The CRU documents: when science becomes politicized, we all suffer
It’s been clear for quite some time that the AGW controversy has morphed from a scientific to a religious war—although in this case, it’s the AGW scientists who are the “religious” fanatics. That sort of situation cannot help but spell trouble.
Now, with the public revelation of a raft of previously private CRU documents from the University of East Anglia (UEA), we know that, in their quasi-religious fervor, these scientists may have purposely skewed data, an act which would run counter to the heart of the scientific method to which they supposedly devoted their lives. And apparently, several august scientific journals (such as Nature, one of the most prestigious science publications of them all) trusted them enough to allow them to jealously guard their raw data from prying eyes and prevent the sort of peer-review fact-checking that ought to have occurred as a matter of course.
If true, these acts would constitute a profound betrayal—not only of science, but of us all. The foundation of science, as well as our trust in it, rests on the idea that facts are sacred, and that they come before theories. If the facts don’t fit, you must acquit. In science, there is no principle of allowing lies in the service of “a higher truth.” There can only be truth.
This, of course, is an ideal, and we live in the real world, where scientists are people too. But they should be continually on guard to make sure they follow the ideal as best they can, despite constant temptations to act differently. Politicized science has a long history—in modern times, particularly in Soviet Russia, which the Western world is coming more and more to resemble. That the UEA scientists fell prey to it, especially in the current climate of religious fervor about AGW, is really no surprise. Nor will it be a surprise if the majority of AGW enthusiasts (including the MSM) continue to ignore the inconvenient truth that the science behind AGW has become exceedingly suspect.
[ADDENDUM: How the MSM is covering the scandal (hat tip: commenter “J.J.”).]
I’ve been waiting for another posting on this subject, because I would like to ask Huxley, whose comments I always respect, to explain something he said last week. He read the emails and said they aren’t as damaging as he’d thought. Perhaps he already expanded on this judgment and I’ve forgotten, but I’d be grateful if he’d revisit his reaction.
The really galling thing is that how this works is very simple: there’s absolutely no reason that you should believe any interpretation of any data if those providing the interpretation are unwilling to share:
1. The data.
2. The model constructed from the data.
3. The process (pencil and paper, software, whatever) used to arrive at the interpretation.
All of this in sufficient detail for anyone competent to reproduce the results. No reproducible results, no science.
By definition.
I read that the hacked information released was only a sampling,
I suspect that those climate scientists who have not been named as less than honest in the emails and who retain some integrity will be distancing themselves from AGW as fast as they can, in order to save what they can of their reputations. The AGW believers will push on as if nothing happened.
Hopefully, all the air will soon be out of this balloon.
Anyone who believes that scientists behave in a manner unlike the rest of humanity should read “The Double Helix” by James Watson for an inside look at how politics are an inseparable part of the process.
I remain a skeptic in both directions on this. That mankind might affect climate via carbon or methane seems plausible. How much effect, and what our response should be, seems less certain.
Working in the psych biz, it is my job to note the psychological benefit people might get from a belief. Certainly, those who doubt that our technology greatly affects climate might be comforted by the idea that there isn’t much to fix, and we can proceed with our daily lives without much inconvenience.
OTOH, those who believe our technology is creating climate problems get something back psychologically from that belief as well. If the behavior of “the people” is out of control, it follows nicely that someone must take control of the people. If it is a catastrophe then the usual checks and balances need not apply. If the blame can be laid at the feet of some group or institution – business, the free market, engineers, less-regulated industries – then those groups would lose wealth and status in relation to those who sounded the warnings.
I strongly favor the view that the psychological benefits for liberals are enormous if anthropogenic climate effect is true, and this influences them to see all the science through that prism. It would mean that the wealth of the masses, especially that of the salesmen, the numerate, the businessmen, and the techies, was ill-gotten and they should be punished. This would allow the chattering classes to resume their rightful place at the apex of social status and wealth.
I am not quite sure what my reaction should be, other than apoplexy, when the New York Times, which during the last Bush administration thought nothing of publishing information–despite administration pleas not to do so–from several highly classified documents leaked to them, which destroyed their usefulness and crippled some very successful anti-terrorism programs, thus, aiding our mortal enemies, now says it will not publish the texts of the recently hacked Climate Research Center documents because “they were not intended for public view,” i.e. if read, they will almost completely demolish the case for AGW that the Times has consistently pushed.
Thanks for referring us to the the Lysenko story, an old story of politicized science, one not to be forgotten.
The AGW scam is one of the more serious problems of politicized science, and that politicization is one of the perhaps unavoidable problems of huge Federal support for programs once done at the State or private level. Grantsmanship and unfounded claims are symptoms.
Similarly to the Lysenko story, few remember that President Eisenhower, in his Farewell speech, warned not only against the “military-industrial complex,” but against Federal subsidies to University and private research and other programs. Besides much rotten, or pointless science, such “aid” has given us Affirmative Action graduates to help lead us.
Neo,
While your description of “profound betrayal” accurately describes what we know of this event, I question whether the sin is that of tainted science or our naive belief that politics does not enter scientific pursuits.
Even going back to Gallileo, politics affected the public outcome (of course it didn’t change the reality). Today, in a world where science is more and more in the domain of government grants, aren’t WE the ones being naive here to think that all “scientific” results are pure and objective?
As Paul Snively writes above (2:16) if the researcher will not share the data, the model AND the process, then it’s not worth the paper it’s written on.
There is too much grant money floating around. Ditto tax benefits for non-profits that try to subvert this country.
One of the reforms I’d like to see is a massive restructuring of the tax laws to cut down on free money to social parasites. My favorite example is the Ford Foundation’s support of the notorious antisemitic Durban Conference in 2001.
There used to be a wonderful website by a State Department diplomat which had great essays on the various antics of NGOs, which he called the “vultures.” I forgot the name of this site–Diplomiad(?). I should google it, but won’t. Anyway, there are many billions of U.S taxpayer dollars lost to various “non-profit” thieves.
I hope our current depression will help cut some of these organizations off at the knees. Of course, that will lead to even more unemployment for many English and sociology majors. Luckily they are still hiring at Starbucks.
I hope my above post doesn’t seem off-topic. I was just mulling over the temptations that scientists and others have when grant money is floating around. In the AGW scandal, it’s clear that the only people allowed near this money are those who are looking for AGW. I personally know some people like this. They absolutely refuse to consider the possibility that AGW is not happening. If it isn’t, they will have to find another line of work.
Please, Neo. please.
The CRU scientists did not “fall prey to” anything. What they did or didn’t do was by their own hands. Their motives may have been pure, or not. But the responsibility lies with them. No one preyed upon them, though others, e.g. al-Gore, surely have, and prospered mightily.
Looking on the bright side, I am cheered by how loyal, patriotic, decent citizens are stepping up to fight the menace before us. Before Breitbart took out ACORN, and the unsung hero of the CRU did his thing, we were faced with a rampant kleptocracy working hand in glove with hard-left elements.
Now ACORN is toast (having been caught in San Diego dumping documents in advance of Jerry Brown’s “investigation”), their funding cut off, their very name a synonym for corruption, and AGW just took two torpedoes in the engine room. They’ll never regain their momentum, and henceforth even corrupt journals such as Science will follow their own rules and insist on data deposition as a condition of publication.
Once again, we have the Internet to thank for getting out information that the Reds and the crooks would dearly love to hold secret.
Occam’s Beard–As for the cut off of funding for ACORN, as with everything else in Washington these days, it is all a charade, smoke and mirrors.
Congress voted to insert cutoff language into a “Continuing Resolution” (CR), limited time (a couple of days to a couple of weeks) stop-gap legislation, intended to continue funding for the government when the regular 13 funding bills haven’t been passed as per schedule. This CR expires in a couple of days, and unless cutoff language is inserted in a new CR–where, again, it will usually only be in effect for weeks–or permanent legislation banning any current or future funding for ACORN is passed and becomes permanent law, the spigot is wide open in a few days.
This is on a par with the “deficit neutral” Health Care Bill which–despite adding coverage to 35,000,000 or so new customers–achieves it’s miraculous effect by starting to collect the taxes immediately and for the next six years before the first benefits are delivered.
After following this all weekend, and reading far more of the documents on wattsupwiththat.com, it certainly appears to me that the documents, both emails and other, are real. Further they demonstrate a total lack of normal scientific behavior. As far as humanly possible, we try to find the problems in the data and/or models. These people seemed to have actively manipulated the data to their own purposes.
That’s bad enough. However, they continue on with conspiring to prevent contrary data and interpretations from being published, thereby destroying the peer review process. On top of that, they then have the gall to claim they only “allow” peer reviewed papers to be the standard in their field (www.realclimate.com) .
This doesn’t just involve UEA, as the emails touch most of the top names in the field; especially those connected with the IPCC. The real problem is that all of this will make no difference if the main stream media continues to run interference. Many people do not know this is happening, and I would suspect those with a vested interest will work hard to keep it that way, from Big Al, Sen Boxer, GE, down to the local Prius owner.
One of the hacked emails from a global warmist states that the lack of global warming over the last 12 years “was a travesty”.
Doesn’t this say it all?
The AGW crowd WANT global warming to exist. If they were true scientists they would (1) accept the data at face value and input it into their demonstrably provable formulae for tracking global temperatures and let the science do its thing, and (2) applaud the fact that we are not facing immediate (or even any) AGW. In fact, they are emotionally invested in global warming (“true believers), facts be damned, and are no longer acting as scientists. They have lost their credibility. They want the world to warm up so that all their crazy scenarios will come to pass. Pissants.
Will Al Gore apologize? Do we care? Or, should we reasonably conclude that he is and has been running on less than all cylinders? It must be evident that, had he won the election in 2000, global warming would have taken a back burner. An Inconvenient Al!
Al Gore has always reminded me of the stereotypical t.v. evangalist preacher who says to his flock (and gets rich in the process of selling the message) things like “adultery and fornication and thievery will bring you enternal damnation.” And then gets caught with his hand in the till, and coming out of a motel room with his mistress.
Except for this difference: Al Gore, with his “the sky is falling – we’re ALL GONNA DIE REAL SOON if we don’t stop spewing carbon” rhetoric, when compared to his own, out in the open, lifestyle – it is as if the preacher who rants against fornication is OPENLY living like Hugh Hefner – an in-your-face moral libertine as opposed to trying to hide it until he gets busted.
If he REALLY and TRULY believed in his message, as opposed to being a sleazy snake oil salesman, don’t you think he would have done things like convert his mansion to being 100% “green” with solar panels, etc., YEARS ago?
ohysicsguy said,
“The real problem is that all of this will make no difference if the main stream media continues to run interference. Many people do not know this is happening, and I would suspect those with a vested interest will work hard to keep it that way, from Big Al, Sen Boxer, GE, down to the local Prius owner.”
Yep. Unless the alternative media – blogs, e-mail chains, letters to editors, cable news, You Tube, etc. give this loud and clear widespread attention, it will soon be dropped from the radar. The MSM has already begun damage control. See here:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100017451/climategate-how-the-msm-reported-the-greatest-scandal-in-modern-science/
I’m already sending links and details to all my e-mail correspondents, my local newspaper editor, my Senators and Representative, and to anyone else I can contact. All of us should be doing everything we can to get this out there and at least get an open, honest debate going on the issues. The Warmers have been trying to stifle the debate for years primarily because they know their case is weak.
Tom: I certainly didn’t mean to absolve the scientists of responsibility. “Fall prey to” probably wasn’t the most felicitous phrase, but I meant that they fell prey to internal temptations, not that they were victimized by others.
Wolla, I was aware of that, but thinking (hoping?) that the stink on ACORN might make it difficult to reinstante their funding by letting the restriction lapse.
Physicsguy, I totally agree with your assessment. The emails I’ve read (not that many, in honesty) seem less consonant with the spirit of scientific inquiry than that of partisan propagandizing.
Occam–here under the shit storm of Obama & Co.’s seemingly endless attacks on our Democracy, coming from all directions, the duplicity of Congress, and the MSM’s providing cover for both, the ACORN funding story–like the Climate Research Center Hack and what it yielded–could soon be buried and somewhat forgotten, as we shift our concern and focus to the next attack that comes down the pike.
Wolla, you’re bumming me out! I’m trying to convince myself that things are looking up. Stop hitting me over the head with reality! /g
Dr. Judith Curry argues that this (the bad behavior) was a defensive reaction to Big oil etc, and has posted this on McIntyre’s blog! She blames “tribalism”, and tries to distance herself from them by referring to others as alarmists.
It seems there are two camps of commenter it over there: those who feel you catch more flies with honey, and those who want to rake her over the coals. The diplomacy over there is interesting. One comment points out that the problem predates the big oil thing. Hee Hee.
WOW! Go to the Bishop Hill link (found near the end of Delingpole’s article that Neo links us to–Thanks, JJ!). This is a major, major smokin’ gun.
A great comfort to all us Doubting Thomases. But the war–Cap & Trade–and its outcome remain in doubt.
Just let’s not call this “Climategate.” It sould be called “Climatequiddick” (or, for easier pronunciation, “Climaquiddick“)
Climatequiddick,’ Anyone?
“Further they demonstrate a total lack of normal scientific behavior.”
No, it demonstrates a VERY normal scientific behaviour and that is a large part of our problem (that extends well past AGW).
If anyone here ever wants to get a nice big let down go work for a National Lab in one of the research divisions. The number of people who understand the scientific method, care to apply it, and get funding to do so is small.
Older scientists push it, middle aged decided to “work within the system”, and the younger have almost never even seen real science let alone have the training needed to create it. If one is lucky they had a mentor, boss, professor, or usually a single individual that pushed it so hard they had to learn (though in the case of the university this normally resulted in mass dropping of the course as the prof was “unfair”). If one is *really* lucky that person is high up enough that a whole group does it, maybe even a section. Never seen a division head that was anything better than “work within the system” and was usually complicit in the funding game.
In fact I would go so far as to say I’m mroe shocked it was as little as we see. Though I will also add in less politicized areas there is less fraud (for instance, while the whole issue is still there no one really cares if a fluid flows in a clockwise or counterclockwise direction).
However you still end up with the same basic issue – the correct scientific principle was *not* followed so the answer is “inconclusive”. The whole Irony here is that if done well it may show a *greater* human influence but the science is bad (along with a specific outcome wanted) that you will never get a different answer. We have built the last few decades of scientific knowledge upon that base and were it not for some of the old timers sticking around in high enough positions I think we would be VERY bad off. Sadly they are dying off.
It’s not “real” science (which is what I am sure you really meant), but it is what equates to “normal” in our universities and labs. Indeed, cooperate science is generally superior internally. They can not afford to be wrong and lie to themselves much, though they often have no problem with falsifying what is released (even better if the competition believes it).
The best science is in a few places that are truly life and death. Military (armor/weapons) and to a lesser extent NASA – which has argued somewhat against AGW for quite a while, had difficulties because of that, and then just shut up about how the little bit of given data didn’t match satellite data. A few areas in the National Lab system are consistently good too.
I’ve learned that if you want to make people’s mouths fall open in astonishment and shock (as at some species of heresy), tell them that Algore could profit from a good psych evaluation. I think he’s genuinely disconnected from reality.
Bishop Hill has, some time past, presented the best, most layman-accessible debunking of Mann’s “Hockey Stick” graph and presentation that I know of.
I’ve thought for a good while that one view of what we are seeing in the AGW view (and in committed environmentalism more generally) is an example of infantile egoism, or infantile narcissism, in action. We’re all familiar, I assume, with the phenomenon of young children seeing themselves as the cause of every major event around them–so that, for example, children of divorce will see themselves as the cause of their parents’ split. I think that committed environmentalists are generally susceptible to a similar egoism. Please note that, when they observe anomalies or changes in the natural world, they imagine as a default position that the cause must be something humans have done. I cite AGW as an example. Others include the fact the bee colony collapse disorder was first investigated as a consequence of some human activity, perhaps cell-phone use; deformities among tree frogs were initially hypothesized as a probable consequence of human (over-)use of pesticides. There are numerous other examples of the phenomenon. I don’t know–it’s not a certainty, but it does seem to be a tendency.
I wonder if neo has any insights into this human tendency. I might be completely wrong, but it does occur to me as something to consider.
betsybounds said : “Others include the fact the bee colony collapse disorder was first investigated as a consequence of some human activity, perhaps cell-phone use; …”
Never mind that the “honey bee” we use for honey and commercial pollination is not even native to North America.
There are native bees like the Mason bee- but their colonies seem to be small.
strcpy’s right. One of the drivers for the problem is the accounting perspective on research productivity. Grinding out lots of papers, regardless of substance, merit, or impact, counts for more than focusing on the latter criteria. As the old (bitter) saying goes in academia, “more people can count than can read.”
The upshot of that is the pressure on PIs to turn the crank. Rather than turn out fully-fledged reflective scientists with broad technical experience, the rational approach is to parcel the work out between grad students in assembly line fashion, so that grad student 1 becomes proficient in technique X, 2 in Y, etc. That minimizes the time spent in learning, and thereby maximizes group productivity, but turns out N narrowly-focused technicians rather than N independent scientists.
I consciously resisted this incentive, to my professional cost, because of my visceral resistance to it. My thesis advisor, a Nobel Laureate (a real one), essentially gave me a lab bench and told me to find something worthwhile to do and then do it, and come back in five years and tell him what I’d found. Which I did, and although that remit was initially terrifying to a 21-year old, it was in some respects the happiest time of my life: no teaching, no grant-writing, no administration, all the resources I needed. All I had to do was generate the ideas, and work them out…
jon baker,
I’m sorry that I’m not clear about your point, but maybe I’m just missing something.
In any case, environmentalists seem bent on assuming that if there were no human influence, the earth’s systems would not change–or, if they did, such changes would be “natural.” Human-induced changes, on the other hand, are first of all assumed as first causes, and second of all despised.
They are determined that humanity shall not be viewed as part of nature.
O.B.,
It’s interesting that you recall your grad student years as, in some respects, the happiest years of your life. Mine were not, although they were happy enough. I recall thinking that one of the best criteria for selecting a graduate program was to select one in which the degree you are pursuing is also the highest one your institution offers. That way, you are guaranteed the faculty’s most intense focus. I got a masters degree in geology from an institution that didn’t offer a PhD. No one ignored me! It was intense, but by golly by the time I got the thing, I had earned it, and it was a pretty good effort, to boot! 🙂
Wolla Dalbo: “This CR expires in a couple of days, and unless cutoff language is inserted in a new CR—where, again, it will usually only be in effect for weeks—or permanent legislation banning any current or future funding for ACORN is passed and becomes permanent law, the spigot is wide open in a few days.”
That is true but don’t you think if this congress allowed the continuing funding of ACORN the outcry in the Blogosphere and Fox News would be loud and long. (I say Fox News because I wouldn’t expect any of the other news outlets to be outraged at all.) But then maybe they don’t care. Or could they be throwing ACORN under the bus in order to take a little heat off their Tax and Trade bill and their take over of healthcare?
Sorry but it was not misplaced trust. These so called august journals made conscious choices to disregard basic scientific principles. If a scientist will not provide the information or data to independently replicate his research, then that research is suspect. Any journal that doesn’t remain skeptical of unverified research is no longer august and perhaps not scientific.
Neither can the University of East
AngliaArtifice, continue to claim to be a prestigious scientific entity.betsybounds,
You are spot on about the tendency of environmentalists to blame any changes in the environment on humans. What they don’t seem to get is that the environment has always been changing. How about continental drift? How about all the ice ages? (Where I’m sitting now was under 1000′ of ice 10,000 years ago.) How about lightning caused forest fires? How about volcanic activity? All these things induce environmental change and have no human fingerprints on them. They decry the effects of mining and yet overlook such grand excavations as Yosemite Valley, the Grand Canyon, or the Great Lakes. They don’t grasp that the minute you build a house, nature begins to tear it down. Only by constant care and upkeep can you keep a house from returning to nature. They refuse to see that we are just players on the stage of a much bigger drama – the story of the Earth and how it has changed and will continue to change going forward.
Do I advocate bad environmental practices? No, I think we should try to husband the Earth’s resources because our futures are tied to them, but to attempt to stop human industry from improving the lot of humans is anti-human. Like Obama’s czar, John Holdren, who wrote a book in the 70s advocating abortion and euthanasia to protect the environment. (He’s renounced those positions, but I’m surprised he has any influence at all since he was sooo wrong about things in the 70s.)
They also have this infantile idea, as you mention, that there is a “just right” state for the environment. That seems to be a thesis of the Warmers (or Bed-wetters as Lord Monckton calls them). They seem to believe that somehow we can freeze climate at some desired state and it will stay there. The same with their constant warnings about losing some species of gnat or smelt or snail. They don’t seem to grasp that literally millions of species have gone extinct and humans had little or nothing to do with 99% of the extinctions. When one species goes something else moves in. IMO the old aphorism that “Nature Abhors a Vacuum” is just so.
I’m a failed petroleum geologist by the way. Left the business back in the days when oil was $2/barrel and looked like it was never going to go higher. That alone has given me some perspective on what change can happen in a person’s lifetime.
Betsy, it was the best of times, and the worst of times. At the time it seemed the latter. In retrospect, with recollection of the bad parts dulled by the passage of decades, one of the best. The very worst of times was as an assistant professor in the runup to tenure. It was five years of boot camp. Grad school was a cake walk by comparison.
“As the old (bitter) saying goes in academia, “more people can count than can read.” ”
The phrase I always heard was “Publish or Perish”.
I was lucky(?) in that I kinda short circuited all of that. I happened to get DoE funding as an undergrad and was was able to fund myself through about 4 years of research at Oak Ridge National Labs. I do not recall the numbers but I think it was around 20 refereed conferences and two journals (one an invited special publication of IEEE) – which isn’t bad if I say so myself.
It was assumed that we (I wasn’t the only one) would get our PhD’s on the run so to speak. That is what college is going to turn down their name on that pace of publications?
My funding ran out and due to other political reasons our group was stripped from 4 people to 1 (plus our actual project manager – the PhD). We were right in our estimate – he got his PhD from one of the larger ones in England. The political reasons were local ones having to do with the fight between commodity off the shelf based PC clusters (our group) supplanting the Big Iron multi-million dollar press release machines. They had more money, they won (sorta, as funding dropped due to national financial reasons they were forced into clusters for most real research anyway, though ORNL still keeps one Big Iron machine there).
After that I did a little bit of re-evaluating my life and decided that was not for me (plus I do no know if I could have dealt with being a lowly grad student after being project lead and having a better publication tract then most of my profs would). Didn’t want to move away from home for the “experience” either.
I now have a great job in industry I am over qualified for, payed well for (better than the academics), and have fun at. Short term that caused some real … hardships but in the long run I consider myself lucky. I went there and conquered.
In those short years I have a better publication tract than many tenured professors. I *know* I can do Computer Science at any level I want and my employers also can easily depend on me to filter BS as few others can (woe be to the salesman or simple programmer who I feel it is time to unload on – I do not take to being feed lies very well).
I also learned a great deal about filtering publications and what is *not* said in them. I became, well a cynic I suppose. As I said there was some really great science went on there. I was also lucky enough that our section head was a real stickler about going where the facts pushed you and I was further lucky enough to have a prof that was VERY well versed in that decide I was worth his time.
But I have also made some people … not happy (of almost any political bent you can think of). It is heresy to say that about Science in many places, yet having been there done that I *know* what goes on. I can understand how some feel about it, I had some naivety blown fairly hard at the start too, especially from some of the old timers – people who had been there since the early days (still a few old codgers that knew Oppenheimer when I was there). Further the two groups I had the most contact with were the Human Genome group (nice group of people there – some good science went on there) and the Climatologist (a few good ones, but that is where I learned how much fudging went on for AGW too).
I still miss being able to walk down a hall and ask a real expert about something. It’s really the only thing I do and I suspect I always will – it was their life and most were more than happy to try and fill your mind with their knowledge. Heck even now I can talk for hours about my research and as long as my mind is working well I guess I will always be able too. My Wall of Text should be a testament the that – I have a ~75 page single spaced “master” paper and a slide show with ~300 slides on it that can still have LOT more detail added to it (never even really got into load balancing on the fly which was *at least* as expansive as what I had already done) 🙂
http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.pdf
The above is from a real grandmaster who got a real Nobel.
High priests of Environmentalism being exposed as corrupt, they cover up fraud, hide the Scripture from laymen, want to sell everybody carbon indulgencies for real and imagionary sins, and for successful trade puff up hysteria of gloom, doom and looming Apocalypse. They try to impose their theocratic rule on all secular governments of the world… Something like this once happened in history: that how Reformation started. But where is our Luther?
Hmmmm (or should I say “MMMM-MMMM-MMMM)? Well we seem to be a fairly well-educated lot, who hang around here. I wonder what this says about the Left’s collective image of themselves as the Smart Ones in the room, and of everyone who isn’t on their side of things as a bunch of Blazing Bubbas. This datum doesn’t prove anything of course, but as actual scientists know, it does rule a thing or two out. 🙂
Promethea Says:
There used to be a wonderful website by a State Department diplomat which had great essays on the various antics of NGOs, which he called the “vultures.” I forgot the name of this site—Diplomiad(?).
The Diplomad.
He also gave us the phrase ‘turd-world countries’.
A quote from a recent “Science” article:
“Are Himalayan glaciers beating a rapid retreat in the face of global warming? That would seem to be the case, according to a flurry of recent reports by BBC and other mass media. But the picture is more complex–and poses scientific puzzles, according to a review of satellite and ground measurements released by India’s Ministry of Environment and Forests earlier this week. The report, by senior glaciologist Vijay Kumar Raina, formerly of the Geological Survey of India, seeks to correct a widely held misimpression based on measurements of a handful of glaciers: that India’s 10,000 or so Himalayan glaciers are shrinking rapidly in response to climate change. That’s not so, Raina says. ”
So, politicized media colludes with politicized science in deception of public. What about other glaciers? I would not be surprized if it turned out that the same pattern emerged: a handful of hand-picked of them, with scenic photo, are paraded as victims of global warming, while lots of others that do not retreat are simply ignored.
Well, since I started this graduate school confessional 🙂
I knew I was going to “do” physics since high school. Attended for undergrad one of the top ten physics depts in the country, then set my sights a bit lower. Did a masters thinking medical physics, but then decided that doing 30 years of patient treatments was not what I had in mind, so back for the PhD. My best decision was to choose a smaller dept that had a group doing what I was interested in: atomic and molecular collisions. The smaller dept was rigorous, but also more personal.
What I discovered along the way is that I REALLY like teaching undergrads. So after graduation I ended up at a small undergrad school.
Regrets: yes, sometimes I look at some friends I have who ended up in DoD research at good pay. I also look at the BS one must suffer through in academia. But, then I spend a few summers working with 2 students in my lab, and they finish by writing a paper that ends up in Phys. Rev. (all my publications, about 1 every 3 years, are student co-authored). Then I know there are some positive aspects to my decisions.
“…But where is our Luther?”
Well, the unnamed hacker who cracked into CRU’s electronic vault at UEA did something similar to posting the 95 Theses on the door of the Wittenberg Cathedral. But lead a “reformation”? Probably not. We may have to do this reformation without a Luther, or even a Henry VIII, for that matter. And it’ll make it that much harder.
Betseyboubds: “… This datum doesn’t prove anything of course, but as actual scientists know, it does rule a thing or two out.”
This is something far too many people … including many (most?) “scientists … fail, or refuse, to grasp.
The discussion on the grad school experience is interesting. I think many would say that the postdoc time is the best–a breathing space between dissertation worries and the political concerns involved in moving a career forward.
One thing not mentioned is the role of the prof in mentoring students. I know that my husband (and I’m not saying that he is a template for all profs) concerns himself with the personalities of his students. He has had very bright students who were a bit insecure and that needed encouragement to aim high. He has had other bright students who were so caught up in their ideas that they didn’t want to give much time to boring things like controls. They needed to be taught to discipline themselves a bit. He has had some very competent people who didn’t aim for the academic stars, but wanted a solid job in industry that used their talents. He has had students who started out with one set of goals, only to find that the world had other things to offer, perhaps in the business side of a start-up or in a synthesis of their academic career with another interest. He has to keep all these people on track with the research projects, but he tries to match their strengths with the project needs and to share insights about working in the scientific community. The latter includes things like choosing the proper journals for publishing their results and editing powerpoints for the intended audience.
Maybe I’m prejudiced, but I think he does a pretty good job of it, and his science isn’t bad either.
The commissars promulgate that image to attract the intellectually insecure into the fold, where they can convince themselves that “they’re smart, they can do things.” I call it the “Fredo effect.”
This is merely the last in a long line of acts of political activism cleverly–or not so cleverly– disguised as exercises in objective thought. Think, for example, of the execrable George Lakoff and his many imitators.
A ‘scholar’ of the Left posits as true a current political prejudice; for example, ‘Republicans are fascists’, and then goes on to “prove” it, cherry-picking his citations and formatting his resulting notes in a transparent veneer of scientific respectability: charts, unreadable prose, copious footnotes in 6-point type, etc. Voila! Republicans are fascists. And then his ‘research’ is available to be replicated again and again in other bogus ‘research’ papers.
When you have professors having to shoehorn mathematics into a socially ‘relevant’ study–as our colleges now require–society is in the shit. The very idea of objective scientific thought has been contaminated.
Oh–, I’m convinced Gore lost his mind when he lost the election.
I used to say this too, and post-doc was indeed good times, but in retrospect the last two years of grad school were better. After floundering about trying to find myself and a project, and how to do research, I caught on in all respects and went off in my own direction. Everyone thought I was nuts, that that whole area was moribund; everyone knew that another area was all the rage. Some even said this (gently) to my face, trying to save me from myself. To them it appeared that I was working on whalebone corsets, and they shook their heads in disbelief. But it interested me, and I’m pretty impervious to social pressure. Make that “entirely impervious,” so their views had no impact.
Long story slightly less long, that work started a field that has flourished for the last 35 years, and has provided for the careers of a few dozen prominent scientists, each of whose papers essentially follow the template of the original work (“and here’s another one, with higher X and lower Y than the first one”). The most ironic thing of all: Berkeley just hired a faculty member to work on exactly the same system (not just in the same area), and he’ll be located…a few hundred yards from where the original whalebone corset work was done.
So my grad work was the most important work I’ve done. Post-doc was good, but I worked under a PI who set goals and directions, but grad school was better. I was completely given my head, and essentially unlimited resources, and then left alone.
God, it was good.
I would like to ask Huxley, whose comments I always respect, to explain something he said last week. He read the emails and said they aren’t as damaging as he’d thought.
mizpants: Thanks! Sorry for the delay. I’ve been traveling.
First, I was struck that these scientists are sincere — they do believe that global warming is a serious threat. They are not Mr. Burns of The Simpsons, steepling his fingers, squinting his eyes, while murmuring “Excellent, excellent,” as he plots against the people of Springfield.
Second, of the thousand or so emails, comparatively few had compromising material.
Third, there is a difference between faking data and using methods to highlight it to best advantage. Everyone does this to some extent — raw data can be pretty raw. Consider the rather amusing history of measuring the speed of light which showed the speed of light varying noticeably over the past century. Some of it was improved technique, but much of it I suspect was scientists looking over their shoulders and trying to stay within the circle error probable of the current measurements other scientists were getting.
All that said, I still find the CRU team’s behavior inexcusable. Specifically:
* their refusals to share their data and methodology openly so their claims can testing by others
* their perversion of the peer review process by which they plot to prevent critics from being published, then rebut critics by saying their work fails to appear in peer-reviewed journals
* the sloppiness of their data handling so that data has been lost, data has been carelessly tracked so that programmers don’t know how to use
the data, plus the sloppiness of some of the code
Given their overall sloppiness and their desire only to validate global warming, they cannot be trusted. In a sensible world, which we don’t have, all their claims would be invalidated, pending a thorough review by outside scientists, particularly critics.
“First, I was struck that these scientists are sincere – they do believe that global warming is a serious threat. They are not Mr. Burns of The Simpsons, steepling his fingers, squinting his eyes, while murmuring “Excellent, excellent,” as he plots against the people of Springfield.”
The thing is, to Goodwin the thread, Hitler really thought he was going to usher in the Utopia. He had *really* great intentions and truly believed what he said. There are VERY VERY VERY few Mr Burns who believe what they are doing is wrong and revel in doing so. I find that to be a reason not to crucify them personally, but that doesn’t excuse them professionally. It is what happens when “science” gets promoted to a believe system and they are simply a by-product of that.
“Second, of the thousand or so emails, comparatively few had compromising material.”
Of course not, most were mundane. It wasn’t a group of e-mails picked up for being controversial, it was just a random grouping of them. I guess I would ask did you expect otherwise?
“Third, there is a difference between faking data and using methods to highlight it to best advantage. ”
The issue here is that they *faked the data*. They simply tossed some aside because it didn’t give them the outcome they wanted. That right there is a negative form of faking it.
The thing with the tree rings was also faking data. They had temperature readings that showed no increase to a slight decrease so they “merged” data from tree rings (that had no correlation to actual recorded temerature increase) to create one. That is faking data – that they didn’t just pick numbers at random doesn’t make it any less fake. I could add in the number of phone calls I got per day to the data, it would be just as legitimate.
I’ll buy your other dismissive feelings, but this one is totally wrong. They *did* fake data, not just put it in a good light. They followed the research to it’s conclusion, didn’t like it, and faked their way to what they thought was the truth. Further they knew they were doing that too – there are numerous e-mails in there where they talk about how it is upsetting that they have to do that and confusion as to why the correct outcome isn’t happening unless they fake the data. They believed in AGW to the point where *anything* else was wrong and anything short of simply making up numbers (even if it was something as silly as adding in the number of phone calls per day) was permissible.
I’m certain you wouldn’t want your doctor to adjust your blood pressure down to normal (assuming it was high) because you were otherwise healthy. I’m sure you would see that “normal” as a fake number right quick. Same thing here – the raw data didn’t show what they wanted no matter what valid attempts they made at it. So they adjusted the numbers by anything they could until they got what they wanted.
It is interesting in the extent that you are watching some otherwise really intelligent people go through mental gymnastics to fake data without just flat out making it up. It amounts to the same thing but this way it allowed them to still rationalize that they were doing “science”. They got exactly the same numbers they would have gotten if they had just picked what they wanted as they picked then made the data fit to what they wanted.
Huxley,
I’m sorry, but it occurs to me that, as a scientific matter, your second post seriously undermines the initial assumption of your first–in fact, it probably rules that assumption out.
Let’s apply scientific method here. You posit that these “scientists” (I would recommend using the term loosely in this event) are sincere and believe in global warming. Maybe so. But are there any other possibilities to explain their behavior? Maybe they want to control research grant apportionment, and sequester large amounts of it to themselves. Maybe they want to impose a state-controlled economy at national or international levels. Maybe they’re committed leftist idealogues.
Now let’s compare the evidence of the e-mails to your assumption that they are sincere believers. In their e-mails, they recommend elimination or suppression, distortion, and in some cases fabrication, of actual data–bending it to not only achieve a desired experimental result, but also in ways that would secure important policy choices of indisputable national and international economic and cultural impact (this fact was not remotely true of the several light-speed imbroglios you mention). Furthermore, the exchanges document collusion in breaking laws that would compel them to release their data to additional investigators, thereby subverting any test for the signal characteristic of scientific findings: reproducibility. Experimental conclusions are universally held to be invalid if they cannot be reproduced by other investigators, employing the same data. Last (but by no means least) the exchanges document co-operation in efforts to destroy the reputations and careers of perfectly reputable scientists, including destroying their ability to publish in professional literature, who have dared to differ with the e-mailers conclusions.
Now, I would suggest to you that none of these are the actions of people who genuinely believe themselves to be right, and to have nothing to hide. I have read the postings of others who suggest what you suggested in your first post, a sort of beefed-up “boys will be boys” position, where we are asked to believe that they were sincere but misguided, allowing themselves to be seduced into fooking up while maintaining good intentions (again, we know what is said to be paved with those). But I think that the evidence of the e-mail exchanges is such that we can pretty well rule out any such possibility. NONE of these actions are characteristic of people who believe themselves to be correct in scientific terms.
On the other hand, while none of the other explanatory possibilites I mention above can be proven by the evidence to hand, it is also true that NONE of them can be ruled out.
That’s how we should view the evidence of the e-mails. This is bigger than some want it to be, or are willing to acknowledge that it is.
Maybe, but I suspect that they merely succumbed to natural human failings. Climatology was a sleepy backwater that suddenly became a Cinderella story (apologies to Caddyshack) because of concerns about global warming. Grant money, prestige, and acclaim showered upon these formerly lowly scrub maids of science (funding increased approximately 10X). They’d had their heads turned, loved the limelight, wanted to stay in it, and came to regard it as their due. Jetting around the world, pontificating to policy makers, Prime Ministers and Presidents on speed dial, prestigious interviews, grant proposals reduced to telling agencies how much you wanted, people hanging on their every word, swaying the course of nations…pretty heady stuff.
Then, back in the lab, they encounter some …awkward…results. Surely there’s something wrong with those results. Oh, and these others, too. Probably a _________ error. Yeah, that’s it. Just tidy up those data, remove the obviously flawed points, smooth the curve a bit, and then it’s off to Bali! Woohoo! What’s that? PM on hold? Oh, OK. After taking his call, then it’s off to Bali.
For them to debunk AGW, admit they’d screwed the pooch, and return to the mop and bucket as people threw shoes at them would require some serious scientific integrity (which they should have mustered). No more phone calls from Prime Ministers, no more trips to Bali, no interviews with the NYT, just back to scrabbling for table scraps of grant money.
I understand it. It’s not admirable, but it is understandable.
I think I’m going to label this scandel (and it’s definitely a scandal!) as “Exhibit A”.
The next time someone dismisses a theory about anything else as being “tinhat” or only to be believed by a “conspiracy theorist” since it would require extensive cooperation between a number of people and groups in the public eye, I’m pointing to this.
Here you have a group of *scientists* who conspired over a period of years to promulgate a fraud.
They hid their own data from public review to keep the fraud going.
They deliberately undermined otherwise legitimate scientists who had the temerity to question their position – not on the basis of science but rather by pulling political and public influence type strings.
How many careers of honest scientists were destroyed in this process?
How much money (and in Gore’s case, I think that’s the major factor in his decision to become the main figurehead for this crap and trade…) was taken from public coffers via taxes and given to these frauds and their ilk?
How much poverty is the world going to have to endure as a result of these *scientists* efforts at putting us all back into the stone age?
And all of this happened with actors playing their roles in full view of the public over a number of years.
They were coordinating their efforts with other players all the while hiding their true agenda and gleefully attacking anyone who dared question them – again in full view of the public.
“The science is in!”
“Only 20 years til it’s too late!”
“The polar ice caps are melting!”
“The polar bears areo becoming extinct!”
These frauds, their ilk, and anyone who championed their cause needs to be ridiculed to the end of eternity for this crap!
BTW, has anyone thought to look through the emails for anything tying the MSM to these frauds in a conspiratorial type way?
It’d be really delicious if there were such links between these conspiracists and the MSM in the exposed emails.
It also leaves me wondering – if this is what was exposed in the emails and data now made public – what is still hidden that has not been made public….
O.B.,
Everything you say is true, and people have been seduced by less, there’s no doubt about that. One can understand it, and I should say of myself that I’m not sure I wouldn’t be seriously tempted as well–sometimes you just don’t know what you would do.
But that doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t know in my head and gut that I was wrong. You’re describing a motive for dishonesty, not a true belief in a mistake. That’s what makes it fraud, even if it has its roots in human failing. I find it very difficult to accept that they believed they were correct. They had plenty of time and opportunity for honest reflection, and they knew they couldn’t have defended themselves against challenge without lying about the evidence–shoot, it’s right there in the e-mails.
I should say that I understand that it’s demonstrably possible for a person to deceive himself, to come to believe something that an honest look at evidence would show him is false. We’re all familiar with the concept of denial and delusion. But we’re not talking about one or two people, here. We’re talking about numbers of people in many places and trusted scientific institutions who colluded to destroy and subvert evidence, to slander opponents, and all the rest. I have a hard time thinking they did it because they thought they were correct. If they’d been correct, there would have been no need to do it.
Betsy, you’re absolutely right.
I was in those guys’ position once, apparently having found something that would have made my career in my mid-20s, but it turned out to be an artifact, and I did the right thing. People in the field still kid me about it. I don’t find it so funny!
Depending, of course, upon what it was that they thought they were correct about.
OB put it rather well in his postings. The issue of scientific integrity can be seen at a very basic level in undergraduate labs. Is there a temptation to fudge data there? Yes. Make the data fit the theory: which can be rationalized as minimizing measurement error. Do some succumb and fudge data? Yes.
Scientists are human, and are as prone to human failings as anyone.
That does not mean that such failings should be sloughed off. There is accountability. The “root cause” of fraud is fraud: eliminate it.
Scottie,
I’ve been wondering about possible MSM involvement in the fraud as well. I’d about like to say that there are cases where you can just about count on it. But, having come thus far with the revelation, we may have to assume that any additional evidence is in the process of being deep-sixed.
Betsy, I agree — if these scientists really believed that deeply in their cause, they’d have no reason to work so hard to prevent contrarian viewpoints from appearing, since they would feel confident that the flaws in the contrarian viewpoints could be demonstrated, once exposed in the ordinary scientific marketplace of ideas. In my view, people who are trying that hard to hide something have something to hide!
Somewhere in one of those e-mails, one of the scientists expresses dismay that the world has been cooling recently and says he hopes the cooling won’t last as long as some other scientist had apparently predicted that it would. These are not the words of someone who truly believes that a warming world would cause so much harm that it must be avoided at all costs. On the contrary, this is somebody who is not really worried about the future of the earth at all, but doesn’t want his own work and scientific reputation to be damaged by, um, inconvenient truths.
betsybounds,
In the old days the scoundrals could just use a paper shredder and burn the scraps.
Voila – what evidence?
In the modern age, you have computer forensics that can dig out data that was long ago thought to have been deleted.
I understand that even reformatting the hard drive won’t always necessarily remove all data.
These days about the only way to really – and I mean REALLY – destroy any incriminating evidence on a computer is to remove it’s hard drive and all memory and start smashing with a hammer – and then break out the lighter fluid and matches to the scraps of metal and plastic that remain.
It kind of depends on how dedicated someone is to retrieving the data – and of course if the AGW proponents are going to that degree to hide their data it doesn’t look good anyway.
Most reasonable people are going to ask why they went to that kind of trouble to hide it in the first place.
If they claim their data was destroyed, then they are interestingly enough placing themselves in the position of, if forced by government prosecution, to recreate their data from scratch.
Something their critics have been demanding for some years…lol.
If they only deleted the data from their emails and hard drives, a competent investigator could still retrieve most if not all of the data as long as the computor was still in existence and functioning.
It may even be as simple as going to the back up data – most offices these days have an automated backup system that records basic data in the event of a system failure.
I’d be surprised if such a system were not in place here, given the amount of funding they had at their disposal.
Then of course I’m sure there are ways to retrieve old emails from various email services.
Should the proper individuals in a position to force this issue choose to pursue the matter, these frauds are going to have their hands full.
It’s hard to describe the paternal (maternal?) feelings one has toward a favorite idea, one’s baby. One wants to nurture it, protect it, watch it grow and thrive.
It’s a pernicious sentiment, and t’s imperative to fight those feelings. As I used to teach my grad students, deliberately using evocative imagery, one needs to forcefully swing a pick ax at the baby’s skull. If the baby has merit, the pick ax will bounce off. If the pick ax sinks in, then so be it – the baby didn’t have merit, and needed to go. It’s hard to do this, but it’s the essence of sound research.
O.B.,
BTW, these guys should remember what happened to Fredo. He was smart. He could do things.
And then his brother the war hero kissed him. Once for real, and later for really real.
I think these individuals (Mann, Briffa, Jones, Schmidt, etal) were liberals who got interested in this back in the 70s when the new coming Ice Age was predicted by several scientists because temps were cooling. The media picked it up and there were some pretty big articles done. One from Newsweek is reproduced here:
http://denisdutton.com/cooling_world.htm
Environmentalists posited then that the burning of fossil fuels was putting too much particulate matter into the atmosphere and that was blocking heat from reaching the surface. The thing that fascinated the libs and the encvironmentalists was that it could be blamed on big business and capitalistic greed.
When the cooling from the 1940s to 1970s reversed in 1979 various scientistts were working to discover what could cause climate change. In the 1980s I lived in Boulder, CO and did a lot of mountain climbing with a Phd who worked for the National Center for Atmospheric Research. (NCAR)He was researching climate change and was using the Cray computer, the biggest of that time, to model climate. He was, like most of his fellow workers, politically liberal. He was determined to find out how air pollution was affecting climate. At the time I was relatively apolitical so we seldom discussed politics. Our shared passion was mountain climbing. I often joined him for lunch at NCAR where he showed me the Cray computer and many of the results of his climate models. After about seven years of work he told me one day that the climate was so complex and chaotic that his computer models were essentially worthless and he was getting no where in his research efforts. Shortly after that he left NCAR for a teaching position at the Navy Post Grad School in Monterey, CA. Obviously others at NCAR, like Kevin Trenbarth, took up where my friend left off.
I’m not sure exactly when it was discovered that the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere were growing, but someone looked at the increase, compared it to the increase in temperatures, and a theory was born. They could show the levels of CO2 increasing gradually from the late 1800s to the present with CO2 levels increasing quite rapidly after the 1960s. (When our economy was growing rapidly) They constructed climate models that showed all this was possible and then they began projecting the models into the future. What they saw looked like a coming disaster. Wow, it was so wonderful that this all fit with the environmental and liberal agenda of stopping the growth of capitalism! That is when this theory began attracting media attention along with big grants.
I was directed to the blog, Real Climate, http://www.realclimate.org/
some years ago by a friend of mine who was apoplectic about the possibilities of global warming being a disaster. I read and read and did a lot of looking around the web at other climate blogs. There were other pro-AGW blogs but Real Climate was the true believer site. Most commenters were also true believers. I made some comments asking questions about such things as the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), the cooling from the 40s to the 70s, and the work of Drs. John Christy and Roy Spencer.
I also challenged their oft stated belief that necessary CO2 reductions could be achieved through conservation, high taxes on gasoline, and more urban transit. Eventually they quit publishing my comments because – “they felt they were not contibuting to the discussion.”
I watched with interest the advent of the blog, Climate Audit. http://www.climateaudit.org/
The blog’s owner, Steve McIntyre, is a retired statistician who found the global warming theory interesting and wanted to get involved with the research. He wanted to start by reviewing the data and models that had been published. He met with resistance almost immediately and that rang an alarm bell for him. He managed to do a lot of independent work that did not correlate to the Warmer’s theory, but he kept asking for the original data. About a month ago someone anonymously sent him the tree ring data that had been used to produce the IPCC’s infamous “Hockey Stick.” When he ran the data he found that the only way he could get a hockey stick shape was by cherry picking the data. That was covered by the blog, WattUpWithThat. http://wattsupwiththat.com/ I believed then that it was apparent that the IPCC, CRU at EAU, and Real Climate were outed as pushing a AGW as looming catastrophe that could not be honestly defended. However, the reaction was not that great. That is why I suspect that someone on the inside at CRU made the first dump to McIntyre and now this one to the blogosphere in general.
However, there is a lot of money, a lot of political capital, many scientific reputations and possibly, the fate of the U.S. economy hanging in the balance. These true believers are not going to accept the outing of their nefarious ways as a fait accompli. No, this is going to be a down and dirty fight to the finish. It is important that the alternative media get behind this in a big way.
The MSM is deeply invested in this as well. Andrew Revkin “I’m a reporter for THE NEW YORK TIMES, covering global environmental issues and, once in a sad while, calamities (9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the Asian tsunami……” was one of the reporters mentioned in the CRU e-mails. They are not going to do a 180 on this issue until the evidence is overwhelming.
“sincere but misguided”
I wonder how much public money has been lost to fund these sincere but misguided fraudsters. These days, losing “trillions” here and “trillions” there gets swept up under the rug pretty fast. (Today’s Chicago Tribune, for example, notes that some of the stimulus money is “unaccounted for.”)
Really, the amount of fraud that we’re noticing these days is just beyond belief.
I wish some of the criminals involved would be prosecuted and jailed for a long time–as a lesson to others. This includes various AGW fraudsters as well as a scary number of U.S. senators, representatives, and other public officials.
To stop all these crimes, there need to be consequences for theft.
“Sincere but misguided” covers a lot of criminal territory, including jihadists, crazy serial killers, communist hitmen, etc. I didn’t mean to imply in my post above that I thought that being “sincere” was an excuse for anything.
Thanks for the valuable historical perspective, Jimmy. Also, I agree with Promethea that there should be consequences for these crimes–not as a lesson to others, although hopefully it would serve as that as well, but for simple justice.
It’s interesting to consider why these guys might be in such a hurry to get their climate control measures passed. It’s occurred to me that it has to do with the fact that, true believers or not, they know that the climate is cooling. They’ve managed to hold off general recognition of this fact by continuing to yell, “CO2, warming alert, warming alert, catastrophe just ahead!” as loudly as they can and meanwhile getting some measures, however small, passed and implemented. Then, shortly afterwards when cooling is clear and incontrovertible, they can say, “See, even the little bit we’ve managed to do already has begun to help, but more must be done.”
Ah, yes. More must always be done.
Jimmy is right. This is going to be a down-and-dirty fight.
betsybounds,
I was in agreement with your position. I was just trying to add the irony that those bee colonies that were supposedly being killed off by human action in North America would not have been in North America to begin with without human action.
Kinda like the hand wringing over culling “wild mustangs” in the southwest who have no major predators, besides humans, to keep them in check.
I assume people reading this blog are aware that horses had either been killed off or died of disease in the Americas before Europeans arrived on this shore.
As tragic as the treatment of the plains indians were, that horse culture was created after the arrival of the europeans.
I think of the Environmentalist worrying about methane from cows. What do they think those vast herds of Bison that once roamed the plains by the millions were doing? Bison and domestic cows are relly the same species- they can produce fertile offspring. Its really only domestication/ culture that separates them.
What do they think those vast herds of Bison that once roamed the plains by the millions were doing?
Taking Beano? /g
Thanks, jon baker. What you say about the bees makes sense.
I think the bison, btw, were rehearsing for crowd scenes in Westerns. Waiting for a casting call, you know.
Real scientists don’t fake the data. What a shame this is for science in general. And to think it is “Conservatives (who) don’t believe in science.” I, like many of you, saw this is coming a long time ago. It will be interesting to watch the AGW Religionists react to these revelations.
The only real way to deal with them now is with scorn. Such as the way the “Swift Boaters,” were reviled by those on the left. Give them their own taste of Alinsky now that they really deserve it.
To any decent scientist, the warning flags were snapping in the breeze like those on a Nigerian email scam.
These guys won’t release their data? Or their code? Why not? They’d better have a damned good reason, and even then, should make them both available to selected third parties for verification. (This is analogous to the Nigerian email asking you to put down a deposit to facilitate the bank transfer.)
They’re dismissive of contrary views? (And this in a flaky field; we’re not talking about people proposing perpetual motion machines here.) Another red flag. You could be wrong; it’s best not to be dismissive of criticisms, because you might end up on the crow diet.
They’re intemperate and doctrinaire in expressing their viewpoints? They’re holding themselves (a la Jeff Goldblum) as saving the earth and humanity? Two big red flags on this one.
Scientists are taught always to speak within the bounds of what they know, i.e., the facts, and then to hedge their speech on what they think those facts mean. Many scientists will even in some cases hedge their statements of facts (e.g., “assuming this observation is correct…”). Being wrong is a cardinal sin in most of science; if there’s a chance you could be wrong, you should either have not said anything, or should at least have qualifed your statement to indicate that possibility (i.e., that you were speculating). Anything said without qualification is presumed to be bankable. If it isn’t, whoever said it just bounced a check.
Traditionallly scientists were taught in writing papers to separate their experimental results from their interpretation (now a tradition sadly more honored in the breach than the observance), the logic being that the interpretation of results might (and often does) change, but any new interpretation will still have to explain the same results.
So these guys had warning signs all over them. It’s much like the situation with John Kerry. Real war heroes aren’t on about it all the time; it’s the fakes who, knowing they’re imposters, throw caution and modesty to the winds, to convince others — and themselves.
OK, time for a little good old-fashioned mockery:
Hide the Decline
“Hide the Decline!” Good one, rickl. ROFL.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute CEI has decided to play hardball with NASA and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).
Read all about it here:
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/competitive-enterprise-institute-sues-nasa-in-wake-of-climategate-scandal/
Three cheers for them!
The scientists didn’t “conspire” to perpetrate a fraud any more than a mob conspires to trample its slower-footed members, or a raindrop conspires to cause a flood.
They saw an advantage in panicking people with tales of a global flood, and the peer review process let them make the most of it. What we should be doing is taking steps to reform the review process so it can’t be manipulated so easily, not hunting conspiracies.
“Now, I would suggest to you that none of these are the actions of people who genuinely believe themselves to be right, and to have nothing to hide.”
I will say I find some level of truth to this – but only some level. For me these are people I worked with and knew – well sorta. I didn’t these *specific* people but I did the next tier down (and in a few cases in the same tier, but not people in these leaks as they were another institution).
The best example I can give is that one of them was running his model on our clusters. He had modeled it to run in a couple of days and it ended up taking over a week. Normally they guy is pretty bright and issues like that need to be looked at (though he was a passive aggressive ass – more on that).
In this case we found that he was only having about a 10% cache hit rate instead of the 90+ he had modeled for. So his model was having to go to the disk or even worse the network instead of memory. This could have easily made a two day run into a month long or more so he was lucky most went to the disk.
He then proceeded to ask us where his model/calculations were wrong – we couldn’t find it – it *should* have been hitting the cache. Therefore the reported cache miss rate was wrong – no problem found in his model. However if one were to change the model of the model (so to speak) to the reported cache rate then everything was 100% correct.
I understood from that moment on how much reliance that individual gave to his models and beliefs as “correct”. If reality gave a different answer and we couldn’t figure out *why* then reality had to bend.
I could have chewed nails when he informed me that once I had the appropriate class at the university (he listed a first/second year undergrad course) I would understand what he was saying. He always held a deep grudge against me because I though he was wrong since the OS reported a cache miss rate that he didn’t think should happen and I couldn’t find a flaw in his logic.
I later ran into other areas where he took his own pre-conclusions over what actually happened and “fudged” the data to fit. He nearly 100% believed in his own supremacy to that point. I use the word “nearly” because I *do* think he was smart enough that some part of himself knew how weak those ideas were, but really I have no evidence that he truly had that idea in any capacity.
As such I will buy the idea that they thought they are doing Good Science. While the above story is someone I didn’t like much there were friends who did, well, bad science but thought they were right. Really, if you take out the passive aggressive thought there is nothing to dislike there from a personal point of view (well, unless you are someone who wrote the part of the Linux Kernel that tracked/reported such things – we were not). I will also buy (and personally believe) that *some* part of them knew the fraud too.
Many of these were otherwise good people and I do agree lets not forget that. We shouldn’t give them professional slack (indeed they should be roasted for this) but there is no need to interject malice where incompetence would suffice.
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Malice or incompetence? Well in the present case, and considering all possible ramifications, that may be a distinction without a difference.
But I will say that, if this many of our allegedly top atmospheric and other scientists display this extraordinary level of incompetence, it might actually be better for the entire scientific “community” to hope it’s malice.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. It contaminates not only the Climaquiddick scienitsts but the entire environmental movement and much of the scientific establishment.
it might actually be better for the entire scientific “community” to hope it’s malice.
betsy: Your comment slipped by me, but yes, this problem goes to the whole scientific community.
One of the reasons I’ve been giving the AGW people the benefit of the doubt is because I thought the scientific community was doing some vetting and exercising some skepticism, but they have been conveniently credulous in the face of the AGW campaign.
It’s not just the climate scientists who have squandered authority here.
Some science–or theoretical math, say–will be free from suspicion because there’s no money in the answers.
if there is, as with AGW, huge amounts so far and inconceivable amounts under Cap and Trade, with their effectively unlimited opportunities for graft and corruption, then people might take this lesson to be skeptical.
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.
I grew up with great respect for scientists, but back in 2001 after I read the SciAm persecution of Bjorn Lomborg for writing The Skeptical Environmentalist, I began to realize that scientists were blue-state academics and that allegiance would trump even science when politics was involved.
If global warming is discredited as thoroughly as it’s beginning to look, it’s going to be a huge black eye for all of environmentalism and much of science.
BTW, John Holdren — Obama’s current top science advisor — was one of Bjorn Lomborg’s SciAm Inquisitors.
See .John Holdren and Obama’s War on Science.
Link again: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1321460/john_holdren_and_obamas_war_on_science.html .
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. It contaminates not only the Climaquiddick scienitsts but the entire environmental movement and much of the scientific establishment.
I said something to that effect long ago, but it didnt take a database breach and 165 megs of stolen data to make it as reasonable as saying it now after the change.
this is great… now if we can get everyone on the left doing things for the cause and colluding to write letters and sign documents and leave them for our discovery, we could actually come to a real conclusion on things having to do with collectivists rather than waffling endlessly.
now if only Obama can leave a signed admission of guilt where a cleaning lady could find it so that the reasonable thing would be to conclude the truth.
I’m a sucker for The Killers they are undoubtedly one of my favourite bands. Although I have to say I recently came across this exquisite mr brightside cover version on YouTube just now and i think I like it more than the classic release! You ought to view this … The Killers Mr Brightside Cover
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. It contaminates not only the Climaquiddick scienitsts but the entire environmental movement and much of the scientific establishment.
I said something to that effect long ago, but it didnt take a database breach and 165 megs of stolen data to make it as reasonable as saying it now after the change.
this is great… now if we can get everyone on the left doing things for the cause and colluding to write letters and sign documents and leave them for our discovery, we could actually come to a real conclusion on things having to do with collectivists rather than waffling endlessly.
now if only Obama can leave a signed admission of guilt where a cleaning lady could find it so that the reasonable thing would be to conclude the truth.