe that material is sufficiently important to report. This is a blog– I’m willing to write a brief update post with the intention of creating an faster loading comments thread. So, yes I write that update? Or no?
No.
Carrot-
What do you mean by “originals”? The request asks for runs plural, says “complete” gives a time span for the data and he says the runs from that paper and he wants “anomalies” So, he’s asking for at least the 6 runs, and he wants anomalies.
If the control is from the spin-up, and he also wants the controls, it appears his wording left that out and so he might not get him everything he wants.
If he doesn’t get the control run and he needs it, I would simply advise him to make a second request for the control data. I’d advise the first outside FOI and following with FOI only if the first request is ignored or rebuffed. I see no harm in this.
Moreover, if he doesn’t request it, you know perfectly well someone else will– I see no harm in that either. I have never thought FOI was supposed to be a process that should be read to impose hurdles on people getting data. It’s supposed to create a process that lets then get data. (I’ve used FOI to get some results of flood simulations run by the county. I called and was told FOI is the only way to get this info.)
His wording says “runs” plural and from the paper. I should think literal reading of what he requested means if there are various forms, he wants them all. Or, if the FOI process permits, maybe they can contact him to clarify.
It reads like all– possibly having screwed up and omitted the control run from his request. Since he had to resort to FOI, this may result in some inconvenience all around.
As for people interpreting literally and sending “all” when he only wanted a subset: I doubt he would grouse if he was sent processed data, whatever you consider “originals”, plus, if it’s different, data used to create files &etc. So, I don’t see how that is a problem.
Since he doesn’t know the precise fomat in which data might be saved, it is rather difficult to come up with precise wording for what he wants. So, yes, the wording is somewhat vague and may result in scientists and FOI officials having to spend time putting together larger data sets than Ryan really needs. But things like this will happen if scientists behave in ways that result in people who want data finding they must file FOIs and make the request broad to avoid not getting information because being more precise risked a response indicating the thing they asked for does not exist.
Carrot–
By the way, the answer to whether or not RyanO was aware of the Mann link you found is, yes, he was.
“There is nothing moot about what I wrote. When scientists want to turn their knowledge/results into a product or service in the private sector they are put through the due diligence grinder I described forwards and backwards.”
Again, you are trying to apply a meaningless standard. The scientists in question are not applying for venture capital, and giving the proven tendency of the system cited to destroy hundreds of billions of dollars in wealth and millions of jobs through shoddy oversight, dysregulation, fraud, and base greed, I don’t think it’s a model the far more successful field of climate science should try and emulate. 😉
In that case, including Mann 07 in the FOI doesn’t make any sense. He already has exactly what he needs to reproduce everything in Mann 07.
Maybe he was just trying to squeeze more NSF grant numbers in there.
I mean before this step
“Could you provide your definition of malfeasance?”
Sure. It’s useful to consider it contrast with the related terms of nonmalfeasence and misfeasance. Thus wikipedia:
“When a contract creates a duty that does not exist at common law, the parties can do one of three things: (1) perform the duty fully; (2) perform the duty inadequately or poorly; or (3) fail to perform the duty at all. When a party fails to perform at all, it is nonfeasance. When a party performs the duty inadequately or poorly, it is misfeasance. Malfeasance is used to denote outright sabotage which causes intentional damage.”
The report found that in some cases scientist performed their duties under the FOI act “inadequately or poorly.” That’s misfeasance, not malfeasance:
“The authors had used some data. They seem to have taken no steps to encourage anyone to make the data available, done nothing to facilitate making it available, written no emails to their co-authors requesting it be shared with those requesting it, did bupkiss to encourage their co-authors to archive and so on.”
Misfeasance (arguably) not malfeasance. None of that is really their job. They are scientists, not archivists. They had certain obligations under the law, a law people were abusing to carry out harassing, redundant requests. They understandably didn’t make it their life’s mission to make the data instantly accessible. The report said they should make more efforts in that direction in the future. That is radically different from the allegations of fraud and fabrication the emails have been cited in support of.
“BTW: Are you quoting someone when writing “actively obfuscated†data?”
The quotation marks are an error. What I am referring to is this statement:
“they took active measure to maximize opacity”
You haven’t described “active measures.” The “measures” you’ve alleged are textbook “passive” — not solicting data that did not belong to them, not creating a user-friendly archive. An active effort to “maximize opacity” would, I think necessarily, also meet the definition of “obfuscation.” It would also necessarily involve an act removing data that was available and making it less so — an act that could reasonably be equated with hiding the data.
I need to get to a dinner, but I hope that clarifies the point — I would like to know what you mean when you say the scientists took “active measures” to “maximize opacity.”
Carrot–
Based on the fuller answer… uhmmm… no. But that’s private email. I can see how superficially, it would appear that the stuff in the link you found would be enough. But then, neither you nor I have tried to do anything with that particular data.
“Mozart was pretty petulant.
Newton was a ass.”
I know, we can write a paper, listing which scientists are complete bags of douche, then see how often they are cited. Now we just need to find a NAS fellow…
Monthly anomalies are obtained by subtracting data from individual months. The requests asks for anomalies. So, I’d read it as asking for the anomalies– that is what you get after you subtract the individual months– obtained as done in the paper– from the monthly data.
Sounds like that’s the step done at some point prior to plotting. Whether that data is archived or not– whether it needed to be etc. I don’t know. But presumably, if that output of that step isn’t archived, then Ryan will step back and request the underlying data required to perform the step.
FOI is not an efficient process for these requests. But if it’s the only method available to the person requesting, the scientists are going to receive a series of requests and have to deal with them.
Well, I haven’t found this model run yet, but I did find out there’s a nice PMIP song
part of it
This is just annoying. It seems like every other model output from that group is at the Earth System Grid page, and there’s no end to model output at CMIP and PMIP, but I just can’t find this one.
Lucia
What the heck is that supposed to mean? It’s the input that goes into Mann’s scripts. What more could you want? Is he having trouble running the scripts?
Robert–
I had found that and thought you might mean that, but I wanted to confirm it.
So. . . you have an American IP address, you know I am American, my blog is hosted in the US, you are addressing me, but I don’t get to interpret your usage according to that provided in American dictionaries like Merriam Webster, and I am not permitted to use the term according to definitions in American dictionaries? I’m supposed to interpret you as using a term of art (i.e. jargon by specialist) used in British courts?
Next time you use terms that way please add “I mean malfeasance, not in the sense used by Americans and appearing in American dictionaries but, in the sense used by British lawyers when representing people in court.”
In case you are an expatriate British solicitor who has never gotten the hang of communicating with people in the country where you live, here is the definition in Merriam Websters:
The scientists were criticized for wrong doing or misconduct. That’s malfeasance according to American usage.
If you are an expatriate British solicitor, who happens to live in the US, and you are communicating with Americans on an blog hosted in the US< you should educate yourself to be aware of what the words you chose mean when talking to American and adapt accordingly. You should also not say that a statement made by an American blogger posted on a blog hosted in the US is factually incorrect the statement is correct when words are interpreted according to American usage. What my statement was factually correct based on American usage.
I might be misreading, but I think it’s more than that. There’s some drift in the control run, up to 1500, so they’re dealing with that drift.
Lucia
“As it happens: I did not look for it. I don’t think seeking it is required to report that RyanO requested it, the request was ignored, he filed an FOI and so on. ”
Your post relies on heresay then, RyanO tells you that he can’t find data, and so you take it upon yourself to imply that Amman is ignoring his data requests.
You don’t know if it was ignored. You don’t know if he asked anyone else. You don’t know if other data would suit his needs… Pretty much you dont know much here.
You have shown no interest in even attempting to locate the data and have shown no interest in finding out if the data that is available would suit RyanO’s need. Plainly this is just an opportunistic post by you to try and paint climate scientists as bad.
Like here:
“FOI is not an efficient process for these requests. But if it’s the only method available to the person requesting, the scientists are going to receive a series of requests and have to deal with them.”
Just another lazy opportunity for you, yes? No need for you to even try and locate the data, no need for you to find out how RyanO had tried to locate the data… Heck he could have entered Amman’s email wrong… Could have used an old out of date contact… Could be any number of reasons, but because of your peculiar breed of political gameplay you have to imply it’s Amman’s fault.
It’s cheap, nasty and sums up the majority of your blog posts. I bet if Zeke had written this, he’d at least have tried to locate the data…
Carrot
Yes. I read Ryan’s request as for anomalies. I think Amman took out drift when creating anomalies. So, when I wrote “obtained as done in the paper”, that would include taking out the drift in whatever way they took it out when creating anomalies.
Nathan-
Do you have reading comprehension problems? Seriously? I didn’t say RyanO told me he can’t find the data. I didn’t report that he tried and couldn’t find it. I said he requested it.
That said: it does appear he can’t find the data. It also appears you can’t find it and carrot can’t. So, it seems likely that he only requested data after searching. I don’t feel any particular compulsion to further “confirm” that it’s hard to find.
I admit there is stuff I did not report which I also do not know. I don’t think the scattershot junk you are barfing up matters much. But if you want to investigate all this irrelevant minutae and report it in comments here or at your blog, go right ahead. No skin off my nose.
Lucia
So are you backing off the claim that Amman is ignoring him?
lucia,
at what point do you pack it in during a discussion and concede some one is just a troll and any response is a waste of time?
Nathan– Huh?
Vernon– It’s 10 pm. I need my beauty sleep. I’m going to bed now. 🙂
For those wondering: RyanO tells me he emailed Amman 3 times, with emails spaced about 3 weeks apart. He received no response. Now, it’s my bed time. Night night!
Lucia:
“lucia (Comment#49770)
July 24th, 2010 at 7:29 pm
Nathan–
Evidently, Amman just ignored the request. So, technically, there is no “Noâ€, just utter failure to responde.
So, given that he couldn’t get a response, RyanO had to resort to FOI– there really isn’t an alternative. ”
You claimed here that Amman ignored the request, but actually you had no idea.
And FINALLY we get some details, ok, so he sent three emails to Amman, and got nothing over 6 weeks. Did he check the email address – he may have sent the wrong one three times. Did he ask any of the co-authors? Did he try going through NCAR? They have a data page (you need to subscribe or whatever) for all their experiments.
And in the manner of Nathan’s comment above, perhaps Amman thought that RyanO was Ryan O’Toole who is a notoriously bad guy and one that any sane person would never respond to. Did you ever think of that Lucia? I did not think so. Perhaps if Ryan had had the presence to send a certificate of being and good faith to Amman he would have gotten a response, but no he insists on making 3 requests in an attempt to show up this poor innocent Amman and then follows it up with the dreaded FOI request.
I would strongly suggest that RyanO beg for Amman’s mercy and take whatever the good man is willing to offer at this point, since he has gone far beyond the bounds of a gentleman’s protocol.
Fellows, Lucia’s take is reasonable and logically correct. Period. Don’t get bogged down in the innumerable semantic/rhetorical twists that are presented in the rebuttals,
Robert [49891]
It is the public sector that through largely uncontrolled funding mechanisms purports to use and direct wealth needed for growth and jobs. The public sector does not, and never has, created wealth: it redistributes wealth after taking its cut. Only someone who lives and breathes there is incapable of acknowledging that it is the private sector that creates the wealth through the market. Obama is once again proving that Keynes’ so called “multiplier” is nonsensical.
So why should it be that scientists whose “research” is used to articulate policies with profound socio-economic consequences should get away without being subjected to the same stringent due diligence applied to an investment that has immediate measurable consequences for its investors [ socialists will always tell you that the tax payer “invests” in society, so that is an investment.. So how about the returns or other consequences?]
Please answer the questions. You have cleverly sidestepped the previous ones.
FOI is not an efficient process for these requests. But if it’s the only method available to the person requesting,
At the risk of making even more of a fool of myself:
Did he try do call Ammann on the phone? (Yeah, I know, he probably did, but just to make things clear.)
Carrot
“You might find such things in the SI. Or such things might be available on request. But in the paper itself?”
its called reproducable research. been around for years. Sweave.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweave
http://www.reproducibility.org/rsflog/index.php?/archives/224-Raisings-scientific-standards.html
“First of all, it is important to point out that reproducibility is not the goal in itself. There are many situations in which strict computational reproducibility is not achievable. The goal is an exposure of the scientific communication to a skeptic inquiry. A mathematical proof is an example of a scientific communication, which is constructed as a dialogue with a skeptic: someone who might say “What if your conclusions are not true?” Step by step, a mathematical proof is designed to convince the skeptic that the conclusion (a theorem) has to be true. As for computational results, even the simplest skeptic inquiry “What if there is a bug in your code?” cannot be answered unless the software code and every computational step that led to the published result are open for inspection.
“If you attend a mathematical conference, you can notice that mathematicians do not usually go through every step in the proof to present a theorem, it is enough to sketch the main idea of the proof. However, the audience understands that the detailed proof should be available in the published work, otherwise the theorem cannot be accepted. Similarly, in a presentation of a computational work, one can simply show results of a computational experiment. However, such results cannot be accepted as scientific unless the full computation is disclosed for a skeptic inquiry. As stated by Dave Donoho (paraphrased Jon Claerbout),
An article about computational science in a scientific publication is not the scholarship itself, it is merely advertising of the scholarship. The actual scholarship is the complete software development environment and the complete set of instructions which generated the figures.
If you don’t want to disclose the details of your computation, then the work that you do is not science.”
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1550193##
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/feb/05/science-climate-emails-code-release
Now want to discuss Mann’s mistakes in his psuedo proxy studies
where he screwed up geography yet again. minor coding error in lat lons
Mosher,
You are missing the point entirely. Forget the question of whether to provide a listing of code or not, archived on a webpage. This person seems to think the code should be in the main body of the paper. In the methods section of the paper. And that’s just silly, and useless to everybody. A single issue of a journal would become the thickness of a phone book. Now maybe that’s not what the person actually means, but that’s what’s being said.
… on the other hand. A discredited NCAR/UCAR allows skeptics to beat climate science with one awfully big stick.
The next step is for others to lobby politicians, federal agencies and academic bodies over the behavior of NCAR/UCAR citing the damage done to science and government policy by the revelations of the Climategate emails and IPCC errors.
Surely NCAR don’t want to be known as being the American CRU.
Ken–
I think it’s pretty hilarious that Nathan is using the method of insinuating questions to suggest that someone is required to run around like a chicken with their head cut-off for months, pestering endless numbers of people — including non-corresponding authors, their employers &etc.– before filing and FOI. FOI exists precisely to provide people a formal mechanisms to get information. When it’s available, it should be used.
As far as I’m concerned, if he’d used it after sending 1 email to the corresponding author who ignored it, I’d think he would be well within his rights. It might be an inefficient choice because talking to the corresponding author. But it would be a perfecly legitimate use of FOI, falling within both the spirit and letter of the law.
As far as I’m concerned, you are wholly unreasonable.
I don’t think that’s the spirit of why the law exists, and it certainly isn’t in the spirit of science to send an FOI after just one email does not elicit a response.
A mature person would try a second email a while later, or maybe a different author, things like that. Apparently this person sent three emails, is that correct, so there is that.
And I’m not just saying that about trying different authors. You start with the corresponding author, as that’s the whole point of designating a corresponding author. In this case, that’s not even Ammann; did Ryan try Joos? I don’t see Joo’s name discussed, so maybe he did not.
But beyond that, I’ve found that different people in the same group have different tendencies to respond to a cold contact. These are human beings going about their work, not robots programmed to drop everything the second they get an email from a stranger. Different people are just different; some give a higher priority to answering strangers than others. But once you file an FOI, don’t be surprised if you don’t find much goodwill.
Ray Donahue (Comment#49912) July 25th, 2010 at 10:28 pm
Fellows, Lucia’s take is reasonable and logically correct. Period. Don’t get bogged down in the innumerable semantic/rhetorical twists that are presented in the rebuttals,
Of course it’s reasonable, what could be more reasonable than taking every opportunity to stick the boot in and kick a scientist. That’s how science is advanced.
It would appear UCAR/NCAR people use FOI requests to obtain data from others.
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/support/help/MailArchives/decoders/msg00934.html
For present American treatment of the ‘spirit and the letter’ of the FOI law see What’s Up and the revelation that Inspector Generals are looking at institutional resistance to FOI requests, and their chilling, authoritarian, responses.
=============
Mac, I repeat, FOIs may be the best way to bring the data for policy critical papers to the public record. That way there is a penalty for deliberate failure to respond with the necessary information.
You’ve got to do something about the way some administrations respond to the ‘spirit and letter’ of the law, though.
======================
Let’s see…. three requests sent over 6 weeks, sent to the specified corresponding author, and those three requests not even acknowledged. Gee, sure sounds like an FOI request was a reasonable course.
Could Amman have been in the hospital, on an extended vacation, or have some other legitimate explanation? Sure, but that seems unlikely. If such an explanation exists, then this would be a good time for Amman or someone who works with him to offer it. More likely, he simply learned nothing from what happened at CRU/UEA. More likely, it’s just more childish petulance; how stupid.
kim @ 6:44
Well, that’s embarrassing. The IG story about which I’m talking is not the one at Watts Up. Elsewhere I’ve read that some elements of this administration are investigating and documenting the status of those who make FOI requests, but now I can’t find where I read it.
Developing……
================
bugs (Comment#49921),
“Of course it’s reasonable, what could be more reasonable than taking every opportunity to stick the boot in and kick a scientist. That’s how science is advanced.”
No, science is advanced only when people are able to verify other people’s work. How can this be so hard for you to understand? Oh, I forgot, you never had any need or desire to do that! Silly me; yours is the perspective of a non-scientist. And perfectly applicable in any analysis of RyanO’s request, of course.
Look again.
carrot eater (Comment#49928),
“Look again.”
Well, if Ryan sent his emails to the wrong author, then a “Please contact Dr. XXXXX for information” message would be reasonable, don’t ya think?
carrot,
Well if RyanO sent it to the wrong author, then a “Please contact Dr. XXXX for information” message would be a reasonable reply, don’t ya think?
Ammann has a past history as well. Ammann and Wahl 2007 referred to its SI but it was not archived at the time of publication. The following year, I corresponded with Ammann asking him for the SI; he refused. I contact Stephen Schneider to no avail. About six months later, Ammann placed the SI online (and did not notify me that he had done so.) It contained one of the more colorful examples of Texas sharpshooting – recounted ably by Bishop Hill.
carrot eater,
If RyanO sent the request to the wrong author, then an email saying “Please contact Dr. XXXX for information” would be in order, don’t ya think?
SteveF
Yes, it would. But I’m just pointing out a simple, factual error in your statement; an error which had some weight in your statement. When you get to snarking, make sure you’ve got your ducks in order first.
But the point remains. Joos is the corresponding author, and one would start there. But if I really wanted something, I’d try one of the coauthors before burning my bridges and resorting to FOI.
You make so much of demonizing the FOI process, Carrot Eater. It’ll soon be the standard for policy critical articles. How else ensure good faith delivery of the necessary data short of penalties?
A good career field might be the role of Inspectors General. We’re gonna need a few to ensure compliance with FOI, given the history so far of compliance with the ‘spirit and letter’ of the law.
================
What is your intent, CE, to demonize the FOIA, a law with a wonderful spirit, and a pretty decent letter?
===============
I’m sure Ammann made a grevious error (haha Hockey Team, amirite?). And of course you corrected him in the scientific record. Just a citation, if you’re not too busy…
“What is your intent, CE, to demonize the FOIA…”
I suspect Carrot is what they call a Global Warming Propagandist. He’s just doing his job, for pete’s sake. 😉
Andrew
kim,
I don’t demonise the thing itself. It’s quite very important.
What I criticise is people resorting to it overly hastily. FOI is maybe a routine thing with some government agencies. But when you are dealing with small research groups, an FOI is going to be taken as a very hostile act. You will be burning your bridges. So you try to avoid it. Which means, don’t fire off an FOI after one unanswered email. Lucia above defended that, but it simply isn’t reasonable. Try again (which Ryan says he did, to his credit), try a different author – perhaps even the corresponding author, just perhaps. In a perfect world, everybody would reply to every cold call in due time, but that isn’t going to happen. I don’t get a response to every email I send (in climate science or outside climate science, either way); I don’t go running around crying about it and sending FOIs.
This is pretty obviously the way to go. I don’t really have a problem with an FOI, but why not try co-authors first. It’s like skeptics can’t wait to FOI because they can get the data AND a talking point.
BTW, Lucia, I get an Internal Server Error nearly every time I comment, though comments do seem to be getting through.
kim,
Please read, instead of projecting. I don’t demonise the thing itself. FOI is quite very important.
What I criticise is people resorting to it overly hastily, frivolously, or with bad faith. FOI is maybe a routine thing with some government agencies. But when you are dealing with small research groups, an FOI is going to be taken as a very hostile act. You will be burning your bridges. And as Lucia agrees, it’s an inefficient process. So you try to avoid it. Which means, don’t fire off an FOI after one unanswered email. Lucia above defended that, but it simply isn’t reasonable. Try again (which Ryan says he did, to his credit), try a different author – perhaps even the corresponding author, just perhaps. In a perfect world, everybody would reply to every cold call in due time, but that isn’t going to happen. I don’t get a response to every email I send (in climate science or outside climate science, either way); I don’t go running around crying about it and sending FOIs.
That’s baloneeee carrot. All government employees and certainly those who are scientists, and even those employed in the private sector working for the government or having to do with public land are required to at least answer a request for info in regards to research; especially research funded by tax payer money, or having to do with the environment or pollution. You don’t know what you are talking about. And if they don’t they are hiding something they don’t want the public to know. My husband is a state licensed environmental scientist and he also worked for the EPA at the beginning of his career. Maybe you ought to watch Erin Brockovitch and get a clue.
It’s completely utterly mind boggling the excuses and spin people can come up with regarding a FRACTION OF ONE DEGREE of temperature!!!!!
Alright, here’s the link to the url for the perversion of FOIA requests in this administration.
msnbc.msn.com/id/38350993/ns/politics-more_politics/
Carrot Eater, demonizing is a strong word, but you are demeaning the use of FOIA. I’m saying FOIA requests are going to become necessary, given that critical information, necessary for sane policy proposals, isn’t voluntarily forthcoming.
=====================
Hat tip to the marvelous ‘Hit and Run’ for that link to the FOIA business.
============
People can’t be incompetent or lazy or sick or busy any more, they are always hiding something.
Like all the stuff CRU was hiding about the surface network, which was completely rewritten after the FOI request by Willis and Steve and 50 other people.
Oh, wait…
Kim,
Again, I’d appreciate it if you actually considered what I wrote, and not something else.
I’m saying it is unreasonable to send an FOI to a research group after one unanswered email.
Perhaps you absolutely love the FOI process, and you disagree. Me, I’d try emailing again. Or emailing somebody else in the group, perhaps even the author designated for correspondence, fancy that. Or calling an admin, to see if there’s a better way to get in contact. I’d do any number of common sense things before resorting to FOI.
You’re whining, CE, and it’s just an echo of the whining done by those scientists not responsive to FOIA requests.
Why do you echo them?
==============
If you demean those who file FOIA requests and if Homeland Security investigates and lists those who make FOIA requests then the ‘spirit and the letter’ of those remarkably effective FOIA laws is violated. Transparency, my good man, transparency.
So why do you demean those who file FOIA requests?
=================
Carrot
I would send more than one email. I would even advise against it– for a variety of practical reasons.
However, I would not criticize someone who FOI’d after only 1 ignored request– which is a different thing from advising doing it.
The reason I wouldn’t criticize someone is that I just don’t think people on the requesting side of data should be considered to be required to invest a lot of time and energy chasing down data. FOI itself is a slow process– so I don’t know why the requestor should be required to invest weeks or tons of his own time trying lots of different methods of contacting someone on whatever mystery terms that person might deem correct. FOI exists and has certain specific terms.
Of course not. But if you word things correctly, you should get information you want. The person who has to fill the request can grouse– just like people grouse over NEPA paperwork, or safety proceedures or various required training programs. That’s life; put on your big boy pants.
Anyway, in this case, three requests were ignored. How much less goodwill could Amman exhibit?
Boris
I know… I can’t seem to track down the issue….
“I’m saying it is unreasonable to send an FOI to a research group after one unanswered email.”
Not if your kid had a brain tumor. Apparently “global warming” isn’t a threat to our children like they keep saying it is. Hmm hmm hmmm.
Kim,
I see zero point in conversing further with you on this. I’ve said what I mean quite clearly, I think.
I am not demeaning the use of FOI. I am simply stating the circumstances under which I think it’s inappropriate in the academic setting, at least until other steps are exhausted. FOI simply isn’t the first step you take in academia, it really isn’t something that people in basic research expect, and it’s a bit of a hassle for all involved. So I have described specifically what other steps I would first take, if my initial email request went unanswered. If after all that, you still don’t get a response or dialogue of some sort, then maybe you try the FOI.
You seem to want to turn my words into something else. Enjoy doing that. But don’t expect any more from me.
Lucia, I think you are ignoring the rhetorical power of the FOI. If you jump to an FOI request, you get front page billing on Climate Audit and a lot of cheerleaders urging you on. If you contact a different author or call someone at NCAR about getting in touch with Ammann, you don’t get much attention.
I’m not saying that’s what Ryan is doing here, but posts like yours encourage inefficient FOIing.
Would you like some whine with your jeez, CE?
==================
Not that I have a problem with your post or FOIs.
The feelings of “small research groups in academia” mattering to the scientific method and whether the published data is made public or not (hello!) is just insane.
I don’t know. Maybe he has hatred in his heart for anybody he associates with CA (is RyanO anybody that anybody’s heard of?). Maybe he’s on sabbatical. Maybe he’s just really bad at answering emails; there are people like this. Maybe he’s deluged by hate mail and doesn’t open email from addresses he doesn’t recognise. I have no idea. But I would have tried emailing the corresponding author at some point. That isn’t a matter of investing a lot of time or energy. It’s a matter of glancing at the paper to see who’s got the little symbol by their name, copy/pasting the email you’ve already written, and sending it to somebody else.
If that didn’t work, I’d contact the editor of the journal.
In the vein of Nathan and others here in the defense of withholding data, or at least holding those requestors of information to making better and more valiant efforts to obtain and to be more thoughtful of the consequences of obtaining, I would like to present another reason for both the supplier and requester of information exhibiting due cautions to the point of great hesitancy in exchanging data.
It has recently come to my attention that a paper was submitted that points to some data errors in a couple of recent Mann authored papers:
http://klimazwiebel.blogspot.com/2010/07/mistake-with-consequences.html
“A new paper in press in Journal of Climate by Jason Smerdon from the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory and collaborators documents surprising, and somewhat inexplicable, errors in some previous pseudo-proxy studies by Mann and collaborators.”
Now how embarrassing would an exchange of this information be for both the authors and the recipient, and particularly if the recipient had used that data to make a point that perhaps did not matter so much to the original authors’ point.
I have loads of other reasons for being “hesitant” in replying to requests for information, but I limit what I present to those for which I have found documentation.
RyanO used to post here a lot. I guess he posts at Id’s place now. Seemed like a reasonable guy most of the time.
Carrot
That would be a good reason to FOI.
There is a reason I am required to use FOI to request information from the county. The managers at the county prefer it this way rather than having people guess what the process is.
Sure. So would I.
I’m just saying I don’t blame people for resorting to FOI quickly.
I don’t think it should be viewed as hostile by those who receive the FOI. I’m aware that some do view it as hostile, but in reality, FOI is nothing more than a systematic method set up by law and permits those requesting a knowable method to obtain information.
I don’t think anyone should be reluctant to use it. I don’t think those who receive FOI’s should whine about it. It’s just a formal method of requesting info.
Boris.
Sure. And in this case, if you get email Amman three times, you evidently also don’t get any answer at all.
Of course people are monitoring whether or not scientists are responsive after the findings of Russel.
I think it’s people like Amman not responding to emails that encourages inefficient FOIing.
But in any case, I don’t think FOI is to be discouraged.
I think people subject to FOI should learn it’s one of those things– like filing NEPA, dealing with EPA, safety inspections etc Yah… you grouse. But there is no reason to think anyone’s intentions are bad. They just want info, and that’s sometimes the way to do it.
If you think my saying this encourages FOIing, well.. ok then. I’d advise it’s inefficient as well– that’s sufficient reason to consider a few other options first.
But yet you agree with me that you’d try another author, in this case the actual designated corresponding author, first.
You seem to agree with me on what’s the better way of going about things. You just don’t want to criticise somebody for doing it in a way you think is less advisable. Fine, whatever, but at the same time, you can still point out what is more advisable.
Different situation, different circumstances. Especially when you get into bureaucracies or bodies that regularly have to field public requests for information, FOI can actually make things easier for everybody.
But in academic research groups, I think it generally will be. One is used to more informal exchanges there. Here is a case of an informal exchange not working. Or rather, not even getting off the ground. So what do you do? I’ve already outlined what I would have done. Email the corresponding author, which is probably where you should have started anyway. Call an admin at the center, to see if the guy’s still alive. Finally, drop a note to the journal editor.
It’s kind of amusing to watch you defend your point, CE. Clearly, in this field, ordinary requests for information are failing to get at the data needed to make sane policy. No matter how you may view FOIA requests in general, it is patent that without FOIA requests we’d still be in the pre-Climategate phase of this Climate discussion, and how would you like us to still be there?
Heh, you don’t have to answer that one.
===================
lucia says: “I don’t think anyone should be reluctant to use it(an FOIA request).
Please read my link at 8:50 AM to the AP article at MSNBC. Would knowledge of such political interference in FOIA requests make you reluctant to file one? Can you imagine someone who might be intimidated?
This is where we are, folks.
=============
kim,
I don’t think you have any clue over how much data were already available, before climate gate.
Even with the research group in question here, you go online and you see all their code. For tons of experiments they published, especially for the experiments used for the IPCC report, you see all the model inputs and outputs. Everything you could want is there.
It just so happens that for this particular paper, they didn’t put up the model outputs. At least, not that I’ve found. The inputs are there. I don’t know why the outputs are not.
But I can see all this, so I have a context you seem to lack. You seem to think you need to use FOI like a machete getting through a jungle; that nothing is available otherwise. This is perhaps the idea you get from reading certain places, I don’t know. I think that’s a wrong picture, because so much useful stuff is easily available. Just in this case, it seems not to be.
More whining, CE, and this time on behalf of ‘academic research groups’. It’s past time that they got used to FOIA requests; it seems now to be routine in some bureaucracies. But you illustrate a problem; why should an academic object to a ‘formal’ request for information? Why should the request be ‘informal’ before it is considered?
It’s the pursuit of truth we’re after, not protection of the sensibilities of academics.
=================
Heh, you are dodging my point that without FOI requests, ClimateGate would not have happened yet. Why do you do that?
================
Carrot
Yes, and I did.
I suspect calling an admin would be useless- it would be at most places Ive worked. But nothing wrong with giving it a shot.
I’d skip dropping the note to the journal editor, someone’s boss etc. I think could well be seen as equally or more hostile than using FOI. Given that, you might just as well risk FOI.
I’d probably write to all co-authors.
But once again: I don’t blame people who don’t do this.
lucia (Comment#49948) July 26th, 2010 at 9:22 am
Anyway, in this case, three requests were ignored. How much less goodwill could Amman exhibit?
It’s not always that simple Lucia, my university has a Spam checking system which filters out suspicious emails (for which I’m very grateful). I’ve had occasions where I’ve missed emails because the spam filter hasn’t recognized the address. I get regular reports so I can check but ploughing through the lists of erectile disfunction ads etc gets a bit old! I could easily miss several requests like that. If Amman has a similar system so could he.
And you miss a very important point, CE. The sort of stuff that is now being garnered via FOIA requests is just exactly the sort of stuff that does not get released with ‘informal’ requests. The stuff that will be given freely is most likely not problematic; what is problematic must be taken via the law. Did you miss the lesson of ClimateGate?
This is why I talk about having a penalty, via the FOIA, for failure to offer up the data in good faith. It didn’t happen without the FOIA requests, at least in the business of climate science.
===========
FWIW, I have had a ton of emails get lost or show up way late (in which case I missed them). I’ve found many others in my Spam folder. Maybe I suck at the internet, but this has happened to me numerous times (especially with a university account that I used to have .) Seems odd to happen 3 times though.
Lucia, Maybe you should send Ammann a note asking if he’s gotten RyanO’s request. If he sends you a rude note it could fun for everyone.
Boris–
I’m trying to turn off a bunch of plugins to isolate where the problem is. I know there is some memory hog on this blog or my knitting blog– but I haven’t changed anything at the knitting blog, so it’s hard to believe it’s that.
Maybe some old plugin is incompatible with the WordPress upgrade to 3.0 and it tries to load too much stuff? The problems seem to date from the time of that upgrade. Anyway, I don’t know.
I’ve turned of the ad insertion. I don’t want to turn off spam control… 🙂
I just turned off subscriptions and editing in case it has to do with that. You should stop getting emails altogether for a bit.
The admin would at least be able to confirm whether the guy is alive, or away on sabbatical, or traveling a lot, or sick in a hospital, or unusually busy, or what. The admin could also confirm the correct email address to use.
I agree that going to the journal editor would be seen as pretty much as hostile as an FOI. But if I were to escalate, it’s where I’d go; I think there is advantage is getting input from somebody in that position. While not every individual editor may take it seriously, the journal has its policy for data availability, and at least some editors would take it seriously. Also the editor will have some familiarity with the paper, and would be able to judge whether your request makes any sense. If you get him on your side, you’ll have a powerful ally, as nobody wants to annoy the editors, and it’s somebody who knows what he’s talking about.
And again, you can continue not blaming people who don’t take common sense steps like emailing the coauthors, but we can continue to point out to everybody else what those steps might be. So if they’re ever in that position in the future, they might try that.
l, I think Boris was speaking generally, and not specifically about this blog. Nonetheless, I’m glad you are trying to figure out where all the server error problems are coming from. It is frustrating. As someone said, most of the time the comments are getting through despite the message, but about 1 in 5 is not. Thanks.
==============
Kim
You simply don’t know what you’re talking about.
Exactly the sort of stuff? Results of a model run?
http://www.earthsystemgrid.org/home.htm
Click on CCSM. You will get tons of *exactly* this sort of stuff there, from the exact modeling group in question.
Just for whatever reason, the results from this one paper are harder to find.
And I like Boris’s suggestion of contacting Amman. It would be worth it if only to shut down all the whining and excusing from the likes of Carrot Eater.
============
Oh, you are hilarious, CE. “Just for whatever reason, the results from this one paper are harder to find”
Sometimes you amaze me. Do you think we’ve all been deaf and dumb for the last few years? It is the problematic information that must be retrieved via FOIA, and sometimes the non-problematic, too.
==============
CE @ 10:59
Nice attempt at distraction. My point stands.
==============
Hey guess what I have an awesome paper that proves that there is no global warming. Hey guess what none of you gets to see it because I worked so hard on it and your going to try and mess up my research. I’ve also told all of you a thousand times, the carrot eater is some activist or student that knows Michael Mann or something. Just read what he says: “Oh yeah I saw the emails, no problem there. Mike’s nature trick? Well, ho ho that’s just scientific jargon for a special equation.” He doesn’t actually believe that, he just knows it looks so bad he has to defend it, probably paid to do it also.
Carrot Eater, please enlighten me. I want to know about the steps you are taking to live a carbon free lifestyle. After 10 seconds of thought, when you realize the answer is zero, please quit coming here and using more coal to tell us to use less. Carrot Eater basically thinks that we should all live in a village while he stays at the hotel.
Yes, kim is right. I was speaking generically about lost emails as a possible explanation for Ammann’s non answer. Sorry for the confusion.
Boris–
Heh!
Kim
I don’t think Carrot is whining. He wants to emphasize that FOI is not necessarily the best course. I agree with him; it’s not. It’s better to do other things first.
But I on the other hand am emphasizing that I don’t think people should be worried about using it nor do I think people should be criticized for sparing themselves a big time sink of having to guess why email isn’t answered, discovering every possible person to email, trying to guess whether a touchy person will be more irritated by a phone call, an email, and FOI, someone calling their boss, the jouranl etc.
So, I don’t think people on the receiving should interpret receiving an FOI as hostile. Many will seeit that way, but I don’t think they should. If they don’t answer email, they turn down a request, have developed a reputation for turning down request or are just grumpy when people call, I don’t have the slightest sympathy if they complain that those requesting information use FOI.
People want information. FOI is a formal procedure to request information. People should not be criticized for using it.
Anyway, as far as I know Amman hasn’t complained about the FOIs. For all we know he’d prefer the formal method to getting unsolicited email from bloggers and trying to worry about whether his spam filters is blocking stuff.
shooshmon,
I think Carrot is more than one person. How else do you explain his/her/whatever’s Omni-Presence here? When does he/she/them sleep or eat? 😉
Andrew
Problematic? So you’re saying it’s a conspiracy because there’s something wrong with it? Wow. Now I’m really not going to waste my time on you anymore.
You realise all RyanO is going to get is a digital file of the numbers used to make Fig 2 and 3 of the paper?
listen carrot eater, how bout you answer some questions that actually matter. We had 7,000ppm of co2 in the atmosphere, and now…390. Where did the co2 go and why? Then explain to me why this will not happen again. Do not take this question and spin it by saying “I’m not saying this will not happen again”. You are. You are making the case that the earth can no longer hold certain concentrations of co2 and you are also basically saying that the earth cannot suck up co2 at the rate which we are emitting it. However, this again makes no sense because the earth sucked up much more co2 in the past. Why are you trying to tell us it cannot do it now?
“you are also basically saying that the earth cannot suck up co2 at the rate which we are emitting it. However, this again makes no sense because the earth sucked up much more co2 in the past.”
At what rate in the past?
Nope, CE @ 11:17, now you know or should know that that is not what I said at all. Why do you feel the need to pervert what I say? What is your intention?
================
Lucia, CE is whining about the sensibilities of academics, as Liza pointed out even before I got redundant about it. But CE takes the cake for redundancy of whining.
====================
I think you’ve been told this before.
Most of it ends up as limestone over time, buried beneath the ocean floor or wherever. Some chunk of it went buried as the coal, gas and oil that we’re now pulling back up out of the ground.
Find any reference at all about the carbon cycle, and you should see some discussion of the chemistry and biology involved, as well as the time scales.
It will, if you wait for long enough. Long enough being, thousands of years. It’ll go from air to ocean, and then eventually to sediments at the ocean floor. Even as we speak in real time, the ocean does take in some substantial fraction of the carbon.
The point is that these are slow processes. If you put carbon into the system faster than it is removed, then you’ll have a build up. Which is exactly what’s happening.
Shoosh, on this I agree with Carrot Eater. A big unknown is how increased atmospheric CO2 will increase the feedbacks to the carbon sequestration.
Most of the scenarios by the alarmists about the long residence time of anthropogenic CO2 in our atmosphere take little or no account of a faster sequestration by encouragement of those feedbacks.
No one knows how long this aliquot of Anthropogenic CO2 will last in the atmosphere. I hope it will last long enough to fertilize crops during the coming Eddy Minimum. I wish it had a strong enough greenhouse effect to keep us warm during the lethal chill to come.
================
Surely there is some irony in somebody calling others alarmists, and then going on to speak of lethal chills?
Well, Watts Up did have the story about the political perversion of FOIA requests in a story on 7/22. OK, be still, embarrassed heart.
=================
I do not know the rate Boris, that is a good question. But we do know that there was 7,000ppm of co2 in the atmosphere so clearly the earth (mainly ocean) can intake tremendous amounts of co2.
With the PDO in its cooling phase for a couple of decades, and with a Sun flirting with a new Grand Solar Minimum, the chances of holocaustic cooling is much greater than catastrophic warming from this weak little CO2 molecule. I know you don’t believe me, but I don’t care; I’m still raising the alarm.
I object to warming alarmists crying wolf with much less evidence.
====================
CArrot–
So?
I do it for the grandchildren, Carrot Eater. Your descendants, too.
====================
Ah, Lucia, he dint mean nuthin’ by it. He was just using lousy rhetoric to try to make an illegitimate point against me. Look at what he does.
=================
Lucia
I thought Kim was implying that something was being intentionally hidden, because it’s in some way problematic.
So I’m just saying that what Ryan is asking for is the digital version of the numbers in Fig 2 and 3. Or more precisely, the numbers that were spatially averaged to make Fig 2 and 3. If there were something problematic there, whatever that might mean in this case, it’d likely then already be visible in Fig 2 and 3.
Either way, it’d be nice to have those numbers in digital form, if you were really interested in this paper. He’s asking for a reasonable thing. Having the gridded data would let you look at spatial patterns, beyond what the authors discussed.
I’ve drank thousands of gallons of water in my life, so clearly drowning is hoax concocted by the lifejacket industry and fostered by the lamestream media.
Carrot:
“Mosher,
You are missing the point entirely. Forget the question of whether to provide a listing of code or not, archived on a webpage. This person seems to think the code should be in the main body of the paper. In the methods section of the paper. And that’s just silly, and useless to everybody. A single issue of a journal would become the thickness of a phone book. Now maybe that’s not what the person actually means, but that’s what’s being said.”
no I am not missing the point entirely. I am pointing out a viable solution to the issue.
1. You are still living in a PAPER world. It’s stupid. Page count restrictions are stupid. People who appeal to page count arguments need education.
2. I’ll assume that what they want ( code in the paper) can be satisfied by Link in the paper to the actual code AS RUN. If they mean literally, “code in the paper” Then I will ask them why they accept footnotes. I think ‘link” in the paper, active link in the paper, works as well as “code in the paper” . If they persist, I’ll ask why they dont demand all the data in the paper. and since data is just a reference to an actual thing, I’ll ask why they dont demand the thing itself in the paper.
See, I wasn’t assuming that, based on the language used. That’s what I was disputing here – why on earth would you want a listing of code in the main body of the paper? That’s just stupid.
If the person would be happy with a link to a webpage, with the code stored in a file at the webpage, then fine.
Co Authors
you mean these guys
Caspar M. Ammann*, Fortunat Joos*,†,‡, David S. Schimel*, Bette L. Otto-Bliesner*, and Robert A. Tomas*
If folks want to drag them into it ,I’m game. is that what you guys want?
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/tss/aboutus/staff/schimel/cv.html
http://www.climate.unibe.ch/~joos/
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/ccr/ottobli/
So we write them and …
1. they dont write back.
2. They say they dont have the data.
3. They say they dont have access to it
4. they say write ammann.
Cool. Is that what you guys really want? cause it can be arranged.
neat Idea, thanks Nathan!
CE. ok we are in violent agreement
steven mosher (Comment#50000) July 26th, 2010 at 12:27 pm
Carrot:
“Mosher,
You are missing the point entirely. Forget the question of whether to provide a listing of code or not, archived on a webpage. This person seems to think the code should be in the main body of the paper. In the methods section of the paper. And that’s just silly, and useless to everybody. A single issue of a journal would become the thickness of a phone book. Now maybe that’s not what the person actually means, but that’s what’s being said.â€
no I am not missing the point entirely. I am pointing out a viable solution to the issue.
1. You are still living in a PAPER world. It’s stupid. Page count restrictions are stupid. People who appeal to page count arguments need education.
2. I’ll assume that what they want ( code in the paper) can be satisfied by Link in the paper to the actual code AS RUN. If they mean literally, “code in the paper†Then I will ask them why they accept footnotes. I think ‘link†in the paper, active link in the paper, works as well as “code in the paper†. If they persist, I’ll ask why they dont demand all the data in the paper. and since data is just a reference to an actual thing, I’ll ask why they dont demand the thing itself in the paper.
I certainly wouldn’t give anyone who asked for it my codes (unless we’re talking about fairly trivial stuff). You could have a description of the equations used and how solved but that’s it. In the cases where I have shared code with others (both to and from), there have been very clear binding agreements, limitations on further distribution and in some cases payment (commercial users).
i dunno,
maybe contacting NCAR research relations might be better
http://www.ncar.ucar.edu/resrel/
or the director
http://www.ncar.ucar.edu/ncardir/
http://www.ncar.ucar.edu/ncardir/ncar_exec.php
As I recall when Santer got pissy about sharing data working up the chain of command was effective.
Again, Nathan Boris others Thanks for the suggestions. Perhaps a large email campaign about the issue would be in order. Executives love getting this stuff in the mail.
Meanwhile.. I’ll look through this stuff.
http://www.fin.ucar.edu/legal/index.html
here is the deal. There were actually Two things that lead to the campaign to do 60FOIA to CRU.
1. CRU’s lying
2. The way Commenters at CA who tried to defend CRU Pissed us off.
So, Thanks Nathan, Thanks Boris. I love a good fight.
We will see how Ryan Os stuff works out first..
Mosh,
There’s no point in contacting the coauthors now that the FOI is filed.
But yes, somebody absolutely should have tried the corresponding author first. Even if that person didn’t have the requested data on his hard drive, at least that person might give a response.
I’m convinced Mosher is basically just an adolescent at heart with these things, or some sort of rebellious pre-teen. Tweaking figures of authority and generally causing mayhem is just inherently fun for him, no more, no less.
Carrot Eater, you might just as well stop defending those who are not transparent. Your rhetoric is disappointing and deteriorating. Have you no idea why Moshe and many others are in a rage about the secrecy?
======================
“figures of authority”
Wishful Thinking at this point, CE… Wishful Thinking.
Andrew
Mosher, be sure to ask those scientists what happened to all that co2 that we used to have in the atmosphere. And be sure to ask them why the earth can no longer absorb “less” co2.
C’mon, Shoosh, obviously the earth can resequestrate all of the anthropogenic CO2. The unanswered question is how long it will take.
=================
“Perhaps a large email campaign about the issue would be in order.”
Maybe a small email campaign first?
“I think you’ve been told this before.”
Absolutely he has. I answered the same question in the same way not a month ago. Either he has a short memory or he is not asking the question to get the answer.
When I answered him he offered no follow-up questions — just left it there. Yet here’s the same question again. Perhaps he could print out your answer and tape it over his computer, a la Memento.
“It is the public sector . . .socialists . . .”
@tetris — Not even a little interested in the predictable ritual denunciations of the “public sector.” Again, your crackpot ideology has destroyed hundreds of billions of dollars and destroyed millions of jobs. Your “methods” in the banking and finance sector are not only totally irrevalent to scientists, but a humiliating failure in and of themselves.
Instead of embarrassing yourself by preaching from the gutter, you ought to be asking how your failed cult of the market can learn from the successful institution of peer review. 😉 That’s the only question you need to concern yourself with at this point.
Robert, have you ever heard of the Boston Fed study?
=================================
Phil,
“In the cases where I have shared code with others (both to and from), there have been very clear binding agreements, limitations on further distribution and in some cases payment (commercial users).”
Is that because your employers insist upon it, or because your research is not completely publically funded? Either way, if you are working in the publically funded sector such attitudes are no longer appropriate in today’s age
Heh, y’all oughta go see what David Holland just put on the Holland thread at CA.
============
Robert [50014]
” the successful institution of peer review” ? Say again?
Do I know and understand peer review? You bet you.
My own academic background and 25 years of working closely with scientists in the life sciences, chemistry and physics have taught me that peer review is a fundamentally flawed system, fatally prone to “you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours” and insidious coteries such as the one exposed by Climategate. This goes not just for climate “science” but applies across the board. When a scientist gets on the wrong side such a group, he/she never publishes in that journal again. And many of them a thoroughly terrified of that. If it had been left solely to peer review, Einstein’s first paper would never have been published!
The scrutiny that scientific results are subjected to in the venture capital investment process makes academic peer review look like a walk in the park. Why, because there are millions of dollars at stake.
Why should climate “science” be held to a similar level of due diligence? Because there a billions of dollars and people’s lives at stake.
But if you truly think that what has been and is going on at UCAR/NCAR, GISS, CRU ,etc., in terms of obfuscation, stonewalling and attempts to destroy data, is OK, then you’ll never understand my point.
“That is the only question you need to concern yourself with at this point”. Say again, from up on high? Haughty, what? 🙁
Put yourself in someone like RyanO’s shoes. He is a very bright young man who has taken an interest in the methodologies used for temperature reconstruction, but who has a day job outside the climate science community. That he is qualified to pursue the paper he is attempting to get published has been shown rather well in his posts at CA and TAV and an exchange with Eric Steig at RC. He evidently needs some information in pursuing his interests in reconstructions, but he is not part of fraternity that have shown previously that they are willing to share data amongst themselves.
He does three emails over a relatively long time period with no results and he then resorts to FOIA. I say good for him and good for an area of science that I judge needs some outsider attention. He can weigh his time spent and efforts versus what a more fraternal approach may have cost him in valuable time. I have witnessed RyanO going out of his way to maintain a congenial relationship with those that his compatriots might view less favorably or even in an adversarial light.
But no matter, in the end, since it is the science that we all want to see progress and to reveal the truth. That someone, who for some reason (and there could 10s to a 100) does not answer his emails, is finally brought to task by way of a FOI, I say has to be good for science. I personally cannot grasp why anyone would care if the person being requested has a temporary hurt feeling or two when considering the bigger picture. Hey maybe that person will be helped by the experience and start proudly wearing his big boy pants – to borrow a phrase from our blog owner.
I hate this thread…
Kenneth,
That’s all generally reasonable. But two points
The extra time needed to email another author to see if that person is more responsive, in this case the author you’re supposed to contact anyway: 30 seconds?
You might want to maintain cordial relations with the people who will be taking the time to send you stuff, and explain stuff to you. If you tick off those people, don’t be surprised when they don’t go above and beyond to help you out.
Carrot
The estimate of 30 seconds is not quite right.
The lost time isn’t the time it takes to write an email. It’s the time required to email and then wait for the response. If, like Amman, the person you emailed doesn’t respond for some reason, when do you decide to pull the trigger on FOI? Do you hunt around for a new person to contact and email the new guy 3 times spacing each email 3 weeks, and waiting 3 weeks after the 3rd one wasn’t answered? Do you start pestering 4 possible people in parallel (i.e. the admin? the journal editor? Someone’s boss? etc.)
In any case, it really isn’t as if being sent an FOI and having to deal with it as part of a job for which you receive money is some objectively horrible thing like being fired, disciplined, made to walk the plank or being given 50 lashes. So, I really don’t see why people who want information should be criticized for using FOI fairly promptly. It’s a bit of a hassel– but so is grading exams, writing grants, dealing with safety, NEPA, etc. So, someone at NCAR has to deal with it. Big whip.
you’re bending over backwards to make this sound much harder than it actually is. he sent 3 emails to Ammann, and waited around anyway. I’d have sent one to Joos a week after I didn’t hear back from Ammann. Water under the bridge now, but it’s what I would have done.
30 seconds.
And it’s not as if your own life and career come to a grinding halt while you wait a week to see if somebody writes back. This isn’t his day job.
And I’m not just saying this. I’ve found that some people at GISS, NCDC, etc are very fast to respond thoughtfully to emails that come out of the blue. Some, you never hear back from. Just seems like common sense to try somebody else, if the first one didn’t work.
But whether Lucia thinks people should be annoyed by receiving FOIs or not, you stand a decent chance of burning your bridges if you jump to that. That said, at least in this case, responding should hopefully be relatively easy, and it does appear to be a very reasonable request.
On the other hand, a FOI like this one (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/24/cei-files-notice-of-intent-to-sue-nasa-giss/) is going to earn you enduring contempt.
Carrot
I also get responses.
Would I send one to Joos? Yep. I would send an email to the corresponding author in parallel.
Sure. People can be touchy and juvenile even though they should not be. Sending scientists FOI’s may unhinge them, make them hate you forever and find themselves unable to ever being nice to you ever, ever, ever. After that, you may find the only way to get additional information you need is to send more FOI’s.
Maybe things will be even worse. The scientists will lose all objectivity, and later become perpetually hostile peer reviewers indulging in the cloak of anonymity to “get” you. The parade of horribles that could happen if you send an FOI is endless.
By sending the FOI, RyanO risked angering Amman and causing him to ignore all future emails, not holding his hand as they spoke on the phone lovingly going over the data etc.
But sending an FOI is not objectively a horrible thing to do to a scientist. Yes, the scientists may become grumpy and not want to friend you, help you etc. So, for that reason, if you think there is some hope of a collaborative relationship, you might want to try other strategies first.
tetris (Comment#50019) July 26th, 2010 at 4:46 pm
Robert [50014]
†the successful institution of peer review†? Say again?
Do I know and understand peer review? You bet you.
My own academic background and 25 years of working closely with scientists in the life sciences, chemistry and physics have taught me that peer review is a fundamentally flawed system, fatally prone to “you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours†and insidious coteries such as the one exposed by Climategate. This goes not just for climate “science†but applies across the board. When a scientist gets on the wrong side such a group, he/she never publishes in that journal again. And many of them a thoroughly terrified of that. If it had been left solely to peer review, Einstein’s first paper would never have been published!
I’m puzzled why you say that, I don’t see anything controversial about it? I mean the capillary action of a straw is hardly earth shattering stuff. It did contain an erroneous theory which caused Einstein to later describe it as “worthless”, so perhaps a reviewer would have been right to reject it?
according to the Climategate mails Jones knew that Casper is VERY BAD at responding to mails.
if you read the mails you’d know this.
dont make me cite it
From: Phil Jones
To: t.osborn@xxxxxxxxx.xxx,”Palmer Dave Mr (LIB)”
Subject: Re: FW: Your Ref: FOI_08-23 – IPCC, 2007 WGI Chapter 6 Assessment Process [FOI_08-23]
Date: Wed, 28 May 2008 17:13:35 +0100
Cc: “Briffa Keith Prof ” , “Mcgarvie Michael Mr ”
Dave,
Although requests (1) and (2) are for the IPCC, so irrelevant to UEA,
Keith (or you Dave) could say that for (1) Keith didn’t get any additional
comments in the drafts other than those supplied by IPCC. On (2) Keith
should say that he didn’t get any papers through the IPCC process.either.
I was doing a different chapter from Keith and I didn’t get any. What we did get
were papers sent to us directly – so not through IPCC, asking us to
refer to them in the IPCC chapters. If only Holland knew how the
process really worked!! Every faculty member in ENV and all the post docs and
most PhDs do, but seemingly not Holland.
So the answers to both (1) and (2) should be directed to IPCC, but
Keith should say that he didn’t get anything extra that wasn’t in the IPCC
comments.
As for (3) Tim has asked Caspar, but Caspar is one of the worse responders to
emails known. I doubt either he emailed Keith or Keith emailed him related to IPCC.
sheesh. do I have to do all your arguments for u.
CE>
“I’m convinced Mosher is basically just an adolescent at heart with these things, or some sort of rebellious pre-teen. Tweaking figures of authority and generally causing mayhem is just inherently fun for him, no more, no less.”
yes. no more. no less.
Perhaps it is better to point out that in light of the phony reviews, and the on going lack of transparency, that the stonewalling never really stopped?
Mosher–
So, if I emailed to ask if he got RyanO’s email, I probably wouldn’t get an answer? If it were in the interest of “the science”, we might have to FOI that! 😉
Lucia, that would be an interesting experiment – why not try it!
PaulM– I don’t think “the science” needs to know whether Amman got the emails and just doesn’t answer, or whether he never got them. I don’t.
Hmm. But a guy who’s just an inveterate email-non-responder doesn’t fit into the narrative we’re trying to build, does it?
You’re all worried about Ryan’s valuable time. Well, now he’s in the FOI process which itself takes time… when a simple email to the right person might have gotten him somewhere long ago.
Not blaming him exactly, but I do blame those in the peanut gallery who jump to their preferred conclusions.
Here’s a relevant quote from “Caspar and the Jesus paper”:
“…McIntyre’s suggestion that he and Amman write a joint paper outlining where they agreed and where they differed was not taken up. When McIntyre later formalised this offer in an email, Amman failed even to acknowledge it.“
Maybe. But, in principle, FOI should be more predictable. Plus, FOI deals with an agency, not people.
What preferred conclusions? Nothing about Amman’s behavior changes the fact that NCAR appears not responsive. Note the main post doesn’t mention Amman. It mentions NCAR and NSF and how they are responding.
Amman’s name doesn’t even come up until we get deep in comments after Nathan tells us he’s confused and appears to want to know more about the timeline. 🙂
Later, Nathan who really does seem to be confused, wants to know more details about exactly what Amman, how many emails were sent etc. But all of that is a bit off track.
Whatever Amman or any other scientists idiosyncracies, the real issue in the unfolding story is not Amman or even individual scientists. The real issues are: What are NCAR’s responsibilities? What are NSF’s? Will these agencies save scientists from themselves by stepping in and forcing data sharing? Or will the agencies behave like CRU or UEA?
Well Kim if this is the case I do not see what the problem is. Who cares how long it takes? We know that there is enough time because there was a lot more co2 in the atmosphere before, so it must have taken longer to get more co2 out, correct? So since we have so much less, we know we have enough time, correct?
Carrot Eater, I want to FOI you. And Carrot Eater since its so easy and all these scientists are so nice, how about you send somebody an email and get whatever RyanO is trying to find. Anyway, here is what will happen.
1. RyanO gets data he is looking for, finds something suspicious about the numbers.
2. Carrot Eater begins defending data and claims that there is nothing wrong with it starts a big argument.
You can see the insinuations in the comments.
Because you were too busy talking about how bad CRU was, and trying to put this in that context, instead of seeing what actually happened here.
If Ryan had emailed the right person, we might not be at this point now anyway.
Not blaming him exactly, but I do blame those in the peanut gallery who jump to their preferred conclusions.
To clarify my point: I respect RyanO’s judgment in this case and since he has all the facts at hand, and it is his time effort at stake, I accept it over others who might come here to niggle. The main point for galleries, peanut and otherwise, is to determine and judge the process of making scientific data available to the public and particularly so for that coming out of government supported work.
Unfortunately I have seen FOI work most often, i.e. as it is set up to work, only when it is used as a starting point for litigation and the seeker of information has a popular cause and the resources of a large organization behind them. To have an individual with RyanOs background and smarts go after an FOI is of interest to me in that it might be an exception. In addition to the potential of getting some science done/revealed, the replies in these “test” cases are often entertaining if not revealing.
We already know Mann messed up some math, when he took the numbers and tried to use them.
http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/~jsmerdon/papers/2010b_jclim_smerdonetal.pdf
http://holocene.meteo.psu.edu/shared/articles/RMWAcomment_2010_jclim_smerdonetal.pdf
We already know Mann messed up some math, when he took the numbers and tried to use them. Pretty cut-and-dry error.
http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/~jsmerdon/papers/2010b_jclim_smerdonetal.pdf
http://holocene.meteo.psu.edu/shared/articles/RMWAcomment_2010_jclim_smerdonetal.pdf
Well Shoosh, we only care how long anthropogenic CO2 resides in the atmosphere if it has an effect, which it probably does. The argument is over how much effect.
And CE, though he beats the tribal drum as loudly as any, does make an attempt to be scientifically rigourous and consistent. If dirty work at the crossroads is apparent, I trust he’ll concede.
Carrot, you tried to make an insinuation of one of my comments, but misfired. So show us the insinuations.
======================
Speaking of dirty work at the crossroads, see what David Holland and Steve McIntyre are discovering at CA on the Holland thread. Muir Russell did not allow David Holland’s submission, but did let Briffa and Osborn respond to it, which they did in a duplicitous fashion.
All in black and white. What say you, my fine feathered vegevore?
=====================
Oh? As far as I can see, what actually happened here is Ryan FOI’d NCAR/UCAR, they rebuffed the FOI but it looks like NSF might step in and be helpful. I should think discussing agency and institutional behavior vis-a-vis tranparency and FOI in context of a very recent finding about lack of transparency and FOI would be “putting this in context”.
I am wondering if we are going to see agencies act like CRU– rebuffing requests for data– or if we are going to see agencies take transparency seriously.
But people like Nathan and you are trying to bring in irrelevant details about whether you think RyanO did the “right” thing in your view suggesting all sorts of hoops he should be jumping through before writing the FOI.
None of this hoop jumping exercise is relevant assessing NCAR or FOI’s response to FOI once filed.
The important issue is are agencies going to encourage transparency and how are they going to respond to FOI’s when they are sent.
If NCAR does turn out to be covered under FOI, their response was wrong and would have been even if Ryan had never emailed Amman or anyone at all. If NCAR is not covered by FOI, their response is correct, and he should have gone straight to NSF. In which case, NSF at least appears to be behaving correctly — which would be a good thing.
If these agencies encourage transparency we will be entering an era where outsiders have a predictable path to getting information they want to obtain. Otherwise, we will likely repeat episodes like we witnessed with CRU.
You want to focus on details that are irrelevant to evaluating what the agencies are doing? Fine. Sure. If Ryan– or any outsider– figures out some way to get information outside FOI, then the FOI won’t be filed. Moreover, in this case, if Amman was the sort of person who responded to email, we also might not be at this point now. And if the authors of the Amman paper had had a more thorough SI, we might not be here. And if bloggers would just not bother their purty little heads about data that isn’t available and would just make do with the data that is available, we might not be here. And if… And if…
But as much as you want to focus on these “what if’s”, they are hardly the important issue.
The important issue is: Are agencies like NCAR/UCAR and NSF going to encourage transparency? Or are they just going to take a big step back and permit things like we saw at CRU?
Easy solution: Mandatory FOI for all policy critical data. We are there already. CE hasn’t woken up and still dreams of the good old days.
========================
The initial requests are an irrelevant detail? That’s a crock.
I suppose the initial emails to Jones et al, before the FOI requests, were also irrelevant details?
The reason why somebody felt that they had to resort to FOI is very much part of the story. If Ammann had written back and said “no, it’s mine, all mine, and I hate you”, I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t have been an “irrelevant detail”.
As it is, we’ve gone into FOI land, and now all the bureaucratic legalistic waste of time comes in. Is NCAR even subject to FOI? Who knows. Does it matter that NSF was part funder? Who knows. Who cares. But once you go FOI, this stuff starts to matter. All when an informal request to the appropriate author was not tried.
Carrot
Yep. And finding those two errors should hardly preclude people being interested in investigating further.
Consider that eduardo zorita writes:
For all you know, RyanO might be interested in examining whether the papers whose methods contained two errors before implementation of the analysis might also exhibit a third or even fourth error in the actual implementation further down stream. If errors are found further downstream, he might might be interested in discovering whether those “matter”. To find out if the error “matters”, he needs the NCAR monthly data he actually requested.
If you read Zorita’s full comment, I think you can see this sort of investigation might be valuable to resolve some substantial debates revolving about the RegEM method.
(See: http://klimazwiebel.blogspot.com/2010/07/mistake-with-consequences.html)
I have no interest in implementing RegEm myself. But I would think someone diving into the various papers with reporting conflicting results about the efficacy of RegEM, that would probably be a good thing. The method is being used in climate, and the question about how well it works would to be one that “matters”. If that’s what Ryan is looking at, I’m all for it.
“Bureaucratic legalistic waste of time”
Way off, buddy. If FOIs are necessary for garnering the data from policy critical data, with their inherent penalties for failure to perform, then they are hardly a waste of time. And it seems that sometimes that is the case.
Get used to it. It’ll become a requirement before long, and it will be made so because of the poor faith manifested by some researchers, granted, the minority, but they have spoilt it for the rest.
===============
Bah, I meant ‘data from policy critical papers’.
=============
If Science is supposed to be a recognized collector for and a resource of mankind’s knowledge, there should be a recognized mechanism by which an individual can access that knowledge.
People who say, “You should try this or that and see what you get” apparently are not interested in such a mechanism.
Why?
Andrew
Lucia,
First off, I’ve said the whole time that Ryan asked for a reasonable thing. It’d be nice to have that file, if you were trying to analyse the topics in more depth. So don’t argue as if I’ve ever said otherwise.
That said, you need it to poke around at the Ammann paper. The Mann paper, you could find it useful, but you don’t absolutely need it to test Mann’s method with the correctly aligned model field. Smerdon et al diagnosed the error, figured out how to correct it, after all, and put it on their webpage. Of course, if you wanted to make sure that they also did it right, and you would, you’d want the original.
Carrot
It would be a relevant details if the discussion is about Ammann. It’s not particularly relevant to the discussion of the behavior of NCAR or NSF.
My post is about NCAR and NSF, and whether or not the agencies are going to encourage tranparency. It’s not about the behavior of individual scientists.
Yes it matters if NCAR is subject to FOI. It matters NSF was part funder. Who cares? I do. And yes, I care whether funding agencies require material created using tax payer money is made available to the public.
And even if you don’t care, Muir Russell had this suggestion vis-a-vis funders:
So, presumably, they cared enough to advise funding agencies make their requirements clear.
You have things a bit confused. FOI exists because the things that make you think “who cares?” matter a lot to many people– particularly those whose taxes support both NSF and NCAR. Lack of transparency always mattered to these people. The Freedom of Information act was devised as a solution for the tendency of many agencies to be functionally opaque.
So, questions of whether FOI will be respected by agencies matter and matter much more than whether or not an individual– e.g. Ryan– followed some protocol Carrot Eater would prefer Ryan followed.
Carrot-
Why would I need to poke around the Ammann paper? Because I wrote a post wondering if agencies are going to encourage transparency or enforce FOI?
That’s nonsense.
Where do you think I’ve suggested you said specific material Ryan requested was unreasonable? I don’t think I said that.
I have said you are focusing on questions of whether or not he followed some protocol you prefer before filing an FOI. I think your questions focus on a topic that is unimportant relative to the question of how agencies responded to FOI. I also pointed out that the latter more important topic is the subject of my post.
He’s got the bone of contributing author to chew on in the corner. For him, you are barking up the wrong tree.
There are lots of trees
In the forest primeval.
Bark on Blind Woodman.
=====================
Oh, heck, the ‘bone of corresponding author’.
================
Lucia,
You’ve become a bureaucrat. Congratulations.
What matters is whether Ryan gets the data. All the rest of it is bureaucracy.
Yes, I see you’re taking that very narrow focus of what NCAR or NSF’s responsibilities are. But how can you separate the topic from the individual scientists? Encourage transparency where? On the level of the individual scientists. Why are we even talking about NCAR and NSF? Because of failed communications with an individual scientist.
Since you’ve taken this bureaucratic mindset, you’ve forgotten what matters. What matters is whether Ryan gets the data he wants. And the fastest and easiest way to have that happen would be for the informal channels to work, and leave the bureaucrats out of it entirely. And when you do that, it doesn’t matter what NCAR’s status is.
When you go informally, it doesn’t flipping matter whether NCAR is subject to FOI or not. You get in touch with the right person, and you get what you want.
But when you go formally, that sort of thing matters. You file an FOI. Well, can you even file that FOI in the first place? You start getting into all sorts of legalistic details, that you would not need if you were able to email the author and just get what you wanted, regardless of whether he was funded by the US government or BP or space aliens.
These are among the practical reasons why you do other stuff first, before you file the FOI.
???
I mean, if you were a human being who was interested in analysing the subject of Ammann’s paper more closely, then you would like to have the data that Ryan is asking for. I was saying that I agree with Ryan that what he’s asking for is useful.
I am not saying Lucia needs to do any of those things.
Heh, Rees must be a bureaucrat, too. Hot stuff: See Bishop Hill’s latest post about Graham Stringer questioning Rees about the ClimateGate. There are some curious answers from Rees, suggesting that there will be an effort to keep data from the apostates.
Read it and weep.
============
“And the fastest and easiest way to have that happen would be for the informal channels to work, and leave the bureaucrats out of it entirely.”
Generalization vs. Generalization time.
If they worked really well all the time, that would be great, wouldn’t it?
Evidently, they don’t work really well all the time. And sometimes they don’t work at all.
Thanks.
Andrew
Carrot–
Sorry, but more than one thing matters.
You write this as if only one thing can matter in the world. Do you live in some “we must embrace the either/or fallacy world?
Whether members of the public can get information more generally also matters. Whether individuals can predict whether they will get information also matters. Whether they are going to be forced to jump through hoops, wait, wonder, also matters. Given the lack of transparency we have witnessed in the past, whether or not agencies encourage or enforce sharing matters. These other things matter a lot.
There are plenty of examples in the past where getting in touch with the right person doesn’t result in getting what you want. That’s why FOI exists and why it matters whether agencies are subject to it.
How many times do I have to agree with you on this point?
But it’s not as if this is the only point in the world excluding even things like “getting a balanced diet is a good thing” or “kids should learn to read”.
Whether or not agencies will enforce transparency matters a lot. I don’t know why a blog post about this bothers you so much. I don’t know why pointing out that in the past some did not enforce transparency (CRU) and that an investigation into their behavior resulted in serious criticism of their behavior. I don’t know why it bothers you that I might be curious about whether our agencies in the US are going to behave like CRU or as advised by Muir Russell.
If you want to write a blog post giving people advice on precise protocol that will result in outsiders, or known critics getting data every time without resorting to FOI, complete with experimental evidence that your method will work every time, along with data showing how long it took to get the information the recipient thought adequate, have at it. Send me the link an I’ll alert people to your post.
But the fact that you wrote a post on the one issue you think “matters” won’t suddenly make the question of agencies (i.e. NSF, NCAR, CRU) attitude toward transparency unimportant to the public.
So here we have Carrot advocating a vaguely/barely described informal “process” that is not guaranteed to work on any particular occasion.
That’s salesmanship! I wish used car salesman were so honest!
I do not see the scientific thinking in this. If there is, I would be grateful if someone could tease it out for me. 😉
Andrew
Carrot– Ok. The comment started with “Lucia” and I thought “you” referred to me.
I agree that Ryan needs the data he requested to evaluate the Amman paper which is one of the reasons he gives for requesting it. I think we both agreed on this point long ago.
Fair Lady and Me
Would cross the sea
“Where’s the boat
That sometimes floats?”
Lucia,
What would you do and say if it turned out that work done at NCAR, and work funded there by NSF, is actually not subject to FOI?
Would it all be fine and dandy then, that nobody gave Ryan some model results, based on that fact?
This is why I think it’s weird that you’re placing so much emphasis on that facet. I think Ryan can reasonably expect to receive those model results, even if the work were funded by non-FOI-able space aliens. What matters in the end is that he gets the results, because they are published results; it’s a perfectly reasonable thing to request; the norm in the field and even that lab group seems to be that such results are made available, and probably (I don’t know) the journal’s policy would require it. At no point in my logic chain does it matter whether it’s FOIable or not.
Dave Andrews (Comment#50016) July 26th, 2010 at 3:22 pm
Phil,
“In the cases where I have shared code with others (both to and from), there have been very clear binding agreements, limitations on further distribution and in some cases payment (commercial users).â€
Is that because your employers insist upon it, or because your research is not completely publically funded? Either way, if you are working in the publically funded sector such attitudes are no longer appropriate in today’s age
A mixture of all except the employer’s insistence. I one instance I was able to borrow Brian Spalding’s CFD code for a grad student to work with, the conditions were that we always acknowledge that the code was Brian’s, that we not distribute the code to anyone else, the code could be an appendix to the PhD thesis, separately bound, that not be distributed with the thesis, and that we not retain the code past the student’s study. I was also involved in a research program which developed a CFD code, this was funded partly by the government, consisted of ten’s of man-years and cost $100,000s, there’s no way any Tom, Dick or Harry who calls up gets that.
A friend of mine developed a code which he used to improve the wing design of Boeing, McD, etc airliners, do you think he should give that away when he writes a paper on wing design? If the conditions of a grant were that any code written would be public property I probably wouldn’t accept the grant.
Re: carrot eater (Jul 27 11:06),
Let me begin by quoting myself:
Note that the response from NSF asked Ryan for evidence the work was done under an NSF grant, and the fact that they ask Ryan to perfect his request by listing the grants strongly suggests that NSF thinks that means it’s covered under FOI.
However, it it turns out that work under NSF grants are not covered under FOI, I would suggest the statute should be modified to remedy this lapse or NSF should change it’s rules to require disclosure above and beyond the minimum required by FOI.
It’s the subject of one post, and you consider this “so much emphasis”?
Sure. But as I’ve noted on your previous points, we aren’t faced with “either/or” situations here.
The fact that ideally, scientists and agencies should be transparent even when FOI doesn’t apply doesn’t mean we can’t be attentive to how it applies to agencies, and how agencies respond to these requests.
I agree. I already said the scientists shouldn’t care whether the request comes as FOI, as a private email a telephone call or not. They should be happy to grant the request either way. If we look at the logic chain, it also shouldn’t matter if a person wanting data contacts someone other than the corresponding author. Ryan should be able to contact Amman by email and if Amman thinks Joos is the proper person to answer, he should spend 30 seconds forwarding that email to Joos then Joos gives Ryan the data. If the requests comes to Amman by way of FOI instead of email, and Joos has the data, Amman should tell people Joos has the data. FOI vs. email shouldn’t matter: Amman should hand over the data either way.
Your observation that some — possibly even those who do not respond to email– get grumpy about FOI, and the fact that the request was made through FOI might trigger obstreporousness seems true enough. It’s childish behavior on the part of the scientists, and some requesting data might want to consider that for reasons of efficiency.
With regard to any individual data request, what matters is whether data can be obtained. If it’s obtained under FOI, great. If it’s obtained by some other mechanism, great too. If scientists find excuses not to provide data, not great.
Of course, if we are concerned with the more larger issue of transparency, it also matters that FOI exists, who it applies to and that agencies subject to FOI implement procedures to enforce it’s dictates.
So, we’ll be watching and see what happens. I’m hoping Ryan gets his data.
Phil
I’m surprised Spalding let you include the code in an appendix!
People do use all sorts of commercial does and don’t distribute the source. Heck, people might use EXCEL, Matlab or all sorts of common place commercial codes. Those source codes don’t need to be “freed” just because someone happened to use them to do something.
I’m generally not in the “free the code” camp because it’s very difficult to identify where to draw a boundary between what must be free and what can be kept separate. On the other hand, I am in the “free the data” or “free the input/output” camp.
lucia (Comment#50069) July 27th, 2010 at 11:32 am
Phil
I’m surprised Spalding let you include the code in an appendix!
Yeah it had to do with the university regulations, what we were able to do was to bind it separately with a ‘do not circulate’ instruction. Everybody was happy, the student contributed some good stuff on the treatment of sprays in the code so Brian got some benefit from it too. Actually it was the start of a fruitful collaboration, Fluent being one of the results.
Phil
A lot of research papers with results based on using Fluent appear in the engineering literature. Clearly, people don’t need Fluent to be released for the information in these papers to be useful to people in the field.
I’m pretty sure Fluent was not permissible for various Hanford applications though– precisely because it didn’t meet the appropriate V&V. I’m pretty sure the decision not to meet the paperwork and inspection requirements was entirely financial on Spalding’s part.
That said, the codes used weren’t released to the public either. The checks didn’t require releasing source code to the public, archiving it etc. But they did require a level of V&V not required for journal articles.
(I don’t know all the ins and outs of the V&V in different applications. But I remember the robots guys debating whether it could ever conceivably be possible to write a code to operate a robot arm inside a waste tank. Some thought it was entirely possible to write a code that made resulted in safer operation of the arm than possible if guided by human operators. But that wasn’t the same as figuring out how to manage to meet the requirements for V&V for a code. The issues were: how do you ever prove that there can be no bug that under some circumstance would not result in the robot arm punching a hole in the wall, or doing some other untoward thing? Of course, you also can’t prove a human operator won’t every do precisely the same thing– but that’s not a V&V issue. )
I tend to think of code as IP. There should be no compulsion to give it out, but in some cases it’s better for everybody if you do.
Lucia, on the stuff above: I think it basically comes down to you using legal norms, in the chance that they might be applicable in this particular case (which we’ll presumably find out), whereas I’m applying more academic norms either which way. So to me, the higher appeal is the journal’s policies on access.
Carrot–
No.Because, as I’ve said many times here, I didn’t advise anyone resorting to legal avenues first. If they want to contact a journal– fine.
I just don’t think one should criticize anyone for feeling free to use FOI while you seem to think someone needs to follow some stringent set of rules before they get use avenues set up by the government to get information from government agencies (i.e. NCAR).
Why the journal? If someone thinks that method will work, I think they should feel free to do so. But, with respect to work at NCAR, I don’t see any advantage over using FOI.
Contacting a journal and getting them to enforce rules is just as likely to make a researcher grumpy as contacting his employer and getting the employer to enforce rules.
But there is a clear disadvantage to contacting a journal: The journal is a private entity which may have policies of their own– but ultimately, they are private publishing houses and have no particular fiduciary duty to the public.
In contrast, there is a good reason to contact NCAR. Amman appears to be an employee of NCAR; with respect to his work as for NCAR (not an academy) he one is not dealing with “an academic”.
NSF is a government agency. NCAR is not a college or university, it is a program under that federal agency– specifically NSF.
It’s perfectly reasonable for a taxpayer/voter/member of public who wants information held by an NCAR staff to use methods provided by NSF and NCAR to get the information. NSF and NCAR both have fiduciary responsibilities to tax payers/voters etc. FOI is a formal method set up to permit people to request documents from various US agencies.
If it binds NSF or NCAR, there is little reason not to use it rather than trying to send letters to journal editors to get them to do exert pressure on a scientist.
No Carrot. You will deny this forever but everybody knows that Mann made that graph to try and make it look like the medieval warm period was cooler than the temperatures today. I’ve read all the stuff on it already, Mann claims that he never intended it to be used as an important indicator of climate or something like that..that is a bunch of bs. Let me ask you a question, when you saw the Mann graph, did you know about the medieval warm period in the first place? I never did. Then I saw all sorts of reports about how it never existed, or it was not as warm as today’s temperatures. I thought global warming was real for a while, still didn’t care about it really but after seeing all the scare reports I decided to do some quick research.
Step 1: Scientists claim unprecendented amount of co2 in atmosphere.
Solution: find graph of historical levels of co2, including historical average.
Findings: Scientists tell huge fat lie. Historical levels of co2 were much higher, and on average are higher than today. Co2 levels were very high and are so low today, only possible explanation. Earth did something with it.
Conclusion: anyone who thinks the earth cannot take out less co2 than it did before is stupid.
Not blaming him exactly, but I do blame those in the peanut gallery who jump to their preferred conclusions.
To clarify my point: I respect RyanO’s judgment in this case and since he has all the facts at hand I accept it over others who might come here to niggle. The main point for galleries, peanut and otherwise, is to determine and judge the process of making scientific data available to the public and particularly so for that coming out of government supported work.
Unfortunately I have seen FOI work most often, i.e. as it is set up to work, only when it is used as a starting point for litigation and the seeker of information has a popular cause and the resources of a large organization behind them. To have an individual with RyanOs background and smarts go after an FOI is of interest to me in that it might be an exception. In addition to getting some science done/revealed, the replies are often entertaining in these “test” cases.
Lucia,
You’re touchy about whether somebody is being criticised or not. Whatever. My point is, keep focused on the goal. The goal is to get the data you want. And I think filing an FOI is a very slow and imperfect way of going about it, compared to one obvious avenue that was possibly left untried here. I’ve said that a million times, and you’ve more or less agreed.
I’m not talking about a stringent set of rules; I’m just saying what I think is the best way of going about it. The FOI avenue is of course still available in my approach, assuming it’s applicable in that case; it’s just further down the list from “email the corresponding author”.
IF you think my pointing out the possibility of that much easier step is criticism of somebody who got themselves into the FOI process, then so be it. I don’t care.
Now we’re just repeating ourselves. To me, going to the journal is escalation on par with FOI, in terms of the grumpy factor. I’ve said that. But it’s what I’d think of first, and it’d be your only procedural leverage if it wasn’t something subject to FOI in the first place.
A lot of research papers with results based on using Fluent appear in the engineering literature. Clearly, people don’t need Fluent to be released for the information in these papers to be useful to people in the field.
I’m pretty sure Fluent was not permissible for various Hanford applications though– precisely because it didn’t meet the appropriate V&V. I’m pretty sure not the decision not to meet the paperwork and inspection requirements was entirely financial on Spalding’s part.
I just want to make it clear that Fluent wasn’t based on Brian’s code. Just that the research program sparked by that collaboration led ultimately to Fluent. I don’t have anything to do with Fluent but friends from that research group do.
RyanO should cancel his FOI request and instead concentrate all efforts on harassing carrot eater for being a loser.
Shooshmon,
For the life of me I can’t figure out what you’re going on about over there.
You still can’t figure out why rates are important?
Try this.
We have a clean table.
I put pencils on the table at a rate of 11 per minute.
Kim removes those pencils at a rate of 1 per minute.
After ten minutes, we have 100 pencils on the table.
Meaning, if we emit CO2 faster than it can be naturally removed from the atmosphere, then it will build up in the atmosphere. And we know this is happening, because the concentration in the atmosphere is in fact going up. In reality, the numbers are non-constant and different from 10:1 of course.
Then, suppose Kim takes a pencil and stabs me. I die.
Then she continues removing pencils at 1 per minute.
She’ll eventually get them all, but it’ll take a while.
Same thing with CO2. Once we stop emitting, then the levels in the atmosphere will go down, as the ocean takes it up, and in the very long term, as it gets turned into limestone sediments buried at the ocean floor. In reality, the rate of removal is not constant over time of course, but you can see that if it’s slow, it’ll take a while.
Maybe this doesn’t get to your difficulty, because I’m having a heck of a time figuring out what your difficulty is.
Carrot
Once again, we’re seeing “the” as if there is only one goal. It seems that maybe one of your goals may be to insist that only goals you value count?
I also am making the point that it’s important to keep focused on important goals. One of the goals is to have federal agencies ensure transparency.
Whose goal? You are addressing me. Is that my goal? Is it the only possible goal everyone in the entire world must share?
You seem to be insisting that we focus on a goal that doesn’t coincide with the topic of my blog post. Let me repeat: One goal is to make sure that federal agencies ensure transparency in funded programs. This is a valid goal. I’m interested in this goal. My post is predicated on this goal– not the other goal that you seem to think must be “the” goal.
Yes. And I keep pointing out that you are on one particular goal, and seem to insist it’s “the” only important one. The goal you insist is “the” goal is not the only valid goal. It’s not the more important of the goals being discussed here. Your goal is also not the topic of my blog post.
Metaphor time:
I recognize that if you think the only goal is to drive in nails, you’ll wax philosophical on why one needs a nail gun and how everyone needs to focus on getting the nail gun, and do research on all varieties of nail guns.
But if someone else tells you they have the slightly different goal of actually building a house and making sure it’s safe to live in, they may keep telling you they need to worry about finding suppliers to sell them wood, setting up quality standards for materials, and consulting safety specifications.
If, metaphorically, you want to go back to hammering away about “the” (definite article” need for nail guns and how driving nails is “the” goal and providing lectures about which nail guns are best and how I need to focus on “the” goal of finding the best nail gun….well…. uhmm.. ok. I’ll keep agreeing that you have found a dandy nail gun and that appears to be a jack dandy way of driving nails.
But I’ll keep pointing out that driving nails not “the” (definite article) only thing that matters. Maybe you’ll see this. Or maybe your vision is so narrow you can’t see that one might have goals other than driving in a nail.
Ugh.
I am speaking about what I would advise somebody in Ryan’s position to do, if I wanted to get data without too much muss or fuss, after one author blew me off.
You, on the other hand, are worried about the disposition of NCAR. Somewhat under the assumption that you know legally what their disposition should be. And if you are wrong, your response is to have the law itself changed. Well, OK, but that’s a little glib and looking two steps ahead; the NCAR should figure out how exactly the law applies to them, and then act on it. I have no clue how the law applies to them.
We’re talking about two entirely different things, which has been clear for some time. So I don’t know why it keeps going in circles.
“I don’t know why it keeps going in circles.”
Because you have to have the last word?
Andrew
That could be. Apologies.
Carrot–
So, in other words, you are giving advise to someone who is not participating in comments on a topic that is only tangentially related to the blog post. When giving that advise, you are referring to that absent person as “you”.
First–You must not be reading what I wrote if you think I’m under the assumptoin I know legally what their disposition should be. The post itself indicates I don’t know legally what their disposition is. See paragraph that starts, “Even if it turns out NCAR is not subject to FOI, …” I’ve repeated this notion that I don’t know in comments.
But at least you seem to be acknowledging the subject of my post is about NCAR, NSF and agency responses. It’s not about “what should Ryan or people like him do?”
Well… not “if I’m wrong” because I didn’t say what the law is and in fact indicated I don’t know. So, I can’t actually be “wrong”.
But yes, if FOI does not require information created under funded programs to be provided to the public, I want the law expanded to ensure greater transparency. I’d said that in comments and requoted it back to you when you later asked.
Maybe it’s because you keep wanting to give advise to Ryan who is not even here in comments, and when you give that advise, you start posts with “Lucia” and then use the word “you” to refer to what you think “Ryan”. If you want to give Ryan advise you might want to use replace the word “you” in your comments with “Ryan”.
But then Andrew_KY should have said “Because both of you have to have the last word?” 😉
I think we have done a nice and thorough job setting the stage for obtaining the services of the Carrot Eater to show us all how easy it is, by applying his approach, to procure the materials that RyanO has been seeking. I would even be willing to make a donation for his valuable time required – although by his own estimations that would not be all the that expensive.
I see it as a win/win situation whereby the Carrot Eater and even perhaps Amman could show us all that our previous pursuits of information were all wrong and the outgrowth of a wrongheaded view of consensus scientist and their attitudes towards sharing information. The time consuming FOI request could be withdrawn and RyanO gets his data and the science goes forward.
Carrot eater is secretly Caspar Ammann.
Lucia,
It’s called a hypothetical. If somebody were in this position, this is what they could do. Since that position was very much necessary to getting to this stage, I don’t see how that isn’t relevant.
It was the framing of your post that I objected to.
Stuff like
assumes a certain ill-will by Ammann, despite your protests that you didn’t mention him. And it assumes that ill-will before you lifted a finger to find out the circumstances of how we got to this point. That’s what got Nathan (or was it bugs, i forget) too, but he went off in some weird ways as well.
and what does that even mean? Like NCAR, NSF will consider what the authors’ obligations actually are. Is that all you mean? Or is there meant to be some sort of soul searching, with new policies made up on the spot?
Oh well. I’m bored of it.
Lucia
all my comments earlier in this thread were to determine if you actually had any interest in either the data that RyanO wanted or in helping RyanO obtain the data. The upshot was that you had no interest in the data and that this thread was simply an opportunity to point the nasty finger at scientists. Seems to have been borne out in the end.
Smart move, to distance yourself from Fluent…
When I saw Lucia’s comment that included “Fluent” and “V&V” I laughed out loud, oh man, thanks for that.
Carrot
Lucia was first to mention Amman by name.
Nathan (Comment#49768)
July 24th, 2010 at 7:21 pm
“It appears RyanO has requested data from NCAR/UCAR, the request has been refused, and RyanO may now be embarked on dealing with the same sort of run-around treatment exihibited by CRUâ€
I’m confused.
Have they actually said “No?
Did they actually say something like “Write the request properly and we will deal with it in the appropriate wayâ€,
From your post at Comment#49736 it looks like you don’t actually know the details, but it certainly could be something like I suggested above.
lucia (Comment#49770)
July 24th, 2010 at 7:29 pm
Nathan–
Evidently, Amman just ignored the request. So, technically, there is no “Noâ€, just utter failure to responde.
So, given that he couldn’t get a response, RyanO had to resort to FOI– there really isn’t an alternative. Then UCAR/NCAR responded that FOI doesn’t apply so he went to NSF, who seems to suggest writing it in the proper legalese language. So, NSF the funding agency– not the scientists– appears to be responsive. (I think my main blog post captures this by suggesing NSF may save the scientists form themselves.)
Given that NSF appear to be helping, Ryan is now dealing with them. However, the requests require legalise since it’s now through FOI.
Ordinarly, people aren’t required to resort to legalese. Scientists don’t ignore requests. ”
Then followed it up with that weird line at the end about how Scientists don’t normally ignore requests… Weird because later in the thread it appears as if most people are saying that FOI is a perfectly reasonable thing to do and isn’t meant to be an ‘attack’…
Why would you need FOI if scientists don’t normally ignore requests?
This whole thread is bizarre…
Nathan–
Well, if you had better communication skills, you could have achieved your goal by asking two questions:
1) Do you personally want to obtain this data?
2) Is the purpose of your post to solicit advise for RyanoO to get the data?
The answer would be no, and no. You would have achieved your goal almost instantly. But you asked all those peculiar questions instead.
My post discusses discuss transparency, historic lack of transparency by scientists, agencies not encouraging and enforcing rules devised to force transparency, and watching whether or not agencies are going to take begin to take rules enforcing transparency seriously– which happens to be recommended by Muir Russell. My purpose in posting was to discuss these issues.
I certainly make no apologies for discussing these issues which I believe are more important than discussing details about how what one particular person might do to get one particular data set.
Carrot–
No. Actually, it appears NSF may be gearing up to enforce obligations– which I would laud. If they do, this will go far to prevent scientists various inclinations from impeding, slowing, complicating or blocking access to data. That would be a good thing. That’s what I mean.
FWIW: If NSF does not enforce requirements, I will criticize NSF. I and others are probably watching– and will be discussing this as it unfolds.
If this bothers Nathan, well, so be it. I think it’s important to watch this unfold.
It’s bed time. Sweet dreams. 🙂
Nathan [50094]
There is a pretty important groups of rather nasty [as in arrogant, righteous and self appointed holders of the “truth”] scientists who well deserve to have a “nasty” finger pointed at them. With everything that has come to light over the past 18 months or so, anyone who still does not see this as a problem is out to lunch.
So if that is what Lucia has [inadvertently] done [because I am not at all certain that is what she would have had in mind], so be it. About time.
Nathan–
Because they sometimes act abnormally and ignore or refuse them. When that happens, we need FOI.
And yes, I brought up Amman’s name when you expressed confusion and seemed to want to know the back story about how the FOI came into being and the order of things that happened. I could have just told you to go read the link at Climate Audit. 🙂
Re: jeff id (Jul 27 18:08),
Nah. Carrot answers email.
Lucia
Sure you can say it’s just some post about the lack of availability of data or whatever… But really it’s just opportunistic rubbish.
“My post discusses discuss transparency, historic lack of transparency by scientists, agencies not encouraging and enforcing rules devised to force transparency, and watching whether or not agencies are going to take begin to take rules enforcing transparency seriously– which happens to be recommended by Muir Russell. My purpose in posting was to discuss these issues. ”
It doesn’t really ‘discuss’ any of them. All you do is basically say:
“They don’t do it, they’re naughty, their reputation suffers”
That’s not a discussion, just you stating your opinion.
And when people tried to discuss it with you, that is find out more details about: what the problem was; what alternatives could be used (in this specific case); How many times the data was requested; etc. All being VERY relevant to a discussion like this, You spent your time mocking those who tried. You mocked people who suggested trying different ways to access the data. You mocked them saying things like “That’s not exactly what he requested”, when in fact you didn’t really know what he wanted or why.
So, yes, in the end you used this as an opportunity to point your nasty stick as scientists.
Nathan–
First: No. Your questions were not relevant to the actual subject of my post. They were relevant to a subject you would prefer me to address in my post. But I permit people to go off topic, so an answered the questions.
Second, you are making silly claims like this:
Of course I knew what he asked for and why. I knew becuase Iread what he asked for, read the reason he stated in the FOI and I have reading skills somewhat above those of the average 10 year old.
If you look further down in the thread, you will discover I did email RyanO, who confirmed that my reading comprehension worked just fine and, indeed, he could not use the various rocks you were suggesting he might want to devote his time and energy examining. He needs what he asked for.
If you think pointing out that someone with ordinary reading comprehension skills could tell that the diversions you were suggesting did not match Ryan’s requests is “mocking”, then so be it.
Lucia
“Your questions were not relevant to the actual subject of my post”
What??
The first lines of your post are:
“It appears RyanO has requested data from NCAR/UCAR, the request has been refused, and RyanO may now be embarked on dealing with the same sort of run-around treatment exihibited by CRU.”
My question were:
“I’m confused.
Have they actually said “No?
Did they actually say something like “Write the request properly and we will deal with it in the appropriate wayâ€,
From your post at Comment#49736 it looks like you don’t actually know the details, but it certainly could be something like I suggested above.”
How could they be not MORE relevant. You were making the case that RyanO is another example of scientists witholding data… When it was clear you didn’t actually know the background. Heck it wasn’t until after my prompting that you actually found the details out!
Nathan–
The subject of my post is not a detailed history of every single thing Ryan did and for that reason does not include a listing of all the details that one would find in such a history. This is not a deficiency. It is true my post was triggered by a request being filed, and NCAR rebuffing it– but that doesn’t mean the post is intended to be about the request. The request gives context to why I am writing about this issue now rather than say, immediately after Muir Russell published their criticism of CRU’s lack of transparency and their handling of FOI.
You are correct that I did not research details that were not germane to my post. Nevertheless, I indulged you and went to the effort to drop an email to Ryan, and let you know. Had you wished to make the effort, you could have asked someone for his email and asked him these questions yourself.
As for your constant complaints about my not knowing enough to write the post I actually wrote: The statements I made in my post were based on things I knew to be correct when I posted. The knowledge I had was sufficient for the subject I was exploring. When I did indulge your curiosity about side issues, the answers from Ryan confirmed the statements I made were correct.
I’m not sure why you have your tights in a twist over this. Good night.
I didn’t get my tights in a twist, I don’t have any tights…
“When I did indulge your curiosity about side issues…”
It’s hilarious that you think finding out what happened with RyanO is a side issue. It’s completely the issue, why bring it up in the first place then?
The problem is that you keep making claims like:
“It appears RyanO has requested data from NCAR/UCAR, the request has been refused…”
Then I asked you
“Have they actually said “No?””
And you say:
“Evidently, Amman just ignored the request. So, technically, there is no “Noâ€, just utter failure to responde.”
So in checking the details we find that RyanO’s request had not actually been refused… See, completely the issue.
I suggested a whole raft of reasons why this could be, which you mocked. You showed no inclination to find out.
But just now I note you say:
“It is true my post was triggered by a request being filed, and NCAR rebuffing it”
What? So did NCAR rebuff it? that was the first question I asked you… And you said ‘technically no’…
Anyway. I’ll stop now, lest I be accused of getting my knickers in a knot.
I think some people have a very optimistic view of communication standards among scientists (and of their own importance).
To put things bluntly: scientists (especially senior scientists) mostly do not feel any obligation to answer emails from unknown people – even colleagues. When they do answer, it may be weeks after the fact, and after several reminders. That’s “academic time” for you. Did you ever wonder why these article reviews took so long – do you think reviewers spend all this time actually reading the paper?
So it’s not just about you skeptics (though the history obviously doesn’t help) – it’s the way things are, in general. The job of a scientist is to do science, and anything that does not directly contribute to that tends to get a very low priority. Now consider that senior scientists also have to deal with significant administrative and (in some cases) teaching duties, generating tens of emails and much gnashing of teeth every day.
So random email from random person asking for random data may well fail to attract attention.
Also, FWIW, I subscribe to the general observation: sending an FOIA request after a couple of emails to the non-corresponding author of a paper (and gloating about it in inflammatory terms on the blogosphere) will have you marked as a loon. Even if you’re not familiar with the concept of corresponding authors, there’s this thing called a phone number, which people expect you to use before unleashing the dogs of Law upon their sorry glutei maximi.
IMHO, YMMV, IANAL, OMGBBQ, etc.
Nathan
Click the link to CA provided in the post. That specific data request was refused.
Yes. NCAR, as an entity specifically rebuffed the request. Amman, an NCAR employee, ignored it. You asked about the more vague “they”.
toto (Comment#50106) July 28th, 2010 at 5:08 am et al…
This nonsense. What a crock. What a bunch of excuses.
As I have shared a gazillion times… My husband is a senior scientist in the environmental field (also a state licensed one) and he answers his email ASAP and sends data from his paper to whomever asks. Why? Because he is proud of his work and loves to talk about it.
He wouldn’t ignore an email just because he didn’t know the name. In fact those emails grab his attention even more. He has also emailed other scientists and researchers cold without knowing them and hasn’t been ignored or treated as you describe as “normal” ever. Most scientists LOVE to talk about and even to argue about their work. Are you kidding me?
I think you want us to believe in this bizarro world you are painting. But these behaviors and “rules of engagement” only apply to this handful of networking “climate scientists” in truth. Everyone knows why. It is because their methods and data are below the standards that most other scientists hold on to and these “climate scientists” have a ideological motivation and belief system that goes hand in hand with their “work” and if you they don’t know if you comply and belong to “the club” you get treated with petty attitudes and maybe even hostile ones, no matter what your background or credits are.
“The job of a scientist is to do science, and anything that does not directly contribute to that tends to get a very low priority”
REPLICATION of an experiment is not a low priority to a good scientist.
toto (Comment#50106) July 28th, 2010 at 5:08 am et al…
This nonsense. What a crock. What a bunch of excuses.
As I have shared a gazillion times… My husband is a senior scientist in the environmental field (also a state licensed one) and he answers his email ASAP and sends data from his paper to whomever asks. Why? Because he is proud of his work and loves to talk about it.
He wouldn’t ignore an email just because he didn’t know the name. In fact those emails grab his attention even more. He has also emailed other scientists and researchers cold without knowing them and hasn’t been ignored or treated as you describe as “normal” ever. Most scientists LOVE to talk about and even to argue about their work. Are you kidding me?
I think you want us to believe in this bizarro world you are painting. But these behaviors and “rules of engagement” only apply to this handful of networking “climate scientists” in truth. Everyone knows why. It is because their methods and data are below the standards that most other scientists hold on to and these “climate scientists” have a ideological motivation and belief system that goes hand in hand with their “work” and if you they don’t know if you comply and belong to “the club” you get treated with petty attitudes and maybe even hostile ones, no matter what your background or credits are.
“The job of a scientist is to do science, and anything that does not directly contribute to that tends to get a very low priority”
REPLICATION of an experiment is not a low priority to a good scientist.
This NONSENSE needs to stop and stop now.
“This NONSENSE needs to stop and stop now.”
Hi Liza, 🙂
Maybe Carrot will help us to stop this nonesense if we email him/them with a lil’ suga’ and sprinkle some ♥ ♥ ♥’s in it. 😉
Andrew
Liza, that’s what I also do. Sending reprints to and answering e-mails from people interested in my area of science, often amateurs – doesn’t make any difference. And sometimes also sending emails to people who I don’t know personally, only from their papers. And they mostly respond, surprise, surprise…
But – maybe it’s because the mycology field is less politicized. We aren’t expected to save the world from getting grilled. 😉
In toto, the remarks, blocked at the end of this post, well summarize the attitude that the public (yeah, the paying public) will have to deal with when requesting critical data (we have been informed previously that requesting data beyond a collaborative work by fellow scientists is rarely done) from academics/scientists/advocates.
The question here then becomes: whose behavior/attitude needs adjusting in order to get information to the public or whether the public needs to know or can properly understand the material being requested (the trust us approach – and on your dime).
I say bring on the FOIA and publicize it to all ends of the internet in order to put proper pressure on the non communicating academics/scientists/advocates. Even loons will eventually be responded to – and even when the FOIA fails.
It was always my experience that scientists (and engineering types) with whom I communicated in a past life were always willing to “talk” about their projects and even when that talk may have been discouraged and forbidden by competing entities. Is there something different about academic scientists? Is the deference to communication that we see with some climate scientists because of their advocacy positions and the resulting tribalism? Or is the public nature of the internet merely exposing something that has existed for a long time and only recently have scientists had to deal with it?
For pete’s sake. Don’t you people know people who are bad at responding to emails? You find the same thing in the academic world. Some people right back with something useful right away. Some do not. Has nothing to do with climate science or not climate science; it’s just how different people are. The only difference is that some climate-related scientists are more likely to get random emails from the general public, especially the higher profile ones.
*write*, not right.
This a weird, obsessive and rather tiresome thread.
Nathan in particular seems to be oppositional for the sake of being oppositional. The prose style is adult but the content is distinctly adolescent.
It is noteworthy (blogworthy) that especially in the wake of the Climategate that there would be any reluctance to share any data upon which published findings are based.
Amman’s failure to even respond makes it worth a blog post. The fact that Amman is a charter member of the Hockey Team who also refused for years to disclose the data in his purported refutation of M&M’s critique of Hockey Stick I makes it (a) even more comment-worthy and (b) even less likely that the failure to respond to RyanO is a mere oversight. It is not an assault on his reputation to cite facts.
Nathan carps about various imaginary duties that lucia did not discharge such as proving there are no alternative sources, proving that Amman’s nonresponsiveness is intentional, etc.
Maybe instead Nathan should prove that Amman did not actually receive the email nor intend to ignore it, prove the data is available elsewhere, prove that RyanO does not need it to check that which he seeks to check and/or regale us as to why Amman et al get to pick and choose which relied-upon federally-funded data they get to withhold from outside scrutiny. Otherwise, Nathan should leave the shtick about lucia picking on the poor Noble Scientist to bugs and sod who live for that sort of thing.
Tobin,
But as Lucia will tell you, her blog post is not about that at all.
Carrot–
No. As I said, my post is not about amman’s failing to respond to email.
On the other hand, I agree with George that Amman’s failings with respect to responding to could be worth of a blog post. It’s just not what I chose to write about.
Since I didn’t want to write about that specific subject, there was no reason for me to undertake all the investigations Nathan seems to think I needed to undertake. And I agree with George that if Nathan wants to know all those things, and bring forward whatever theories he has about Amman’s unresponsiveness, Nathan can go figure it all out himself and then report back whatever it is he thinks he’s discovered about Amman.
I posted the following comment (first try) as a comment in the Montford thread on RC. Several other posts since mine have been approved and mine no longer shows in moderation:
[quote]Gavin:
I have often posted issues with McI’s criticisms which are exaggerated (overmodeled red noise, etc.). However, I would trust your comments more if they seemed more independant (allowing your differences with Mike to be seen).
One very simple issue is that Mann short-centering was not even DISCLOSED in the methods. Tamino, at least, has indicated to me in the past, that Mike erred by not sharing this. I have tried asking this question here in the past, in relevant threads and my question was censored. No matter. What say you now?[/quote]
ah Lucia, but you did write about Ammann
If you think it’s necessary for some institution (NSF, whoever) to save scientists from themselves, that meant the scientists in question here need saving from something. And you quite explicitly defined that something. but we have no idea whether that something actually happened here, or not. For all we know, I could email Ammann telling him that he may already have won a trip to Tahiti, and he’d ignore that, too. Well, bad example, but you get the point.
Carrot–
In which question?
When I write the word “scientists”, I don’t mean “Amman” or “a small group of scientists involved at NCAR”, any more than Muir Russell meant “Amman” or “Phil Jones” when he wrote “researchers”.
In the sentence you highlight, I use “scientists” to denote a rather general group. I’m hoping NSF and other tax payer supported funding groups (e.g. DOE, DOD or whoever.) will institute and uphold policies that will be applied generally to scientist doing funded work. I hope they apply this not only in this case but to other cases going forward. I even hope this applies more widely than “climate scientists”.
We know that data was not shared. Amman failed to share. He happened to do this by indulging his tendency to not answer email and which happened to result in not sharing it. NCAR failed to share.
Sure. So? First– the paragraph doesn’t point specifically to Amman. But second, if, for some reason, Amman doesn’t respond to email about winning trips from Tahiti, I could say “Amman lost out on an free trip to Tahiti because he indulged his inclination to ignore email announcing he’s won trips.”
But, as I keep pointing out, it’s not as if I can only say one thing. More than one things can be true and I could still observe that Amman indulging in an inclination to ignore email from people like Ryan results in not sharing data with people who might disagree with him.
So, the effect is to indulge in not sharing data with people who disagree with him, making the hypothetical statement that might apply to a subset of scientists specifically apply to Amman. Unlike not winning trips to Tahiti, the not sharing of data with people who might disagree with him harms the reputation of climate scientists.
So, one hopes NSF or other funding agencies will step in and save scientists from damaging themselves by exhibiting this sort of self-indulgent behavior.
Gosh,
I succeed yet again in tying every conversation back to a mail in the pile and no applause! I give you guys the mail that proves ammann doesnt respond and carrot doesnt thank me.
I need new friends.
Jeez, tough crowd.
Ryan0 probably should have followed the McIntyre approach.
1. mail the author.
2. mail the co authors.
3. mail the journal editors.
That way you get a bunch of people. When they fail to respond, when the fail to follow their own guidelines ( if any apply)
Then you got two paths
A. escalate through the chain of command ( sure to fail)
B. escalate through legal channels.
So, Ryan should have contacted others. Its good on three counts:
1. increases the chances of getting the data.(maybe)
2. increases the body count if they deny.
However, I’m enjoying the long thread.
meanwhile over at WUWTS, I’m gaining a certain bit of sympathy for warmista who have to deal with a hordes of the ignorant.
it vexes me
PolyisTCOandbanned–
It will be interesting to see if your comment appears. That said, you’ve been banned so many places. But before we make too much of this, you’ve been banned lots of places. Have you previously been banned at RC under your current handle or any previous one?
If yes, I don’t think we should read too much into your comment not appearing.
As long as you mentioned Tamino-have you noticed the mass deletion of past articles? I clicked back to one where he proposed a bet, but it vanished. Then I saw all old archives were gone. You read that blog– do you have any idea why it happened?
Mosher–
When you say “should” are you suggesting he should do this because the method results in getting data? Or do you mean he should do it, so he can show people were fully and truly unresponsive without FOI?
If people aren’t responsive, I think those who really want data would be wiser to just hit FOI pretty fast. If the goal is to prove that some people really don’t hand out data unless you FOI them.
I’d have advised Joos to email the corresponding author though. Just ‘cuz. But still, I think FOI makes sense.
I mentioned on Tamino’s that it’s hard to find old topics. They’re apparently still there, if you have the correct URL. I was told it was a wordpress issue.
Lucia:
I’ve probably said I was banned at RC, but I beleive my comments go through regular moderation. They’re so controlled there, I never got a foothold to troll anyhow.
I donno about Tamino. Have heard people say that, but haven’t gone to any pages and seen it myself. My first guess would be technical or space or such, vice active purging.
However, it does go to show what a crappy archival method blogs are. Have seen “Chefen” make claims that he had a method to blow Mann out of the water (for d and a, random walk tests). I pointed out to him that he was fixing a trend in his random walks by pinning the start point and fixing the mean. (He had been giving me a lot of crap about how dumb I was, but I detected the flaw in his work.) He said he would go off and try to fix the problem (still researching like Basil, Watts). Then he took the blog down months later (I don’t think for this reason). But bottom line was that he got a bunch of PR and skeptic influence out there and it was never fixed (even to have an archived correction).
mosh
Yes, you did well to pick a relevant nugget out of the haystack. And for once, a nugget that doesn’t really need context that isn’t in the email itself.
Spencer’s attempt to kill the G&T business appeared to draw all the nuts out. I’m surprised just how many people think the greenhouse effect itself is unphysical, and I’m not exactly one to overestimate the quality of the commenters over there.
So what would be the “proper” response of the naive scientist who does not bother to answer emails or who is not aware that he should communicate his data for tax funded projects once he has been made aware of the request with an FIOA. Lets assume that this scientist has no axes to grind and is strictly interested in the science and furthing it.
I would like to think it might be something like: “Let me get you that data as soon as I can. I am so busy doing science that I sometimes forget to comb my hair or change my shirt so please excuse my tardiness and let me know what you plan to do with the data.
You can say that, but you aren’t writing this post if Ammann had answered his darn email. You are shoehorning this case into that broader narrative.
That’s an awkward dance you have there.
More than one thing can be true. But they aren’t all causative, and your statement implies causation.
Suppose we knew that Ammann was taking a hot air balloon ride around the world. Yes, his inclination to take balloon rides would result in not sharing data with people who might disagree with him.
You sure as heck wouldn’t write that same sentence, if you knew that. But if you used the same logic you’re trying to use now, you would.
Yeah, maybe that’s it… he’s taking a baloon ride and is too high to return emails
Well Carrot I guess the question then becomes are we emitting co2 faster than it naturally happened before? I would say the answer ranges from “no” to “impossible”. We know that it takes 5 years to add 1 molecule of co2 to 100,000ppt of atmosphere right? I also would point out that I don’t think people equate the pollution from a dinosaur compared to a car, a horse even. When one of these animals takes a dump, there is a ton of methane that is emitted, which we know is much stronger than co2. Perhaps dinosuar excrement emitted so much methane that it overflowed the carbon sinks, I don’t know.
Lucia, what is so important about RyanO’s FOI request? I think it is time for a new post. Nobody should be surprised that this guy can’t get the information he wants. I actually have a friend that attends Boulder university and she said, “my teachers do not talk about research contradictory toward global warming.” She does not even know who Roger Pielke is, and he teaches there.
Another friend of mine that attends Boulder said another student asked the teacher “What do these emails called climategate mean? Did they make a phony graph?” Teacher said, “Those are private correspondences and we are not discussing them.”
This is all 100% true. No, I cannot give the names of my friends that attend the school, other than that 1 is a boy and 1 is a girl, both believe in global warming.
Shooshmon
When before? Two hundred years ago? Two billion years ago?
I’m also not sure where you’re headed here. The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is obviously going up. Clearly it’s physically possible for it to go up, because it’s happening.
Eh? The concentration is increasing at 2 ppm per year. So in 5 years, that’s 10 ppm.
Anyway, here’s a graph.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Carbon_Dioxide_400kyr.png
Re: PolyisTCOandbanned (Jul 28 12:21),
I self host, and space would never be an issue. WordPress.com blogs should absolutely never have space issues. It’s not that big a deal, but I was curious.
Blogs aren’t archival. They are places to discuss ideas.
Anyway, I was just wondering if anything had been mentioned over there.
carrot, There are two kinds of nuts.
Persistent nuts. Those who beat the same point.
Drive by nuts.
Although it has given me some ideas for doing some posts to crush some nuts.
Finishing up a new release with a User Guide. maybe then some nut crushing. Nick did some cool stuff to enhance KML that I want to add in and I still need to integrate the suggestions you had for the resampling bits.. Taking bits and pieces of Ron Graphics and JeffId/Roman Graphics as well. Need to add some bits for filtering and doing trend lines.. Fun. maybe I shouldnt get distracted by the nuts.
… let’s not forget the fruits.
Shoosman isn’t nuts. Ad Hom hom hom hom
That graph carrot is showing you Shoosman..see those peaks and valleys of that C02 you could say “so?” too …because he doesn’t know and no body knows how much time actually there is between them. And the peaks aren’t hardly any different then “now”. It’s just a graph and the farther back in time we go the data gets fuzzier and fuzzier. It’s all an educated guess with “now” highlighted to cause alarm and gee, look at the C02 rise after the LIA! You know life does that when it gets warm. If you take much much longer periods of time and make another graph the planet is C02 deprived “now” compared to the past, as you say; and those valleys are way more scarier and harmful to life too.
Super sad that the condition of our universities is like that. I’ve heard countless stories from lots of kids and people all over the country just like yours. Don’t teach HOW to think anymore just WHAT to think. That’s the ticket.
Thus we get “The Team” who can’t even employ and automatic “out of office” email reply whilst out ballooning or something but they say they have got the whole planet figured out with computer models. lol
EW, thanks!
Hi Andrew KY!
Yeah, Moshe, we’ll still be here when you get back. Count on that.
Isn’t Jeff Id’s post about the Christiansen paper nice? Good stuff about sensitivity.
==============
MikeC, I forgot to say. You crack me up!
Détente between TCO and Lucia…. wow, maybe progress on climate science is possible after all. 😉
I agree completely with Steven Mosher @Comment#50124
This is of course assuming that RyanO actually wants the data, and this isn’t just an opportunity to lodge a FOI to make some point.
If the data is the desired thing, then certainly a little running around after it is not that big a deal. It’s absolutely the norm.
And Lucia
“If people aren’t responsive, I think those who really want data would be wiser to just hit FOI pretty fast. If the goal is to prove that some people really don’t hand out data unless you FOI them.”
A couple of years ago(?) you and I had a ‘discussion’ about FOI and you were complaining that people shouldn’t have to do it, because it cost a lot of money (and I indicated I didn’t think it was a significant expense). And now you are advocating going straight to it rather than using up all the ‘free’ avenues…
Why on Earth would you encourgae using FOI for instances when you haven’t exhausted other means? Why not email around and at least find out if the author is not on holidays or something.
Thanks Liza … I try…
Oh, and by the way, Liza… someone needs to clobber you over the head for being right… I’m in Redondo Beach fishing right now and I’m freezing my butt off.
Nathan
Are you discussing back when I discussed Bader/Santer?
I still think people shouldn’t have to do it. Scientists should be responsive without forcing people to do it. But I don’t think people who are refused information should hesitate to use it nor should they be steered to running around in circles trying to guess methods to get information.
As I recalled, people were complaining that those asking for FOI were costing the scientists research budgets loads of money taking it away from research. Whether the cost is high or low, the fault for any costs, falls to the those who make it difficult to obtain information through other cheaper channels. In the Santer case, that was Santer– but I see no reason why those who want the data should have hesitated to file the FOI for reasons of cost.
So: In general, I’d prefer agencies to encourage employees to cooperate and give out data that will eventually be available if requested under FOI. This will save the tax payer money. But if an agency chooses to be inefficient, obstreperous or closed to outsiders, that’s no reason for an outsider to bend themselves like pretzels to save the agency or other taxpayers money.
test
Thanks Liza … I try…
Oh, and by the way, Liza… someone needs to clobber you over the head for being right… I’m in Redondo Beach fishing right now and I’m freezing my butt off…
Lucia
“nor should they be steered to running around in circles trying to guess methods to get information. ”
This kind of language isn’t conducive to ‘discussion’.
People aren’t being told to run around in circles. Or is contacting more than the principle author ‘running around in circles’? They are being advised to check if the principal author is there, for a start, and also contacting co-authors, and the university before lodging an FOI. A simple phone call to the Uni should be enough to find out if the author is there, and possibly the opportunity to speak to the author.
“…falls to the those who make it difficult to obtain information through other cheaper channels.”
Yet the onus is also on the person looking for data to make a reasonable attempt at sourcing it.
Perhaps you should write what you think constitutes a reasonable attempt?
oh, get over yourself. Emailing another author. Period.
wow, that’s really running around in circles and bending yourself into a pretzel.
This whole argument by the hippies is ridiculous. Information related to the setting of public policy is a fundamental premise of democracy and freedom. Every state in the Union and the Feds themselves have an open records or freedom of information law. In every case I am aware of, the person requesting information is required to pay for the reproduction of the information… usually what ever the cost of reproduction is… ie 25 cents per page. The availability of the information is directed at the average-Joe-taxpayer… there are no restrictions based on whether Joe Taxpayer is part of any related project or if he is likely to understand the information. It is his right as a citizen and a tax payer to have access to information… with very few exceptions such as the personnel / medical records of employees or national security information.
Since the I / the taxpayer is being asked to pay from our pockets, particularly international welfare checks, taxes and limitations on our lifestyle choices, we have a right to everything that leads to the outcome, especially underlying data…
MikeC
You might think you are, but you aren’t arguing with anybody in here.
Nobody has said this particular set of data shouldn’t be available.
It’s just a question of what’s the best way of going about getting it, and FOI simply isn’t logical/practical/easiest/fastest as the first thing to do.
If you’re able to use google to find the email address of one author, you’re able to use google to find the email address of another author. Or even better, look at the paper and see there’s a little symbol next to the one guys name, and would you fing know it, his email address is right there on the first page of the paper. Yes, glancing at the first page of the paper is now apparently running around in circles and twisting yourself in a pretzel.
Carrot, I realize that the individuals who surround you are often handicapped by substance abuse, so I will forgive your silly response.
RyanO is simply getting the run around… everyone seems to be expending more energy trying to prevent him from accessing the data than it would normally take to just give it to him… everyone, that is, except the scientist himself who is ignoring his requests.
This is just like Jones-the-exonerated who tells everyone to delete emails amongst other stunts.
But, hey, maybe that’s just what they’re used to since, as Jones-the-exonerated testified, none of the official reviewers ever asked him for the data… so why give it to non-official reviewers who will probably find something wrong with it?
There is no need to offer extremes, change the subject, distract or etc. The AGW advocates are hiding data from folks who have a right to that data… period.
MikeC
I think you prove the danger that Lucia presents. Quite rational people will believe there are huge conspiracies, rather than much more simple conclusions. That there is some system in place that is deliberately witholding data from the Blog-scientist-auditors of this world… It’s quite insane.
“RyanO is simply getting the run around… everyone seems to be expending more energy trying to prevent him from accessing the data than it would normally take to just give it to him… everyone, that is, except the scientist himself who is ignoring his requests.”
This is really quite amusing, as it was basically Carrot Eater who was the one who truly went out off his way to attempt to find the data. All these people complaining that data is difficult to access, and no one even tried.
You claim he was given ‘the run around’, when RyanO, emailed one person three times (for no response), then emailed NCAR (who said “No”) and then spoke to NSF who gave him advice… Ummm That’s not really much of a run around is it?
…Oh, and while the AGW advocates try to hide the decline, the data and the missing heat… SOI is going ballistic, the 20C isotherm has broken the surface, negative anomalies are below -1 in the 3.4 region with -4 pooling below the surface… meaning that a mad La Nina is developing which billions of dollars worth of computers didn’t predict 1 month ago.
Nathan, may I offer that your thoughtful and logical response proves that not all of the comrades are up sniffing glue at this hour…
As to your point, yes, it is the total run around… especially since all any of them had to do was write him back and say, here, dude, here’s the link… have at it … have fun…
It would have been much less time and effort than the responses (or lack thereof) that they gave… and it would avoid the appearance that they are hiding something.
This is really quite amusing, as it was basically Carrot Eater who was the one who truly went out off his way to attempt to find the data. All these people complaining that data is difficult to access, and no one even tried.
The data “found” ie the series change is only in the periodic solar (hale)cycles.The data requested is the monthly series, which would the authors to show the annual solar forcing ie a change of 7% inTSI.
As one suspects that annular mode will not be present in the monthly series,there would be genuine reasons why the authors are hesitant.
MikeC
I live in Australia, is the middle of the day here…
MikeC
“As to your point, yes, it is the total run around…”
guess we’ll just have to disagree…
On a lighter note, there is an exellent discussion at RC on the 35th Anniversary of “Global Warming” – although there may be doubts as to the actual truth of the 35 year claim. In any event. I think you, MikeC, would benefit greatly from having a read.
If RyanO gets the data and he uses the Windows port of R he might have a “fun” time being able to use the data. It most likely is encoded in netCDF-4 format. Given the length of the simulations, it would only make sense to use netCDF-4 because it offers HDF5 compression. There is an R package (which I just installed and am eager to try out) to read these types of files but there’s no Windows binary available. Then again the files might be in HDF5, in which case he’d be able to use them, but that seems unlikely.
MikeC (Comment#50154) July 28th, 2010 at 11:22 pm
They don’t claim to be able to predict them.
Nathan, I normally do not expose myself to the biasing influences of the AGW ministry of propaganda… however, in light of your wonderful sense of humor (and the fact that you do not sniff glue day or night) I will give them a read tomorrow when I get too cold fishing and take cover in the coffee shop
…
Bugs, Eh… they try to use them for forecasts… but like climate models, forecast models do not understand the Earth’s processes enough to accurately predict how many polar bears will die, or how many people will stub their toes due to global warming by 2030
…I, on the other hand… will be bragging to a client Monday morning about how I was able to outforecast billions of dollars worth of models when I said this was going to happen months before the models even started thinking beyond ENSO neutral
MikeC,
Yep. I am sitting here wrapped in a polar fleece blanket right now down south of you in HB. The furnace actually kicked on yesterday morning. I can hear it now… “that’s just weather”. (As if Southern California not having a summer is so normal. The Real Climate Scientists are yawning. Despite all that C02 being pumped daily into the air from the 405 fwy. It must be “out of the office” and unable to participate at this time. lol)
We are off to Hawaii next week. I am excited!
Good morning everyone, and Hi Liza. 😉 lol
Anyway, since this topic has been whipped into a coma, I thought I’d give a Yard/Garden Update.
My hot pepper plants are not producing, however, my surprise cucumber plant is doing very well. It has already produced two big cukes.
The Eastern Redbud trees that my dad planted in my back yard are now about 10 feet tall and are really off to the races, growth-wise. The short runt one has now caught up with the others. 🙂
Andrew
Good morning everyone, and Hi Liza. 😉 lol (8th try :/ )
Anyway, since this topic has been whipped into a coma, I thought I’d give a Yard/Garden Update.
My hot pepper plants are not producing, however, my surprise cucumber plant is doing very well. It has already produced two big cukes.
The Eastern Redbud trees that my dad planted in my back yard are now about 10 feet tall and are really off to the races, growth-wise. The short runt one has now caught up with the others. 🙂
Andrew
MikeC,
Yep. I am sitting here wrapped in a polar fleece blanket right now down south of you in HB. The furnace actually kicked on yesterday morning. I can hear it now… “that’s just weather”. (As if Southern California not having a summer is so normal. The Real Climate Scientists are yawning. Despite all that C02 being pumped daily into the air from the 405 fwy. It must be “out of the office” and unable to participate at this time. lol)
We are off to Hawaii next week. I am excited!
sorry if this is a duplicate post.
Andrew KY, I had trouble getting peppers to grow last year. Thanks for the update. 🙂
Nathan
As if the only thing people have been told to do on this thread is contact the principle author. Heh! The list of things people have suggested people like RyanO must do includes: Contacting the corresponding author, contacting every single author, working through the journal, contacting admins at a university, phoning people, phoning to enquire about people’s vacation schedules, and continuing until all possible avenues one could dream up have been exhausted.
I have repeatedly said that it is wiser and more efficient for someone to do things like contact the corresponding author, or the authors. This fosters more cordial relations, which benefits the person asking. In this regard, if the person who wants the data values having cordial relations with the person who holds the information, then clearly, they should try steps that foster these. And even if they don’t value cordial relations, they might find certain steps time efficient. No one is suggesting they not do these things.
But I don’t see why anyone should be required to do all the things some on this list are dreaming up. FOI exists; they have every right to use that– and promptly if they judge that more efficient to their needs. I see no reason why after taking a rather modest number of reasonable steps– like contacting an author at the institutions where the data was generated (NCAR) several times (e.g. 3 times) over a period of time (3 times * 3 weeks wait for answer= 9 weeks) — and getting no response, one should not resort to to FOI. It’s true other methods might have worked, but they also might not have worked. I don’t think the onus of divining the method that might work and pestering everyone on the planet falls on the author. FOI exists– people outside the system have a perfect right to use it.
No, but it’s the biggest one. And unless you do that at the least, talking about FOI is extremely premature.
I don’t see how any of the other things are any harder than doing the FOI itself, but that’s up to each person.
But simply contacting the other authors is just plain common sense. Talking about pretzels and circles is wholly inappropriate when that option is left on the table.
Carrot it does not matter when. All that matters is if at some point in time co2 was being emitted faster than we are doing it now and I submit to you that when the dinosaurs walked the earth, it was being emitted faster. I looked at the graph you linked to and once again you have pissed me off. In earth’s lifetime the average is higher than it is now. There was more co2 when cavemen were roaming around and they didn’t decide not to build fires. Same thing with trains. Did some loser ever say “Oh boo hoo, boo hoo, we can’t keep shoveling this dirty coal into the furnace to power the train. Now we have electric cars. What a wonderful way to expand our carbon footprints. We can charge up using coal, have a higher electric bill and then we can hit up the gas station and use up some oil. The whole global warming thing is going to remembered as the stupidest fake scare ever. In fact it is getting to the point where some of these people should be put away in mental facilities.
LOL under carrot’s graph it says :
“This figure was prepared by Robert A. Rohde from publicly available data “
Shooshmon,
I still have no idea what you’re trying to say, but try not to rant about electric cars if you want me to bother trying to figure it out.
You want a graph that goes further back? Then try this one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Phanerozoic_Carbon_Dioxide.png
If you go back far enough, you get some pretty high CO2 levels.
And? I can’t figure out what you’re trying to say. You’re saying it’s impossible to reach high CO2 levels (and we aren’t talking anything remotely close to what’s on that graph), because.. there used to be even higher CO2 levels?
Focus carrot focus. Use your powers of empathy like you do for those climate scientists and their email habits.
Chad, I tried out the NetCDF package on the Mac version of R ( which is super flakely) and it worked out ok, kinda slick for ocean data. Still R regularly pukes whenenever I hit the limit ( say 1.2GB) and doesnt degrade gracefully at all. What’s your experience on windows?
nathan I loved the back of the envelop calculation that was done in that paper 35 years ago. VERY KOOL. The ability to do that is greatly under appreciated. I think the important points of that paper is that a prediction was made: 1. during a cooling period.
2. It was based on the fundamental physics that no working scientist or engineer would deny (radaitive transfer) 3. it was pretty damn close for a 3 equation guesstimate. Damn good.
In some sense the simple model beats the complex GCM.
Carrot-
I think contacting the lead author ought to be sufficient even if, for some weird reason, he’s not the corresponding author. The lead author managed to pull together the paper, he ought to have enough vigor to forward the email to the corresponding author if he feels that’s necessary. ( Quite honestly, unless the lead author is retiring, is periodically stations on the moon or was diagnosed with cancer soon between the time the paper was accepted and the galleys were finalized, I don’t quite understand why the group doesn’t designate the lead as corresponding author. Unless something really major happens to him, the lead author ought to be willing to answer people’s questions or at least forward email.)
Stolen from the web somewhere:
Researcher’s End Game
When it is all said and done
And we are long since gone
What will remain to be distributed
Are the data we contributed
With digital identifiers assigned
And our names clearly defined
Our work will be on-line
Until the end-of-time.
Steven,
The Windows port is fine. Haven’t had any problems with it. I usually don’t push R to the limit. It’s interpreted and not really suitable for that. That’s what Fortran is for. What I don’t like about the language though is that it gives you no control over precision. Double precision (eight bytes) is forced on you even if you run out of memory and use up swap because of it.
@Shooshmon: regards the ~>5,000ppm of CO2 in the early Phanerozoic, you need to factor that solar output has increased since then. So, I’m not convinced it’s a killer argument… yet.
>400 posts on this? Perpetuum mobile.
Zeo0th, solar output has increased since then… hmm but yet it’s not the cause of “global warming” and just a few ppms (as opposed to a few thousand!) is the reason. Amazing.
(only in the climate models that is!) My edit buttons are gone.
Chad,
Yeah. Ryan asked for a gigantic text file. He could well get the netcdf instead, unless somebody is feeling inclined to go out of their way for him, or unless it already exists in some other format.
Mosh,
Also the old radiative-convective models from the 60s do a very nice job, for what they are.
Ryan said this about format:
I think that makes it pretty clear he’d prefer text, but he’s willing to take NetCDF. Based on the request, he is not making any demand on anyone at NCAR to reformat for him. If R doesn’t like NetCDF, then, presumably, Ryan will deal with the format somehow.
Liza– Yes. The edit button is temporarily gone while I try to figure out why I’m having memory problems. The error log is showing some individual spammers who just keep visiting,visiting, visiting…. They seem to be in a loop. But I’m also turning off lots of plugins for a while.
Liza,
The change in solar we’re talking about take place over the time scale of millions of years.
What is it, at the beginning of the earth ~4.x billion years ago, the sun was giving off 70% the radiation it’s giving now? I forget the numbers.
Combine those changes in solar, with changes in volcanic activity, CO2, albedo and the land surface, and you have plausible explanations for much of the geological-scale history. Still a lot of work to be done, of course.
Lucia,
Emailing the first author should in principle be sufficient, but when it isn’t, common sense tells you to email another one. It isn’t your concern to worry why the first author isn’t the corresponding one; it’s your concern to take a 2 second glance at the paper and see who it actually is. Or is that making a pretzel of yourself, as well? [and it anyway isn’t at all unusual for the first author to not be the corresponding one]
Carrot, but I’d like to know exactly what ‘much’ means. LOL
Just in the last million yrs there have been roughly 22 ice advances and retreats (your graph up there only shows 3 the major ones in times scales spanning hundreds of thousands of years) and it is the distance from the sun that changes- which explains it all just fine. It has nothing to do with C02 which has remained at relatively constant levels. It does have to do with the sun because the sun is part of the “distance” part. LOL Everything in the universe is in constant change is it not? So the sun has changed too. you say 30%.
Like I said, no one knows how long it takes for things to change within those peaks and valleys on that graph. Certainly you can see from that graph that the distance from the sun (the orbit) is driving those C02 concentrations up and down. Even when the concentrations were at the warmest levels it still got cold. At the lowest levels it still got warm.
Carrot–
Are you going to try to debate what common sense tells us? Common sense tells you that if the first author is unresponsive, and FOI is permitted, you can save yourself aggravation of dealing this group of authors and file an FOI. All those “advantages” one might hope gain by dealing with these people are likely to never materialize.
I don’t care who the corresponding author is. If the first author won’t even reply, I don’t think there is anything wrong with filing an FOI instead of undertaking the assigned list of tasks deemed necessary to make carrot eater happy.Clearly, you think people need to do things your way. Doubtless, you will come back and repeat yourself.
As far as I’m concerned: If they want to do it your way, they may elect to do so. If you can persuade them to do it your ways, fine. If they don’t want to do it your way, they don’t have to. And guess what? They don’t have to do it your way because you aren’t dictator of the world.
If you want to force people to do it your way, contact your congressman and get FOI changed to enact the specific pre-conditions you feel are necessary. Maybe they can even devise a checklist people can follow so everyone knows precisely which of the suggested things above one “must” do and which one can skip.
Liza… it means that the oceans either warmed or ate a lot of bean burritos… because there’s a lot of outgassing going on there.
Nathan,
OK, I read the article and a bunch of the comments at the propaganda ministry… and low and behold I didn’t become ill!
But the usual word and visual games were in effect. Broeker was off by 10 years… and by about a third of the warming… glossed over by the usual (let’s overlook that) games… using the full graph rather than the 20th century (which was Broekers forecast) not to mention changing the usual 5 year smoothe line with a non linear trend line… I think they read too much Goddard…
Lucia, let’s just say I’m extremely unimpressed. Why even bother sending the first email? If you think it’s so great to send FOIs at the slightest cause, then just start with the FOI. It’s legal, isn’t it? So why not. And it’ll save the work of completely ignoring the email address on the first page of the paper, and instead spending five minutes googling to get the first author’s email address. The put-upon public must really resent losing that five minutes. The only thought on the decision tree is apparently, is it legal, not whether it’s practical or sensible. Heck, why even look at the group’s webpage first? Just FOI away, without checking to see if it’s already available. Yee haw.
Liza
Not even close. The orbital forcing along simply cannot explain the glaciation cycles. It isn’t strong enough. And if the only thing you consider is the sun, then there’s no way you can explain why the earth wasn’t frozen 3-4 billion years ago.
Carrot
So?
Anyway, I think we’ve all figured out that you want people to do things your way and are “unimpressed” if they don’t. Big whip.
Why do you insist on distorting what I said and then providing counter arguments to those?
Wrong. I am considering what is practical and sensible.
As the remaining “argument by hypothetical question”, I really don’t feel any need to answer those. They have nothing to do with what I’ve written.
Look, you seem to want to have an argument with positions I have not taken. I’m tired of this silly game. Feel free to continue; I’m going to be trying to track down the problem that causing server errors. Ciao.
The thing that amazes me is that some people seem to think that submitting a FOIA request is a big deal. I agree that, in seeking the type of data that RyanO requested, you should first contact the author(s) at least a couple of times. Probably easiest to email the lead author and cc the others. Try it twice a week or two apart.
After that, if you have good reason to believe the data is subject to FOIA, there is absolutely no reason not to submit a FOIA request to the appropriate agency. FOIA request should not be seen as a big deal. As noted by Lucia above, they are used all the time. For many regulatory agencies, e.g., USEPA, this is how you get to review files that have been submitted on for various projects. For example, it needs be nothing more than a simple letter stating that under the Freedom of Information Act, I am requesting an opportunity to review all emissions data filed by XYZ company for the period 1990 – 2010. It really doesn’t have to be much different than whatever email RyanO originally sent to Amman, except possibly a little extra detail, such as requested by NSF, to demonstrate that the requested information is subject to FOIA. It doesnt need to be any big bureacratic, cost-sucking, to-do. It just formalizes your request and ensures that, if the information is subject to FOIA, that you get said information.
If anything, it seems that researchers should welcome the use of FOIA since it has a mechanism by which some of the costs of getting the information together can be recovered. In terms of time, if the files are electronically available, it should be no more time than it takes to copy files onto a CD, DVD or whatever type of media and definitely no more time than if the researcher had responded directly to the informal request in the first place.
Bottom line is that the use of FOIA is no big deal (as long as the information is subject to FOIA) and shouldn’t be seen as such by anyone. Nor should anyone be insulted if they receive such a request for data.
Note also that I used FOIA (pronounced foy-ya), which is the common designation for the US Freedom of Information Act.
Lucia by now you should be getting a feel for the obvious problem with warmistas….
apologies to Kim for intruding on her monopoly —
The repetitions
Circle without convergence
Endless horizons
Probably just adding to the noise but:
In my field, at least, it is not uncommon for the first (or “lead”) author to be actually a student, postdoc, visitor, etc., who *may* have done the larger share of the work, but who is likely not to be around at the same institution for very long. The corresponding author, instead, would typically be someone who has tenure at the leading institution, and so can be expected to stick around, to keep the records, and to handle the e-mail.
Julio–
I’d add that to my list of reasons. But in those cases, the function of the corresponding author is often to simply forward email to the lead author, and when one knows the lead author and knows how to contact him, one often does so directly.
What I don’t see see is any good reason why one cannot contact the lead author if one knows his contact information. This is not difficult in the instances where the lead author continues to be employed at the institution listed on the paper itself.
Carrot Eater, everyone has been going back and forth about this data from NCAR…does RyanO have the data he wants yet? If the answer is “no” I think it is safe to say that NCAR is being a bunch of clowns and obviously not trying to release their data. As I said before, NCAR is an extremely ideological group and they do not like questions. Of course, I cannot prove to you that I actually have friends that attend Boulder University, I hope you will take my word for it, it would be a stupid thing to just make up. At this point, the best thing RyanO can do is get his majesty, his mightiness, Lord Christopher Monckton, III Viscount of Brenchley, one of the first persons to ever use a computer, an expert in enivronmental fraud. NCAR, whatchu wanna do when you get a MONCK on your door!
No monopoly in art, Harold. And that’s a good one.
==================
carrot eater,
I was talking about explaining just the last million years in general. We are still in the ice age that started 3 million yrs ago BTW that has had periods of warming and cooling. The Earth wobbles. It has been going back and forth into glacial cycles for millions upon millions of yrs longer then that (as I think you know. do you?) All has to do with ice sticking around or not and changes in the shape of the orbit and the wobbles and tilt at that time..then all the rest like the ocean… What do you think happens when the orbit changes from a circle to an oval shape? No one knows what the planet is like then. You think the shape change just happens over night? I don’t think so, and I also think you don’t think about time the way I do or know about data resolution. When does the circle to oval change and visa versa even start? How long does it take? Is it gradual or instant?
No one knows the answer to that!
6 million years ago a mega super tsunami changed almost the entire coast of California all the way to the mountain ranges. That’s what my husband’s paper is about. He discovered evidence for that mega event. We live on a dangerous planet. The earthquake in Chile rang the planet like a bell for months.
The Earth has it’s own warmth from inside besides what comes from the sun too remember. They are still finding volcanoes under the ocean. There is a theory I think that says 3-4 million years ago comets bombarded the Earth (large craters on the moon date to that age or something like that) So who knows? Comets bashing a planet don’t change its tilt and wobbles and a whole lot of other things? I believe the Sahara becoming a desert had to do with just tiny change to the axle tilt of this planet…or at least that is the theory.
Still don’t believe C02 matters all that much, and that C02 chart you provided looks like a pretty regular pattern, a wave up and a wave down over time, not “something else”. Same types of patterns change the temperature every single day between night and day, and every year the seasons.
MikeC, lol. Yes there’s the ocean. Rivers, lakes and streams too, and the Moon (which is moving away from the earth) and the Moon also breaks up ice at the North pole when full because it effects the tide…and there is BEANS!…on and on and on…:)
Liza,
Um, yes. The Milankovitch cycles exist, and they clearly have something to do with many of the observed glaciation events. And yes, there are extremely slow. I don’t know what you’re getting at.
carrot eater (Comment#50211) July 29th, 2010 at 5:29 pm
I believe I just showed you are full of it and don’t know what you are talking about.
Mosher
Yeah, What Broeckert did was cool… Not cool enough for MikeC… although, possibly it was COOL enough… Get it? Ha ha ha… Oh I’m hilarious.
MikeC
“But the usual word and visual games were in effect. Broeker was off by 10 years… and by about a third of the warming… glossed over by the usual (let’s overlook that) games… using the full graph rather than the 20th century (which was Broekers forecast) not to mention changing the usual 5 year smoothe line with a non linear trend line… I think they read too much Goddard…”
what does this mean? Sure he was ‘off’ by ten years. But that’s not bad for a very basic ‘back of the envelope’ calculation.
I really don’t get the other points you’re making.
“Broecker assumes a climate sensitivity of 0.3ºC warming for each 10% increase in CO2 concentration, which amounts to 2.2ºC warming for CO2 doubling. ”
Ok, so he assumes a Climate Sensitivty of 2.2, however most research places it at around 3, including a very recent paper that they link to in the comments:
http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/10/1923/2010/acp-10-1923-2010.html
Full paper:
http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/10/1923/2010/acp-10-1923-2010.pdf
Liza, My point was that heating of the oceans resulting in outgassing of CO2 is probably the source of the CO2 in the timescales you menhtioned… but that is purely an edumakated guess
..
Nathan, In short, his calculations add up to the missing heat
MikeC
Ok, sure gotcha…
MikeC (Comment#50218) July 29th, 2010 at 10:39 pm
Yah, and stuff like all the organic material that was frozen and couldn’t decay before, etc…endless possibilities IMHO on a dynamic planet full of life.
There is a theory I think that says 3-4 million years ago comets bombarded the Earth (large craters on the moon date to that age or something like that) So who knows? Comets bashing a planet don’t change its tilt and wobbles and a whole lot of other things?
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
You may be referring to the late heavy bombardment about 4 billion years ago and coments and other bolides will have for all practical purposes no impact on the earths rotation. It takes something pretty humangus to do that.
dorlomin (Comment#50234) July 30th, 2010 at 9:19 am
Thanks! And never mind..got the 3-4 millions of years ago mixed up with the 3-4 billions of years ago in my memory. That’s why I said “I think” in that first sentence. LOL
Comets/meteors do have an impact on the Earth’s wobble though. Earthquakes do also. The Weather and Seasons does too (distribution of water etc). The Earth bulges in the middle and changes shape too..not a perfect circle so it wobbles. Totally separate subject from just saying the “rotation”.
like this:
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2009/08/14/2655852.htm
Also the the other heavenly bodies in the solar system change the wobble too. It is all a big dance and not yet fully understood.
like this:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090806141512.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Latest+Science+News%29
“We can calculate changes in the Earth’s axis and rotation that go back 50 million years,” Clark said. “These are caused primarily by the gravitational influences of the larger planets, such as Jupiter and Saturn, which pull and tug on the Earth in slightly different ways over periods of thousands of years.”
That, in turn, can change the Earth’s axis – the way it tilts towards the sun – about two degrees over long periods of time, which changes the way sunlight strikes the planet. And those small shifts in solar radiation were all it took to cause multiple ice ages during about the past 2.5 million years on Earth, which reach their extremes every 100,000 years or so.
(These articles are just examples I found on the fly)
mikeC.
My point is this. There are a number of Unconvinced who want to argue against the basic physics. The basic physics predict that adding GHGs will warm the planet. The basic physics do not predict that adding GHGs will COOL the planet. And by basic physics I mean RTE. I focus on this because engineers who build stuff MUST accept the truth of these physics to build working devices.
1. Lindzen accepts this physics, monkton, christy,spencer, willis, anthony.
Working from this basic verified by observation physics, making an educated guess at sensitivity, you get a back of the envelope estimate. getting it within 20% is quite an accomplishment.
That last 20% takes a huge amount of effort to refine.
Here is how it stands. You have a physics that predicts warming with added GHGs. You have observations that support the prediction. Skeptical arguments are a matter of routine. By that I mean they are arguments one CAN ALWAYS make about any theory.
1. There ‘could’ be other explanations. Trivially true
2. The AGW explanation is not perfect.
What nobody has done is offer a competing theory ( read prediction). You get appeals to ignorance ( natural variation) to get “concepts” the iris effect, sun spots, magnetic feilds, gamma rays.. But Nobody who opposes AGW has done the following.
A. show that RTEs are wrong ( cause they cant and engineers who use them successfully will not stop using what works)
B. offer a testable alternative.
The real skeptical position is one that focuses on sensitivity. It is getting warmer (not cooler) additional GHGs in the atmosphere are one component causing this. The Science question is how much.
The policy questions are different in my mind. I think one mistake that warmista have made is to focus on global action rather than local experimentation and adaptation. I think they have tied the policy too tightly to the science as if science could give policy answers. I think the science gets skewed. The answers dont get skewed (so much) but the questions asked get skewed.
Look at the GCM runs people do for the IPCC. thats a huge resource and huge amount of brain power programmed to provide answers for a document. I think science directed by committee is a horrible thing. Thats personal. i dont see how those guys follow orders about the science they should do. I’d flip out.
Right Mosher. No body has a competing theory and they need a “testable” alternative. Whatever. You have a computer model and just A FRACTION OF A DEGREE. Reasonable people remember that.
But no matter. Let’s just celebrate. you won’t have to do all that “observing” anymore thank goodness because the physics is correct. Let’s forget all those billions of research dollars that were spent make absolutely sure “the physics” was right all along. Forget that guy Gore and all his awards too, forget that he’s in big trouble too.
Then let’s take billions of dollars from people, lose jobs, fine businesses, regulate everyone to death and control their energy like good tyrants do! ( you really are going to let poor people and those in the underdeveloped places on the planet suffer more)..to reduce that evil C02 concentration back down to 100ppm less then it is now like back in the old days when the climate was “correct” and the “global average temperature” was FRACTION OF A DEGREE lower then now.
Wait, don’t scientists and other really smart people say even if we reduce emissions right now it won’t do anything? Or didn’t they say a few years back global warming was on a break for 30 yrs? Or something about the numbers not being statistically significant. I seem to recall??…so confusing. Never mind.(sigh)
C02 is pollution! We will halt the rising seas!
All all will be well for generations to come right Mosher?
Amen!
(I think you should take a geology course because all this physics talk means nothing without it. The planet is not a machine and engineering feats fail all the time because Nature happens.)
Re: liza (Jul 30 13:18),
Liza… you aren’t responding to what Steve Mosher actually wrote.
And getting him or other lukewarmistas to take a geology course will not help your case. I should know… Rox major, exploration geologist as 1st post-college job… 🙂
Liza, once again, making uneducated guesses… I would think that defrosting organic material would give off methane rather than CO2… but since heightened levels of CO2 normally follow increases in temps… it only leaves a very warm ocean that I can think of to cause those high levels of CO2…. unless the dinosaurs somehow hid a bunch of SUV factories from us…
.
molsher, like I told Nathan, it all adds up to the missing heat… find out how much heat is missing and compare it to how much heat was supposed to be there… and you’ll probably figure out your sensativity
I found some gold and a nice sapphire, does that qualify me for geologist? geologist jr in training at least?
AMac (Comment#50240) July 30th, 2010 at 1:25 pm
I know that. I was saying more.. what is not being said. I always think of Yucca Mountain when someone waxes on and on like that… the most studied place on the planet gee, probably using science AND engineer. Nobody trusts that science and engineering. LOL And nobody is going to do anything about the energy problem.
I respect your posts AMac and I don’t see you ignore the geological or paleo discussions and make claims like “it’s all figured out” or “I am not interested in that”. And a real earth scientist wouldn’t be so quick to think “observations” for a few a years (compared to geologic time) and the way the temp data was handled would be good enough to make claims of something “unusual” happening.
MikeC
Nope. Sorry! 🙂 One of the team members once said on RC, “geologists only study rocks”. That’s bs.
I am not arguing with you about the ocean or where the C02 comes from. Still not very much C02 compared to the past geological record. I’ve read the outgassing of the ocean after an ice age MAYBE contributes 80 to 100 parts per million of C02 (??). Good thing. if the ppms were any lower (on carrots chart) plants would not live.
found this article from two years ago:
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2008/10/20/lorne-gunter-thirty-years-of-warmer-temperatures-go-poof.aspx
“science AND engineer.” Oops. you know what I mean (I’ve got no edit buttons anymore)
What nobody has done is offer a competing theory ( read prediction). You get appeals to ignorance ( natural variation) to get “concepts†the iris effect, sun spots, magnetic feilds, gamma rays..
Ill posed assumptions,it is legitimate to question how systems work,when the “theory” is still bounded in the realm of arbitrary axioms ie why systems react in the way they do,eg Hilbert
After a concept has been fixed completely and unequivocally, it is on my view completely illicit and illogical to add an axiom – a mistake made very frequently, especially by physicists. By setting up one new axiom after another in the course of their investigations, without confronting them with the assumptions
they made earlier, and without showing that they do not contradict a fact that follows from the axioms they set up earlier, physicists often allow sheer nonsense to appear in their investigations. One of the main sources of mistakes and misunderstandings in modern physical investigations is precisely
the procedure of setting up an axiom, appealing to its truth, and inferring from this that it is compatible with the defined concepts. One of the main purposes of my Festschrift was to avoid this mistake. ([9], p. 40)
The usual path is to examine say a process and ask how and why the system as a whole behaves as it does.
Lets look say at the solar problem and its implications with the 11yr cycle and effects on climatic means.The partyline eg Lean 2010.
Confounding expectations of a monotonically warming globe, the average warming rate from 2000 to 2008 subsided by almost
an order of magnitude, and temperatures in 2008 were cooler than in 2002. These varying ‘trends’ in global temperatures arise in part from the influences of solar irradiance and other natural processes, which must be comprehensively assessed in order to
properly ascertain Earth’s response to the underlying anthropogenic influence.
Much surface temperature variability observed in the recent past appears to arise from causes that can be identified and their impacts quantified usingauxiliary observations. Solar irradiance cycles, for produce warming of ∼0.1◦C during epochs
of high-solar activity.
The standard assumption is that as say TSI increases and decreases the global temperature follows and the climate community can assign the natural variability to theory such as the RTE.
However in the real world ie observations counter intuitively tell us the spectral variance in the near infra red is inverse to the relationship ie the frequencies that effect GHG decrease at maxima and increase at minima,hence one can legitimately ask how does the climate community arrive at such a signal?.
As the process of the atmosphere are wavelength dependent,what irreducible imprecision is evoked by not asking the correct questions.
http://i255.photobucket.com/albums/hh133/mataraka/solarforcingspectralirriadiance.gif
maksimovich (Comment#50248) July 30th, 2010 at 2:56 pm
thank you for that comment.
When the IPCC says the level of scientific understanding of solar forcing is low… then I see the former head of the IPCC at the Guardian debate with Steve McI proclaim, with great certainty, that the sun is not responsible for warming, my bull-chit-o-meter immediately starts chirping
OK Liza, but I knew what to look for when I saw signs of aluminum at a scarp, can I get at least a boy scout geology merrit badge or something?
.
oh, and Liza, I’m sure I saw something about an equasion wrt changes in outgassing and temp change… any chance the hubby might know something about that?
MikeC, hubby is home early today (getting ready for trip to Oahu where the ocean is 82°f! yay)
He says you still can’t have a badge and “the equasion wrt changes in outgassing and temp change”…that would be a good challenge to figure out. He thinks it would be related to the equation from chemistry PV=nRT. Which is pressure, volume, n is equal to the number of moles of gas (the number of molecules divided by Avogadro’s Number), R is the gas constant, T temp. He doesn’t want to remember..brain ache stuff. lol It was a long time ago he says. Let’s just say the colder the ocean temperature the more gas it can store. The warmer the ocean temperature the more it off gases C02. Volume would be a problem to figure out. So maybe we can say, that in the polar regions the ocean is taking in C02 and at the equator the ocean is off gassing C02. That’s an edjamakated guess right there. 🙂
Liza, I have friends at TSA and all flights to Hawwaii are cancelled til I get my merrit badge…
.
oh, and I fount this which talks about the issue and does some equasions… so I’m thinking that for periods where there were thousands PPM CO2 it probably wouldn’t be from ocean outgassing… perhaps CO2 emmitting animals eating all of the CO2 sequestering plants… maybe something volcanic where enough sunlight was blocked to limit plant growth or a combination of the above… once again these are unedumaketed guesses
http://brneurosci.org/co2.html
liza (Comment#50252) July 30th, 2010 at 4:02 pm
MikeC, hubby is home early today (getting ready for trip to Oahu where the ocean is 82°f! yay)
He says you still can’t have a badge and “the equasion wrt changes in outgassing and temp changeâ€â€¦that would be a good challenge to figure out. He thinks it would be related to the equation from chemistry PV=nRT. Which is pressure, volume, n is equal to the number of moles of gas (the number of molecules divided by Avogadro’s Number), R is the gas constant, T temp. He doesn’t want to remember..brain ache stuff. lol It was a long time ago he says. Let’s just say the colder the ocean temperature the more gas it can store. The warmer the ocean temperature the more it off gases C02. Volume would be a problem to figure out. So maybe we can say, that in the polar regions the ocean is taking in C02 and at the equator the ocean is off gassing C02. That’s an edjamakated guess right there.
The equation you want is Henry’s Law: PCO2=k[CO2] where k is the Henry’s law coefficient which relates the partial pressure of CO2 in the atmosphere pCO2 to the concentration of CO2 in the water [CO2]. k is temperature dependent, the relationship is usually experimentally determined although you can get an approximation by integrating the van’t Hoff equation.
MikeC
re: missing heat… Maybe I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Perhaps this paper would help:
http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/10/1923/2010/acp-10-1923-2010.pdf
Calculating climate senstivity based on the radiation imbalance at the TOA.
BTW “I saw signs of aluminum at a scarp”… That’s probably a geology fail. You wouldn’t see aluminium, you’d see bauxite.
Nathan, I’m shocked you are not familliar with the issue… it was a pretty stunning revelation in one of the climategate mails which resulted in them having to deal with the issue… get your mind outta the AGW booty and start thinking independently or I’ll have to stop laughing at your jokes
.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/04/100415141121.htm
.
Nope, the sign was not bauxite
In a famous NPR interview a couple of years ago Kevin Trenberth inadvertently let slip the truth when he said maybe the missing heat had been radiated back out to space.
Several months ago, Pielke Pere, Kevin Trenberth and Josh Willis had a three way conversation about the missing heat, with Kevin hoping it could still be found in the deep oceans, and Roger and Josh telling him that was unlikely.
===================
Once I knew a man
Who danced with the missing heat,
From Cleveland, you bet.
===================
MikeC
Oh yeah… the emails… Yeah good.
Did you even look at the paper I linked to?
MikeC (Comment#50254) July 30th, 2010 at 4:52 pm
Oh for shame! Using intimidation to earn your merit badge? 😉
kim (Comment#50261) July 31st, 2010 at 4:52 am
Was he a space man? 🙂
What Mosh said above:
“What nobody has done is offer a competing theory ( read prediction) You get appeals to ignorance ( natural variation) to get “concepts†… ”
When my husband read this he pointed out to me yesterday, and I’d like to share that not only does Mosh call a geologist’s position like his (natural variation) ignorance (which is just silly ) he also (and maybe others here) might believe that most or all planetary processes can be understood just like that. Not true. Some are. Like the tides (he used that as an example) But many are not. We have thousands of years of good data about earthquakes and earthquake faults but we can’t really predict earthquakes can we?
And I can imagine with my edjamakation that the parameters (the data and all that jazz) needed to model what makes an earthquake happen might be a lot simpler then what is input to run a GCM too.
Nathan (Comment#50262) July 31st, 2010 at 5:52 am
I did. The climate system wasn’t remembering anything before 1880? 😉
Nathan:
The paper you cited is interesting. Looking to improve simplistic models with a better handle on deep ocean transport and a longer-term time frame would be a positive development and the authors do a good job fleshing that out.
On the downside, there is not enough data to confirm that the ‘missing’ heat is where they say it is. In essence, they take a net energy value derived from TOA observations (which they openly concede is still uncertain), not unreasonably reasonably infer that the energy not accounted for at the surface has be somewhere so it must be in the deep oceans (assuming it is not already radiated out).
[Aside: It is not clear to me what impact a change in the TOA value used in the paper would have on sensitivity figures derived in this manner. Is it linear? Maybe somebody with better math skills could answer.]
Unfortunately, we do have to consider the atmospherics (politics) of the matter. Trenberth’s “missing heat†comment got a lot of play recently and Pielke Sr et al have pushed the idea that the ‘missing heat’ cannot be in the deep ocean. (See discussion at Pielke’s site (here.) And all this plays into the issue of the validity of the “pipeline†argument by Hansen that any projected warming that has not yet taken place will do so eventually because the oceans have warmed.
So the fact that 7 scientists in Hansen’s shop with 3 friends opine (without any new data) that the missing heat is in the deep ocean at the exact time when the “missing heat†issue is in play seems more like Consensus cheer-leading that a conceptual breakthrough. And that is unfortunate because deep ocean behavior deserves more attention and these guys did a good job of showing how it should be incorporated into better modeling.
Lucia:
my comment on RC (re failure to disclose short-centering method) made it through after significant delay. Not sure exactly when, but over a couple days. Probably needed to get Mike’s input on the voice of God rebutall and/or just wanted to bury it by delaying the posting time.
the response is about what I expected. Not a clear “should have been described” nor a clear “didn’t need to be described”. Kinda wanders around talking about how it doesn’t matter and then also says maybe the method shouldn’t have been used.
I disagree that this much of a data transform (extremely unconventional) did not need to be described. Tamino did so as well. Too bad, Gavin can’t give a straight answer. I can…ask me if I’ve stopped beating my wife and I’ll give you a yes or no answer and look you in the eye. But I probably have a manlier lifting program than he does, too.
Lucia:
my comment on RC (re failure to disclose short-centering method) made it through after significant delay. Not sure exactly when, but over 24 hours. Probably needed to get Mike’s input and/or just wanted to bury it by delaying the posting time.
the response is about what I expected. Not a clear “should have been described” nor a clear “didn’t need to be described”. Kinda wanders around talking about how it doesn’t matter and then also says maybe the method shouldn’t have been used.
I disagree that this much of a data transform (extremely unconventional) did not need to be described. Tamino did so as well.
Too bad, Gavin can’t give a straight answer. I can…ask me if I’ve stopped beating my wife and I’ll give you a yes or no answer and look you in the eye. But I probably have a manlier lifting program than he does, too.
TCO
Well, I wouldn’t answer “yes/no”. I’d answer that I don’t have and never have had a wife. 🙂
Now, you don’t know that. Anyway, we haven’t seen before and after pictures of you to so we all just have to take your word for it your lifting program is manly. For all I know, your lifting program is as feeble as my out of shape old lady lifting program.
Lucia:
Gaving also snipped the part of my post, where I referred to having made the question before and having it deleted.
I could go back and post again: pushing him to give me a direct answer (yes/no) should the short centering have been described. I’m fully aware that not every aspect of method can (or should) be described. For instance, the left-handedness the technician operating a machine. Am also aware that sometimes the method needs to be described as it limits the results (for instance, caliper testing being different than DEXA for bodyfat percentages).
Or even that some parties (although not the author) may believe a method hurts the results. But the author still discloses it, since he knows it is a bone of contention and jsut wants to be completely gentelmanly about putting it forward and allowing the debate to occur. Even though he has the opinion that the method is fine blabla.
All I want is Gavin to take a stand on if the method should have been disclosed. He wouldn’t asnwer the question.
I get so tired of having to pin him down, McI, you, Mosh, Watts, Id. You all are not the same…but there is a commonality that is eirie. Zorita remains my idol.
I would just say “no” if someone asked me if I stopped beating my wife. I’d do it. Literally, the one word answer. Then let them cavitate and misinterpret the impact. Can engage on that. But I’d asnwer the direct question with a direct answer.
Re: lifting comparison. Read the operative qualifier “probably”. Of course, I don’t know for sure. You have even less info than I (since at least I know myself well). But if you had to make a call…a bet…a (proverbial, no threat intended) gun to the head.
Diet is more important than exercise. However, a good program of cardio and resistance training can be extremely motivating. Make sure that instead of thinking “I worked out, therefore I can misbehave”, you think “I worked out…I don’t want to blow all the benefits by chowing down”. This is a mind trick that makes good habits reinforce.
Also, make sure and realize that weakness, makes improvement more likely than strength in lifting. IOW, the beginning of a program is when you make most gains. Of course as a woman, you have less gains genetically available. But you can still improve over time. The activity can actually also be useful cardio and calorie burning. There is some. Note, the caveat about diet being most important remains.
The way to think about lifting is just to be very zen about it. Enjoy the process. Think about the techniques and prefect them.
Don’t worry about progression, but have some. IOW, don’t think that you need to double strenght in a month. A year or two is a very valid amount of time to make that sort of gain. Just try every week (I actually restrict myself to every 2 weeks) to make the tiniest possible gain in weight moved. Before you know it, a year goes by and you’re substaintially stronger. but don’t flame out. It’s actually fine to start noticeably below failure. It will give you some “fake progress” or “running start” towards failure training, give you time to perfect technique, will avoid discouragement, and will give you time to develop a compliant regular mindset. That is by FAR the key thing in making gains. not that you didn’t kill yourself on day one. But that you stuck to program. And note since gains are non0lieanr and have a tapering off effect, the impact of not training to failure on the first lifting day or week becomes very minimal as time goes on.
http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/muscle-gain/beginning-weight-training-part-1.html
(note: there is maybe 5% of this set of articles I would slightly disagree with…but it’s really good…and relevant visavis discussion and disagreement with other misconceptions).
Please stop pushing the pics. I am quite a character on the net. I understand the desire to see them, since that is so important and motivating in weight loss. And also since I am such a curious troll. but let it go. I’ve shown them before on the net and rationally probably shouldn’t have (given all my silliness over the years). But it was so tempting to want to. Anyhow…let me make the call on when I decide to share things like that.
And do your cardio outside. We’re a bunch of cavemen in our genes. Stuck in cubicles instead of manly outdoor jobs. So, you should bike outdoors, not on the stationary. Walk (it is very calming) outdoors looking at nature and breathing air, not on the treadmill.
Swimming indoors is probably OK and basically mandatory in cold climates most of the year and really has less impact on the experience anyhow. But the walking…you can do that through the snow…through rain showers…get off on it like a polar explorer…like a gnarly grunt…feel the nature.
TCO–
FWIW: I understand about weight lifting. 5 years ago, I worked my way up to being able to do 10 pull-ups. So, I get that. But then I back slid.
I don’t want them for motivation at all I want to see them because you are a character/ troll. That’s 100% the reason. I want to compare your looks to John Abraham and Christopher Monckton. 🙂
That said, while diet & exercise advice is interesting, I don’t want this blog to be about dieting. Not everyone here wants to diet, to read about dieting or other things. Constant talking about dieting can also be very boring to others. So…. if you want to discuss this, I can create a thread on my other blog….
I like eduardo zorita too.
My diet digression is way better than another 500 posts about RyanO’s data request! Normally you should snipp my offtopicness, but here I’m doing you a favor. 🙂
10 pullups for a woman is outstanding! 50% of college women can not do a single pullup. We’re probably talking top 1% of the distribution to do 10. Even if you had some form errors, that 10 is phenomenal.
Note: weight has a huge impact on pullups. If you are (or become) slimmed down, you may be pleasantly surprised about the strength coming back. And if you’re dieting at the same time you’re training, the factors will coincide to be very motivating.
TCO–
Notwithstanding your opinion of which comments are “better” or “worse”, The Blackboard is not about dieting, and this post is not about dieting.
I am aware that weight has a huge impact on pull ups. I mean… uhmm… yah. I suspect I had form errors. Based on last time I whipped myself into shape, it will be, oh, a year before I can do pull-ups (if ever.) Currently, it’s not a goal. Now, no more discussion of dieting and exercise. If you want to discuss that, I’ll send you to the other blog.
Wilco.
Nathan, I’d already read it and couldn’t decide to toss it into the Nessie or the BTS file… Nessie as in; the missing heat is hiding down there somewhere with the Lock Ness monster… or BTS as in the many climate papers that can’t get beyond a significant problem and shrugg the problem as being BEYOND THE SCOPE of the study (Quayle and Memme are great examples for temp record papers that do that).
In the mean time, the missing heat may be any number of things… negative feedbacks… natural variation… temp data collection error… but never the less, I place the theory of “missing heat being down there in the great deep” pretty low on the list because I watch vertical transport quite closely and do not see the missing heat draining down to warm Nessie (aparently neither do the Argo boys or they would be screaming Eureka).
… oh, Nathan, tell us a good one… sumptin like… you had to stop using viagra and rogaine because it made you look like Don King :)~
Someone show me temperature data of any kind that shows that the last 10 years aren’t the warmest decade on record. i.e. surface, satellite MSU, satellite AVHRR, buoy, ship, radiosonde, etc. 10 years from now, when each one of these metrics says that it’s even hotter, people will still be complaining about “missing” heat.
bwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahahahahha… classic humor cce… the AGW advocates want to compute, compute, and compute even more… write a computer program no more effective than pac man then hope everyone forgets about those terrible observations… ie: missing heat… ouch
of course it goes the other way too… when the computers calculate too much heat and it doesn’t match observations, the AGW advocates have to invent aerosols to cool things down… again, contrary to observations
then they point to the last ten years… which put us at the end of the warming following the recovery from the LIA… and we know from Phil Jones himself that there has been no statistically significant warming since the mid 90’s as the globe recovered from Pinatubo…
But let us not loose sight of the subject at hand… I wanna see someone find that missing heat
::::whistling:::: here missing heat, heeeeeeeere missing heat
HEY NESSIE….WHERE’S THAT MISSING HEAT???
cce,
“Someone show me temperature data of any kind that shows that the last 10 years aren’t the warmest decade on record”
I didn’t turn on th AC at all last summer at my house. Very unusual that I was comfortable enough to not turn it on at all during that period. The dog days normally get pretty hot in Kentucky.
Here’s number to do some fancy calculations with – “0” 😉
Andrew
Andrew, don’t forget that he said “10 years from now, when each one of these metrics says that it’s even hotter, people will still be complaining about “missing†heat.” which means that you have to wait til 2020 and see if your house is still that cold… and by then it will only be 10 more years til 2030 to see if the oceans boil, the Polar Bears lose their teeth and if everyone stubs their toe due to GHG’s
now I’m gonna go down to the casino and see if I can clean em out by 2040 (mountain time)
“Andrew, don’t forget that he said “10 years from now, when each one of these metrics says that it’s even hotter, people will still be complaining about “missing†heat.â€
MikeC
It is indeed interesting that cce declares he already knows what’s going to happen 10 years from now. I wonder how he or she knows?
“now I’m gonna go down to the casino”
Go get ’em tiger. But remember, you can get up from the table when you are ahead. 😉
Andrew
Ocean heat content.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/05/ocean-heat-content-increases-update/
Just another time wasting debate in which perfect knowledge is demanded from scientists. And you want a pony for christmas.
Heh, Bugs, I’ll take Pielke Pere over RealClimate any day. There was a real discussion at Climate Science over this. Even with comments closed. Now figure that out.
Give up? Go look.
==================================
kim (Comment#50294) July 31st, 2010 at 10:59 pm
What in particular do you have an issue with, in the papers they refer to?
Please show me temperature data of any kind that shows the last 10 years aren’t the warmest decade on record.
Bugs, see George Tobin’s comment #50267 at 11:02 AM. The rate of transport of heat into the deep oceans is not fast enough. But please, don’t listen to me; go listen to Roger, Josh, and Kevin hash it out among themselves. GT has the link.
==========================
Dang, a server error again. At least, Lucia, the server error notification is now different.
Bugs, see George Tobin’s comment #50267 at 11:02 AM yesterday. The rate of transport of heat into the deep oceans is not fast enough. But please, don’t listen to me. Go read Roger, Josh, and Kevin hash it out among themselves. GT has the link.
=======================
kim (Comment#50294) July 31st, 2010 at 10:59 pm
I have no idea what I am supposed to be looking at, but you haven’t looked at RC.
There is no good reason to ever look at RC unless you want to be horrified at how the policy cart has got before the science horse. I’d have to invoke the authority of the anti-vivisectionists over the animal abuse if I took a look over there.
==================
They refer to papers by scientists, you don’t have to trust them. The ocean heat content is rising.
Why don’t you try reading the little symposium Roger ran there. MikeC and George Tobin understand in comments above. There is no evidence that the missing heat has been transported deeper.
It is difficult to understand why you don’t know what you are supposed to see at Climate Science. MikeC, George Tobin, and I have all told you.
The days of invoking Real Climate as an authority are passing. The moving hand, having writ, moves on.
====================
Kim, at the mome3nt I can’t see much that isn’t in multiples of …like…. two’s and three’s… so…. even though my climate-casino-computer-predictor had me cleaning out the casino by 2040… i think that one swas off by a little… but judging by the multiple blackboards in front of me… I think I cleaned out their liquor cabinet pretty good… I’m too lit to look for the missing heat so I’ll crash for the day and try again tomorrow
It’s easy, Mike; double down when you win and all’s well. Bingo.
=============================
“cce (Comment#50297)
August 1st, 2010 at 1:07 am
Please show me temperature data of any kind that shows the last 10 years aren’t the warmest decade on record”
cce,
This is an unreasonable request. It is similar to asking, “please show me the data that shows you haven’t been doing x for the last ten years.”
No one here could possibly produce the data you request, which is the very reason you keep asking, so then you can appeal to numbers that align with your conclusion.
Yawn.
Andrew
“The days of invoking Real Climate as an authority are passing. The moving hand, having writ, moves on.”
To be replaced by Anthony Watts and his band of idiots, I suppose. I like the latest from Willis where he is PERSONALLY INCREDULOUS about a paper. I can’t wait to read his response pa—ha, just kidding.
Cue Willis to call me the worst person ever or Anthony to say I’m a coward for posting with my first name only. Boo-hoo and etc.
Boris:
Nah. Science of Doom.
Though I can see why you’d like RealClimate… it often stoops to your petty level of name calling.
kim (Comment#50304) August 1st, 2010 at 7:57 am
Where is ‘there’? I have no idea what you are talking about. What is your actual problem with RC apart from ignoring it? They have a lot of good information there.
Carrick (Comment#50310) August 1st, 2010 at 2:28 pm
Where? They seem to be pretty well focused on the issues to me. Compared to WUWT or CA, the snark level is zero.
Boris (Comment#50309) August 1st, 2010 at 12:38 pm
It is Willis favorite argument, and about the weakest one you can make. If he can’t understand something, the most obvious explanation is fraud. Yet it plays well to the audience there.
Bugs, at 11:02AM, on July 31st, in the year of our Lord 2010, George Tobin, in comment #50267, gives a link to Climate Science which has the relevant discussion. This is the third or fourth time you’ve been directed there. Now that I’ve held your hand so well, do you need to have your head held, also? Maybe to keep it from exploding at what you read?
=========================
Actually, Bugs, an even better reference is Pielke Pere’s post of 5/24: ‘My Perspective on the Nature Commentary by Kevin Trenberth’ with links to the three way discussion he had with Josh Willis and Kevin Trenberth.
======================
Bugs:
Their “snark level” is hardly zero, or anything close to it. You just don’t notice it, because your own language is immersed in similar veins of snark. I will agree that the tone of the blog has improved since the “illegally hacked emails” were released.
Other than tone, the other things that bother me about the blog are self promotion and their often one-sided commenting policy.
I view RC as more of an advocacy blog than an actual “science” blog much of the time. It’s a good place to go shopping for the arguments of hyperventilating climate catastrophists (HCCs). Don’t expect to find much on RC that is outside of the HCC party line.
That said, I’m not much of a fan of Pielke Srs blog for similar reasons…no commenting policy at all, and 95% self-hype.
For the latest blow to Gavin’s and RealClimate’s credibility, and it is a heavy blow, see ‘The No-Dendro Illusion’ at Climate Audit.
==================
Thank goodness for all that missing heat, because if it weren’t missing then the ice pack I’ve been holding against my head to help the mad ass hangover would have melted by now.
Oh no… the Dreaded Doctor Analogy has reared it’s ugly stethoscope over at Jr.’s.
Andrew
Only in it for the power.
==================
WRT Wliis.
When I read a title that says “AGW disproved” I take a similar attitude. One doesnt need to find the math error.
it does help, however.
“When my husband read this he pointed out to me yesterday, and I’d like to share that not only does Mosh call a geologist’s position like his (natural variation) ignorance (which is just silly ) he also (and maybe others here) might believe that most or all planetary processes can be understood just like that. Not true. Some are. Like the tides (he used that as an example) But many are not. We have thousands of years of good data about earthquakes and earthquake faults but we can’t really predict earthquakes can we?”
Well, your “husband” needs to read more carefully. The appeal to natural variation is an appeal to ignorance. he even provided an example. We have thousands of years of data on earthquakes and cannot predict. THAT is ignorance. A collection of facts is not knowledge. It is numbers. Looking at those numbers and deriving an underlying process that allows you to predict (WITH SKILL) is Knowledge. WRT climate it is Not knowledge to say “climate varies” that is merely observation. When, one looks at the fundamental physics of radiative transfer and says “If GHGs increase our first order understanding predicts that temperatures will generally go up” that is knowledge. Does the climate go up in a steady way? no. does it still oscilate? yes. Do temperatures go Down in dramatic ways when volcanoes erupt? Yup. Does the theory predict that? Yup. Does the theory predict that oscilatting will STOP? nope. can the theory predict all the oscilations? nope. Can transients be larger than the underlying long term signal? yup. Does the theory say as much? yes.
Consider:
I start my descent to the runway. The theory of gravity and the laws of physics predict my plane will touch down in 3 minutes.
is my descent perfect? nope. Why does it oscilate up and down?
Hmm, I look, oh, my plane sees local wind variations, oh the drag effects from the flaps are not exactly as predicted, I get some seperation at the leading edge, Oh, the temperature gradient is bigger than predicted. Oh, my thrust changes with changes in the ambient air. These variations dont falsify the law of gravity or the physics of flight. They require me to MODEL MORE PHYSICS.
Crap, I have to add a Gust model to my wind model.
I get closer to the ground, my plane starts to climb? WTF? WTF? oh I discover the ground effect.
Looking at that squiggly line of ups and down while I descend I can often find areas where It looks like I defeat the laws of gravity and the laws of flight, at other places it looks like ‘natural variation’. But no engineer or scientist stops there. Why does the plane pitch up ABRUPTLY, when no new forces were applied? magic? gremlins? WTF?
ah no, the random occurrance of a nose vortex. Is that predictable? hmm less so, We study, we can bound that problem to certain speeds and certain types of airplane noses, and certain Angles of attack. So there are Limits to our knowledge. We discover those by looking and trying to model and predict. We do not discover those by seeing wiggles and calling them “natural variation”
If we are INCURIOUS we look at the wiggles and say “natural variation” nothing to explain, no point in trying. if we are incurious, perhaps we pick fields of science that are dominated by observation ( like geology) rather than by prediction.
or here is another way to look at it
if we looked at the wiggles in temperature after a volcano, and looked at that drop
would could say:
1. My “husband” is a geologist and geology teaches that temperature goes up and down over long scales, THEREFORE this small drop is unpredictable, within the range of natural variation, and therefore uninteresting
2. Hey the science of how the atmosphere works predicts JUST SUCH a drop. That’s a point in its favor!
I got the internal error page.
My shorter proof of fermats last theorem is lost forever
Whatever Mosher.
Coming to you from a teeny tiny island in the pacific…
Ignorance- yeah the word ignore is part of that word.
Take a geology course. Ignoring the vast geologic record is ignorance.
No where in the vast geologic record of knowledge does C02 drive temperature. All the processes that surpassed the “power” you assign this tiny gas are still at work today too.
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/Reference_Docs/The_Geologic_Record_and_Climate_Change.pdf
Did we find the missing heat yet?
steven mosher (Comment#50350) August 2nd, 2010 at 12:47 pm
I got the internal error page.
My shorter proof of fermats last theorem is lost forever
My friend Andrew will be most relieved, he would have hated to have done all that work for nothing!
If you’re looking for a change of attitude to openness around data it’s worth contemplating the title of this table in the recent State of the Climate 2009 report.
Table 2.1. Sources of those datasets used in this chapter that are publicly available for bona fide research purposes.
I’m not sure “publicly available” should come with provisos. If you want something to be be publically available you should accept all future use and abuse of it. It does suggest what they really mean is “available to like-minded friends”. Why not get rid of that doubt and make it truely publically available. It’s not like it’s a technically difficult thing to do, better to dump it on the net than employ a gatekeeper. After all one of the main arguemnets I’ve seen from the scientists is these FOI requests waste their valuable time.
HR–
I agree with you. After all, who decides what’s “bona fide research purpose”? Either it’s publicly available or there is a gatekeeper and it’s available to those of whom the authors approve. It can’t be both.