Klimaattopwetenschappers manipuleren informatie, het bewijs

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Op zondag 22 november 2009 20:31 schreef Bowlingbal het volgende:
Elke post van bendk is toch wetenschappelijk?

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Op zondag 22 november 2009 20:32 schreef spijkerbroek het volgende:

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Aangezien ze niet 100% controleerbaar zijn, zijn het aannames geworden.

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Op zondag 22 november 2009 20:32 schreef spijkerbroek het volgende:

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Aangezien ze niet 100% controleerbaar zijn, zijn het aannames geworden.

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Op zondag 22 november 2009 20:34 schreef Lord_Vetinari het volgende:
Sterker nog: Aangezien het bestaan van bendk niet 100% controleerbaar is, is ook hij een aanname geworden.

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Op zondag 22 november 2009 20:42 schreef huhggh het volgende:
Altijd leuk dat vervuilen van een topic, waarvan het onderwerp je niet aanstaat.

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Op zondag 22 november 2009 20:42 schreef huhggh het volgende:
Altijd leuk dat vervuilen van een topic, waarvan het onderwerp je niet aanstaat.

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Op zondag 22 november 2009 20:42 schreef huhggh het volgende:
Altijd leuk dat vervuilen van een topic, waarvan het onderwerp je niet aanstaat.

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Op zondag 22 november 2009 20:54 schreef du_ke het volgende:

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Het onderwerp is dan ook niet zo spannend. Het klinkt leuk aan de borreltafel maar stelt inhoudelijk niets voor.

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Op zondag 22 november 2009 20:43 schreef FunkyHomosapien het volgende:

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wij zijn druk bezig hoor.

TS wilt alleen geen feiten geven, en dan is het al snel klaar he.

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Op zondag 22 november 2009 20:44 schreef Lord_Vetinari het volgende:

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Nee, altijd leuk dat tegen oetlullen gebruiken van hun eigen argumenten om aan te tonen dat ze onzin lullen.

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If you own any shares in companies that produce reflecting telescopes, use differential and integral calculus, or rely on the laws of motion, I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the calculus myth has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after volumes of Newton’s private correspondence were compiled and published.

When you read some of these letters, you realise just why Newton and his collaborators might have preferred to keep them confidential. This scandal could well be the biggest in Renaissance science. These alleged letters – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists behind really hard math lessons – suggest:

Conspiracy, collusion in covering up the truth, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.

But perhaps the most damaging revelations are those concerning the way these math nerd scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence to support their cause.

Here are a few tasters. They suggest dubious practices such as:

Conspiring to avoid public scrutiny:

There is nothing which I desire to avoid in matters of philosophy more then contentions, nor any kind of contention more then one in print: & therefore I gladly embrace your proposal of a private correspondence. What’s done before many witnesses is seldom without some further concern then that for truth: but what passes between friends in private usually deserve ye name of consultation rather then contest, & so I hope it will prove between you & me.

Newton to Hooke, 5 February 1676

Insulting dissenting scientists and equating them with holocaust deniers:

[Hooks Considerations] consist in ascribing an hypothesis to me which is not mine; in asserting an hypothesis which as to ye principal parts of it is not against me; in granting the greatest part of my discourse if explicated by that hypothesis; & in denying some things the truth of which would have appeared by an experimental examination.

Newton to Oldenburg, 11 June 1672

Manipulation of evidence:

I wrote to you on Tuesday that the last leafe of the papers you sent me should be altered because it refers to a manuscript in my private custody & not yet upon record.

Newton to Keill, May 15 1674

Knowingly publishing scientific fraud:

You need not give yourself the trouble of examining all the calculations of the Scholium. Such errors as do not depend upon wrong reasoning can be of no great consequence & may be corrected by the reader.

Newton to Cotes June 15 1710

Suppression of evidence:

Mr. Raphson has printed off four or five sheets of his History of Fluxions, but being shew’d Sr. Is. Newton (who, it seems, would rather have them write against him, than have a piece done in that manner in his favour), he got a Stop put to it, for some time at least.

Jones to Cotes, 17 September 1711

Abusing the peer review system:

…only the Germans and French have in a violent manner attack’d the Philosophy of Sr. Is. Newton, and seem resolved to stand by Cartes; Mr. Keil, as a person concerned, has undertaken to answer and defend some things, as Dr. Friend, and Dr. Mead, does (in their way) the rest: I would have sent you ye whole controversy, was not I sure that you know, those only are most capable of objecting against his writings, that least understand them; however, in a little time, you’ll see some of these in ye Philos. Transact.

Jones to Cotes, October 25 1711

Insulting their critics:

The controversy concerning Sr. Isaac’s Philosophy is a piece of news that I had not heard of unless Muys’s late book be meant. I think that Philosophy needs no defence, especially when tis attack’t by Cartesians. One Mr Green a Fellow of Clare Hall in our University seems to have nearly the same design with those German & French objectors whom you mention. His book is now in our press & is almost finished. I am told he will add an appendix in which he undertakes also to square the circle. I need not recommend his performance any further to you.

Cotes to Jones, November 11 1711

Gravity does not extend so far from Earth that it can be the force holding the moon to its orbit; school students are increasingly reluctant to practice differential equations, that will only lead to the practice of more oppressive forms of higher math; the tide is turning against over-regulation, like Newton’s “laws” of motion and Universal Gravitation. The so called ‘Cartesian’, ‘skeptical’ view is now also the majority view.

Unfortunately we’ve a long way to go before the public mood (and scientific truth) is reflected by our policy makers. There are too many vested interests in classical mechanics, with far too much to lose either in terms of reputation or money, for this to end without a bitter fight.

But if the Newton / Royal Society mail scandal is true, it is a blow to the Renaissance lobby’s credibility which is never likely to recover.

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Op zondag 22 november 2009 22:12 schreef ethiraseth het volgende:
Het blijft te lachwekkend om te zien: jarenlang onderzoek, duizenden wetenschappelijke, peer-reviewed artikelen en al die "sceptici" roepen dat het onzin is. nu lekker er wat emails uit en meteen zijn die emails de keiharde waarheid.

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Op maandag 23 november 2009 00:59 schreef Dutchguy het volgende:

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Er zijn ook al die tijd wetenschappers geweest die het broeikaseffect niet onomstotelijk aan menselijk handelen toeschreven. Wat de emails aantonen is eerder een soort tunneldenken richting een bepaalde uitkomst en andere zienswijzen en zij die dat uiten worden systematisch buiten spel gezet en belachelijk gemaakt. Dat vind ik eng, bijna sectarisch.

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Op maandag 23 november 2009 03:57 schreef SeventhWave het volgende:
De linkse subsidie kraan droogt snel op als je rechtse resultaten publiceert, en als wetenschapper is de keuze snel gemaakt als je goed betaald krijgt voor prutswerk, en er niemand is die je lastig valt zolang de resultaten politiek correct zijn.

Het bedrog is overigens vele maten groter met betrekking tot de genetische (en voornamelijk intellectuele) verschillen tussen de mensen rassen. En de linkse media speelt het spelletje vrolijk mee.

http://cofcc.org/2009/10/(...)overies-in-genetics/

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Op zondag 22 november 2009 21:02 schreef huhggh het volgende:

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Blijkbaar spannend genoeg voor jou om hier ook te reageren.
Verder reageert iedereen weer gebruikelijk als door een wesp gestoken.

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Op maandag 23 november 2009 00:59 schreef Dutchguy het volgende:

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Er zijn ook al die tijd wetenschappers geweest die het broeikaseffect niet onomstotelijk aan menselijk handelen toeschreven.

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The CRU hack

As many of you will be aware, a large number of emails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia webmail server were hacked recently (Despite some confusion generated by Anthony Watts, this has absolutely nothing to do with the Hadley Centre which is a completely separate institution). As people are also no doubt aware the breaking into of computers and releasing private information is illegal, and regardless of how they were obtained, posting private correspondence without permission is unethical. We therefore aren’t going to post any of the emails here. We were made aware of the existence of this archive last Tuesday morning when the hackers attempted to upload it to RealClimate, and we notified CRU of their possible security breach later that day.

Nonetheless, these emails (a presumably careful selection of (possibly edited?) correspondence dating back to 1996 and as recently as Nov 12) are being widely circulated, and therefore require some comment. Some of them involve people here (and the archive includes the first RealClimate email we ever sent out to colleagues) and include discussions we’ve had with the CRU folk on topics related to the surface temperature record and some paleo-related issues, mainly to ensure that posting were accurate.

Since emails are normally intended to be private, people writing them are, shall we say, somewhat freer in expressing themselves than they would in a public statement. For instance, we are sure it comes as no shock to know that many scientists do not hold Steve McIntyre in high regard. Nor that a large group of them thought that the Soon and Baliunas (2003), Douglass et al (2008) or McClean et al (2009) papers were not very good (to say the least) and should not have been published. These sentiments have been made abundantly clear in the literature (though possibly less bluntly).

More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though.

Instead, there is a peek into how scientists actually interact and the conflicts show that the community is a far cry from the monolith that is sometimes imagined. People working constructively to improve joint publications; scientists who are friendly and agree on many of the big picture issues, disagreeing at times about details and engaging in ‘robust’ discussions; Scientists expressing frustration at the misrepresentation of their work in politicized arenas and complaining when media reports get it wrong; Scientists resenting the time they have to take out of their research to deal with over-hyped nonsense. None of this should be shocking.

It’s obvious that the noise-generating components of the blogosphere will generate a lot of noise about this. but it’s important to remember that science doesn’t work because people are polite at all times. Gravity isn’t a useful theory because Newton was a nice person. QED isn’t powerful because Feynman was respectful of other people around him. Science works because different groups go about trying to find the best approximations of the truth, and are generally very competitive about that. That the same scientists can still all agree on the wording of an IPCC chapter for instance is thus even more remarkable.

No doubt, instances of cherry-picked and poorly-worded “gotcha” phrases will be pulled out of context. One example is worth mentioning quickly. Phil Jones in discussing the presentation of temperature reconstructions stated that “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction, and the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all. As for the ‘decline’, it is well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence problem”–see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens.

The timing of this particular episode is probably not coincidental. But if cherry-picked out-of-context phrases from stolen personal emails is the only response to the weight of the scientific evidence for the human influence on climate change, then there probably isn’t much to it.

There are of course lessons to be learned. Clearly no-one would have gone to this trouble if the academic object of study was the mating habits of European butterflies. That community’s internal discussions are probably safe from the public eye. But it is important to remember that emails do seem to exist forever, and that there is always a chance that they will be inadvertently released. Most people do not act as if this is true, but they probably should.

It is tempting to point fingers and declare that people should not have been so open with their thoughts, but who amongst us would really be happy to have all of their email made public?

Let he who is without PIN cast the the first stone.

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This is a continuation of the last thread which is getting a little unwieldy. The emails cover a 13 year period in which many things happened, and very few people are up to speed on some of the long-buried issues. So to save some time, I’ve pulled a few bits out of the comment thread that shed some light on some of the context which is missing in some of the discussion of various emails.

Trenberth: You need to read his recent paper on quantifying the current changes in the Earth’s energy budget to realise why he is concerned about our inability currently to track small year-to-year variations in the radiative fluxes.

Wigley: The concern with sea surface temperatures in the 1940s stems from the paper by Thompson et al (2007) which identified a spurious discontinuity in ocean temperatures. The impact of this has not yet been fully corrected for in the HadSST data set, but people still want to assess what impact it might have on any work that used the original data.

Climate Research and peer-review: You should read about the issues from the editors (Claire Goodess, Hans von Storch) who resigned because of a breakdown of the peer review process at that journal, that came to light with the particularly egregious (and well-publicised) paper by Soon and Baliunas (2003). The publisher’s assessment is here.

I can update this if there is a demand. Please let me know in the comments, which, as always, should be substantive, non-insulting on on topic.

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Op maandag 23 november 2009 09:44 schreef Monolith het volgende:
Een wat zinniger perspectief kun je zoals gewoonlijk op realclimate.org lezen:
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Evenals referenties voor de zogenaamde 'controversies'.
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