It is really too bad that I don’t have a subscription. I’m a bit late to commenting on this editorial that appeared in Nature magazine yesterday, but I feel it is important to say a few things about it, even though many WUWT readers have probably already seen the editorial.
1. For a scientific journal to use the label “denialists” is in my opinion unconscionable, and highlight’s Nature’s own bias. For the record, while there may in fact be a few people who deny any warming has occurred in the past 100 years (it has) the real issue is the cause. That is what skeptics are about. There are many academics and researchers that have questions about what is being presented in the mainstream climate science today. To put the full weight of Nature behind a broad brush labeling them as “deniers” or “denialists” is a huge mistake. The scientific integrity of one of the foremost scientific magazines has been tarnished by the use of a cheap slur.
2. The claims of harassment are ludicrous. The very foundation of science is based on the ability of other scientists to perform replication via data sharing. Finding excuses to not do this, and actively setting up hurdles to those requesting data for replication is not only not part of the scientific method, it is obstruction of the method. Had the files been provide in early FOI requests, no escalation of requests would have happened. CRU brought this on themselves, mainly due to the stubborn refusal of Dr. Jones to allow data for replication purposes. Besides, UAE has a person specifically assigned to handling FOIA requests. Jones had the data to fill the requests, all he had to do is hand them to the FOIA officer. He chose not to, further in one of the emails it was revealed that Jones and his staff lobbied that FOIA officer not to honor these requests. My hunch is that is where this row started.
3. For Nature to claim that:
Researchers are barred from publicly releasing meteorological data from many countries owing to contractual restrictions. Moreover, in countries such as Germany, France and the United Kingdom, the national meteorological services will provide data sets only when researchers specifically request them, and only after a significant delay.
Is pure rubbish. See point 5 below also – they provided the data to Peter Webster. The majority of weather stations that report data used in the CRU are from public airports worldwide. Here is a list of stations that was grudgingly provided by Phil Jones after years of effort, and it was delivered broken. McIntyre had to fix it. See the cru_station_info file. Pick a few stations in France, Germany, and United Kingdom, then go to weatherunderground.com and see if they are available as hourly reports, or check many of the publicly available climate data sistes It is public data. Yet CRU claims it is proprietary and protected by agreements and we can’t see the data they are using?. Something is wrong there.
I picked three from the countries listed at random from the cru station info file:
GERMANY HOHENPEISSENBERG See http://www.tutiempo.net/en/Climate/HOHENPEISSENBERG/109620.htm
FRANCE BOURGES See: http://www.tutiempo.net/en/Climate/Bourges/72550.htm
UK WADDINGTON See: http://www.tutiempo.net/en/Climate/Waddington/33770.htm
Anybody with a PC and Internet connection can get some of the data CRU uses that is claimed proprietary, so why the need for protectionism when a researcher asks for data from the same locations collated as used in CRU processes?
4. Nature assumes it was a hack in, but the evidence points to a leak, or even a carelessly left file on a public FTP site at CRU (which has happened before) Hackers are usually smash and grab affairs, with little time for understanding of what they are grabbing since they don’t know how long it willbe before they are discovered. They’ll sort it out later. The FOIA2009.zip appears to have been carefully assembled, pointing to someone with specific knowledge and broad access across systems. Further, hackers usually tout their exploits as “badges of honr”. We’ve heard nothing.
5. Previously, Nature reported on Steve McIntyre’s attempts to get access to this data in their report on August 12th, 2009 without so much as a disparaging word against Mr. McIntyre. They wrote then:
McIntyre is especially aggrieved that Peter Webster, a hurricane expert at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, was recently provided with data that had been refused to him.
Webster says his team was given the station data for a very specific request that will result in a joint publication with Jones. “Reasonable requests should be fulfilled because making data available advances science,” says Webster, “but it has to be an authentic request because otherwise you’d be swamped.”
Yet today, they drag out the slur denialist over the very same issue: data access and replication. If replication is not a valid request, then climate science is doomed.
Yes, I’d cancel my Nature subscription if I had one. – Anthony
Here is the Nature editorial as posted here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v462/n7273/full/462545a.html
Editorial
Nature 462, 545 (3 December 2009) | doi:10.1038/462545a; Published online 2 December 2009
Climatologists under pressure
Stolen e-mails have revealed no scientific conspiracy, but do highlight ways in which climate researchers could be better supported in the face of public scrutiny.
The e-mail archives stolen last month from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UEA), UK, have been greeted by the climate-change-denialist fringe as a propaganda windfall (see page 551). To these denialists, the scientists’ scathing remarks about certain controversial palaeoclimate reconstructions qualify as the proverbial ‘smoking gun’: proof that mainstream climate researchers have systematically conspired to suppress evidence contradicting their doctrine that humans are warming the globe.
This paranoid interpretation would be laughable were it not for the fact that obstructionist politicians in the US Senate will probably use it next year as an excuse to stiffen their opposition to the country’s much needed climate bill. Nothing in the e-mails undermines the scientific case that global warming is real — or that human activities are almost certainly the cause. That case is supported by multiple, robust lines of evidence, including several that are completely independent of the climate reconstructions debated in the e-mails.
First, Earth’s cryosphere is changing as one would expect in a warming climate. These changes include glacier retreat, thinning and areal reduction of Arctic sea ice, reductions in permafrost and accelerated loss of mass from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. Second, the global sea level is rising. The rise is caused in part by water pouring in from melting glaciers and ice sheets, but also by thermal expansion as the oceans warm. Third, decades of biological data on blooming dates and the like suggest that spring is arriving earlier each year.
Denialists often maintain that these changes are just a symptom of natural climate variability. But when climate modellers test this assertion by running their simulations with greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide held fixed, the results bear little resemblance to the observed warming. The strong implication is that increased greenhouse-gas emissions have played an important part in recent warming, meaning that curbing the world’s voracious appetite for carbon is essential (see pages 568 and 570).
Mail trail
A fair reading of the e-mails reveals nothing to support the denialists’ conspiracy theories. In one of the more controversial exchanges, UEA scientists sharply criticized the quality of two papers that question the uniqueness of recent global warming (S. McIntyre and R. McKitrick Energy Environ. 14, 751–771; 2003 and W. Soon and S. Baliunas Clim. Res. 23, 89–110; 2003) and vowed to keep at least the first paper out of the upcoming Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Whatever the e-mail authors may have said to one another in (supposed) privacy, however, what matters is how they acted. And the fact is that, in the end, neither they nor the IPCC suppressed anything: when the assessment report was published in 2007 it referenced and discussed both papers.
If there are benefits to the e-mail theft, one is to highlight yet again the harassment that denialists inflict on some climate-change researchers, often in the form of endless, time-consuming demands for information under the US and UK Freedom of Information Acts. Governments and institutions need to provide tangible assistance for researchers facing such a burden.
The theft highlights the harassment that denialists inflict on some climate-change researchers.
The e-mail theft also highlights how difficult it can be for climate researchers to follow the canons of scientific openness, which require them to make public the data on which they base their conclusions. This is best done via open online archives, such as the ones maintained by the IPCC (http://www.ipcc-data.org) and the US National Climatic Data Center (http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/ncdc.html).
Tricky business
But for much crucial information the reality is very different. Researchers are barred from publicly releasing meteorological data from many countries owing to contractual restrictions. Moreover, in countries such as Germany, France and the United Kingdom, the national meteorological services will provide data sets only when researchers specifically request them, and only after a significant delay. The lack of standard formats can also make it hard to compare and integrate data from different sources. Every aspect of this situation needs to change: if the current episode does not spur meteorological services to improve researchers’ ease of access, governments should force them to do so.
The stolen e-mails have prompted queries about whether Nature will investigate some of the researchers’ own papers. One e-mail talked of displaying the data using a ‘trick’ — slang for a clever (and legitimate) technique, but a word that denialists have used to accuse the researchers of fabricating their results. It is Nature‘s policy to investigate such matters if there are substantive reasons for concern, but nothing we have seen so far in the e-mails qualifies.
The UEA responded too slowly to the eruption of coverage in the media, but deserves credit for now being publicly supportive of the integrity of its scientists while also holding an independent investigation of its researchers’ compliance with Britain’s freedom of information requirements (see http://go.nature.com/zRBXRP).
In the end, what the UEA e-mails really show is that scientists are human beings — and that unrelenting opposition to their work can goad them to the limits of tolerance, and tempt them to act in ways that undermine scientific values. Yet it is precisely in such circumstances that researchers should strive to act and communicate professionally, and make their data and methods available to others, lest they provide their worst critics with ammunition. After all, the pressures the UEA e-mailers experienced may be nothing compared with what will emerge as the United States debates a climate bill next year, and denialists use every means at their disposal to undermine trust in scientists and science.
“Anybody with a PC and …” That explains the MSM environmental reporters, they all use Macs!
I assume the unsigned editorial was written by an editor of Nature magazine, i.e. someone who represents the opinions of their management. If that’s true then we have an admission from one of the most “respected” scientific journals that they have no problem with scientists who are guilty of at least the following.
(1) Publishing research, which you know will be relied on to justify making the most expensive policy change ever in the history of humankind, then actively withholding the raw data from scientists who were, in the past, instrumental in showing that similar work was flawed.
(2) Using tricks, or any method, to hide data that is contrary to what you want to prove.
I’ve seen the excuses for this on realclimate.com but they fail. The argument amounts to, “the tree-ring data after 1961 doesn’t show warming, so there must be something wrong with it, so we’re justified in hiding it.” The logical thing to do would be to question the entire data-set but instead they employ the “trick” of using the part they like, and hiding the part they don’t like. Then they have the audacity to pretend “everyone knew” that the post 1961 tree-ring data was “suspect” so they couldn’t have been hiding it.
(3) Working to manipulate the peer review process, so papers that you like get published and contrary papers don’t, so you can later claim that the unpublished scientists are obviously wrong because they’re not published, and that there is a consensus in the published literature that favors your theory.
The truth is that the conduct shown in the emails is outrageous and totally unacceptable. The fact that so many scientists are willing to explain it away scares the crap out of me and it ought to scare the crap out of any thinking person.
If the conduct exposed by the emails had related to corporate financial data, a criminal investigation would ensue, and if the conduct was found to be true, people would go to jail. Enron executive used tricks to hide the decline and tried to rig the peer-review process (financial auditors) and they got put in jail for a very long time. But Enron was child’s play compared to this stuff. These emails relate to something far, far more important (and expensive) than the value of one corporation’s stock.
“It is Nature’s policy to investigate such matters if there are substantive reasons for concern, but nothing we have seen so far in the e-mails qualifies.”
Uh – redefining the peer review, threatening editors and journals, stacking peer review panels, deleting raw data, obstructing FOI requests?
SHAME ON YOU NATURE. You have demonstrated you are no long about science, but about politics, protecting special interests, and promoting an agenda. SHAME!
Not long ago I was thinking of subscribing to Nature.
Not anymore. . . .
I was even tempted to cancel my subscription to Scientific American, after I saw some of the politically-correct AGW stuff they posted on their website; and the SciAm verbiage was not nearly as bad as the above outright apologia for Jones, Mann, et. al. The above Nature piece reads like it could have come from the Huffington Post.
Nature (the journal) drank the AGW Kool-Aid long ago and it would involve too much loss of face for them to admit now their longstanding lack of healthy skepticism and objectivity on this topic. They have a longstanding bias (in a political sense) against things American, much like the BBC, and readily adopted the AGW zeitgeist because, after all, America was by far the worst “offender” and the largest target. This is completely unsurprising thought it is disappointing.
The Hacker/Whistleblower has a great vote of thanks from me as do Anthony, the moderators and others not known. The BBC reported this morning (UK) that the head of the IPCC has ordered an investigation in to the allegations.
The edifice is crumbling fiether.
Seems they have exactly the same bias as is overwhelmingly demonstrated by Jones et al.
It isn’t in the emails.
“First, let’s get this out of the way: Emails prove nothing. Sure, you can look like an unethical asshole who may have committed a felony using government funded money; but all email is, is talk, and talk is cheap.
“Now, here is some actual proof that the CRU was deliberately tampering with their data. Unfortunately, for readability’s sake, this code was written in Interactive Data Language (IDL) and is a pain to go through.
“NOTE: This is an actual snippet of code from the CRU contained in the source file: briffa_Sep98_d.pro”
http://cubeantics.com/2009/12/the-proof-behind-the-cru-climategate-debacle-because-computers-do-lie-when-humans-tell-them-to/
Now, this is what needs doing… It’s all about the code. Put the efforts there.
It’s just a sad day for Science and the reputation of Scientists. The problem is that ANY normal person with common sense can read the materials for themselves and see that wrong were committed. Sure enough we’re familiar with politicians and the like providing a cleverly worded piece of spin to throw out and then its just supposed to be accepted. Most people don’t accept such poor excuses as a winning of an argument; but then most people also recognize that you just can’t overcome that kind of complete illogic and they don’t bother. We’re now on par with Lawyers, Financial Analysts, Politicians, and the Mainstream Media when it comes to public trust. I wonder if the folks at Nature would be happy with their physicians treating them with therapy based on research that required data manipulation to prove it worked?
Dont have a subscription to nature, dont want a subscription to nature wouldn’t even buy a subscription as a gift much less refer someone to them as an example of objectivity. Their short term mentality of propping up the global warming ideology will result in the long term decline and end of their publication.
“Never let the truth get in the way of a good story!”
Completely off topic, but this I think would sail right over everyone’s heads at most blogs: http://tackyraccoons.com/2009/12/01/climategate-summarized/
Nature’s behaviour has been disgraceful for a considerable time. It has abdicated its responsibility to serve science in order to serve politics.
In doing so it has brought “peer review” into disrepute.
I wonder how many subscriptions will be cancelled for the various magazines or whether folks will want to keep them for the legitimate reports. So far this has been my choice with Scientific American but I did not renew National Geographic, and even that is a bit different than asking for your money back. For the past couple of years some of them have been half c—p but you don’t have to step in it (or read it either).
I also wonder how many flights have been cancelled to Copenhagen.
How many local speeches and events have gone bye-bye. And so on. We’ll never learn some of this but the major events and players seem to be being kept track of.
I tend to have a high threshold for what constitutes “conspiracy”, but what else do you call it when you have them agreeing to delete emails, and relaying instructions to others to do same? It certainly meets the legal definition. If they were talking about, say, suppressing evidence that second-hand smoke kills, prosecutors would have no difficulty filing RICO charges.
What’s this guy’s background anyway? Journalism? Sure doesn’t sound like a law school grad (let alone scientist).
After enduring a few years of obvious and increasing bias in the climate change arena, I finally canceled my subscription to Nature last year. The proverbial straw that dropped the dromedary came when I tried to search the Nature on-line archive for two particular articles I had noted, but neglected to copy. One (published in 2000) concluded that the greatest source of anthropogenic carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was from Third World home fires with an important contribution from the Indonesian peat fires. The other, published in 2005 also looked at sources of anthropogenic carbon in the atmosphere and concluded again that the leading source was home fires with a distinct concentration from rural China. Neither article can be found in the Nature on-line archive.
The wagons are circled and all guns are pointed outward. All who dare to question their received and perceived wisdom will be fair game to them.
The emails give us the same message. The whitehouse climate czars speak the same.
They are in the end game and NOTHING will distract them from the victory that almost within their grasp.
I canceled my subscription to Nature years ago not long after John Maddox stepped down as editor. There was a man of rigorous integrity. The new guy started a policy which I can only describe as ‘creating monetary opportunities for scientists’ by pushing for DNA testing for insurance screening.
OT, but the BBC, commonly known as the Bolshevik Broadcasting Corporation or the propaganda arm of the labour party, is fighting a rear guard action against ClimateGate. There are three articles at the top of the agenda on their website today. They obviously can’t ignore it anymore because it’s now’ official’ but they are still trying to discredit it:
UN body probes climate e-mail row:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8394483.stm
Climate e-mail hack ‘will impact on Copenhagen summit’:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8392611.stm
Now I know what to do if I ever have some data and emails I want to keep secret (but shouldn’t). If anyone demands to see it, I’ll release it in small increments and in a way that’s as time-consuming as possible for me. Then I can claim I’m being harrassed by the people who are requesting it.
latest from the BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8394483.stm
“stolen e-mails have revealed no scientific conspiracy,” However one-sided, biased editorials such as this one do.
I saw this earlier today. It shows that Nature is part of the problem. Peer review is part of the problem too.
From Wikipedia on
Post-Normal Science (not that this is a always a good source of info):
"…advocates of post-normal science suggest that there must be an
"extended peer community" consisting of all those affected by an issue who are prepared to enter into dialogue on it. They bring their "extended facts", that will include local knowledge and materials not originally intended for publication such as leaked official information. There is a political case for this extension of the franchise of science; but Funtowicz and Ravetz also argue that this extension is necessary for assuring the quality of the process and of the product."
(empasis mine)
Kind of an interesting statement given the the current situation.
The science journal Nature reveals a pernicious “elitism” that is pervasive in science, that of being in the “in” group. One such “in” group is having the “proper scientific qualifications”. Another example is from the Climategate alleged scientists who’s “in” group meant anyone who “agreed with their hypothesis”. The science journal Nature seems to have adopted both “in” group requirements. In groups form “cliques” or “cults” when the rules of membership get too constrained.
Read the full comment here: http://pathstoknowledge.net/2009/12/03/climategate-alleged-scientists-and-the-alleged-science-journal-nature/
The Nature stuff is amazing, or perhaps more precisely appalling. At the risk of dropping too much stuff on the comments, I reprint what I dropped on the comments at The Nation in response to a bizarre (to me) article entitled ‘Climate Fog’ that talks about talking about the climate, but then jumps to polling data as if it were evidence for the physical climate.
My purpose for the lengthy re-post (riposte?) below is to see if there can be a WUWT et al talking points put out to help journalists get a better feel for the whole story and why the released information has such impact. My effort is probably riddled with errors but this is a good place to get them fixed. With the indulgence of the moderators…
Let’s go over the score…
Postulated Driver Mechanisms for ANTHROPOGENIC Warming
1. Mid tropospheric/mid tropic warming bands – non-existent, ‘Iris Effect’ shown to selectively dissipate proposed anomalous heat islands – Empirical data available.
2. Long Wave IR reflectance – no evidence for increased or enhanced effects due to postulated increased atmospheric water vapor from ‘warming’ – no supporting evidence during nearly 9% increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration.
3. Enhanced Feedback due to ‘something’ correlated to and therefore causally linked to incresing concentration of atmospheric CO2- no empirical evidence found.
Net score for ANTHROPOGENIC warming mechanisms… zero evidence.
Ten year track record of UN cited GCM models
1. Failed to predict current south pacific basin cooling
2. Failed to predict flatlining of atmospheric temperatures
3. Failed to predict record Antarctic ice cover
4. Failed to predict recovery of annual and multi-year Arctic ice and extent of Arctic ice boundaries
Net Score… zero
Reliability of GISS data set (which Hadley’s CRU2/3 sets mirror within tenths of a degree
1. Forced to correct 1998 as warmest year in 20th century, moved to 4th warmest under intense scrutiny.
2. 1998 restored as warmest.. with no publicly available rationale or methodological review
3. Complete failure to acknowledge the average UHI effect (based on original NOAA scoring from 1950’s placement work) of ~4 deg C based on site evaluations publicly available on surfacestations.org
4. Closely aligns with now highly suspect Yamal data set uncovered by MacIntyre and several tortured to the point of disavowal by the original study authors statistical interpretations (e.g. Finnish sediment work )
5. Failure to publish methods and database for cross checking and evaluation even after FoI requests and above cited divergences from experimental and public data
Net Score… negative points for wide diversions from observed data
Tell me again where the certainty referred to by this author comes from? IT cannot proceed from science, it therefore appears to spring from an agenda, bias or simple personal need on the part of the author, editors and publishers of this publication mechanism (The Nation).
If you want to be taken seriously, respond… might I say in advance, without ad hominem attacks on my non-climate scientist status… to those talking points, developed all on my own through research, alas without a single cent of funding from an oil company.
As a citizen I have a right and a duty to demand clear, concise answers from the government on these points. As a journalist, I expect you to have the same questions to raise, or to be able to point me to already published answers.
Show me the answers, show me your inquiries to date to get the answers or cease pretending to be a journalist.
Pick one and let us all know.
Not exactly on topic but to any canadians out there I hope you watched the news tonight because they finally reported on climategate.
CTV had a report which included a brief apperance of Steve McIntyre, and CBC’s Rex Murphy also commented on it at the end of the national.
No wonder Al is running scared because there was brief mention of calls to investigate the very science of climate change.