Jones and CRU exonerated

[Captain.Sassy]

Mann was largely cleared of any wrongdoing some time back http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=166526

It now seems that Jones and the CRU have similarly been cleared in a UK parliamentary investigation into Climatefizzle.

http://www.desmogblog.com/phil-jones-exonerated-british-house-commons

Here's one for you, East Anglia climate scientists:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0iWKQJze-U

1-2, 1-2
1-2, 1-2
CRU, CRU,
Bubblin...bubblin...

 

[BenBurch]

And once again we see that even when the climate deniers stoop to criminal activity in their attempt to silence the voice of science, they FAIL.

 

[MattusMaximus]

Nice. Just as I mentioned a long time ago when Climate-fizzle was getting started, a thorough investigation was in order. Now that such an investigation has been conducted and the results made public, we can move on.

Btw, my favorite part of the report:

Even if the data that CRU used were not publicly available—which they mostly are—or the methods not published—which they have been—its published results would still be credible: the results from CRU agree with those drawn from other international data sets; in other words, the analyses have been repeated and the conclusions have been verified.

ETA: I've seen on other threads that some GW deniers are dealing in hypotheticals by asking, "Would you have accepted the conclusions had they been different?". I find it very interesting that some of these folks would rather deal in the hypothetical than confront the reality of the investigation & its conclusions as they stand.

 

[Furcifer]

My favorites:

It is not standard practice in climate science and many other fields to publish the raw data and the computer code in academic papers. We think that this is problematic because climate science is a matter of global importance and of public interest, and therefore the quality and transparency of the science should be irreproachable.

We consider that further suspicion could have been allayed by releasing all the e-mails. In addition, we consider that had the available raw data been available online from an early stage, these kinds of unfortunate e-mail exchanges would not have occurred. In our view, CRU should have been more open with its raw data and followed the more open approach of NASA to making data available.

There is prima facie evidence that CRU has breached the Freedom of Information Act 2000. It would, however, be premature, without a thorough investigation affording each party the opportunity to make representations, to conclude that UEA was in breach of the Act. In our view, it is unsatisfactory to leave the matter unresolved simply because of the operation of the six-month time limit on the initiation of prosecutions.

The first 2 go to my initial concern with transparency. Given the importance of the research it should have been made more accessible. There's no real excuse for it, these are very smart men after all and they should have known.

The third doesn't exactly "exonerate" Jones and the CRU now does it? I think apologies may be in order.

All in all I'm satisfied with the report. I think it reflects my views after having read a few of the emails in question.

 

[TheDaver]

And once again we see that even when the climate deniers stoop to criminal activity in their attempt to silence the voice of science, they FAIL.

But sadly, we also see that the deniers and the mainstream media who were all over the idea of a “controversy” aren’t so interested in the fact that there is none.

 

[andyandy]

And once again we see that even when the climate deniers stoop to criminal activity in their attempt to silence the voice of science, they FAIL.

Unfortunately I think they've succeeded a great deal in shaping the public discourse. Everyone read the headlines about this supposed "climate cover up" - how many people will read a report from a parliamentary committee?

Like "The Great Global Warming Conspiracy [or Swindle, can't remember....]" before it, this has massively damaged public perceptions about AGW.....

 

[CoolSceptic]

Unfortunately I think they've succeeded a great deal in shaping the public discourse. Everyone read the headlines about this supposed "climate cover up" - how many people will read a report from a parliamentary committee?

As I noted on the other thread, perhaps the public don't have a great deal of trust in the UK parliament, bearing in mind this is the same UK parliament who claimed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that could be mobilised in just 45 minutes. This is the same UK parliament that rubber-stamped cleaning out an MPs duck pond as valid parliamentary expenses; and when it was pointed out, the MP expressed how shocking it was that the taxpayers should have the cheek of knowing how their money was being spent.

Y'know, whether it's right or wrong, trust and credibility in the eyes of the public has to be earned. This present parliament has little or no trust or credibility in the eyes of the public. And for very good reason, too.

Personally, I've always felt that the FOI issue would be the biggest aspect of the climategate affair. The UK parliament report doesn't address that in detail, but demands that it is investigated thoroughly. I think the ICO report into this will be very interesting indeed.

 

[BenBurch]

Unfortunately I think they've succeeded a great deal in shaping the public discourse. Everyone read the headlines about this supposed "climate cover up" - how many people will read a report from a parliamentary committee?

Like "The Great Global Warming Conspiracy [or Swindle, can't remember....]" before it, this has massively damaged public perceptions about AGW.....

People often believe well-crafted lies. Hence most product adverts for useless homeopathic junk.

 

[CoolSceptic]

People often believe well-crafted lies. Hence most product adverts for useless homeopathic junk.

Homeopathic junk, UK parliament dossiers and IPCC AR4.

Although technically I would not regard them as "well crafted", but actually pretty inept.

 

[uke2se]

Homeopathic junk, UK parliament dossiers and IPCC AR4.

Although technically I would not regard them as "well crafted", but actually pretty inept.

Just to be clear here, you are in fact calling the IPCC AR4 an "inept lie"?

 

[a_unique_person]

My favorites:

Releasing every bit of code and data has not been standard, especially if it's publicly available data that you can go out and get yourself, or if it's data that is commercially available for sale and protected by confidentiality agreements. The data in question was a bit of each in this case. The only data that wasn't was how they selected or not which stations to include in their temperature record.

The traditional method of QA in science has been replication, and that is not slavishly repeating everything that someone else has done. It means going out and 'reinventing' what they have done. Repeating what someone has done is only going to replicate systemic errors, not much use in that.

http://tamino.wordpress.com/2010/03/01/replication-not-repetition/











The first 2 go to my initial concern with transparency. Given the importance of the research it should have been made more accessible. There's no real excuse for it, these are very smart men after all and they should have known.

The third doesn't exactly "exonerate" Jones and the CRU now does it? I think apologies may be in order.

All in all I'm satisfied with the report. I think it reflects my views after having read a few of the emails in question.[/quote]

 

[DallasDad]

Why is Jones the "director of the Climatic Research Unit"? Shouldn't that be the "Climate Research Unit" instead?

The title as given in the article seems to imply his unit has its own research climate.

 

[CoolSceptic]

Just to be clear here, you are in fact calling the IPCC AR4 an "inept lie"?

Just to be clear here, I did not use the word "lie" and as a rule I try to avoid doing so. It is a highly emotive term usually used by people who want to polemicise a topic rather than engage in meaningful debate. To differentiate between incompetence and lying requires some information about what the people knew prior to producing the documentation, which is often very difficult to know or come across, and even if you can evidence such a thing, usually only applies to a very narrow aspect of an issue.

For example, some homeopathic brochures may be written by well-meaning idiots.

As for the UK parliamentary dossier on Iraq and IPCC AR4, I hold them in pretty similar regard. I personally think that they both contain serious errors and omissions. I consider both documents to have been produced ineptly.

Clearer?

 

[uke2se]

Just to be clear here, I did not use the word "lie" and as a rule I try to avoid doing so. It is a highly emotive term usually used by people who want to polemicise a topic rather than engage in meaningful debate. To differentiate between incompetence and lying requires some information about what the people knew prior to producing the documentation, which is often very difficult to know or come across, and even if you can evidence such a thing, usually only applies to a very narrow aspect of an issue.

For example, some homeopathic brochures may be written by well-meaning idiots.

Well, from the quote you made, you most certainly inferred that the AR4 was an inept lie. As you say, you didn't mean that, and that's why I asked.

As for the UK parliamentary dossier on Iraq and IPCC AR4, I hold them in pretty similar regard. I personally think that they both contain serious errors and omissions. I consider both documents to have been produced ineptly.

Clearer?

I take it you have the necessary scientific background to cast this judgment over the AR4?

 

[TraneWreck]

Just to be clear here, I did not use the word "lie" and as a rule I try to avoid doing so. It is a highly emotive term usually used by people who want to polemicise a topic rather than engage in meaningful debate. To differentiate between incompetence and lying requires some information about what the people knew prior to producing the documentation, which is often very difficult to know or come across, and even if you can evidence such a thing, usually only applies to a very narrow aspect of an issue.

For example, some homeopathic brochures may be written by well-meaning idiots.

As for the UK parliamentary dossier on Iraq and IPCC AR4, I hold them in pretty similar regard. I personally think that they both contain serious errors and omissions. I consider both documents to have been produced ineptly.

Clearer?

Just none you bother to list. Because once you make an argument on the science, everyone here debunks in 20 sec, you fall back on the uncertainty argument and launch ad hom's at random scientists, we spend 10 pages asking you to support your claims, and we get no where.

Or I could be wrong, maybe you're the only person on the forums willing to criticize the IPCC on the merits.

 

[3point14]

People often believe well-crafted lies. Hence most product adverts

Sorry, had to fix that.

 

[CoolSceptic]

The traditional method of QA in science has been replication, and that is not slavishly repeating everything that someone else has done. It means going out and 'reinventing' what they have done. Repeating what someone has done is only going to replicate systemic errors, not much use in that.

Only someone who knows little about scientific history would claim such a thing.

Taking Blondlot as an example. People "reinventing" his experiment with their own apparatus in their own labs found inconclusive results. It was only when Blondlot allowed someone sceptical of his claims into his own lab, to get up close and personal with Blondlot's own equipment, was the flaw in his experimental setup made evident.

Independent replication is, of course, important, but double checking code is important as well. It was through double checking code that (for example) the error in the UAH temperature series was found, and the cos latitude error in Ross McKitrick's work was found.

And this ignores the public policy aspect. If the science is intended just to live as science and have no impact on the lives of people, then there is no need to make it available. If you want to make public policy decisions based on this science, everything needs to be utterly transparent. This was the whole point of the comment in the parliamentary report (which you seemed to miss entirely)

 

[CoolSceptic]

Just none you bother to list. Because once you make an argument on the science, everyone here debunks in 20 sec, you fall back on the uncertainty argument and launch ad hom's at random scientists, we spend 10 pages asking you to support your claims, and we get no where.

Or I could be wrong, maybe you're the only person on the forums willing to criticize the IPCC on the merits.

My views are fairly well known I think.

Obviously there are known and agreed errors (e.g. Himalayan glaciers)

There are errors which are not uniformly agreed but are IMHO pretty clearly wrong (such as the link between AGW and disaster, which was debated recently at the Royal Society, and the IPCC position largely discredited as being against the consensus opinion at the time, and thoroughly discredited since)

My main bugbear is the problematic handling of uncertainty throughout AR4, in particular by omission through ignoring the work of Cohn, Lins, Koutsoyiannis et al. Their work has profound impact on the confidence intervals used throughout the report. It got little more than a paragraph in the second order draft which was removed to a single line in an appendix by the final version.

My position on this is well known amongst the AGW regulars on this topic and I don't think anything would be added here by going into detail. This is something which is not generally discussed amongst sceptics (I think it is a topic that is not widely understood by many people) but for the few that have engaged and actually understand the topic with any depth, it is a very serious issue indeed.

 

[uke2se]

There are errors which are not uniformly agreed but are IMHO pretty clearly wrong (such as the link between AGW and disaster, which was debated recently at the Royal Society, and the IPCC position largely discredited as being against the consensus opinion at the time, and thoroughly discredited since)

I'd like a source for this.

 

[TraneWreck]

My views are fairly well known I think.

Not by me, sorry.

Obviously there are known and agreed errors (e.g. Himalayan glaciers)

Yeah, a typo. 2035 instead of 2350. It was corrected and nothing important was derived from the error.

The glacier levels are used later in the report, but the correct numbers were applied. More evidence that the first "error" was a minor oversight that required 2 sentences of correction.

There are errors which are not uniformly agreed but are IMHO pretty clearly wrong (such as the link between AGW and disaster, which was debated recently at the Royal Society, and the IPCC position largely discredited as being against the consensus opinion at the time, and thoroughly discredited since)

Are you talking about the criticism from Leake? There was use of a debateable graph by the IPCC-- http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2010/02/ipcc-mystery-graph-solved.html --but the researcher confirmed it was used correctly by the IPCC-- http://www.rms.com/Publications/2010_FAQ_IPCC.pdf

If that's not what you're talking about, please link to something specific.

My main bugbear is the problematic handling of uncertainty throughout AR4, in particular by omission through ignoring the work of Cohn, Lins, Koutsoyiannis et al. Their work has profound impact on the confidence intervals used throughout the report. It got little more than a paragraph in the second order draft which was removed to a single line in an appendix by the final version.

Well, on the whole, the IPCC report is incredibly conservative. Take the sea level issue, for example:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/03/the-ipcc-sea-level-numbers/

As for Cohn and Lins, they have adopted a skeptical position regarding the testing of hypotheses in climate models. Theirs is a statistical claim and will likely lead to improvements in future modeling.

If you think they were wrongly limited in the IPCC report, I don't know what to tell you. Here's a discussion of their paper:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/12/naturally-trendy/

People are aware of it, they're factoring into their research, we'll see how it goes.

My position on this is well known amongst the AGW regulars on this topic and I don't think anything would be added here by going into detail. This is something which is not generally discussed amongst sceptics (I think it is a topic that is not widely understood by many people) but for the few that have engaged and actually understand the topic with any depth, it is a very serious issue indeed.

Sure, and they will continue doing their work as other climate scientists continue to develop models. I'll be charitable and agree that it's an open question, but they are a very long way from creating legitimate doubt about AGW. Who knows, maybe they will be the guys