Part III of Courrielche’s Climategate series has been posted. Of course, I’ll post the bit that mention me. Once again, you get snippets of “the” email:
As mentioned in Part I, Gavin Schmidt emailed Lucia Liljegren, providing “a word to the wise†in an apparent attempt to halt Climategate’s promulgation. The connectedness of these climate scientists is also seen in this email. “Lucia, as I am certain you are aware, hacking into private emails is very illegal,†said Schmidt. “If legitimate, your scoop was therefore almost certainly obtained illegally.â€
An interesting observation in this statement is his use of the words “if legitimate.†You may recall that the Climategate files had been uploaded to Gavin Schmidt’s site, RealClimate, approximately two days before the story broke on the Air Vent. “I had no idea where [the file] had come from or if they had been tampered with,†said Schmidt, when asked about the use of the term if legitimate. However, Schmidt could have easily authenticated their content because he was a participant in over one hundred of the email exchanges. The use of “if legitimate†appears to have been purposefully used in this correspondence with Lucia.
‘
As you know from my comment of Part I of Courrielche’s Climategate series, when I received that email, I was convinced they were important. Reasons:
- Gavin, who rarely emails me, bothered to send the email.
- The headers says “Received: from sphinx.giss.nasa.gov (sphinx.giss.nasa.gov [169.154.204.2])
by cubmail.cc.columbia.edu (Horde MIME library) with HTTP; Thu, 19 Nov 2009
15:48:21 -0500”. So, I knew it was really from Gavin and his spidey-sense was sufficiently activated to motivate him to email promptly and from his NASA office. - I’d looked at enough emails to know the contents sure looked legitimate.
We later learned that Gavin had had access to these files. Gavin strikes me as an intellectually curious fellow, and I would find it difficult to believe he had not read the emails. In fact, I would find it astonishing if he had not already contacted CRU or others to tell them of what occurred. If so, then many people whose emails were leaked knew the emails were legitimate and — presumably– would have time to think about how to respond when they finally were revealed to the public.
But then, I admit that I don’t know Gavin personally. Maybe those who know him personally would find it easy to believe Gavin just happened to notice the hacking into RC’s account during the minutes when it was occurring, foiled the person who hacked in, yawned, said “no biggie” and returned to the mundane task of improving a parameterization in ModelE, never taking a peak what story the RC hackers were trying to disseminate.
Now on to a Courrielche observation about Steve Mosher:
One could even argue that Mosher is one of the few people with the right assortment of circumstances, and associates, to understand the significance of the Climategate files and the technical expertise to post them on various locations using open proxies, a method hackers use to hide their identities while online. Given that the Climategate files came from computers with IP addresses in Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, open proxies is most likely the technique used by the person who posted the files and links on ClimateAudit, RealClimate, and the Air Vent.
I agree with this observation– to the extent that within a few days of the email release I asked Steve if he was the hacker. He told me he was not. Like all of you, I am waiting for the book.
Look at the reaction to Yamal. The ‘if legitimate’ and ‘illegal hacking’ were probably disseminated in an e-mail to the team.
Why does this guy get the impression that the “peer to peer review” network is disinterested and detached from the outcome? Watts, McIntyre, Mosher–they all have agendas on the issue–and it isn’t to improve understanding. You guys troll through email because you hate Mann and Jones, and that is supposed to be some sort of proof of objectivity?
Or to put it another way: the range for climate sensitivity is unchanged by the CRU hack.
Boris–
I don’t hate man and Jones.
Of course the estimated range of climate sensitivity is unchanged by the CRU hack. In fact, the true rate of climate sensitivity is unaffected by both the CRU hack and any IPCC or consensus estimate.
But why are you rebutting this strawman (i.e. argument Corrielche never advanced.) In fact, he appears he woud agree with with you that the CRU hack did not change the current estimate of climate sensitivity. That’s just not what’s important about the CRU hack.
But… of course, it’s the argument some would prefer to rebut. The more nuanced argument Corrielche (and others ) actually advance is more inconvenient isn’t it?
Lucia,
My main point was that Watts, McIntyre and Mosher are not objective judges of the science, as Courrielche seems to believe. Unless you think Joe Romm and Tamino are also objective and should be part of the peer to peer process. I don’t.
“As you know, I’m not political. If anything, I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right, regardless of the consequences. This isn’t being political, it is being selfish.â€
how many papers has Jones reviewed?
Boris,
I that point even meaningful?
Is anyone truly an “objective judge of ‘the’ science”? Heck, is there even such a thing as ‘the’ science? Is Courrielche claiming anyone is a objective judge of ‘the’ science?
Scientists — like other rational people– can sometimes judge individual questions. For example: SteveMc. can perform some analyses to judge whether or not someone used proxies upside down to create their reconstruction. He can comment on the adequacy of confidence intervals or question why some proxies are used and other excluded. He can post his argument. He may be right or wrong, but his discussions appear to contain at least some useful information. Moreover, his criticism of some published papers contained at least some elements of correctness– as supported by Wegman, and the NAS panel. Also, didn’t Kauffman fix his “upside down” proxy after Steve identified it’s existence in his reconstruction?
These sorts of observations can be advanced by people and they can advance their argument. Courrielche is observing that some arguments and discussions are going out outside of the peer -reviewed journal circle, and that people are reading each others stuff and developing followings. The groups is large enough to make a difference. Maybe it’s not making a difference to what you, Boris, call ” ‘the’ science”. But no one knows what ” ‘the’ science” even is — and I don’t mean that in just climate science. I mean, in any science.
I don’t think anyone can judge ” ‘the’ science” because no such thing exists. You can try to talk about whether people have an impact on ” ‘the’ science” all you want. But in the end, that comes across as a vague meaningless muttering because it doesn’t mean anything.
Gavin is a debater and an adversary. When he says, “if legitimate” I don’t take that to mean the question exists in his mind. To me it means that he wasn’t going to confirm or deny the legitimacy of the emails. I don’t see anything wrong with that stance, although if I had my druthers all federal agency emails in the US would be open to scrutiny. Agencies are where laws are made now. As the Courrielche piece points out, it’s nice to see that when the stakes are high enough the forum will disband and reassemble in a more convenient place.
MikeN says:
“Look at the reaction to Yamal.”
I also see some clues there. But when I look at CRU I know I’m only looking at one piece of the whole. Also, it might be a mistake to try to finger one person. If it was an inside leak (which I have suspected from day one) there could have been a chain reaction of command. Is that why Jones made sure to be absent Nov 13?
.
I hope Briffa’s illness is over and he’s feeling lots better.
Something had to be done that nobody wanted to be affiliated with.
Hank —
Sure. Gavin acts like a political operative. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. But it’s worth recognizing especially when some bloggers or commenters start trying to characterize all scientists as politically naive innocents who never consider the political or social impact of their postings. (Sort of like Sheldon on “The Big Bang Theory”.)
Have proponents of the “illegal hacking” hypothesis apologized yet for their naivete and willful ignorance?
“Is that point even meaningful?”
Ask Courrielche. He seems to think blog review is better than peer review, and that it is better because “it ostensibly sanitizes the outcome from the affects of interested parties.” I’m glad we both agree that this is a ludicrous claim.
There is no scientific support for the romantic notion of objective human behavior (and objective decision making). The cognitive science clearly shows that humans are incapable of making decisions based solely on objective data. All decisions that involve risk (like deciding to publishing a paper) must be processed first through the emotional centers of the brain. This area of the brain evaluates actions on the basis of perceived social consequences of the action. If the perceived negative social consequences are too high, then the action is not taken. This is often a subconscious process.
(This is true for all healthy humans but not true for sociopaths — who are able to operate completely outside of social norms).
For a scientist to argue that they behave based on objective facts and data, requires that they ignore all of the objective facts and data about cognitive science.
The trouble with climate science is that scientists are often unware of the ‘forcings’ of their own behaivor. This is why a more open review process is required. People outside of the author’s social circle and homophily sphere must be part of the review process to ensure that social bias is eliminated.
“Have proponents of the “illegal hacking†hypothesis apologized yet for their naivete and willful ignorance?”
Is there evidence that it was anything else?
Boris,
“Watts, McIntyre, Mosher–they all have agendas on the issue–and it isn’t to improve understanding.”
.
They most certainly do have agendas, but I believe that those agendas have a great deal to do with improving understanding. What I think you completely miss Boris is that lots of skeptics and ‘lukewarmers’ believe that increasing GHG’s must (of course!) cause a temperature rise; they just don’t believe that current estimates of future warming, and the projected consequences of future warming, are at all reliable, or in many cases even rational.
.
I personally want very much to have understanding of Earth’s climate to improve to the point that projections are truly credible. After that (as Gavin says) “the rest is economics”. And politics. And value judgments. What I don’t want is hysterical left-wing-green political advocates corrupting climate science and attempting to preempt the economics, politics, and value judgments which have to be the basis for any public response to global warming from GHG emissions.
Boris–
And this somehow supports what you claim is your point which involved throwing around the vague ill-defined term ” ‘the’ science”? Please enlighten us by explaining how.
Traditional peer review doesn’t involve evaluating ” ‘the’ science”. It involve evaluating very specific claims that answer very narrow specific questions. The fact is that with regard to public understanding of uncertainties etc. SteveMc’s blog discussions on very narrow questions about paleo-reconstructions do have some advantages over three anonymous peer reviews hidden away from the public.
Some people might not like blog discussions– but others think they add something. That something may not be something gate-keepers like, but so be it.
Actually Boris, Blog review can be very effective sometimes, so I don’t think you should dismiss it so readily.
For instance, I might remind you of the Hwang Affair.
Um, yes it supports my point, because it is my point.
Change “the science” to anything you like–it’s not going to make Watts a disinterested party.
Courrielche tries to argue that blog review is better than peer review because blog reviewers are “detahced” and are not “interested parties.” That’s a pretty dumb argument.
Change “the science†to anything you like–it’s not going to make Watts a disinterested party.
Hi guys,
I’ll get to Boris and others, But for now I’ll copy here what I wrote over at patricks. Patrick was at a little disadvantage when it came to figuring this out, because I wouldnt give him much. I couldn’t I had not written anything when I talked to him. Did I download the files? No. How did you get them? On a CD. Who gave them to you?
Cant say. Why did they give them to you? To see if they were a hoax. How did you do that. I called people mentioned in the mail, I read them mails. At that stage I’m very unsure if I even want to talk about what happened between Nov 13th and Nov 19th. Is the book gunna a be a who dunnit? a what happened?
a why does it matter?
With all that said.. here is what I wrote at his site:
Another piece in the puzzle, a piece which has been in PLAIN VIEW, will come out over the next couple
of days. The people who helped me have the chance to tell the story from their perspective. Hopefully, you’ll
hear from one of the guys I talked to, and then the person who gave me the CD. That person commented
long ago about getting the file. For people who like to do this investigative stuff, I’ll leave that out there, but
it’ll come clear before the book goes out. Finally, one clarification. I didnt seek information from CRU. It came
to me. I’ll let the people involved in that tell their view of things. The actual person inside CRU, had no clue
what his message meant to me. It meant the files were real. It meant the files were out there. Like deep throat
he passed me no information. he just told me what I needed to know. These were real. I could point to them
with confidence and let the community play the role of woodward and bernstein. You still can.
You can still go read the mails BORIS. are you curious..
Boris is fine with Jone’s agenda and bias
Then I would expect such blogs to stick to matters relevant to those subjects. Watts obviously doesn’t do so as more than half his posts are political in nature. And then there is the obvious nonsense about CO2 not coming from fossil fuels or whatever other drivel he can muster.
Is Patrick Courrielche a nom de plume for Steven Mosher or is Steven Mosher simply the coolest guy ever?
Boris
Could you find a quote? I’m scanning the first article and don’t see that. All I’m seeing is that what he calls peer-to-peer review is shaking things up and forcing some information to be disclosed that others would prefer hidden.
Lucia,
“spidey sense”..
You add to my vocabulary yet again.
I quoted him in Comment#29832, second of this thread.
Steve F–
The definition of spidey sense is in the urban dictionary
Boris–
Yeah. I read that. But Courrielche isn’t arguing what you seem to claim he’s arguing. He doesn’t say individuals are utterly disinterested. He says the process sanitizes the outcome from the affects of disinterested parties. That is: individuals may not be disinterested, but the open process sanitizes the outcome from the disposition or inclination of these interested parties.
Plus, in most cases, we are detached from the outcome of any arguments or discussions of papers or issues discussed at our blogs. For example, whether Rahmstorf’s weird smoothing turns out to be good bad or indifferent, politically motivated or not– the outcome doesn’t affect me. Same with any hockey stick evaluation or what not.
So, as far as I can see: You are reinterpreting this to mean something Courrielche doesn’t argue and what Courrielche argues sound in the vicinity of reasonable. Perfect? I’m not sure. There is an element of opinion piece in there. But we aren’t talking anything in the Eli Rabett or Joe Romm level of weird opinion spewing.
Boris,
“And then there is the obvious nonsense about CO2 not coming from fossil fuels or whatever other drivel he can muster.”
.
You mean nonsense about CO2 like this: wattsupwiththat.com/2009/05/22/a-look-at-human-co2-emissions-vs-ocean-absorption/ where I argue that rises in atmospheric CO2 are most certainly the result of emissions?
.
You are seeing only what you want to see Boris.
Lucia,
“The definition of spidey sense is in the urban dictionary”.
I had already looked it up… Gavin’s sense of threat was right on the money; spidey sense indeed. Or maybe it was that he had seen most of the emails long before, and knew that something smelly would soon hit the fan.
Boris can’t even make a point.
However, Patrick gets it wrong.
I am not disinterested. I have an interest. My interest is this:
I am curious. I liked to see data. I like to see code. You can look through my whole life in every endeavor and its always been about that curiousity and getting my paws on stuff. To see how things work. To have what you say I cant have. That’s why I like science. That’s why I like detective stories. I like the science, because the rules of science say : give mosher the data; give mosher the code. Cool. When you dont, then I like that TOO.
why? because I get to see if I can figure things out without your help. That’s my interest. My interest in global warming? hey, I agree with the climate scientists. I beleive in raditive physics. I dont think that science will be proved wrong. Hockey stick?
Garbage. It doesnt matter. It’s fiber evidence in case where we have the murders fingerprint on the gun. Could I change my mind? Sure. data and code please. Cap and trade and blah blah blah. You see how well I follow that shit? I dont give a rats ass.
ONCE… ONCE I said I thought Ross Mckittricks Idea of a TAX based on T3 was a COOL idea I would support. Why is that Boris?
I think its cool because of the connection between the enviroment and a tax. Cool. just plain cool from an engineering perspective. cool. a feedback.
Now, What is McIntyre’s interests. WAY DIFFERENT.
Anthony? OMG. his perspective is way different. He used to be a warmist long ago. Did you know that? Do you know WHY he changed? Of course not. When he told me I was like.. “cool”
hey I believe something else.
here is the trick Boris. Its not the LACK OF INTERESTS that put us in a better position to judge. ITS THE DIFFERENCE OF INTERESTS.
If tommorrow steve McIntyre said he was a socialist ( hes liberal) I would still read his blog. I could care less about his politics. If tommorrow he said that sensitivity was 5C for doubling, I’d still read his blog. I do care about his view on that. If he hide code and data. I’d beat on him with every tool I have.
Lucia,
He is making the claim that the online observers are “detached” in some sense from the outcome. However, any time Mann is mentioned, McIntyre is not detached. He wants Mann to go down, so he will exaggerate or whatever. There is a lot of noise and muddied water on CA and it becomes very unclear what the issues are and , especially (as TCO would note, were he able), the impact of whatever errors are found is very rarely discussed. I don’t see how this is better than peer review.
I will say that more defects will be found via blog review, just because more attention is paid to the subject than in a peer review from a person who is probably very busy. Then, no one ever claimed peer review was the final word.
I laugh when everyone on the other side of the debate claims that they dont engage in group think.
hehe. that’s metagroupthink to think that you dont think with groupthink. So Boris and others are deluded about their being deluded.
Anyways. Some signposts that I look for. People who criticize what we find in the mails ( selective reading) who DONT LOOK FOR THEMSELVES AND MAKE THE OPPOSITE CASE. wow, that’s a signpost for group think. being incurious. People who complain that they are taken out of context, without looking at the context. Wow, thats a signpost of intellectual laziness, kneejerk PR reaction 101. Incurious, lazy.. What else. Ah, attacking the person. I mean shallow attacks. Shallow attacks are attacks
like ” he a member of this tribe.. oh hes bad” shallow ad hominim
Also a signpost of groupthink.
There are somethings that I also look for. Circling the wagons. suspicions of others ( that editor has gone to the dark side..)
refusals to admit mistakes. Shit I would love love love to catch Lucia in a mistake or MC in a mistake and run around the blogesphere saying I found a a mistake. And Lucia or Mc would do a nice little ” thanks steve, thats why we post in the internet, you never know who can find a mistake.”
This implies that there are not already differences in interests in the “traditional” scientific community–and it’s pretty obvious that there are. Judith Curry, James Annan–both have complained about skeptics and alarmists–and then there are the couple thousand or so climate scientists who don’t have a large web presence. There is already a considerable collection of interests conducting these peer reviews and writing rebuttal papers and working in different aspects of the field. The blogs exacerbate any conflicts and generally devolve into namecalling (eg, Willis Eschenbach, Carrick, Boris). Mainstream scientists who comment on CA are usually assailed by the ideologues and get frustrated and leave. It’s almost like CA wants to be the Townhall stop on the global warming tour. Al Gore is fat. And let’s not forget neverending arguments over the definitions of words.
You also imply that a difference of interests is wanted, but this is very dependent on what those interests are. Since Anthony wants to see James Hansen rot in prison, I don’t know how much value he adds to the debate. Same thing with Romm though. If you guys think Watts is good for determining the truth or falsity of AGW, then you have to accept Romm. I accept neither.
It was Paul Hudson, wasn’t it?
“Lucia, as I am certain you are aware, hacking into private emails is very illegal,†said Schmidt.
Why use the word ‘very’?
How many different shades of illegal are there for Gavin?
And there I was thinking he was such a black and white character.
Boris–
What, did he die? Or has he managed to get himself banned from every single blog, and internet forum on the planet?
As for detached– you seem to have a way of taking words out of context. When McIntyre looks at a proxy reconstruction, his life is not affected by the outcome of his analysis. But anyway, you persist in claiming Courrielche is simply promoting peer-to-peer review as “better”. He’s just describing it as a different things, which in certain instances has certain properties. One of those properties is “In a case where politics comes into play, it appears that this review process is much more rigorous – it ostensibly sanitizes the outcome from the affects of interested parties. ” — which it does.
Like it or not, any claim is open to immediate public inspection and criticism. There is no way to prevent criticism from being aired or to hide mistakes.
In some instances, this property is an advantage.
Does recognizing some advantages mean someone’s claiming it’s flat out better? Not necessarily. I can point out that candles have advantages to incandescent light bulgs (and vice versa). Point out advanges doesn’t mean one is claiming it’s “better”.
What Patrick is noticing is this thing exists and it has noticable effects. Not only that, even though it is informal we all kinda-sorta know it exists. After all, Steve Mosher knew who to send comments too to prode the announcement of the link at Jeff Ids.
This peer-to-peer network didn’t use to have a name. But it already existed. Now it has a name. It’s not peer review. It’s not going to replace peer review. It’s not the same thing– but it exists, it will continue to exist, and it will have effects.
Boris,
here is what you dont get. YOU DONT GET IT.
In the old media world reports are categorized into various items.
You have your news writing ( thats a fun class, ever take a journalism class, news writing is a PITA ) you have your features, you have your opinion section. You got letters to the editor.
All very neat and tidy. A nice box. news has no opinion in it; opinion has no news. If a news writer has an opinion he is told to stuff it. more or less, depending on the paper. You write a altter to the editor, may or may not get read or published.
Then you have science publishing. What a piss poor contraption.
When I read the strategies and tactics and page limts and publishing time lines and anonymous reviwers.. Wow. rube goldberg. Anyways, thats not my point.
here is my question.
What is WUWT? do you know. you dont even effin know. you dont.
Who selects the articles for WUWT? who? do you know? you dont.
you think you do. but, you dont. You have no idea how its done.
Who writes the commentary on the news? what do we call this kind of writing?
Does Watts also have ‘analysis pieces?” who writes them?
HOW ARE THESE PIECES SUBMITTED TO WUWT? who reads them before they are posted? do you know? Do you know the criteria they use to make the decision? are those criteria news criteria, interest criteria? science criteria? or are the pieces passed around for a variety of inputs, from all sorts of people with different perspectives? Huh.. tell us about that Boris.
Bottomline boris you cant help but judge watts by your old tired stale dinosuar categories. he is his own quirky mixture of a bunch of stuff. News, opinion, commentary, and yes researcher.
Instead of all of these things being hidden ( like jones not liking blair) Anthony is transaprent. I can calibrate that.
steven mosher (Comment#29881): “And Lucia or Mc would do a nice little ‘thanks steve, thats why we post in the internet, you never know who can find a mistake.'”
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
Everyone has interests. But the back and forth helps to sanitize that interest. “Its not pretty” as I said in the piece, but mistakes will be found.
Could anyone at this site imagine only allowing 3 commentors to comment on a study that Lucia posted on this site – then applying the conclusion of those three people and Lucia to the world.
How quickly would Lucia’s site be hacked…leading to the inevitable “Lukewarmergate”?
Boris–
First, I don’t think either Watts or Romm are good “for determining the truth or falsity of AGW”. That said, I don’t think Real Climate, Climate Audit, The Air Vent, Annans’ blog, the Pielke Blogs, Open Mind, or any blog is good for “determining the truth of falsity of AGW”.
I accept and welcome the existence of all these blogs. I think open discussion is good.
It’s true that Watts and Romm serve as counter weights for each other. Many blogs end up with a counter weight. How is this bad?
In any case, whatever notion you intend to convey by saying you don’t accept Watts or Romm, you are free to never visit them if you wish to avoid them. You are equally free to not subscribe to newspapers you don’t value, not watch tv shows etc.
I still think the existence of blog commentary is a good rather than a bad.
“hehe. that’s metagroupthink to think that you dont think with groupthink. So Boris and others are deluded about their being deluded.”
Groupthink is a problem for everyone, and if you aren’t aware that it is, that’s because you are engaging in it.
And I have read the emails, but only the ones that people have pointed to. I’ve been underwhelmed with claims of fraud. “hiding the decline” was the best ammo–that WMO graph was a piece of shit. But it still represented what Jones and the rest thought was the most accurate picture of climate. Their reasoning shouldn’t be buried, however.
But people getting up in arms over climate scientists getting pissed about what was going on at Climate Research? They should have been pissed off. That was an embarrassing moment for the skeptic/denial community. They finally break into the real journals after being held back for so long by conspiracy (lol), and they publish a paper that makes the WMO graph smell rosy.
I don’t see any reason to further delve into the metadiscussion, unless you can show me where there is a tangible result, I’m not interested. Life is short. The policy will move toward the correct answer–and you’re no going to find the correct answer in blogs or emails. You gotta look at the real world.
“Huh.. tell us about that Boris.”
I can make a reasonable guess as to how Anthony selects his posts. I would say anything that questions the mainstream view of global warming gets a greenlight. Anything that might make a climate scientist look bad is probably good. He probably rejects most (but not all) out and out ridicule of climate science. Let’s see, what else? Oh, yeah, if it’s been cold outside somewhere, that gets in. Snowfall is golden.
The biggest joke was when he linked to Uncommon Descent. So we know that linking to an out and out unscientific venue in regards to criticizing climate science is not out of bounds.
(You play poker? You see, I’ve got a read on Watts. I know his range. He raises with damn near everything.)
But, see, what you don’t get, Steve, is that I don’t need to know the internal machinations of WUWT to know that the output is crap.
Boris–
Based on your detailed knowledge of WUWT, you must read it more often than I do!
Boris,
“Same thing with Romm though. If you guys think Watts is good for determining the truth or falsity of AGW, then you have to accept Romm. I accept neither.”
.
There are big differences. Anthony allows contrary opinion to be posted on his blog. Joe Romm does not. Anthony only deletes comments that are profane or completely off topic. Joe Romm deletes almost everything he doesn’t agree with. Anthony is a meteorologist; Joe Romm is mainly a political hack. My email exchanges with Anthony suggest a quite reasonable guy. My email exchanges with Joe Romm suggest… well, not so reasonable.
The difference between blogs that support AGW and blogs that are skeptical (or lukewarm) about AGW is very clear; you need look only at their moderating policies.
Well put lucia.
Patrick puts a name to it. Since I’ve named a few products in my time, and coined a few terms, and made a huge portion of my life studying “novelty” and emergence, I understand what patrick ( who also has done engineering and product marketing) is up against
when he tries to describe what is happened in these comments/posts made on the internet.
Lets start with “peer review” whats that mean in most peoples minds. What’s the image you have. I’ll tell you mine. AS IT WAS SOLD TO ME.
peer review means the paper gets reviwed by people with the same knowledge and standing as the people who wrote the paper, people who know enough to check the paper for accuracy. are there mistakes? unsupported conclusions. does the text match the science. and the people who do it are dedicated to truth and not personaility. they put that shit aside. yeah, truth is preserved.
The Reality is different. Peer review is anonymous. Man, thats a huge problem for me. wow. that makes me question the whole thing. thats a system that can be hacked. A peer might be my enemy. What about the editor, is he in the bag for the skeptics?
These are not my worries alone. THE VERY MINUTE, that Soon’s paper got published, mann had a suspicion about the editor.
Lets build a file on him! and Jones.. Jones knew the game and said “we have a cru employee on the board” he didnt say he knew a smart guy on the board.
I think of other models. The murder board. I went through those.
Hostile open review. Openly hostile. Hostile on purpose. I like that. Bring it dope!
Anyways. on the internet anybody can review things. Your superiors, your inferiors, your friends, your enemies. Its all in the mix. And dang, Its really hard to coordinate attacks. Its immediately transparent. interest is out there right on the surface. Patrick needed a term or he had to invent a new one.
So, like any good marketer he picked a known term and twsited it to his purpose. “peer to peer” not centralized, not controlled, everybody shares, and a network emerges.
When it comes to reviewing a news article, what works better to check facts. two guys in the fact checking department or a million fact checker of widely differnt skills. The army of davids of course. Science articles? Thats an open question in my mind.
OPEN QUESTION. that means I’m open to be convinced by experiment. Folks like Boris, the closed dinosuar minded, have decided that the current peer review system is just fine. Incurious, closed minded, faith based, nonsense. And from people who should know better.
SteveF
Moderation Policies!
I am glad you mentioned that topic. I am very very glad you mentioned that Topic, especially WRT Watts. More on that later.
Boris. Can you tell me about the moderation policies at Watts?
Can you? You cant. I can. But, I don’t moderate Watts.
Boris. Can you tell me about moderation at RC? can you?
Ever had a comment banned? I have. do you know what my comment said?
“thank you” after a while of having comments banned there you can reverse engineer the policy. THEN IF YOU READ THE CLIMATEGATE MAILS, you can see in their own words what they try to do.
Re Boris:
As evidenced by the E-mails, a very small and tight circle of scientists have a strongly disproportionate amount of power in deciding what climate science articles or authors get published and which don’t. All of them on a first name basis with each other, all coordinating who will review which submission and what their response should be before hand.
Bloggers and writers are rarely, if ever, detached from the outcome of what stories or topics they cover.
As for agenda’s, I don’t imagine SM is going to lose his house if CO2 sensitivity turns out to be 10C/century. But those in the other camp would have a more difficult time finding grant money if it turned out to be 0.1C/century.
“Oh, yeah, if it’s been cold outside somewhere, that gets in.”
What part meteorologist do you have trouble understanding? He is interested in weather. Since when is that a crime? If there is even a hint of a sunspot that shows up too. Does that mean he is being a typical New Dalton denier? Seizing on space weather because he doesn’t know the difference between it and space climate?
The section is called “weather is not climate”.
Moreover, this statement is utter nonsense: “If you guys think Watts is good…then you have to accept Romm”
Nobody “has” to accept anything here. We are free people, for now, we can accept and reject what we wish. Jeez you get grumpy when you think about Watts. Me thinks your real beef is his sphere of influence…
I can make a reasonable guess as to how Anthony selects his posts. I would say anything that questions the mainstream view of global warming gets a greenlight.
DING DING DING. It’s called WATTS UP WITH THAT FOR A REASON.
anthony, my personal observation of him in person, is that he likes these odd things. Things that dont fitthe normal picture.
But he also loves stuff about space and black holes, always fringe. margin. INTERESTING. novel. rare. hey, watts up withthat?
Let’s see, what else? Oh, yeah, if it’s been cold outside somewhere, that gets in. Snowfall is golden.
Boris, as usual falls straight into a trap. You see I was hoping he would say this. the snow articles in the mainstream press just kept on coming in. Boris, why was this post put up?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/08/high-fire-danger-in-south-australia-as-temperatures-soar/
I mean exactly why? hint hint.
You see, you see the output of a machine and think you can understand the inner workings. Read the intent through the words.
Hmm, If I take that approach, then I reject everything of climate science. because I see a machine that cant even share data and code. And looking on the inside, I get a clue as to why
“Folks like Boris, the closed dinosuar minded, have decided that the current peer review system is just fine.”
Have fun pushing over straw-Boris? Peer review is imperfect. That doesn’t mean that blog review is better or even marginally useful.
I like open review, though.
“You see, you see the output of a machine and think you can understand the inner workings. ”
Are you actually arguing that Anthony Watts does not promote an anti-mainstream climate science viewpoint? Really?
“Boris. Can you tell me about the moderation policies at Watts?
Can you? You cant. I can. But, I don’t moderate Watts.”
I can tell you Watts has not published posts of mine (and not because of profanity or whatnot). And he’s pretty much banned Steve Bloom. The “Watts doesn’t moderate comments!” claim is clearly false from my experience.
Idiots like Courrielche aren’t nuanced, just ignorant. The whole point of peer reviews is that garbage is kept out. The paper that was the cause of the concern was garbage, and it was smart denier politics that got it published. gerlich and Tscheuschner pulled a similar stunt with their paper. Find a small journal, move in someone sympathetic to your view, manage the peer review process, published. Half the board of the the journal that published Soon etal resigned in protest, the paper was that bad. People seem to ignore that, because it is convenient for them. The paper was bad. It told lies (the references it made to other papers that ‘backed up it’s claims’ were deliberate misrepresentations of the findings of those papers). It should not have been published.
If you honestly believe, as the CRU researchers do, that CO2 is going to be causing serious problems for the world, and you find someone subverting the system to tell lies, what are you going to do?
Boris:
You noted that you had read some of the emails from “climategate” but only those where someone had specifically pointed you to.
I am now officially pointing you to this summary (see link below). No, it’s not everything, but the analysis provides a good place to dig in and really assess what was happening with, for and to these folks over the years…. in their own words. 😀
http://assassinationscience.com/climategate/
Have fun Boris!!
Bruce
Wow… it’s been emotional. Moshgate sure likes drama….
As long as Watts is showing his hits-count-willy (“how about this for a hockey stick”) I can’t take him any more serious as Joe “Pitbull” Romm.
There are way too many ego’s in Circus Climate *sigh*
“Find a small journal, move in someone sympathetic to your view, manage the peer review process, published. ”
Bugger Bugs, you’ve managed to pull out the Mother of All Hypocrisies…
bugs–
You are making the mistake of believing that if peer-to-peer review doesn’t do the same thing as peer review in journals, it does nothing. What Courrielche is observing is there is something happening at blogs and it has an effect. He had given it the name “peer-to-peer” review. The motivation for the name is obvious– it involves peers: that is, bloggers. Whether you like it or not, it involves reviews which we disseminate to our peers: other bloggers.
It’s pretty evident that the impact is going further than if a bunch of us were in a bar chatting over a beer. But the fact is: reviews of a sort are happening at blogs. People are reading them. And they are having an effect.
You can call the observation idiotic all you like– it’s not going to stop the momentum. Moreover, you can dislike the word “peer-to-peer review”. But in that case, coin a better word that people who recognize the existence of this “something” and want to describe this “something” will embrace.
Oh. I suspect you prefer to coin a word the people who think it’s a big nothing will use. But that won’t work because these people don’t recognize the existence of the something and so won’t use your word. So, if you don’t like the word “peer-to-peer review”, come up with one of your own. ‘Cuz I bet Patrick Courillche just coined a word that will not only circulate through climate blogs, but bust out into other topics.
bugs (Comment#29902):
What should be done is to write either a comment, letter or new paper explaining why you think the other paper is wrong (or contains lies) and submit it for publication.
You could also publish your opinion on a blog.
What you don’t do is attempt to prevent criticism of your own paper or a friend’s paper, by trying to prevent publication of critical comments, letters or papers.
Hoi Polloi
I’m tempted to show mine just to show what climate gate did. I’d like Jeff Id to show his. I bet they will be amazing.
Ok… in fact, I’m going to do it. Tomorrow!
BDAABAT,
I’m really not interested in reading through the mess. Let’s say for the sake of argument that they’re all lying liars. What is climate sensitivity now? Is it different? Why? Thanks.
Boris,
I remember reading Steve Bloom’s comments on Pielke, Sr’s blog, when he still allowed comments. The lack of substance, ad hominem’s and veiled (and not so veiled) threats got old after a while and I put him in my mental killfile.
Now there’s a thought. I wonder if MrPete could add killfile capability to CA Assistant?
The new order that has emerged has placed a new definition on the label peer — that of an amorphous group of intelligent online observers, detached from the outcome, with an extremely solid grasp on the topic at hand. This peer-to-peer review network surrounds and attacks the study, in search of chinks in its armor. It’s not pretty, but through this social, open dialogue, problem areas inevitably rise to the top. In a case where politics comes into play, it appears that this review process is much more rigorous – it ostensibly sanitizes the outcome from the affects of interested parties.
not often have i seen so many blatant errors in such a short piece of writing.
the denialist camp actually is pretty homogeneous. the majority of posts is a copy of another post on another denialist site.
the majority of observers are not intelligent. are you folks reading the garbage on blogs and comments? #
detached from the outcome is simply false, as Boris has pointed out.
solid grasp of the topic? are you for real?
on most blogs there is zero dialogue. actually Lucia is a pretty special case, allowing different views. but even here, real “dialogue” is rare.
the “review process” is only trying to find every minor error, and blowing it out of proportion. it is about the opposite of what scientific review is about.
denialists are “sanitizing the outcome from the affects of interested parties”? along with the marshall and the heartland Institute? come on!
two ways of reading.
When you study a period of say history or literature, I found there were two ways of reading. Reading inside the canon, and reading everything, canonical and non canonical. The accepted texts and the rejected texts. Without exception there were two kinds of people. The incurious and the curious. the incurious read inside the established lines. The curious read the margins.
tell me what you think of the mideval period. That period when religion ruled what was written. If you read inside the margins
you get one view. Read the marginalia, you get another view.
Marginalia is fascinating:
http://www.heyotwell.com/work/arthistory/marginalia.html
Articles stream into WUWT by the hundreds from user tips to automatic feeds, to individuals who read and recommend directly. The articles are choosen because they are of interest.
Those interests are open and easily discerned. I read WUWT like a book. I dont look to it for truth. It cant give me that. It can point me to an orginal document, and hpefully that document can point me to a primary source. Its an aggregator, with commentary. Only the incurious would ignore it. Only the incurious would read and swallow everything whole.
Now, to be sure, there are those like Boris, who appear to beleive that there is some process, peer review, credentials check, whatever, that allow you to choose a source and then trust that source. Like RC. You do a little pedigree check, you read a few peices. you agree with them. GREEN LIGHT, drink that kool aid. Its a lazy way to get your truth.
So, If I want to get a angle on what climate scientists say, I read RC. I get the papers I read them. Hmm. ok. Can I read the con perspective? sure. I gotta go to another site. Do i drink that kool aid? Nope. is doing it this way slow and painful. ya. do I care?
nope.
Boris wrote: “I’m really not interested in reading through the mess.”
Perhaps that’s why you really don’t appreciate what exactly has happened and the ramifications of the actions of those involved.
Bruce
lucia (Comment#29906) January 12th, 2010 at 4:02 pm
This is all starting to sound suspiciously like Dr Inferno.
sod (Comment#29911),
“the majority of observers are not intelligent.”
.
Very thoughtful and conducive to promoting constructive dialog SOD. Yup. You, more than any of the other commenters here, really know how move a thread in a positive direction. My hat is off to you. I wish I could learn how to treat people so well as you do. Did you attend a Joe Romm blog comment seminar, or is it just a natural talent?
Boris:
“Ask Courrielche. He seems to think blog review is better than peer review, and that it is better because “it ostensibly sanitizes the outcome from the affects of interested parties.†I’m glad we both agree that this is a ludicrous claim.”
No question that blog reviews are done by people with a dog in the fight – on both sides. Courrielche is wrong to say that we are detached from the outcome. But the difference is that we know who those people are that are blogging. We know what their agenda is. And we have a chance to answer them. Well, at least we can answer them on most sites. Doesn’t apply to Romm or Tamino.
The traditional peer reviews are done by unknown people, they accept or reject for unknown reasons that we never get to see, they also have a dog in the fight. We don’t know the quality of their review. And we cannot answer them.
For example, Boris, you can comment on this:
http://reallyrealclimate.blogspot.com/2010/01/another-inconvient-truth-for-agw.html
And you can do it even though I know that you are on the other side of the fence from me and even though I already know that your review will be negative.
That is all good, don’t you think? See, you are a part of peer to peer also.
do you really disagree with my statement?
“the majority of observers are not intelligent. are you folks reading the garbage on blogs and comments?”
hell, i am not sure whether the majority of those doing real peer reviews would be classified as being “intelligent”. and they at least have some sort of a higher rank academic degree.
do you think that the majority of comments made on “sceptic” blogs are written by intelligent people?
are you reading the same stuff i am reading?
the “online review” and the “dialogue” is 95% shouting at each other, with the constant repetition of contra-factual claims.
i am sorry, but i am pretty sure that this is about as honest an assessment as things get. (actually some comments on my side of the topic aren t better, but the numbers surely are on the denialist side..)
sod,
If you look at the demographics of CA versus RC you’d be amazed.
I’ll go with the smarter commenters
The beat up is impressive, if lacking in substance
Reminds me of the Mad Magazine spoof of “In Cold Blood”. How did the cops break open the case? A friend of the murderers squealed.
How did the “muckracker” Mosher crack open Climategate? Someone handed him a CD.
How did Woodward and Bernstein crack Watergate?
Deep Throat handed it to them.
It’s not the source, it’s what you do with it.
Tilo
Boris doesnt want to be part of the peer to peer.
He wants to be fed.
And if he doesnt like the color of your skin, or the ethnic food you are asking him to sample, he will turn up his nose.
Me, I like to try all food. And then critique it.
So, just understand. Boris is incurious. Boring Boris. he never surprises me. he is like the “u” after ‘q’
Steve Mosher,
Hope you have a GOOD proof reder for your book!
🙂
Its funny when Sod and other criticize people they dont know, like RomanM, UC, jeanS. I kinda
laugh
So, its funny when I read Mann say that Watts and McIntyre are part of a big conspiracy. Its funny to me cause I get to see that “conspiracy” first hand. And I say WTF is Mann smoking.
Then I get to read mann and jones mail. Wo. can we talk about conspiracy.
A couple of questions for Steve Mosher if he is able to disclose.
Did the CD contain the same content as the released zip files? For example did it contain the emails from 12th November?
Hot Off The Press!
The Pakistani’s have solved the climate question!
http://translate.google.no/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=no&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aftenposten.no%2Fnyheter%2Furiks%2Farticle3460872.ece&sl=no&tl=en
Sod is, in fact, a left wing blogger who originally just was focused on that terrible old Iraq War. Hence the blog sodiraq.blogspot.com, if I remember correctly. Unfortunately for him, he doesn’t understand the concept of a moving average:
http://climateaudit.org/2008/01/21/loehle-correction/
“Boris (Comment#29909) January 12th, 2010 at 4:07 pm
BDAABAT,
I’m really not interested in reading through the mess. Let’s say for the sake of argument that they’re all lying liars. What is climate sensitivity now? Is it different? Why? Thanks.”
To paraphrase Lucia, climate sensitivity is what it is and ain’t nothin nobody and can do about. But you seem to imply that climate sensitivity obeys the hockey team. It doesn’t.
Somebody should really look into this and figure it out!
Andrew FL–
Your link reports
Any clue what a høyenergistrÃ¥le is? Let’s keep these out of the hands of Norwegians in January. Please reserve their use for July and August.
How did Woodward and Bernstein crack Watergate?
Deep Throat handed it to them.
It’s not the source, it’s what you do with it.
In our case “deep throat” did even less. On the morning of Nov 19th two people held the file. ( that I know of) Me on a CD and a blog moderator who was holding the FOIA comment. Embargoed at the request of the Blog owner. I’ll leave it to them to explain in their own words. That’s not my place. So on the morning of the 19th, we got word that UEA had informed employees that some files of mails had been posted on the internet. Like “deep throat” just told woodward and bernstein that there was a coverup and to follow the money, this communication told us the file was real and was out there. Since the comment pointing to the link was held in moderation, that meant one thing! whoever posted the file, posted it somewhere else. That meant go find it.
Which we did. And then alerted people to it.
CTM has explained some of this long ago, but people just missed it. See the thread on the third theory.
Now Im off to dinner
Gee, Boris, I thought for a while that you might be TCI reincarnated. You have certainly monopolated this thread.
sod:
You seem terribly preoccupied with judging the intelligence of commenters at skeptical blogs. Sure, there are some off-the-wall statements made (at all kinds of blogs!), but as often as not these are due to a simple misunderstanding of basic science, or due to a politically motivated rage (some of that even at The Blackboard it seems).
.
I would not go so far as to judge a person’s intelligence based on a blog comment, though I believe you can judge if they have a technical background pretty quickly. Heck, lots of well known politicians (on both ends of the political spectrum) say absolutely crazy things about science. That doesn’t make then stupid (ok, maybe in a few cases 😉 ). If your arguments are sound, and your presentation is reasoned and respectful, then most people will at least consider what you have to say. If your main message is “I am smart and right and you are stupid and wrong” (a la Romm, Tamino, Mann, Trenberth, Gore, et al ad nauseum), then you aren’t going to make much progress.
Lucia – they are referring to the HAARP expirement.
http://www.haarp.alaska.edu/
steven, you are nothing but a teenage girl when it comes to these emails. The metadiscussion is what’s important to you. Not the science. But the argument tells us squat about what is going to happen. You love the gossip, but the gossip is 99% bullshit on both sides and trying to get anything out of it apart from some brief tingle. If McIntyre quantified his claims, then we could get somewhere, but in the end all he produces is talking points.
Do you really think that if Greenpeace gets Patrick Michaels emails they it’s going to be interesting at all? Focusing on a skeptics emails is stupid because it doesn’t expose the weaknesses in the argument. Since Michaels arguments are usually pretty bad, why would anyone want to focus on anything else? If the IPCC arguments, in toto, were really bad, would you guys be hammering these emails as hard? No, you wouldn’t.
Yeah, it’s sort of fun to poke a stick at an ideologue now and then, but, man, if that’s your focus? Speaking of boring.
I’m curious Boris… lets step away from the name calling for a moment. what’s your take on these leaked emails?? Do they show you anything? If so, what?
Just curious.
Bruce
That was why the formal scientific process was created, scientists realised long ago that human failings would always be with us. It has been a spectacular success to date.
bugs,
“That was why the formal scientific process was created, scientists realised long ago that human failings would always be with us. It has been a spectacular success to date.”
How so?? We are still saddled with flat-earth science that protects itself in any way it can!!!
Big Bang, Evolution, Global Warming errrr Global Climate Change!! Any number of smaller things like H1N1 epidemics, carcinogenic substances…
Can you point to any scientists operating outside of our University systems who get publishedl?? Can you point to any Russian scientists who get any attention in the US who aren’t parroting the Accepted Science of our Universities??
You are delusional in OHHHH so many ways!!!
bugs:
However, the current version of peer reviewed research (science wide) has only been with us for about 50 years, and the concept is still evolving. “Open peer review” is currently in vogue in many journals, and there are even journals now where the article is posted and viewable by the public months before its publication, in kind of a blog-like setting. The horror!
Lucia:
You’ve just described the philosophical basis of the adversarial court system in the US.
I wouldn’t expect a full “jury trial” on any given paper anytime soon, but the various methods, techniques and measurements do get picked apart and debated (from both sides). And while there isn’t anything publishable about the improvement of a technique in and of itself (at least in physics), that does progress the science, whether the trolls on this blog like it or not.
Bugs –
You are sooo right! What would Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Bacon and Pascal (just to name a few) done without peer review?
It boils down to this: peer-review as currently practiced has a sample size that’s way too small to adequately appraise the quality and insights of the research being reviewed. Open-review solves that problem at the cost of a lot more noise to signal. Given the ease of communication and the ability of most people to sniff out a sound argument and solid support of it, that’s a more than fair trade-off. The old proverb still holds: out of multiple counselors comes wisdom.
Mosh, I always though CTM had it pegged: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/23/the-crutape-letters%C2%AE-an-alternate-explanation/#more-13003
Lucia — this may be OT but it is about Climategate. Has anybody read Frank Furedi’s take on this at:
http://www.frankfuredi.com/index.php/site/article/350/
Interesting viewpoint summed up as:
“focusing on episodic acts of dishonesty distracts from the far more difficult task of challenging the broader cultural insecurities and mood of misanthropy that fuels climate-change alarmism today”
Com’on, what’s happening is that the internet is changing things, period. I’m reading blogs on my phone for Petes sake! What traction would SteveMc’s analysis have had pre-internet? Minimal to zip. Consider the Drudge Report’s affect on a presidency (for better or worse) when the MSM wouldn’t touch it. Blogs are new. So is YouTube, Facebook, and so on. They could be like CB radio and quickly fade when the noise level (the equivalent of trolls) starts exceeding the information. I even find it quaint that Mosh got the info on a CD.
The invention of the science journal changed how science was done (where was peer review prior to that?), and the internet will do the same. The present system was based on old technology and a new one will supersede it to utilize the new technology. Imagine Mann having done his analysis pre-computer (probably would have been the work of a career). No one can guess what’s going to come out of this as the new paradigm.
If there were no policy considerations who would be interested in tree rings? Just some scientist and science nerds who like puzzles and math. Mann could have gone about his career with his buddies congratulating each other on their latest paper that only they bothered to read.
I’m also amused by how AGW proponents smear any site that doesn’t toe the CAGW line as deniers. Which as far as I can see CA, tAV, Blackboard, and, yes, even WUWT, aren’t. All of them fall into the lukewarmer category, but that doesn’t seem to stop the denigration.
The Internet might not create a noise-free environment for the ultimate testbed for truth, but if we (I know, the W-word again) can’t shed any light here on our understanding of the World’s mysteries (say because we’re being controlled by groupthink or metagroupthink or metaPRgroupthink or plain mosherthink or savage mammals or whatnot), there is little hope for us (as individuals or as a specie) in our meager communication capacities. Consider the ol’ Physicists arguing about Nature’s real nature, or the ol’ theologists disputationes: tough to imagine how they could have fared worse than they did if their readers had access to some kind of blogosphere, interfering, questioning, demanding free code, free data and free (sorry, open, for that would mean free books too) debate. As long as noise is created in good faith, noise can’t be that bad; but then how to leap from that faith to proper behavior, and how to deal with such an explosion of interlocutors?
willard, peer reviewed papers aren’t noise free either, of course. In fact, they often are full of mistakes, for reasons that have been discussed in the past, such as difficulty in finding competent reviewers, reviewers not having enough time, reviewers not having access to the code & data used to obtain the results, etc.
Worse, since the errors often reflect consensus thinking, not only are they not noise free, but that noise is unfortunately also highly correlated. At lest with white noise, the bias averages out over time.
Tony Hansen (Comment#29884) < good eye, Tony!
Well, once it was the publisher who decided what got published. That was before computers and printers and internet and is changing as a result.
Peer review of anything is just a preliminary. Ultimately, before anything is acted on, it's subject to the scrutiny of the individuals who seek to apply it. (If it has no application, it's just academic…lol).
Therefore, the objective facts are finally reviewed dispassionately and results proceed.
If this is done on the net a little bit ahead of the old chicago machine style way, costly boondoggles are avoided. This time it saved trillions, by my conservative reckoning.
Funny about the Yamal stuff. There is a whole folder on it. The emails that refer to the Russian dendrochronologist are all about how thoroughly he's collected tree rings from around lakes, instead of at high altitude tree-line areas – so that they are never subject to drought and therefore show temperature variations very nicely- and how they show the really warm medieval period.
It looks to me like that folder was a 'war file' that was 'value added' to the leaked emails.
Objectivity… what that means is that you defer to truth.
One can be very passionate about that- and should be.
It's the moral relativists who lack an objective standard of values who are incapable of discriminating right from wrong and for whom legality, on a sliding scale, substitutes for principles.
The AGW crowd seem to deny the existence of right and wrong as the fundamental axiom of their metaphysical orientation – that's why consensus consensus consensus.
The guru syndrome is how a successful narcissist ends his time on the global stage. He surrounds himself with compliant sycophants until he is fully insulated from feedback with reality. Even though the guru usually calls for sacrifice on behalf of some universal principle, it's really all about 'follow me'.
They had a unified response to the leak. They told each other not to mention it but to hammer the meme 'stolen email' instead – and hold out hoping the commoner's famously short attention span would surf on by with party crashers and celebrity scandals as it usually does.
McKintyre and the famous Et Al are properly dissecting everything- which is necessary or else they will use the obfuscation recipe too easily.
Thanks Mr. Mosher, for sharing what details you shared.
Pirates always win! P-}
and oh- the sun is not now and never was yellow.
Carrick (Comment#29954) January 12th, 2010 at 9:39 pm
So has science in general made amazing advances or not?
There were 3 possible denials-
stolen, illegal!
taken out of context!
falsified!
They dropped the falsified message almost immediately- barely hinted at it -very tentatively.
Steve’s detailed analysis has deprived them of the ‘out of context’ obfuscation.
I notice they haven’t said ‘stolen emails’ for a while – now they are ‘personal, private correspondence’, which may be significant.
What really riles Mann, as he said, is to have his authority questioned. That’s a major threat because his principle tool of survival is his authority – his ability to persuade – his salesmanship.
He’s keenly aware of being in charge of a marketing department.
Final randomish thought-
Anonymous broke the Church of Scientology just about the same way the 3 MMMusketeers, Et Al broke the Church of Climatology. Different style, same under the hood.
It’s historic, it’s epic, it’s awesome! YARR!
bugs:
That’s a bit of a straw man.
There were a lot of other things that happened besides peer review, like a trustworthy mail system, the phone, the plane and international conferences, and now the internet.
Communication between scientists is the main reason for the advancement. Peer review’s main role is archival. Anybody who actively does research will tell you that.
Maybe this is the future of intellectual property?
One of the early adopters was Richard Stallman of course.
Free the IP, free the code, free the data. Just pay us salary and consulting fees. LOL.
Traditional peer review literature is behind pay walls. Conferences have hellish conference fees or by invitation only access. Why can’t they use some of that huge revenue to place the videos of conference talks on line?
I’ve read thru the comments on this thread and must admit that Boris makes no sense to me. Why is so much effort being expended towards countering what Boris says? I don’t understand why Boris should be getting this level of attention from the ‘best & brightest.’ What am I missing here? Does he have an argument that should be seriously entertained?
Oh, BTW, I enjoy WUWT because who knows what’s up with his next posting – very eclectic, which I enjoy.
A. Ford
“steven, you are nothing but a teenage girl when it comes to these emails. The metadiscussion is what’s important to you. ”
EXACTLY. When I am told that access to the data is not required and code is covered by IPR, THAT is a metadiscussion. Its a discussion about how the science should take place. When I am told I must believe because there is a consensus, and I see it manufactured, That is a metadiscussion.When I am told that I should trust peer review ( cause I cant have the data ) That is a metadiscussion. We cant even GET TO a discussion about the science without laying the GROUNDWORK for rational agreement.
Dont you get that?
“Not the science. But the argument tells us squat about what is going to happen. ”
Since I see no Science to discuss, only advertisements for science then the discussion OF COURSE, turns to a discussion about the methods of persuasion. Want to persuade me? Its easy. I’m rational. Data and code. If you dont, then we have nothing to discuss except your refusal to be rational.
“You love the gossip, but the gossip is 99% bullshit on both sides and trying to get anything out of it apart from some brief tingle.”
As I have said before, until HADCRU data nd code.. all the data and all the code gets released all you have is GOSSIP. Jones said.
words. He produces words, I analyze them. When he shoots out the code, guess what? I do that too. But until such time if he wants to Gossip about the average temperature like a teenage girl, then bring it. I understand that mode of communication just fine
“If McIntyre quantified his claims, then we could get somewhere, but in the end all he produces is talking points.”
Well with botched up databases and hidden code, and a corrupt publishing process what do you expect. Mann’s papers are talking points. When he does science, call me.
“Do you really think that if Greenpeace gets Patrick Michaels emails they it’s going to be interesting at all? Focusing on a skeptics emails is stupid because it doesn’t expose the weaknesses in the argument. ”
What you would see is… We generally dont communicate. There is no conspiracy as mann assumes. The conspiracy meme is what drives the tactics that Kill our ability to get people to take AGW seriously. Dont you get that. You dont get action without public support. You dont get public support without convincing people like me. You dont convince people like me without dropping your teenage girl conspiracy talk and your data hiding.
“Since Michaels arguments are usually pretty bad, why would anyone want to focus on anything else? If the IPCC arguments, in toto, were really bad, would you guys be hammering these emails as hard? No, you wouldn’t.”
Wrong, I hammer them to make the process better. To remove the doubts of people who can think. Will some people believe the earth is flat? Yup. Should I call them names? Prolly not.
Further, the emails are hammered because they show that Mcintyre was right about the games that were being played.
How important were the issues? You cant know. neither can I. THAT’S what this brought us. Less certainity, more doubt. and not doubt in the science on my part. doubt in the process.
“Yeah, it’s sort of fun to poke a stick at an ideologue now and then, but, man, if that’s your focus? Speaking of boring.”
Again Boris, can you please come up with an argument that I have not thought of or one that hasnt been given. As I HAVE SAID NUMEROUS TIMES.. nothing in the mails can falsify the science.
they are mails. The can, however, and do however, stop me from taking at face value anything put out by peer reviewed journals and the IPCC. In the begining overpeck laid out the strategy and mann signed on: focus on the peer reviewed journal versus non peer reviewed. That’s how we beat the skeptics. That was their strategy. When the skeptics got in the journals, the explicitly changed tactics: work the editors. change the meaning of peer reviewed literature. Game the IPCC review process.
With what result to the science? I dunno, they corrupted the chain of custody. The tampered with the jury. They bribed witnesses. They paid expert witness. The defendent may still be guilty as HELL, but sorry.. mistrial.
BarryW (Comment#29952) January 12th, 2010 at 9:08 pm
Com’on, what’s happening is that the internet is changing things, period.
yup.
That was why the formal scientific process was created, scientists realised long ago that human failings would always be with us. It has been a spectacular success to date.”
yup. data and code please. otherwise you just have an advertisement.
Carrick
“You’ve just described the philosophical basis of the adversarial court system in the US.
I wouldn’t expect a full “jury trial†on any given paper anytime soon, but the various methods, techniques and measurements do get picked apart and debated (from both sides). ”
Agreed.
It’s somewhat similar to what I’ve experienced called a “murder board” Adversarial review. In any case, “discovery” rules are going to be at the top of my list. I just have not seen a single cogent argument against it. not one. I see veiled moral appeals
“you should be able to figure out the method from the paper”
I see unchecked gatekeeping “Ill give you the data if I think your a valid researcher” I’ve seen nothing, nothing, that says
“truth” is arrived at faster, more efficiently by withholding data and code. Nothing. I’ve seen nothing that shows science moves faster by having one guy hold data to himself as Thompson does.
I’ve seen nothing that shows that science is improved by having researchers re invent Santers code or steigs code from a verbal description. With holding code is a recipe for confusion and stupid guessing games, and bright people wasting their time.
The intransigence in this matter, and the stark absence of any cogent argument that data withholding and code withhloding is somehow superior to sharing, indicates one thing to me. Irrational individual human interest.
An interesting comment thread, but unfortunately very typical of the polarized debate between the ‘consensus’ and the ‘skeptics (warmists and deniers, etc etc).
Boris clearly is engaged in what I call the ‘dragline’ method of debate: find some obscure point and use it to illustrate that the other side is not credible. Ideally irritate someone enough to say things that can be taken out of context.
Otherwise known as trolling.
From my own part – my own forays into understanding the state of climate science have yielded a powerful impression of a science in flux. A science which is very young, and very arrogant, and also very much beholden to outside interests.
Anything which obscures open debate and analysis in such a situation is damnable.
The CRU emails show a clear predilection in one key warmist group.
On the other hand I’ve also seen open debate between skeptics like Spencer and Lindzen on their respective work, similarly Pielke the Senior with many of those who don’t agree with the Pielke line.
To me the latter process is far more likely to yield the truth.
I can only hope that the skeptics will continue to try and not get hijacked by the counter-political agenda to that of the AGW faithful.
I think Courrielche’s on to something with his idea of P2P research and the work of McIntyre at CA has really established the blog as a public notebook of ongoing scientific analysis. It is a new way of doing research that is to be admired and copied.
But I can see that it threatens career scientists for whom I feel some sympathy. I can see that 5-10 engineers, scientists and programmers spending their spare time focussing on a problem that can be solved using some data and a modest computer must clearly worry a professional scientist who is working on the same task. He has a job and a career. These part-timers have nothing to lose but their spare time and together they may be able to find mistakes in his work and even do something new themselves. Indeed, if they have unchallenging jobs, this work may become for them their major intellectual stimulation.
However this model only lends itself to certain types of science. That’s why Gavin Schmidt is in a safer place. The time and resources needed to independently audit, rebuild, test and run the GCM’s is several orders of magnitude greater than that needed to do some climate proxy analysis. A project like that is doable but much harder.
Fred (Comment #29975): from a psychological PoV, I think that is exactly it. Except that it’s not just about jobs and careers, but also about egos. Especially in Mann’s case – he just can’t stand the idea that “some retired blogger” (or however else he has described Steve McIntyre) could have managed to utterly demolish his work – just sitting at home with a computer, and indeed in his spare time and for intellectual stimulation. What McIntyre has shown is how limited intellectually Mann is – and relatively easily. This is what Mann can’t bring himself to accept, and why he has reacted the way he does.
Mosher,
“cause I cant have the data”
Utter bullshit. How much data and code are available on AGW? Lucia wouldn’t be able to do her analyses if data weren’t available. You can throw out all studies that don’t have data released and the consensus position isn’t changed a bit. You know this, but you won’t say it.
Remember GISS. “Free the code!” When the code was freed, what happened? Some people found some minor errors. What else? Nothing changed in the GISS analysis. Skeptics still think it’s bullshit. I’m all for releasing code, but what effect did it have? Zero. So stop pretending that if the last 1% of data is released that suddenly people will start behaving rationally, because that isn’t going to happen,and you shouldn’t be so naive as to think that anything will change.
“Since I see no Science to discuss”
Try reading instead of sloganeering.
“and a corrupt publishing process”
Yeah, so corrupt that crap skeptic papers like Chilingar get published all the time.
“There is no conspiracy as mann assumes.”
There’s plenty of evidence of “skeptics” working together. You don’t think it takes planning to get those crap papers published?
Boris,
Reading through your posts you come across as being very, very bitter and angry about this whole Climategate debacle. Why so? It’s out there. It’s documented and will be read and referenced by students of science for decades to come. There’s absolutely nothing you can do about it.
Relax. Enjoy the weather.
People finding “minor” bugs with GISTemp is progress.
The science was moved forward by the GISS people releasing the code. Even the act of making their code available has improved it for the GISTemp team. That always happens when you release code (a lot of the warts get fixed in a hurry, since you don’t want them seen in public).
More progress is being made:
There are several replications of it already, the most complete being Clear Climate Code. That too is “progress” for the community at large. Next it will be refactorized, that too is “progress” because it allows the assumptions of the code to be tested more rigorously than is possible in the current hacked-up mess used by GISS.
Jeff ID is doing an independent examination of certain aspects of the land temperature reconstruction, including examining the UHI effect. He, I and others learn something from that, whether or not the GISS team does or not. That is why we are on these blogs, so for those of us who are tracking this, that is progress.
People are going back and look at other adjustments like time-of-day bias, comparing (tmax+tmin)/2 to average temperature and so forth. Those of us who are interested in learning more “under the hood” information, will learn from this to, so more progress.
So “ZERO” effect? I don’t think so.
lucia (Comment#29931)-It took me a while to figure out, but you seem to be referring to Leo G’s comment.
But no, I haven’t a clue.
Boris (Comment#29979)-““There is no conspiracy as mann assumes.â€
There’s plenty of evidence of “skeptics†working together.”
Wow, do you really not know the difference between collaboration and conspiracy? Are you really not familiar with Mann’s paranoid black helicopter rantings? Big Oil is at the root of everything!
“Michaels arguments are usually pretty bad”
Please explain to me the flaw in arguments like, say:
Heat related mortality has declined, in spite of increases in urban apparent temperatures, therefore people must be adapting to the heat, and predictions of increases in age adjusted heat related mortality in the future are not credible. Especially considering that Tampa, given it’s age structure and mean temperature, is all the more remarkable for it’s lack of excess deaths, similarly with Pheonix. The only place where people are just dropping like flies is Seattle.
Or, how about, recent warming has been characterized by moderation of variability-greater winter high latitude warming, warming of minimum temps-therefore, climate will likely become less extreme.
Or maybe, gosh, the warming is occurring in cold anticyclones. That must mean that Greenhouse Warming is apparent!
AnotherFord (Comment#29966),
“Why is so much effort being expended towards countering what Boris says? I don’t understand why Boris should be getting this level of attention from the ‘best & brightest.’ What am I missing here? Does he have an argument that should be seriously entertained?
Answers: 1) I don’t know.
2) Nothing that I can see.
3) Nope.
I have wasted my last minute on Boris, since he is quite beyond the influence of rational discussion. It seems to be all emotional/political with him.
Boris might very well be right about the torturer’s fallacy (“tell me what I want so I will stop”): the inquiry shall never end, however free the data and the code will become. Why stop exactly: it’s a show, it must go on, the audience is listening; so mesmerizing are the inquiries about scientists that it becomes almost impossible to believe they’re scientific inquiries anymore; the characters become antagonists in a saga where some of them get slowly but surely assassinated, live, in front of the public eye, from the comfort of its computer screen. A neverending audit, figuratively speaking: stories told to unravel daily braid after daily braid, framing minds and people, renewing the interest, the curiosity, the anger, the powerlessness.
There is a difference in tone in the emails before the emergence of Michael Mann. The early ones (e.g.Wigmore-Briffa exchange comes to mind) read more like scientists who have a definite opinion about AGW but are reluctant to overstate the scientific case. Eminently reasonable.
Once Mann unveiled the hockey stick and new political demands forced the wagons to circle, the tone is entirely different.
It’s kinda like all those revolutionary movements in which the gentler intellectuals and idealists get pushed aside by the hard men: Robespierre, Lenin, Michael Collins and now… Michael Mann.
And now boris has a new edge. To get strangely angry at Steven Mosher for patiently making rather obvious points is odd or perhaps diagnostic.
The tribal approach favored by Michael Tobis/bugs/boris/sod which a self-identified elite and their camp followers get to decide who is eligible to judge or comment makes it impossible to see or deal with fundamental corruption of basic processes of review and publication within the elite. The more the elite departs from the scientific ideal, the greater the need for the tribe to caricature it’s perceived enemies as stupid, malevolent and monolithic. Tribalism has no internal corrective mechanism.
boris et al do not see the irony in rather bitterly circling the wagons to defend The Team from the charge of circling the wagons in lieu of dealing above board when substantive questions were presented.
When peer-review and related processes get replaced with a loyalty test, everything suffers but especially the credibility of the scientists. That is the essence of Climategate.
In contrast, the notion that this was all Steve McIntyre’s fault for daring to disagree and question the sacred consensus (a la bugs) is the epitome of tribal groupthink.
George Tobin
Absent effective gatekeepers this approach can’t work. Those who are not in the tribe just go about thinking for themselves and discuss things in areas utterly beyond the tribes control.
When gatekeepers are neutralized the process can self-correct at more quickly.
Boris (Comment#29882) January 12th, 2010 at 2:19 pm
“Its not the LACK OF INTERESTS that put us in a better position to judge. ITS THE DIFFERENCE OF INTERESTS.”
“This implies that there are not already differences in interests in the “traditional†scientific community–and it’s pretty obvious that there are. Judith Curry, James Annan–both have complained about skeptics and alarmists–and then there are the couple thousand or so climate scientists who don’t have a large web presence.”
Boris, I’m not so sure about this. have you read the Wegman report, which went into detail on the social and work networks of the climate scientists? Given that reviewers must be expert, surely there’s a prima facie case for doubting whether the current peer-review process in climatology is sufficently robust?
Boris,
I think you are right there are agendas involved in the blogs (and in the science). And the interactions sometimes get overheated. What I think you ignore is that it is usually not the science that gets people so worked up.
Nobody would care about climate science and there would be few climate blogs with any traffic if climate scientists had stayed in the science playground. But Mann, Jones and all jumped the science fence into the political, policy and engineering playgrounds when they joined on with the IPCC. The IPCC is not disinterested and has a very specific agenda. That is why we all payed attention: they were playing in our playground.
It is that alone that interested us and gave us all the right to participate in any way we felt appropriate. We could then petition our governments, demand information from public groups and posit our own opinions regardless of our credentials.
Yes, I too have a dog in the race; just don’t know which one it is…
George Tobin (Comment#29998) January 13th, 2010 at 9:59 am
No.
And what is their agenda? Apparently, it is not what they say it is, but something nefarious and secret instead.
bugs:
You’re really having trouble working out their political agenda.
What politicians do they associated with? What political activists? Nothing secret about their agenda at all.
As I said, they made a huge mistake by playing amateur politicians. Had they remained above the fray, they wouldn’t have shot their credibility within the scientific community to hell. At least for those of us who don’t identify with the aging hippie agenda.
bugs,
Please do better than a Monbiot-esque strawman irt motives.
Power, prestige and a few million a year in honoria, bookdeals and research grants will do just fine.
Solzhenetsyn pointed out that to do a great evil, one must be convinced they are doing a great good.
Dissembling off into Moose and squirrel land to pretend your guys are good, is as silly as the true believer other strawman, that skeptics are wicked shills of ‘big oil’.
Carrick (Comment#30049) January 13th, 2010 at 5:48 pm
For some reason all climate scientists have an aging hippied agenda. What are the odds of that?
hunter (Comment#30062) January 13th, 2010 at 6:35 pm
Well, I guess that means you are evil too, hunter. Too bad, eh?
Climate scientists are only in it for the gold, the prestige, the power. The must be idiots, because you become an investment banker to do that.
ever heard of Wegman?
bugs:
Who said “all”?
bugs:
Again you are lumping them all into one category. I don’t see anybody else doing that.
høy-energi-stråle is norwegian and means high energy beam.
Lets look at the Heatland Institute conference for people who people hang around with.
Not a good look, fighting science with fools.
http://www.heartland.org/events/NewYork08/newyork2008-ppt.html
What does Heartland have todo with anything? I’d expect political organizations to act political.
Carrick (Comment#30092) January 13th, 2010 at 9:49 pm
Denier central, they are all there.
“12:00 noon – 2:00 p.m.
LUNCH and CLOSING REMARKS
Joseph Bast
President
The Heartland Institute
Roy W. Spencer, Ph.D.
Principal Research Scientist
University of Alabama – Huntsville, U.S.
Recent Evidence for Reduced Climate Sensitivity”
Yep, he was there for the closing address.
Boris:
“Utter bullshit. How much data and code are available on AGW? ”
I think every sentient being on this web will agree that I have been a hedgehog about the precise data and code I have asked for and plan to ask for in the immediate future.
First and foremost I believe the best evidence we have that the temperature, that physical property we measure in degrees, the best evidence for that is the historical record of thermometer readings. That’s the best evidence. heck its the only evidence that is measured in temperature ( ice extent for example is not a temperature ) So, I focus on the best evidence. Dont waste your breath asking me to consider other evidence, secondary supporting evidence NOT MEASURED IN TEMPERATURE, lets stick with temperature. it looks like, at first blush, like its gotten warmer since 1850. Ok. how much warmer.. .4c, .5c, .874536C
how much? AND what are the confidence intervals. This is a fair and reasonable question. You cannot respond to this question by running for the ice, or pointing at glacier retreat, or sea level increases. yes yes, those too support a thesis of more warming.
I dont question that thesis. I want to see how much.
Now, You point me to HADCRU chart. That is a pretty graph.
I’ve read the mails of the man who is responsible for that graph.
1. All the underlying data and sources of that data used to
produce that graph. Both the data used and the data disgarded.
2. All the underlying code used to quality check that data, average that data, adjust that data, graph that data.
Further, since some of the data used by Hadcru ( USHCN, for example ) has been adjusted, I’d request all the raw data and algorithms used to adjust it. USHCN for example comes from three raw source data files and a variety of adjustment programs are used ( hint you can probably guess that I have requested this stuff )
Your assertion, that masses of other data are available is true.
True an irrelevant. A GCM has 100K LOC. It generates TERABYTES OF DATA. thats a huge amount on the boris scale of truth.
Now, I run my GCM and I want to compare it to the land temperature record. That’s a tiny bit of code and a tiny bit of data. it matters little to the statistical test compareing the output of a GCM to the temperature record that the amount of code and data for one piece is much much larger than the other.
So, your question? How much as been released? GOB AND GOBS AND GOBS. willy wonky amounts. And it has precisely nothing to do with my specific argument. you see boris I have faced this same dodge in other worlds. A company can release Gigabytes of code and still hold back that vital little program and data that makes the whole machine work. Please. step up your game and think about counter arguments first. It will give you the appearence of intelligence.
Boris:
“Lucia wouldn’t be able to do her analyses if data weren’t available. You can throw out all studies that don’t have data released and the consensus position isn’t changed a bit. You know this, but you won’t say it.”
Well, wrong. Hadcru have released information. processed data.
So, they say. we selected 1000 stations, we did x y and z
and the result is this vector of information. Numbers. processed data. Lucia, of course, can use this “information” its just numbers. When she does this, she can say ” assuming this information is correct, these are my results” My object is to look at the validity of the data that Lucia takes at face value. I still look at her work. I do so like this. “if hadcru is true, then the results lucia shows are true” IF. so i want to check this IF.
So I get to throw out hadcru and GISSTEMp results? since the raw data and code ( be carefull we are talking all the way down to all adjustment codes and raw data which I have requested and you dont know what you are talking about ) Boris, if Iget to throw out HADCRU then what does the consensus position look like?
I dunno. neither do you. nobody does.
“Remember GISS. “Free the code!†When the code was freed, what happened? Some people found some minor errors. What else? Nothing changed in the GISS analysis. ”
you missed the memo. First off, when I urged gavin to free the code I told him and people like you that no big errors would be found, small errors might be found and his problems would vanish. And, you missed this part, as always, that the next bit of stuff to plow through was the adjustment codes and the raw data.
Finally, we have a small issues of microsite corruption ( watch this space for some papers on that ..) Again, I expect that when this is done I will still beleive it is warming. But I will have full confidence in the result. and I think other people will have their concerns lifted.
“Skeptics still think it’s bullshit. ”
Well, here is the deal. Some people will always believe the earth is flat. Others may be open to convincing. BUT merely because some small fraction will always deny things IS NO EXCUSE
for changing pricniples that YOU KNOW WORK. Boris, and you can go look at my history, I became less skeptical when GISStemp got released.
“I’m all for releasing code, but what effect did it have? Zero.”
See above. you miss a bunch of effects. first it took the pressure off nasa. second nasa could have taken a totally different approach with it and published a new paper based on the iproved code. They could push to use gisstemp in future IPCC, marginalized hadcru and takenthe hadcru issue off the table.
Shit, I’ve pushed lucia to use gisstemp exclusively. Journal could join as well. they hid what they enabled. dopes.
” So stop pretending that if the last 1% of data is released that suddenly people will start behaving rationally, because that isn’t going to happen,and you shouldn’t be so naive as to think that anything will change.”
you see that is the difference between you and me. At its base, the idea of hiding data and hiding code and closing debate, at its BASE is a belief that the other side is not rational, inhuman.
they cant be reasoned with. So isolate them. ridicule them. ‘do what’s best for them” cause they dont know what is in their own interest. and if they still resist, well they are not rational beings.
You know what kant says about our obligations to creatures that are not rational? simple. we have no moral obligations to them.
They shoot horses dont they?
I’ve argued this before. All the memes and all of the the underlying thought patterns of people like you boris lead to a final solution of sorts. My opponent isnt rational. I owe him nothing.
Or put another way. If you dont believe, as you dont, that a group of people can be reasoned with, what do you suggest to do to change their minds? brainwashing? or headbashing? cause if reason wont work, then only naked power is left.
Again, you should understand that I have thought YOUR ARGUMENT THROUGH FROM START TO FINISH from your side.
I know it inside and out. up and down. I have seen your argument in many forms and many places. you cannot help but think down the lines you do. you are the “u”
“I’ve argued this before. All the memes and all of the the underlying thought patterns of people like you boris lead to a final solution of sorts. My opponent isnt rational. I owe him nothing.”
The problem is that you are not listening to my argument. You have heard some argument 100 times, so you just substitute the one you’ve already thought about and refuted 100 times. I am not making any judgment on how to treat skeptics or denialists or anything. When I keep asking about effects, you want to talk about effects on the argument. I DON’T GIVE A RAT’S ASS ABOUT EFFECTS ON THE ARGUMENT. The soap opera doesn’t matter.
Releasing the GISS code was good. Fixing small errors and improving the code is good. But the analysis hasn’t changed and it very likely won’t change because the code was released. When HadCru releases everything, the analysis won’t change either. We’ve been through all this before. At some point, you guys have to admit that the people who have been doing this know what they are doing.
Quantification is anathema to climate skeptics. McIntyre doesn’t do it. You don’t do it. Watts doesn’t do it. Why? Boris wonders.
Drokles– Thanks on the translation of høy-energi-strÃ¥le!
“boris et al do not see the irony in rather bitterly circling the wagons to defend The Team from the charge of circling the wagons in lieu of dealing above board when substantive questions were presented.”
See, you guys have your fingers in your ears. You think I’m Joe Romm or some pimply Greenpeace agitator and you substitute their arguments for mine. I’ve not defended the “team.”
I just want to know what has changed in terms of our best guess for climate sensitivity.
You guys want to whine about some scary Mann being mean to your friends, and I could give a shit. I want to know how this changes anything, not how people aren’t going to trust “Science” as much or how some slick cabal was trying to raise your taxes. There’s a reason that mosher and George and all the blogs want to talk about the emails: it distracts from the fact that nothing has changed from the most important conclusion: that climate sensitivity is between 2 and 4.5 degrees C and that most of that range is going to suck hard for civilization.
If you have an argument for why estimates should be changed based on the emails, present it. If you want to keep crying and concern trolling, I’ll just ignore you.
“When HadCru releases everything, the analysis won’t change either. We’ve been through all this before. At some point, you guys have to admit that the people who have been doing this know what they are doing.”
Well, that’s the point, isn’t it. You’re confident in their expertise and disinterested honesty. But, as you say, HadCru haven’t been releasing “When HadCru releases everything”.
Mosher is suspicious, not because of bias but because he’s always suspicious. I’m suspicious because a) I have a gut feeling that it is possible these people have been biased, b) the emails indicate the possibility of bias, and c) because they have not been open. Others (SteveM?) are suspicious because they have found evidence of poor work in the past, and a refusal to admit it.
As and when they are open, then the test will be what the data shows, in a more open debate about surface temperature measurement.
I’m quite happy to admit warming, but i would like to know how much exactly, and have confidence that the process has passed the new exciting world of PTP review. At the moment it has passed Hockey Team and Patchy review. That’s the problem.
So chill – you believe they have done the work honestly and well, to the extent that you don’t believe it needs further checking. Others don’t.
Boris–
I and others have repeatedly told you that the estimate for climate sensitivity is not changed. That’s not what’s important about the climategate letters.
Why is your response to people answering your question clearly and directly repeat asking how the letters changed the estimate of the climate sensitivity? We’ll keep answering: It hasn’t. That’s not what’s important about the climategate letters.
Of course, many will then jump in to explain what is important– or discuss explanations like Courrielche’s top of the fold. Your persistent attempts to divert the conversation to a tangent is going to stay below the fold or at boring nearly unread blogs like In It for the Gold. That’s what happens to blogs that try to discuss things everyone knows are red herrings.
bugs, did you actually have a point with your discussion of a political organization?
Your singling out Roy Spencer for criticism is diagnostic, because as far as I can tell, Spencer’s biggest “failing” is he doesn’t accept without proof the catastrophic warming hypothesis nor the draconian (and provably ineffective) measures proposed to address this “catastrophic warming”.
The thing that will improve our understanding of climate sensitivity is improved climate models. Going into what limits the ability of the climate models to model the climate over the last 30 years also gives insight.
CO2 sensitivity is an important issue, probably even “the” issue of our day, but not the only issue for many. I think for some, it’s because they don’t feel they can really comment intelligently on what limits the GCMs ability to model climate.
I agree with Lucia that focusing on just CO2 sensitivity as a response to criticisms of climate science is a bit of a red herring, because certainly pro-CAGW climate scientists discuss other things besides just CO2 sensitivity themselves. In light of that, it seems arbitrary and maybe even a little silly to argue that critics should only discuss this one point.
Boris,
“it distracts from the fact that nothing has changed from the most important conclusion: that climate sensitivity is between 2 and 4.5 degrees C and that most of that range is going to suck hard for civilization.”
There is, I believe a science changing aspect to these emails that my fellow skeptics (no deniers) may not be recognizing. Why is historic natural variability so important, b/c it relates to the oddly worded second half of your claim- it will suck hard for civilization.
I agree with you nothing has changed about the sensitivity science.
But we should take note of the honesty problems with the science of paleoclimatology and the fact that natural variability may (I believe is) in fact be far greater than what’s been stated.
So you say what did the emails do to the 2 to 4.5 number. Nothin’
What did the emails do to science. Well it gave very good reasons to question papers on the historic variability question.
“That’s what happens to blogs that try to discuss things everyone knows are red herrings.”
I understand. You guys are interested in the soap opera and I want things quantified. To describe my focus on the actual effects on what we know in terms of the Earth’s climate wrt CO2 as a straw man is bizarre and just shows that blogs like this one have lost sight of what the important things actually are.
I’m sure Rod Blagojevich’s blog would get more hits than Ed Witten’s. So what?
Jeff,
You make a fair point. And if you have good reason to think internal variability is greater, then those ideas are valuable.
Carrick
Moreover, boris, you, I and most people here agree this is NOT what the emails show us. So, why would we bother discussing what the emails don’t show? Interesting discussions are going to be the ones about what they do show, and whether or not it’s important.
The climategate emails also don’t show that chlorophyll is not all it’s cracked up to be. They don’t show that 2+2≠4. If someone claims they show any of these things,the response is “no. They don’t”. Then we can move on.
Discussing they what they don’t show is rather uninteresting. Discussing what they do show is intersting. And Boris’s constant attempts to force people to stop discussing the interesting bits simply because the climategate emails don’t show something that might also have been interesting if shown isn’t going to stop conversation. What the Climategate emails show remains interesting and people are going to talk about it.
So boris, if you don’t want to read discussions about what the climategate emails do show, don’t read them. People still get to discuss them even if you aren’t interested in the things the emails do show.
Boris–
Don’t be silly. We also want things quantified.
If you don’t see how the climategate emails cast on uncertainty in the claims that publicly disseminated claims about quantitative stuff then you are blind.
Of course the letters don’t tell us anything about how much climate sensitivity might change. But it does tell us that something is not quite right in the process where a group of people comes to believe a certain range is correct. The behavior of some people is such that some self-correcting aspects of science would likely be inhibited. You can call this the soap opera, but it’s actually important.
But it has decreased the signal to noise ratio of the thread. It’s also the very definition of trollish behavior. I really wish the killfile add on for Greasemonkey worked here.
Boris – if you think the emails don’t change anything, I have to say that UEA/CRU seem to think they might.
The first point in the Investigation announced by UEA is:
Sir Muir Russell will head an independent review into the
e-mails leaked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in Norwich,
UK.
UEA has said the review will:
* Examine e-mail exchanges to determine whether there is
evidence of suppression or manipulation of data at odds with
acceptable scientific practice which “may therefore call
into question any of the research outcomes”.
Let’s not pre-judge, but they acknowledge the possibility seriously enough to make it the first point in the list of four.
Jeffid
“So you say what did the emails do to the 2 to 4.5 number. Nothin’
What did the emails do to science. Well it gave very good reasons to question papers on the historic variability question.”
Yes, yesterday somebody asked me to put the problem into one sentence or so. “Chapter 6 of AR4 and its supporting papers are now in question.’
(RE: IPCC agenda)
bugs (Comment#30047)
January 13th, 2010 at 4:59 pm
“And what is their agenda? Apparently, it is not what they say it is, but something nefarious and secret instead.”
I’m unclear how the discussion got to “nefarious and secret” with respect to the IPCC’s agenda. I think the agenda is very clear, it is what they say it is. Does this imply to you we cannot question it?
Steven Mosher:
But was Chapter 6 ever NOT in question? The concluding passage on uncertainties is pretty comprehensive and candid (my summary below):
We don’t know why the glacial-interglacial period thing happens. We would like to attribute that to ghg’s but we can’t. (“…mechanistic explanation of these variations remains to be articulated” NOTE: Nominated for most elegant way of saying “I dunno” ever!)
We can’t really explain any past sudden changes in climate or ocean circulation or even ENSO. We have lousy, regionally disparate and conflicting proxy data and we don’t really know how to read any past extremes from it..
…but other than that, we’ve really nailed the whole paleoclimate thing. Trust us.
“What the Climategate emails show remains interesting and people are going to talk about it.”
You can talk about it all you want. If you have something substantial, by all means post it. Post insubstantial stuff too, it doesn’t matter. I hope you don’t mind if I point out the things that I don’t think matter. I think many of the readers here and at TAV and CA are expecting some huge shift in the direction of climate science. I don’t see it. But sometimes I’m wrong.
Boris–
I’ve already seen a huge shift. Loads of previously unavailable data that people asked for are now being made available.
Of course, we are getting the rhetoric that there has been scads of data all along. But the fact is data people have been asking for and which was refused is becoming available.
You may not consider this a change in science– but I consider the process becoming more transparent and accessible to people outside the circle of climatati a big change.
Bugs,
You are remarkably resistant to reason and critical thinking skills.
You used a childish strawman, trying to assert that the AGW promoters must have nefarious motives. I pointed out that nefarious motives are not required to be wrong and to defend being wrong.
You then assert that I must be corrupt, as well.
That is more incoherent than most of what you write, which is saying something.
You may not notice it, but many certainly do notice, that you are fighting a losing battle, a sort blogosphere version of Monty Python’s Black Knight.
As I predicted elsewhere, as AGW’s catastrophic clap trap becomes less and less credible, you and other true beleivers will find yourselves becoming less and less coherent.
Thanks for the demonstration of exactly that.
Boris wrote: > I think many of the readers here and at TAV and CA are expecting some huge shift in the direction of climate science.
Yes, and in fact we’re already seeing that shift begin. The subterfuge and the fraudulent methods have been (partially) exposed, so that in roughly two months time, information is at last being released. The significance of this will dawn on you the day you learn to think in terms of principles.
Boris wrote: > But sometimes I’m wrong.
Understatement of the year (so far).
hunter (Comment#30183) January 14th, 2010 at 2:53 pm
I just used your logic against you.
“Yes, and in fact we’re already seeing that shift begin.”
A shift in behavior is a sociological phenomenon, not a change in the science. Lucia could probably supply you with a definition if need be.