More on Koutsoyiannis and the homogenization of temperature data – plus some comments on blog review

Crowd-sourcing – whether that be in data collection such as the SurfaceStations project, data analysis such as in the many cool Zooniverse (https://www.zooniverse.org/) projects, or blog critique of research – is proving to be immensely valuable in the advancement of scientific understanding because it’s democratic. That is, it opens up participation to the talents of more than the few individuals who by chance happen to be at the right place. IOW, “On the internet nobody knows you’re a dog.” Furthermore it succeeds because of merit rather than cronyism and the rewards for most participants are intellectual rather than monetary, which dampens the tendency toward corruption.

What happened to simply sending an email to signal the omission?

The true riesig Fade (extra points for identifying the reference!) is that so many are wrong on the Internet!

Matt Briggs has a series on data homogenization starting here:
http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=1459

Kelly, the IPPC ignores blog posts on WUWT as precisely becausse they are better reviewed and more worthy of inclusion in their reports than the hackery they need to support their agenda.

Good move to correct the record on sources. Due credit when known is extremely valuable and everyone should make an effort to trace ideas back to their source.
I think we are seeing a turning point in the scientific review process. The old formal review process has demonstrated it is (and has been) broken for some time. In theory it is a good concept, but in implementation, human frailties cause it to creep toward a corrupt process unless a strong hand is at the editorial wheel that enforces good practice and no back room manipulation on the review process.
As crowd source blog review becomes more mainstream, I see us moving toward a combined process, where an initial presentation of the idea is posted, and quickly screened for errors by literally hundreds or thousands of reviewers. Each poking at their area of interest or expertise. Sometimes bringing to bear unique experience or exposure to obscure knowledge that often leads the original poster to sources and problems that would have gone unnoticed in a formal review by a small group of specialists. Then after that quick reasonableness check the formal paper is refined and presented for formal review by a broad range of specialties, not just the primary specialty of the author.
We see it often here where climate is examined from the point of view of process control engineers, electrical engineers (feedback, capacitive and inductive circuits), physics, chemistry and geology specialists just to name a few specialties that come to mind from recent discussions. In doing so they bring fresh ways of looking at the problem and sometimes expose what appears to be a poorly understood process that in another specialty (such as process control — ie feed backs ) is a very well studied and understood field.
Suddenly the original poster is opened up to areas of knowledge that he/she simply did not know existed. The depth of human knowledge today is so vast that no one person can possibly know even a small fraction of it.
This is evidenced by “climate scientists” who dabble in computer programing and statistics and think themselves competent in those areas when they are in fact blundering amateurs, making sophomoric level mistakes.
Unfortunately the formal review process by experts in their narrowly defined field only reinforces those faulty perceptions of confidence because the reviewers often do not themselves have journeymen level understanding of statistics or computer coding good practices, and proper code validation and testing methods.
In time I think we will see that the “instant review” of the blogs and crowd sourcing backed up by formal review of multiple specialists such as statistics, higher mathematics, physics etc. will help to break down the current faults of the peer (pal) review system as it exists today.
Please someone publish a paper on the frailties of computer models, and the inherent risk of undocumented bugs in all computer code, even well tested code. Model output is not data it is a method to make quick reasonableness checks on a theory or evaluate its sensitivity to initial conditions “if the model is correct”. For example aerodynamic analysis models do a good job of allowing aerodynamic designs to be developed on the computer but they are not data, that is only gathered in wind tunnel testing and flight testing to prove the model expectations were close to reality.
Larry

~Gary says:
July 20, 2012 at 8:30 am
“IPPC should include WUWT blog posts in their reports”
Thanks for the giggle! The difference is that drafts of submitted papers get revised and improved as a function of peer review. Here, things just get repeated over and over. Not quite the same thing.
—–
Example(s), please? Did you forget the Geurgis (sp) paper, among likely many others?

Long term persistence;
Take the hint and visit Crok.
Koutso-Venema.
=========

Larry Ledwick (hotrod) says:”
I think we are seeing a turning point in the scientific review process. The old formal review process has demonstrated it is (and has been) broken for some time. In theory it is a good concept, but in implementation, human frailties cause it to creep toward a corrupt process unless a strong hand is at the editorial wheel that enforces good practice and no back room manipulation on the review process.
As crowd source blog review becomes more mainstream, I see us moving toward a combined process, where an initial presentation of the idea is posted, and quickly screened for errors by literally hundreds or thousands of reviewers. ”
The EGU journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics has an open review. Open in the sense that the comments of the reviewers are posted on the web and in the sense that everyone is invited to comment. In practice the number of reviewers is a little less than “literally hundreds or thousands of reviewers”, which is why the journal also always requests two official reviews. It would be great if one could get some sort of continual review process going.
Anthony, credit were credit is due: the cartoon is funny!

Nothing like a legion of citizen scientists….to keep the ‘pros’ on their toes….
thanks for the Romper Room of Truth….
where we work to correct reality, instantaneously….

@Larry
Is this now a difference ‘twixt open source and propriority science?

“Koutsoyiannis makes an interesting point about blogs -vs- traditional peer review. Traditional peer review is a slow and arduous process, taking months, sometimes years, and in my opinion is a holdover from a much slower time pre-Internet and email.”
True.
Inefficiency is orders of magnitude beyond what we can afford to tolerate.
–
“Blog review of papers, presentations, and topics is like an insta-launch, where citizens and scientists alike spar in sometimes a gladiatorial style over broad issues as well as minutiae. Hundreds and often thousands of eyes and minds are brought to bear, often picking the carcass clean of errors until nothing is left.
For all its warts, science blogging has a purpose and a place in today’s world.”
It’s not working. There’s a fatal shortage of sensible, capable parties participating.
One possibility is that most sensible parties steer clear of volunteering blog comments (although they may be reading). At present the “blog review” system is operating like a corrupted justice system — corrupted by coupled pools of ignorance &/or deception.
One possible way around this is more competition — for example (no offense intended – only advancement of collective human lucid awareness intended) WUWT needs at least a handful of serious competitors with at least equal readership. I would suggest that some of these widely-read competing blogs should have different core foci & rules.
I will now suggest what I would personally find most efficient (efficiency is a high personal value due to severe constraints on time & resources):
1. Encourage conciseness (Pareto Principle).
2. Core Purpose:
Focus exclusively on exploring natural variability (using observations).
3. Bad Apples:
Strictly prohibit protracted, presumptively-“authoritative” swipe-quote harassment (Peter Principle, Law of Authoritative Ignorance &/or Deception). Judith Curry has the idea with one of her blog rules, which suggests saying what YOU have to say (as opposed to aiming solely to protractedly harass others ad infinitum). Ignorant &/or deceptive “critics” can be allowed to concisely say what they have to say ONCE. After that they are unacceptably wasting everyone’s time if they continue with dark negativity & criticism rather than switching to offering positive, truly constructive, possibly even inspiring, observation-based alternatives. The guilty parties here are bankrupt of exploratory vision and should be cut off from further commentary after 3 back-&-forths (to keep it simple) if they’re incapable of independently exercising appropriate restraint. Just a few bad apples ruin the tone of the whole blog. I have 2 WUWT regulars in mind with this suggestion for new, competing blogs (but I refrain from naming them).
4. Ban mention of chaos & CO2.

Thanks for pointing out this blog post by Marcel Crok. However, his blog post was not the “source” of the posting on The Hockey Schtick. The “source” was a tipster who only provided this link:
http://itia.ntua.gr/en/docinfo/1212/
from which I wrote my own interpretation, extracted and transcribed slides and the abstract, and created my own post.
I don’t know where the tipster found this link and therefore don’t consider this an “error” or lack of courtesy, but nonetheless give Marcel credit for having found this link to a very interesting presentation and for the additional information provided by his 2 posts.
I am also not the source of the confusion about this paper being “peer-reviewed” as I never claimed that it was in my post. Having “presented papers” at over two dozen international scientific conferences myself, I am well aware that the purpose of meetings is to present and discuss new research findings often prior to even writing a paper and submitting it to formal peer review. Nevertheless, the scientific community still calls this “presenting a paper” even though the written version often hasn’t yet been prepared or submitted for formal peer-review.
I, of course, agree that credit for finding interesting links should be acknowledged when known.

This is an excellent thread, once again the best of WUWT at work. I agree with pretty much everything said so far. I too think blogs are really important for the future of science.
BUT
There is a big caveat. I have seen at least two instances here where I felt the peer-reviewing process failed signally. I remember two because they left a bad taste in my mouth which has still not completely gone, probably because the core issues have not yet been sufficiently addressed or sufficiently compensated elsewhere.
The first failure was the review of the Sky Dragons book. What caused the failure was the disproportionate focus on the contribution of one individual who is known here as holding a rather strange singularity of interest with the sun. Not only was this contribution removed; the problem was compounded by material that came to light about this individual. In the whole process, valuable material in the rest of the book was simply drowned. In the sense of book review, Amazon manages far better IMHO.
The second failure was the handling of Ned Nikolov and Karl Zeller. I know there were faults on all sides. But the upshot is almost certainly that WUWT lost a lot of competent readers at that point. Still, I always try to find the positive in everything, and the upshot for me was, in the end, good, no, more than that, astounding…
…I went back to the material to check, check and check again. I obsessed with the science of Nikolov and Zeller for a long time, finally got my head round their maths, found it really worked as they said, found their assessment was correct, that the IPCC S-B equations are wrong… so next I started a wiki for Climate Science where I might get their material in a form that not only read far more easily but also was open to updating and correction… but then ran into the problem of their apparent contravention of the Second Law of Thermodynamics… so I dived into that… read up the lives of Kelvin and Maxwell, travelled up to Scotland to come as close to their spirit and legacy as I could… then I dived into the utterly amazing work of Graeff who has verified experimentally what Loschmidt said 150 years ago, challenging Clerk Maxwell’s interpretation of the Second Law… and upholding Nikolov and Zeller… I travelled to Germany to meet Graeff because I wanted to get to the bottom of his experiments and claims… omg it all holds up, this is Nobel-quality material but the universities won’t take on replication because… because… because Nobody Challenges The Second Law of Thermocynamics (except perp.mob.nutcases)… well actually Prof Sheehan has been running conferences on 2LoT and he’s interested in Graeff… so now the wiki is on hold (asleep not dead) while I “gird up my loins” to do this replication myself (with anyone else interested) that the universities should be doing but are not. Well, not so far… heck who am I to be making these claims, retired, no science degree… but it’s needed and it promises to correct something so fundamental that Climate Science has been wrong-footed right from the start…
… ye gods. Anthony and Willis, what have you launched me into???
🙂

I fully agree, the traditional peer-review model is obsolete and should be augmented by open access blog review.
Many of the most important discoveries in science are made when there is cross-fertilisation of ideas from different disciplines. But that becomes harder as knowledge grows exponentially and subjects of study become subdivided, specialized and compartmentalized.
Climate scientists go to conferences to meet other climate scientists. People from related disciplines will attend, of course, but experts in unrelated subjects will not.
If scientists want make use of the Internet but still restrict review of their work to other scientists then surely they could do this on forums where the membership is restricted and everyone’s qualifications are known. However, I think they would be wrong to (only) do this.
Everybody has some expert knowledge in something. Sometimes an insignificant piece of information from one area of expertise can be highly significant in another. Science blogs are important not only because they provide a forum for scientists but because they enable anyone and everyone to contribute. There is no way of knowing where the next insight will come from and innocent questions are often the most insightful.
I’ll give two examples from my own experience. They are only to illustrate a point. I don’t think either is particularly significant or likely to lead to someone’s eureka moment but I have no way of knowing.
1. Some have suggested mitigating global warming by modifying the albedo of urban environments e.g. using white (or lighter coloured) roofing materials. Many mocked this idea but I think it has merit. It reduces urban heating and the building’s requirement for air conditioning and (in some situations) heating.
One little-known factor that effects the whole sustainability/cost-benefit analysis is that lighter coloured roofing materials also often last longer. Because of thermal stress, the manufacturers of polymer coatings for profiled metal roofing sheets typically give a 30 year guarantee for the lighter colours in their range but only 20 for the darker ones.
http://www.cagroup.ltd.uk/docs/Technical%20Notes/TN-46%20Rev%200%20Colorcoat%20HPS200%20or%20Colorcoat%20Plastisol.pdf
2. The urban heat island effect is well known. Some warmists choose to dismiss it. Agricultural land use also changes the albedo of the earth but not always by increasing it, as some scientists seem to suggest. I knew this long before I had heard the terms UHI or climate change as I used to hang glide. Any hang glider (pilot) will tell you that a ploughed field is a good place to catch a thermal. If you want to see a small heat island in action just look at where the birds are circling.
http://tinyurl.com/cxn245j
P.S. I’m a big xkcd fan too. If you haven’t seen this one, it’ll crack you up
http://xkcd.com/556/

David Ross says:
July 20, 2012 at 2:01 pm
I agree with all of what you say.
I also argue for increased albedo roofing. There are good reasons why in many hot sunny locations, houses are painted white.
I live in a hot sunny location (Perth) and pretty much all new roofs are of reflective metal that look white from above, and which keep the house cooler in summer.
Although the downside is that it makes houses colder in winter. It occurs to me that someone who invents a roofing material that changes from low to high albedo at around 25C or by the flick of a switch, will get very rich, and save more energy than all the world’s renewable energy projects put together.

Demetris Koutsoyiannis says:
July 21, 2012 at 3:55 am
“Anthony, thank you very much for this and the previous post. I was really glad to see some misunderstandings being resolved here, as well as the comments by Marcel Crock, Hockey Schtick and Victor Venema, who all contributed with their own blogs in this discussion.”
I saw on Victor’s blog some rant about the WUWT posts and skeptics overall, also justifying homogenisation with the need to correct for UHI.
This is an alibi for the homogenisation as it is done.
We all know the UHI effect to be real and introducing a significant difference in the temperature between the urban and natural environment, on the other side the adjustments for UHI are so minuscule or non-existent that it is a misdirection to talk about it.