Some Thoughts on Disclosure and Due Diligence in Climate Science
Filed under: General— Steve McIntyre @ 8:14 am
Because of my experience in non-academic environments, I have found that my perspective on:
1) what constitutes "full, true and plain disclosure" in academic articles and in scientific prospectuses, such as the IPCC reports, and
2) what are adequate levels of due diligence for scientific policy
is quite different than people only used to an academic milieu. Here I discuss some thoughts on these matters.
I have spent much of the past 2 years analyzing and re-constructing some of the basic studies used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to support their conclusions about global warming and, in turn, to promote policies on climate change. It started as a hobby and it evolved into a full time avocation, resulting to date in 3 peer-reviewed publications, which Natuurwetenschap & Techniek, the National Post and the Wall Street Journal have recently reported on.
Previously, I spent about 35 years in the mining and mineral exploration business. During the last 20 years of this, I worked in the micro-cap exploration business and have a great deal of practical experience in dealing with prospectus and securities issues from the company point of view. Concepts like audit trails, due diligence and full, true and plain disclosure become second nature when you work in such an environment.
I have often felt like an anthropologist as I’ve ventured into academic disputes, where very different standards of disclosure and procedures for due diligence apply. I think that many non-academic people, who would be put off by technical questions like the validity of principal components algorithms, may very well be interested in what I have learned about these processes as they apply to modern climate studies.
In a corporate world, there is simply no question about providing audit trails, and while they can take many different forms they all serve the purpose of ensuring the validity of information used for investment decisions. In addition to familiar forms of financial audit trails, the splitting and retention of drill cores is a form of audit trail in the exploration business. In my opinion, the absence of drill core at the Bre-X exploration site, if publicly known, would have alarmed investors long prior to the final demise. (See my notes Bre-X#1, Bre-X#2 and Bre-X #3)
The 2001 IPCC report produced findings that have guided investment decisions, which vastly exceed the sums involved in even the largest financial scandals of recent years. Since the IPCC leaned heavily on a novel approach called a “multiproxy climate study†and in particular the “hockey stick graph†of Mann et al., this is where I’ve focused my attention. An audit trail in this case is easily defined: the data in the form used by the authors and the computer scripts used to generate the results. In principle, these can be easily buttoned up and publicly archived. I think that most civilians would assume (as I did prior to starting my studies in this area) that such packages would be standard as part of a peer review process.
In fact, this is not the case. None of the major multiproxy studies have anything remotely like a complete due diligence packages and most have none at all. The author of one of the most quoted studies [Crowley and Lowery, 2000] told me that he has “mis-placed†his data.....
