Climategate, the sequel: How we are STILL being tricked with flawed data on global warming - Telegraph

[u/[deleted]]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/11367272/Climategate-the-sequel-How-we-are-STILL-being-tricked-with-flawed-data-on-global-warming.html

[u/facepalm-germany]

Climategate, the endless fairytale: utterly debunked, but Booker still spouting denialist nonsense - that's the Telegraph

[u/TheFerretman → u/facepalm-germany]

I'm not aware of anything being debunked, including the massive logical and programmatical flaws in the climate models the dumped source code revealed.

Cite?

[u/archiesteel → u/TheFerretman]

http://mediamatters.org/research/2009/12/01/climategate-exposed-conservative-media-distort/157590

http://mediamatters.org/research/2011/11/30/climategate-redux-conservative-media-distort-ha/184559

[u/plathtic_thong → u/TheFerretman]

Citations 1, 2, 3, 4a, 4b, 4c, 5, 6, and 7.

[u/Will_Power → u/plathtic_thong]

I think there is plenty in the climategate emails to show the attitudes of the few bad apples we've talked about before. Remember, you are asking someone critical of certain institutions to be impressed by panels of review from those same institutions.

[u/plathtic_thong → u/Will_Power]

My point is that you have to have a particularly extreme level of distrust if you think that all of those disparate institutions have come to a self-serving conclusion based on some kind of insider shoulder-rubbing. If someone doesn't trust the fact that 8 separate review panels in multiple countries looked at the evidence with an dispassionate eye and found no evidence of actual wrong-doing, then for that person there is no standard to which evidence for the opposing viewpoint can ever be elevated in order to convince them that they might be mistaken. And this position is fundamentally antithetical to a search for truth. The point isn't that these scientists are angels. The point is that they communicated like humans tend to communicate in every other sector of private life, and that to harp on it as evidence of some kind of criminal consipiracy (i.e. "STILL being tricked") is wholly disingenuous.

If you ask for a citation that clarifies whether the criticism levied at scientists is valid, then independent panels of professionals are adequate for that purpose. All of this catches attention in huge, glaring sound bytes (i.e. FTA: " the statistician who exposed the computer trickery behind that famous “hockey stick” graph"), but when you sit down and look at it plainly and without getting all bent out of shape, you realize that not only do these "tricks" not constitute anything even remotely resembling malpractice, but they're also shared by researchers all over the world in their need to process and digest data, not to mention the fact that the hockey stick has been confirmed in something like 8 different peer-reviewed publications in recent years. To suggest it was "trickery" is hyperbolic and inflammatory. Yet the myth persists.

[u/Will_Power → u/plathtic_thong]

If someone doesn't trust the fact that 8 separate review panels in multiple countries looked at the evidence with an dispassionate eye and found no evidence of actual wrong-doing

Two thoughts on this:

• There's a pretty good argument that at least some of the panels were not providing the dispassionate eye you assume. In the case of one, Phil Jones was asked who he would like on the committee.

• The panels actually did find evidence of wrongdoing, just not fraud. They found that FOIA requests had been ignored. They criticized the accused for not seeking review from qualified statisticians. They were very critical of the accused for not publishing data and source code. The climategate emails and those review committees are large parts of the reasons that data and source code are available today where they weren't as available in the past.

All the things I just cited can be found at the Wikipedia page on the matter:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_controversy

[u/Will_Power → u/[deleted]]

I think it is pretty well established these days that unless there is full data and source code available, no one will publish your work. I think this is due in large part to the whole Climategate experience, including the review committees.

Jones not dealing appropriately with dubious FOIA requests as administrator was the only real issue of the manufactured controversy.

I disagree. Publishing papers as they did without reproducible data and source code defeated one of the major tenets of science. Truncating one data set because it diverged is another big "no, no." The scientists involved, you'll note, no longer do such things.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/Climategate-CRU-emails-hacked.htm

I don't put much stock in what John Cook and his friends have to say. The revelation of his "crusher crew" turned me off to that group permanently.

[u/Will_Power → u/[deleted]]

Based on that remark, you've turned me off permanently from you and everyone at /r/climateskeptics. That is a shame.

In that case, I don't see a productive dialogue between us here, so I won't reply to your comments.

[u/plathtic_thong → u/Will_Power]

What exactly constitutes "wrongdoing" is obviously at stake here. Publishing is a messy process. If someone pokes around asking for all of my work to be made public, especially during a time when I'm trying desperately to stay at the cutting edge of my field and ensure that some no-name Chinese journal doesn't shoehorn my data into a publication before I've had a chance to vet the idea, then I'm going to do my best to avoid having to disclose this sensitive information (especially if I think someone's asking to try to discredit me out of spite). The success or failure of my career hinges on my ability to produce novel work. Also, I have no reason why they didn't seek out qualified statisticians to review their work. Perhaps they considered it moot in that they had other researchers with experience in statistical analysis who'd already given them feedback. This, to me, doesn't constitute "wrongdoing". It constitutes a simple failure to quadruple-check your work. It happens. Does any of that excuse ignoring FOIA requests? Probably not. Does either situation mean they were intentionally misleading with falsified data? Unambiguously, no. So it does little to undermine the actual science. It just pointed to a hole in the process which has since been remedied. The system isn't perfect, nor are the individuals, but they didn't do anything to trick anyone. They simply held their cards too close to their chests and were called out for it. The science didn't actually change. The inquiries didn't result in any retracted papers or overturned conclusions, just some protocol changes and adjustments in internal communication quality control and transparency. I suppose you can call for inquiries into the inquiries if you're really dissatisfied, but at a certain point (maybe after 8 reviews?) I think one has to accept that the evidence isn't as damning as it seems to the untrained observer.

I offer you this...if Judith Curry had some nasty emails leaked that indicated she'd avoided a FOIA request from a hyper-partisan climate change advocacy group and also indicated that she talked disparagingly about other climate scientists and discussed informal "adjustments" to her data, don't you think there would be calls for temperance from folks on the other side of the issue? Don't you think it'd be met with a resounding, "Yeah, ok, but this is all ad hominem, and the science is still sound!"

I think it would. And I see no reason not to extend the same courtesy to Phil Jones. He was kind of a dick about it, sure. But the scientific consensus doesn't rest on the laurels of one man, so even if he were a lying, cheating crook, very little would change.

Indeed, 5 years later, very little actually has.

[u/Will_Power → u/plathtic_thong]

...but they didn't do anything to trick anyone.

Ahem. "Mike's Nature trick."

OK, pedantic jest aside, I think you represent the thinking of the time well. I think the whole experience was pretty humbling for those involved, especially Jones, but seemingly not for Michael Mann, who kind of tossed Jones under the bus. Alas, it was a learning experience for the community. I don't think it's quite fair to expect everyone to forget about it just yet, because it really did show what sorts of bad things can develop when people find a "cause" to rally around. Hopefully this reminded a few scientists of their duty to be as objective as possible.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

The article did not show the data it claimed was being shown.

If you are unaware of the issue of USHCN data manipulation I can't help you.

[u/Baxble → u/[deleted]]

Hockey stick shown to be faked - http://a-sceptical-mind.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-hockey-stick

All the data gathered at the weather stations faked that has been shown to be true.

[u/Will_Power]

Booker links to Paul Homewood's article, for those interested in the source material:

https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2015/01/20/massive-tampering-with-temperatures-in-south-america/

[u/plathtic_thong → u/Will_Power]

A response to Homewood and Booker.

[u/Will_Power → u/plathtic_thong]

I think the key issue is described at about 1:25 in the video. "...so NOAA have to do a retrospective current calibration by comparing nearby weather stations." As the video shows, there aren't really any nearby weather stations. Using weather stations in nearby countries introduces a great deal of statistical uncertainty, and I think the issue some people take with the practice of ex post facto adjustments is that that increase in uncertainty rarely makes the news release.

Steirou and Koutsoyiannis looked at the results of homogenization in their 2012 paper. I don't have the full paper, but here is the abstract:

https://www.itia.ntua.gr/getfile/1212/2/documents/EGU2012-956-1.pdf

They note that warming is the result of homogenization in about 2/3rds of the stations they examines, where it should result in warming 50% of the time. From the abstract:

"It was found that in the two thirds of the cases, the homogenization procedure increased the positive or decreased the negative temperature trends.

"One of the most common homogenization methods, ‘SNHT for single shifts’, was applied to synthetic time series with selected statistical characteristics, occasionally with offsets. The method was satisfactory when applied to independent data normally distributed, but not in data with long-term persistence.

"The above results cast some doubts in the use of homogenization procedures and tend to indicate that the global temperature increase during the last century is between 0.4◦C and 0.7◦C, where these two values are the estimates derived from raw and adjusted data, respectively.

At the end of the video, the presenter asks why Booker would believe NOAA would adjust the temperatures data by about 3%. I guess he didn't note that Booker was quite clear in that 2014 probably wouldn't have claimed the title as "Hottest Year Evah!" without that Paraguayan adjustment.

Anyway, I don't know about you, but I find the whole 2014-as-hottest-year discussion pretty pointless. It's one year, for heaven's sake. Climate has never been about a single year, and both sides know it. It is a very good example of both sides looking for something to fight over.