CRU to have old papers peer reviewed again
When you’ve worked in radio and television news for 30 years as I have, you get an eye for spotting rubbish. My rubbish detector went full tilt when I read this press release (see below) from UEA announcing they were going to have an “independent external reappraisal” of their peer reviewed publications.
I suppose that they think this move will be a “double plus good” public relations win for their work and for the organization. Perhaps it will be seen that way by a select few. But, review by the Royal Society, which has in the past done little if any significant questioning of its own about climate research, and in fact has a web page full of statements that are in line with the findings of many CRU papers, suggests that the Royal Society cannot be objective in this matter. It suggests that the investigation’s outcome is predetermined and only an exercise for the benefit of bolstering the appearance of high scientific standards via name dropping. It suggests a whitewash. I hope I’m wrong.
UEA/CRU would have gained much more public trust and avoided criticsms like this by choosing a truly independent review organization that has not made any public statements about their position on climate change.
Here’s what the Royal Society Climate Change web page has on it:
Debunking climate change myths
Scientists give their personal opinions on climate change
For example, the Royal Society has this on their web page under the heading: Misleading Arguments.
Misleading argument 4: ’Temperature observations don’t support the theory’
The central issue about CRU which led to the Climategate affair, which has led to this supposedly independent investigation, is that CRU wouldn’t share the temperature data and took illegal steps to suppress FOI requests from those who wanted to replicate the work to determine whether or not “Temperature observations don’t support the theory”. In fact if you follow that link at the Royal Society, they don’t question surface measurements at all, but discuss instead why satellite measurements don’t agree with surface measurements. The message is that the Royal Society does not question the surface record.
With Royal Society having statements like that on their web page which already don’t question the central issue from which the investigation arose, I suspect the outcome statement will be something like this:
“While it is clear that requests for data sharing and FOI requests were handled improperly, our independent review team found that the research conducted by CRU has been done properly, within correct standards consistent with the scientific practices recognized by the Royal Society, and the conclusions are robust”.
Meanwhile, we still don’t have what has been asked for in the first place: full data, procedures, and code. You won’t find a release like that on the UEA press page.
From the University of East Anglia press office:
New scientific assessment of climatic research publications announced
Thu, 11 Feb 2010
An independent external reappraisal of the science in the Climatic Research Unit’s (CRU) key publications has been announced by the University of East Anglia.
The Royal Society will assist the University in identifying assessors with the requisite expertise, standing and independence.
“Published papers from CRU have gone through the rigorous and intensive peer review process which is the keystone for maintaining the integrity of scientific research,” said Professor Trevor Davies, the University’s Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research, Enterprise and Engagement. “That process and the findings of our researchers have been the subject of significant debate in recent months. Colleagues in CRU have strenuously defended their conduct and the published work and we believe it is in the interests of all concerned that there should be an additional assessment considering the science itself.”
The independent reassessment will complement Sir Muir Russell’s Review of the key allegations about the handling of data arising from the publication of a series of e-mails hacked from CRU. Sir Muir’s Review is expected to announce its finding in Spring 2010.
The reassessment of CRU’s key publications will be completed at the earliest date the assessors can manage. The findings will be made public
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I’m sorry to shout but…
HAS ANYBODY RESUBMITTED HOLLAND’S FOI REQUEST? BECAUSE IT SHOULD GET A RESPONSE NOW – THEN WE CAN SEE THE DATA!
Sort of like Enron auditing itself.
Who knows? They may actually advocate the rejection of conjuring temperature proxy information from tree rings in favor of a more tried and true method. Such as reading chicken entrails, a popular method in use since at least Roman times. . .
Bernie Madoff audited his own books also. No need to waste time and money on CPA’s.
Just release the data … we’ll let you know what it says and it won’t cost you a penny.
Is it just me or do words like,
rigorous
intensive
keystone
significant
strenuously
just sound like someone is, um, desperately trying to convince us of something?
How about just letting evidence speak for itself.
The re-evaluation of publications could be huge if done well, it really won’t take much change to move the models back to more importance of solar input and a saner view of the worst case scenarios (Tuvulu is safe, whew!). The fact that these guys and the Sir David King’s of the world are backing off their insane statements is a great thing.
Ah, lets always remember the true crazies, maybe they will be history soon:
“Sir David King, head of the UK government’s Office of Science and Technology, called global warming a greater threat than world terrorism and said an international accord must be reached within two years to mitigate the warming and minimize environmental catastrophe.”
No wonder there is going to be no real investigation. These are the guys that started the whole thing:
Global Warming: How It All Began by Richard Courtney
http://www.john-daly.com/history.htm
I have a question. I have seen other skeptics replicating measurements e.g http://kenskingdom.wordpress.com/2010/02/05/giss-manipulates-climate-data-in-mackay/
I wanted to know how it is that it is claimed that the data for the surface station data is not released (with how the adjustments are made to temperatures) and then also the modellers code itself with how it handles all the data to plot a temperature ‘climate’ history whilst at the same time claims are made showing the way they came to their results. Then they are disproved by some other statistical analysis..
I believe this is how McIntyre was able to show the hockey stick was a little steeper than it should have been in the 98 model. I would just like to know if anyone can clarify what is yet to be released because I read from realclimate that all the data and source code is completely released from Gavin Schmidt (from his own modelling which correlates with the IPCC).
Anyone able to clarify for me?
Oh yeah, this is the same Royal Society that published an alarmist 10 misleading arguments against the IPCC report. Right I remember that one. That was full of junk, too.
This is what happens when you put a bunch of academics in a room and create an echo chamber. Reality beats them on the head and they believe their own echo chamber rather than reality. I don’t expect anything to have changed in the Royal Society since their last series of out-of-touch proclamations.
Since the British started this whole thing with Maggie Thatcher trying to show she had chops, it is no wonder they aren’t going to want to investigate themselves.
The origins of the global warming scare
The hypothesis of man-made global warming has existed since the 1880s. It was an obscure scientific hypothesis that burning fossil fuels would increase CO2 in the air to enhance the greenhouse effect and thus cause global warming. Before the 1980s this hypothesis was usually regarded as a curiosity because the nineteenth century calculations indicated that mean global temperature should have risen more than 1°C by 1940, and it had not. Then, in 1979, Mrs Margaret Thatcher (now Lady Thatcher) became Prime Minister of the UK, and she elevated the hypothesis to the status of a major international policy issue.
Some peer review! That’s like me saying my husband and I will be the impartial consensus to see who to the chocolate chip cookie from the cookie jar – but I know this: Our consensus says Johnny took the cookie:
Misleading Arguments:
1) Johnny did not take the cookie: the consensus knows he did
2) Johnny says he doesn’t like chocolate chip: the consensus says he does
3) Johnny is too short to reach the cookie jar: the consensus knows he probably used a stool, it doesn’t matter if we saw this or not
4) Johnny says he wasn’t even in our house when the cookie went missing: the consensus just doesn’t like Johnny so it really doesn’t matter
But we’ll be very impartial.
Royal Society? Newton, where are you now?
I know it has to be right to ask to see the data, but based on what we know of how the historic surface temperature record has been massaged, perhaps we should be asking to see both the raw data as well as the adjusted set.
Anything with the word Royal in it is no good… with the exception, of course, of Crown Royal scotch, a fine Canadian scotch.
A year or two ago I made a comment on the peer review process and how it often did not necessarily mean anything about the quality of the research. I was told to tune it down and be careful about such remarks… well… was I wrong or what?
“CRU, you are lying.”
“No we’re not. See, I’ll double check. …….Nope. We’re not lying.”
It is clear they (Institutions and Governments) are full steam ahead with the climate doctrine at any price.
Whitewash and further measures based on a failed theory are in the pipeline.
I agree this is very bad PR.
Tom Sawyers Fence is brilliant.
What is there more to say?
First line fromThe Royal Society web site: “International scientific consensus agrees that increasing levels of man-made greenhouse gases are leading to global climate change.”
A call to authority instead of a call to reason… in a debate this is known as a loss. Quality science is a scarce resource.
This is how respectable science societies and science journals will end up following the daily newspaper into slow oblivion. Their currency is credibility, and if they lose that they will have nothing left of value.
—
@Wind Rider – The practice of “conjuring temperature proxy information from tree rings” is not in itself an invalid method of estimating pre-instrumental mean temperatures prevailing in a region, but prejudicial selection of data points thus obtained (“cherry picking”) sure a hell is.
As was “Mike’s Nature trick,” which was an apples-to-avocados blending of instrumental and proxy temperature readings so as to conceal a down-tick in the proxy data.
That was the kind of feeble fudge one expects from a high school student, not authors who can be addressed as “Doctor.”
What the CRU correspondents have done with regard to their tree growth ring proxies has been the same thing they’d done to the surface stations databases’ instrumental readings, which is suppressio veri, suggestio falsi – the suppression of data which would tend to invalidate their hypotheses in order to ensure that their contentions would appear to be well-supported.
In the pharmaceuticals industry, we see this kind of “trick” tried by manufacturers striving to fudge efficacy and/or safety outcomes in their clinical trials, and we see it all the time. While peer review in The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine has not been as concertedly co-opted as the CRU correspondents had managed in the climatological literature, it has been side-stepped by mendacious authors with a commercial axe to grind, I assure you.
Hell, gaming the marketing approval processes of the FDA and the EMEA is something of a small industry in and of itself. If anyone is prepared to spot the sort of amateurish fraudulence of Prof. Jones, Dr. Mann, Dr. Hansen et alia, it’s those of us who have experience on the clinical side in drug development. We literally live with it every day.
Proxy temperature estimates – honestly done – can be useful and effective, within limits of error. What you must remember is that Dr. Mann and Dr. Briffa did not do their work honestly.
—
“UEA/CRU would have gained much more public trust and avoided criticsms [sic] like this by choosing a truly independent review organization that has not made any public statements about their position on climate change.”
Not if you wish to perpetuate a whitewash.
Consider how damaging it would be if an independent panel (including several skeptics) investigated this affair thoroughly and came back with a dozen or so problems, including denying FOI requests, taking junket trips on money they should have used for storing and securing their data, working very hard to suppress dissent, getting people fired for speaking up–the list goes on and on.
Their “public trust” would be gone and their good will nonexistent. They’d all be flippin’ burgers ’cause they would never be employed in science again.
Won’t make a scrap of difference to how people feel about the CRU cabal. The problem is that the raw data has been lost or destroyed, so nothing can be proved one way or the other.
Luckily our chaotic climate system is having the last word on this scam, let it snow, let it snow, let it snow :-))
Stefan (09:07:51) :
“Is it just me or do words like,
rigorous
intensive
keystone
significant
strenuously…..”
Well, at least they didn’t use “robust”.
So then why would you need “An independent external reappraisal of the science in the Climatic Research Unit’s (CRU) key publications has been announced by the University of East Anglia?” – If – “Published papers from CRU have gone through the rigorous and intensive peer review process which is the keystone for maintaining the integrity of scientific research.”??? Unless you needed a clean-up crew “The Royal Society will assist the University in identifying assessors with the requisite expertise, standing and independence.” And they have the gall to use words like “integrity, standing, independence”. A disgraceful lot really.
John Luft (09:01:56) :
Sort of like Enron auditing itself
Yes. Almost correct. Enron wind is now GE wind.
James Hansen and others worked with Enron to generate trading and rules for 4 ghg products.
Enron was audited by Anderson CPA’s. Anderson Consulting had around 25 million dollar contract to run IT for Enron. So it was Anderson CPA’s auditing Anderson Consulting. (now named Accenture)
It is a legal ethics failure for a CPA to both prepare financials and to audit them.