On being a scientist – a manual

Wonderful post,
But the people we deal with day to day don’t care about scientific principles.
Would Gavin care about the substance of the publication subject to this post? I suspect not. He’s not a scientist. Nor is Gore, he’s a propagandist that uses phrases from scientists. So who do we reach with this report? Hopefully it is scientists that care about their reputations more than their wallets.

The problem with those mediocre climate accountants is, that they attained their climate superstar positions not through the scientific process, but just the opposite,
firstly, because they controlled the data and allowed nobody except their allies to look at it and their “science”, let alone find errors in it,
secondly, if anybody managed to slip through this barricade, there was/is a second line of discrimination in place through the control of the peer review process and boards of journals,
and finally they succeded unchallenged, because their message pleased powerful leftist interests and big money with surprisingly similar agendas.

Could be a good present for members of the team, or maybe they could write a review of the book and sign it for students – a book with Michael Mann’s signature might be a curiosity on ebay one day – could we give it as a book prize for the best endorsement quote NOT given by a team member, would have to be mythical of course, as it is not to “their” science standard operating procedures.

Unless I’m misreading something, the date of the press release is March 2009, but Climategate broke in November 2009, as I recall. We use this book as one of the texts for one of the required courses in our graduate environmental science program at the Univeristy of Guam: EV508 Scientific Competence & Integrity. Climategate is one of our case studies now.
REPLY: Sorry, terrible writing on my part, I just banged out the sentence way too fast. I’ve rewritten that sentence to make it clear that I meant it can be used as a response to Climategate issues, not that it was a response. – Anthony

What is happening with the sun is truly amazing probably of historic proportions easily the most significant attributable factor for climate from past records

“ON BEING A SCIENTIST
A GUIDE TO RESPONSIBLE CONDUCT IN RESEARCH”
Where does that leave Mann, Hansen, Jones et al? and the Warmistas that quote their results ad nauseam?

Admirable though it might be, I find it unbelievable that such a book needs to be written; what is going on in our schools and universities?
When I was at school experiments conducted during science lessons had to be written up. The general format expected was:
Introduction: – the background to why the experiment was being conducted
Aim: – What the experiment was intended to reveal
Method: – How the experiment was to be conducted to meet the aim; how equipment was to be configured and what measurements were to be taken.
Analysis: – What methods were to be used to analyse the data
Results: – All measurements were to be logged
Analysis Results: – All calculations and graphs were to be presented
Error: – All sources of error were to be identified along with their impact on the results
Conclusions: – Report the success (or not) of the experiment with respect only to the original Aim.
Recommendations: – Usually revolved around how future experiments of a similar nature could be conducted with reduced error.
This was the process in a bulk standard secondary school (admittedly 50 years ago); and now scientists need a “How to do Science” book. …………. Unbelievable.

So, basically those of us who learned what science we know a very long time ago are not imagining things. This is how science is done. The NAS itself agrees with our points. We aren’t wrong. Jones et al and Mann et al are doing it wrong.
Duh.
And Anthony, it says that those who have sided with you and Steve and Lord Monkton are not crazy, but correct in supporting demands that the data AND methods be fully made available and be fully archived.
What can I say but, “YEAY!”

Paul Coombes says:
February 6, 2011 at 2:54 am
Talking to a civil engineering lecturer of mine, he was quite surprised when I asked him if he had his program code reviewed when he submitted a paper. He clearly saw the code as nothing more than a tool and, because he wrote it, it did exactly what he wanted it to do….”
In Pharma everything we do is scrutinized by agencies. Everything as to be reviewed, audited, and source documents must be kept for a hundred years. It’s a giant pain to conduct science in this environment. If you run a calculation in Excel someone else has to check it by hand calculation ( unless the software has been validated which can take years). But when it comes to public health and safety the stakes are high.
Maybe climate research should be conducted under the watchful eye of the FDA? That would definitely wipe out the shenanigans of Mann et al.

Surely this publication contains exactly those strictures that, “Post-normal Science”, is designed to avoid?

This book would not go amiss in the library of the Royal Society, whose president seems to have forgotten the first principles of the scientific method and ethical conduct. If Sir Paul Nurse could steel himself away from having to work at his laboratory bench in order to read the book, he might get a few ideas on a possible theme for next year’s Christmas lecture.
A possible title:
Why not to call your scientific peers “Deniers”

“The scientific research enterprise, like other human activities, is built on a foundation of trust. Scientists trust that the results reported by others are valid. Society trusts that the results of research reflect an honest attempt by scientists to describe the world accurately and without bias. The level of trust that has characterized science and its relationship with society has contributed to a period of unparalleled scientific productivity. But this trust will endure only if the scientific community devotes exemplifying and transmitting the values associated with ethical scientific conduct.”
cemece.trakya.edu.tr/images/OnBeingAScientist.pdf
Oops.

I have searched in the past for any standards that cover scientific research in government funded research. (http://socratesparadox.com/?p=178) The only thing that I found at the time addressed misconduct. This covered fabrication, falsification and plagarism. Unfortunately, the “awardee institution” is permitted to investigate charges of misconduct, as in the case of the Penn State inquiry. This investigation could then be reviewed by the Inspector General. But here is the real zinger: “A finding of research misconduct requires that”—” There be a significant departure from accepted practices of the relevant research community…. ”
(From The Code of Federal Regulations, Title 45, Chapter 4, National Science Foundation, in section 698 ) There is more written about accounting of funds, which as a taxpayer I respect, and equal opportunity than there is about scientific standards.
I am going to get the book from Amazon. It looks interesting.

I was under the impression that peer reviewed papers are the academic equivalent to patents in industry. A patent must include a description of the invention in sufficient detail that one skilled in the art can reproduce the invention. An academic’s published papers should likewise include sufficient detail that one skilled in the science can reproduce the experiment. I’m an engineer not a scientist so I only know the rules about patents. Patent examiners – those public employees who review patent applications – ostensibly insure that all patent applications have sufficient detail for reproduction by those skilled in the art before the applicant is granted a patent. Peer reviewers I thought were supposed to do the same with scientific papers before they can be published.
The peer review process appears to be substantially less robust than the patent review process. Both have problems but I think the patent process has fewer probably because patent examiners are paid professional reviewers who do nothing else while peer review in academia is performed by reviewers who are not paid for the work and do it only on occasion rather than as a primary task in their line of work. The patent process I’m convinced has something of a good-old boy network going in it where the big corporations employing well known IP law firms enjoy something of a rubber-stamp treatment for their patent applications.
Is that about right?

Lawrie Ayres says:
February 6, 2011 at 2:05 am
“How come no one in the climate sciences has read it? Or if they have, ignored it’s advice?”
Mostly because they produce hypotheses which can only be tested over the course of many years or decades. If your hypothesis cannot possibly be falsified for decades it won’t damage your reputation or livelyhood until a time when it no longer matters. In other words there’s no personal accountability, no consequences for being wrong. You can cherry pick weather events and call those events that support your hypothesis “climate change” and discount those events that do not support your hypothesis as “weather”. Climate science is a racket for the practioners and a tool for politicians and ideologues to further their agendas.

Educational research suffers from the same lack of rigor and adherence to standards. There are so many examples I can’t even begin to list them without admitting to the fact that a long list would be just a drop in the bucket. Head Start would be one of them. That government funded project is a spin off from a research project commonly referred to as “The Perry Project”. The research (laughable) behind the notion of “whole language” instruction as the basis for teaching the mechanics of reading is another area so filled with nonsense it gets my blood boiling. And don’t even get me started on the research behind any and all behavior problems being symptomatic of disease. If this area of human behavior disease goes much further, those of you who are shy will have your own little title for your disease and a special education category in which to bring legal suit against the school system. Which will only lead to what is known as a continuum of symptoms leading us to declare that extroverts are entitled to protection under IDEA. To wit: If the three little pigs and the wolf who would eat them were in school today, they would all carry a handicapping label.

All I can add is that like most of the posters, this is what I was taught in my Physics/Chemistry/Biology classes in High School, and reinforced during my time at the ETH-Zurich. Part of the development of research skills there, was the recreation of key experiments in the history of Physics – Mossbauer Effect, Electronic Work Function, Josephson Effect, etc. Even after the experiments had been pioneered, getting results, even negative results, required a lot of diligence and the error discussion was critical to making the grade.
At the risk of being snipped, todays Climate Scientists wouldn’t have gotten any credit at all. These clowns – they are after all in the field of entertainment – would have been looking for a non-science degree from a less demanding university or college.

Peter Miller,
“I am currently exploring and developing a substantial mineral deposit in south central Spain. Absolutely everything I do must be verifiable and reproducable by independents. Also, the procedures I am required to follow to ensure there is no possibility of fraud are onerous. ”
The fundamental difference between what you are doing and what ‘climate science’ is doing, is that it matters to the people paying your salary that what you claim to be true actually is.
“Climate science” doesnt need to be true to work for its intended purpose. It just needs to retain the equivalent of the political concept of ‘plausible deniability’. This is why there has been a recent shift towards ‘looking at the uncertainty’ in the face of an inconvenient global temp trend. This newfound desire to ‘look at the uncertainty’ is accompanied by reference to ‘post normal science’ which serve to use ‘uncertainty’ to drive the policy to the same conclusion as the previous fake certainty.

Anyone get the irony of someone finding it necessary to publish the “3rd” edition of this book?

Anyone get the irony of this book being available openly for free? Even the very knowledge of how to be a scientist with standards is ignored by many in the climate science field. Sloppy is as sloppy does.
Now, it would be really great if we could collect together ALL the alleged climate science papers of “note” and request all the data and methods from the authors as this wonderful manual “ON BEING A SCIENTIST: A GUIDE TO RESPONSIBLE CONDUCT IN RESEARCH” and other books and guides on the Philosophy of Science and the Scientific Method require of published papers to be considered scientific.
Along with the list of papers that are “key” to climate science mark the status of their compliance with the scientific method standards, those that provided data, raw data, details of manipulations, methods, statistical equations, software, etc…, everything needed to reproduce the paper’s conclusions (or refute it). Oh, and a list of all papers that it references and a list of all papers that reference it. In addition a list of all the “claims” or “conclusions” and “assumptions” made in each paper would be fantastic so that as each “claim, conclusion, or assumption” is refuted it becomes clear which papers are refuted and nullified in part or in whole.
Then we grade the papers and see how well the climate scientists and their papers actually stack up against the standards of the scientific method and the standards of the philosophy of science.
This project is as important as the Surface Stations project, for it cuts to the very heart of the matter.
What say you?

Thanks to the link above submitted by Don Shaw, I was able to down load a PDF copy and read manual. Sorry to say, I was very disappointed. Below are passages that I found significant. The first two are good, but there is no rigorous enforcement. The rest is motherhood sanctioning what already exists. I was hoping for more.
“Given the expectation that data will be accessible, researchers who refuse to share the evidentiary basis behind their conclusions, or the materials needed to replicate published experiments, fail to maintain the standards of science.”
“Some forms of data undergo extensive analysis before being recorded; consequently, sharing those data can require sharing the software and sometimes the hardware used to analyze them.”
“Science is largely a self-regulating community. Though government regulates some aspects of research, the research community is the source of most of the standards and practices to which researchers are expected to adhere.”
“Scientists and their institutions should act to discourage questionable research practices (QRPs) through a broad range of formal and informal methods in the research environment.”
“The circumstances surrounding potential violations of scientific standards are so varied that it is impossible to lay out a checklist of what should be done. Suspicions are best raised in the form of questions rather than allegations. Expressing concern about a situation or asking for clarification generally works better than making charges.”
“Researchers have a professional obligation to perform research and present the results of that research as objectively and as accurately as possible. When they become advocates on an issue, they may be perceived by their colleagues and by members of the public as biased. But researchers also have the right to express their convictions and work for social change, and these activities need not undercut a rigorous commitment to objectivity in research.”

I’m surprised it doesn’t have a yellow and black cover, like the rest of the “Dummies Guide to ” series…
I was taught to write scientific reports in High School and University in exactly the same manner as Dusty by teachers who were also qualified scientists in their respective fields. When did the standards change?
Or is it more that theses “climate scientists” believe they are above such mundane trivialities?

I remember learing the basics of report writing at school and university, way back in the 1940’s and again in the 1970’s.
How has this been lost?

Pwl says:
QUOTE IN PART
Now, it would be really great if we could collect together ALL the alleged climate science papers of “note” and request all the data and methods from the authors …..
mark the status of their compliance with the scientific method standards, those that provided data, raw data, details of manipulations, methods, statistical equations, software, etc…, everything needed to reproduce the paper’s conclusions (or refute it). Oh, and a list of all papers that it references and a list of all papers that reference it. In addition a list of all the “claims” or “conclusions” and “assumptions” made in each paper would be fantastic so that as each “claim, conclusion, or assumption” is refuted it becomes clear which papers are refuted and nullified in part or in whole.
Then we grade the papers and see how well the climate scientists and their papers actually stack up against the standards of the scientific method and the standards of the philosophy of science.
This project is as important as the Surface Stations project, for it cuts to the very heart of the matter.
UNQUOTE
I agree completely with Prl.
This may be the way to get the attention of the media, and with that, the attention of the world’s politicans.
Since ClimateGate, all the major AGW claims have been disproved, but the politicans just continue unabashed. The voting public in many countries now see AGW as a failed concept, so governments are now pushing AGW restrictions through administrative fiat.
This will only be stopped if the true facts can be brought out in the light of day.
Prl’s proposal merits much thought and discussion.
It would require direction by a group of people of the highest intregrity and standing, including senior scientists, but also judges and others from various walks of life.
To get it started it requires a group of entheusiasts who can at the apropriate time step back when a committee of heavies is formed.
Anthony or moderator Charles, this deserves a post on its own.

Still, for all their obvious dishonesty and lackadaisical approach to science, they must be doing something right. Why? Well, because modern temperature records derived from completely different sources by completely different people are in reasonable agreement. Unless perhaps Roy Spencer is an AGW mole!

@JJ
I agree that ‘plausible beliveability’ couched in enough sciencey phrases with just a dark touch of denialist epithets is the main communication from the AGW groupings. It is for the most part preaching to the choir. The choir will no doubt remain – Jimmy Swaggert did well enough after his fall – but the pews are emptying.
I for one would be content to stop referring to the non-science and concentrate on supporting the real work that needs to be done. Stop raging against the darkness because in the end, it is still dark.
A good venture might be an online WUWT magazine of reviewed articles, to be followed by a print version. The readership is already here. It needs a deal with someone in the publishing business.

Jeremy said @ February 6, 2011 at 5:29 pm
” Pamela Gray says:
February 6, 2011 at 6:49 am
If this area of human behavior disease goes much further, those of you who are shy will have your own little title for your disease and a special education category in which to bring legal suit against the school system.
Pam, they already have this. They called it Asberger syndrome.”
Aspies ain’t necessarily shy. Here’s my list of what makes The Pompous Git an Aspie:
1. He spends more time involved with objects and physical systems than with people;
2. He communicates less than others do;
3. He tends to follow his own desires and beliefs rather than paying attention to, or being easily influenced by, others’ desires and beliefs;
4. He shows relatively little interest in what the social group is doing, or being a part of it;
5. He has strong, persistent interests;
6. He is very accurate at perceiving the details of information;
7. He notices and recalls things other people do not;
8. His view of what is relevant and important in a situation often fails to coincide with others;
9. He is fascinated by patterns and systems in the world — visual, numeric, alphanumeric, etc;
10. He collects things: books and records (music) mainly, but also certain types of information;
11. He has a strong preference for experiences that are controllable rather than unpredictable;
12. He has an IQ that places him in the top 2% of the population;
13. He’s happier in his own company than with crowds;
14. He is naive;
15. He has a strong sense of justice;
16. He takes what people say literally; that is, he’s relatively impervious to irony, double-meaning, subtext etc.
Based on Simon Baron-Cohen’s work.

A less-talked about but serious flaw in the “science paradigm” as practiced by the journal-chasers and status-seekers is the “positive results bias”.
A refutation or dis-confirmation actually conveys more information, and is more valuable, than an (apparent) positive result. Yet it’s very difficult to get such study results published, not to mention get funding for a replication study that will likely restore H0 instead of H1, H2, &/or H3!
“If I was Science Uber-Czar” I would require that every journal publish an equal number of pages and articles over the course of a year with “failure to confirm” previous claims to the positive ones. It would sweep away a lot of nonsense, and put status and funding in the hands of much better practitioners of the art of truthful data-seeking than is now the case.
And Climate Science and the Hokey Team would go out in a brief but violent blaze of glory.