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.
Clearly Nature is supporting attempts to manipulate public opinion, and support denying attempts to replicate results. These guys are corrupting science. They and others have been very quiet about deleting the raw data, choosing instead try to portray these scientists as harassed. Damn! Man up! A true scientist presents his thesis and then endures all attempts to to disprove it. That is science. Instead these weenies destroy data, manipulate public opinion and degrade anyone that criticizes with their Orwellian-speak. The higher we look the crookeder this gets!
“Nothing in the e-mails undermines the scientific case that global warming is real — or that human activities are almost certainly the cause.”
That is a blatant lie, which also happens to be a travesty.
And i love the “almost certainly.”
This entire piece is so loaded with trigger words: paranoid, obstructionist, propaganda, climate-change-denialist fringe (!), “worst critics with ammunition” …
This isn’t scientific language, it’s emotive.
One respected daily paper here in South Africa has started covering the issue. The Business Day (www.businessday.co.za) has for some time accepted letters on both sides of the debate, but has recently given a good deal of editorial and comment inches to the issues.
http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=88813
http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=88798
http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=88810
(I had to put one of my own letters in here)
http://www.businessday.co.za/Articles/Content.aspx?id=87726
http://www.businessday.co.za/Articles/Content.aspx?id=87233
http://www.businessday.co.za/Articles/Content.aspx?id=87134
I don’t understand the value of Nature and other scientific pubs in the era of the worldwide web Google (or other search engines). What is the point of having such elitist gatekeepers? Seems like the scientists in each field should be able to perform their own “peer review”. After all, the Internet was originally set up so that researchers could more easily collaborate and share knowledge. Oh I guess that is the point of “Nature”–to hinder the free exchange of knowledge. I wonder what George Orwell would have to say about this.
I have never read anything a tenth as polemic described as an “abstract”.
Astoundingly unprofessional.
Continually referring to sceptics as “denialists” only displays their own phobia and hysteria.
Prof Aynsley Kellow summed them up well when he described them all as the self appointed “gatekeepers of science”.
I wonder what the World Jewish Congress thinks of labeling people who are skeptical of the consensus ‘deniers’ (which is obviously a much to casual parallel with holocaust deniers). It just cheapens everything.
Consensus think based on biased evidence, slander, and hostility to other points of view will never lead us forward.
I am a British ex-patriate scientist living in the US. I am a moderate climate sceptic and, like Anthony, I resent the silly term “denialist” as used here by Nature. One thing in addition to Anthony’s good comments is that the Nature Editorial displays a very irritating anti-American bias. There is currently growing climate scepticism all over the world – look at recent events in Australia, for example – and to try to blame their concerns about scepticism on “bad republicans” is a naive, cheap and self-righteous shot more often seen in newspapers like the notoriously anti-American Guardian than in respected scientific journals. Thanks for the post and for this website, Anthony. – John Game
I had already recommend that in Quadrant Online:http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2009/11/peer-review-locks-gate
This is the text:
November 30, 2009
The only thing that the Climategate emails tell us about the peer review process is that it was used as a gate-keeping exercise to keep sceptical papers out of the system. For those of us who served in the trenches in the climate battle, part of the much larger culture wars, this revelation is not news. In disparaging my papers, one of the first things that warmers would say was that they were not peer reviewed. They were, but that did not matter either, because like the warmer scientists, I got to choose my own reviewers. One of my papers passed a higher test than peer review. Real Climate devoted a post to attacking it, which was fabulous because it told me that I was having an effect, and gave me encouragement to keep going.
My nemesis in the solar science trench of the climate battle recently retired from the fray. One of the things he used to say was that bad papers will be forgotten and that they would be replaced by good papers. Of course, another researcher told me that he had to publish to counter the misinformation from my nemesis, who had taken it upon himself to go through the solar record, flattening out the bumps so that the Sun could not have an effect on climate. All that means is that good and bad papers will be published, nothing can stop that from happening, but the truth will finally out.
I don’t believe that changing the peer review system will help, in fact any prescribed changes are likely to make it worse. As the Climategate emails show, the warmers captured the whole system – all the journals, all their editors and the journals’ boards. They successfully removed inconvenient editors. As a last line of defence, they were going to change the definition of what peer review meant. Making the system more prescriptive will simply entrench the corrupted establishment, similar to what happened as a result of the ban on tobacco advertising. With no advertising, new brands could not enter the market and the existing brands were spared the expense of advertising, increasing their profitability.
The way to improve the review of papers is to break the power of the corrupted establishment. Two of the most prestigious science journals have been Science and Nature, but both of these now publish a certain amount of twaddle. In fact Nature seems to have degenerated to occupy the niche formerly occupied by New Scientist, and New Scientist has degenerated into the publishing arm of Greenpeace. There are two ways to break the power of the corrupted establishment. In the first instance stop subscribing to journals that have promoted the climate fraud. If you work in any sort of academic establishment, it is your responsibility to the nation to recommend to your librarian that the subscription to Nature not be renewed. Secondly, we need more online journals so that good work can more easily find a home. This would increase the rate of creative destruction in the journal space.
CO2 Realist (22:56:44) :
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.
I have been having a fun and informative email exchange with Jerry Ravetz over the last few days. He and his ideas about ‘post normal science’ have come in for some stick over the last week or so, but I think that since I pointed him at a lot of info he hadn’t seen before that he is more and more coming over to our side of the debate.
As a historian and philosopher of science, he is more willing to re-evaluate than some who are more deeply enmeshed in the situation.
Here is Rex’s commentary:
Nature does not have a very good track record in filtering out hoax science, so if I were them I would not sit so firmly on one side of the fence over this issue. Back in 1999 to 2001 a guy called Hendrik Schon managed to get 7 papers published over the course of 2 years with some fantastic claims (and to the frustration of many researchers who could not repeat his work). See his entry on Wikipedia for more information. He was only eventually found out due to the fact he cut and pasted the exact graph from one publication into 2 others (in one case he flipped one axis) and someone noticed the remarkable similarity between the noise in the low current levels!
Shame Nature doesn’t seem allow reader comments on its site. I wouldn’t mind sending them a little editorial of my own!
Here is an article from Liberal Conspiracy, a Warmist mouthpiece, plotting strategy. It’s very interesting, especially in relation to terminology:
http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/2009/12/03/re-tuning-the-environmental-movement/
“No retreat, no surrender on the terminology.
Jack of Kent asks whether ‘denialism’ is too strong a word. Look at the people who push global warming denialism: Fox News (enough said), The Telegraph (enough said), The Spectator (recently promoting AIDS denialism), Melanie Phillips (enough said), Christopher Booker (has anyone read his Wikipedia entry recently?), James Delingpole (enough said).
These are the kind of fuckwits (Delingpole, Richard North) who think there’s a conspiracy when their article doesn’t appear on Google News or use Google search hits as example of how big the story is.
Calling them ‘denialists’ is being too kind: they should be abused at every instance for the stupidity they churn out. They should be ridiculed, parodied, cussed, and constantly called out for the idiots they are because they deserve it.”
I’m glad to see that the Warmists are supportive of reasoned debate. Surely the way to convince the skeptical among us of the merits of their viewpoints is to ridicule, parody and cuss at us. In fact it’s working already, here I am staying up late just to help them get the word out. As more people see the incisive commentary and respectful tone in Nature and Liberal Conspiracy, I’m sure that they will be inspired and compelled to embrace the flimsy catastrophic anthropogenic global warming narrative…
It’s like they are trying to have us believe that 99% of journalists and 99% of scientists believe in anthropogenic global warming. These numbers would certainly be real if we were under a global dictatorship (come to think if it!!!)In a normal world, every journalist must be neutral and so should any scientist be. Both types are there to observe and report, in one case it’s the news, the other what nature is trying to tell us.
The Brit scientific establishment is very left wing and shot through with leftist politics. Has been since the 30s. You can see echos of this reading old articles in the “New Scientist”. Articles in the 80s like penguins going blind in Argentina due to ozone layer depletion over the antarctic. Tabloid rubbish, of course, but still published in a supposedly respectable science journal.
just remember as I pointed out in my comments about the Piltdown Mann….
or Penn State Mann…
Nature continued to publish articles about the piltdown man after it was clearly demonstrated that it was a hoax.
Nice track record there.
Of course Nature came out with this tripe. Nature is implicated in the emails. Remeber that “mike” use a “Nature trick”. Presumably he’d done it before the Briffa paper.
One wonders how many sleight-of-hand tricks Nature has used in the past to keep the lie alive.
I fisked the article here – http://www.di2.nu/200912/03.htm – I think we pretty much agree on what’s wrong
David Davidovics (23:27:46) : Here is Rex’s commentary:
Thanks for that. I’ve saved a link to show to friends. Never heard of Rex Murphy before but that is a very good summary of ClimateGate
Slightly OT. The BBC is starting to report climategate on headline news. But I cannot beleive what I just heard Roger Harrabin just say on BBC Radio:
“I approached the IPCC last week .. and they said, actually this can’t be brushed under the carpet, it has to be taken seriously ..”
Err, what was that about brushing under the carpet? Does that not speak volumes about Roger’s inital approach to the issue.
Just in case of minor inaccuracies in the above quote (which I don’t intend to make), I’ll post a link to the interview later in the day when it is put on the BBC website. Hear it for yourself.
The Nature Editorial reads like something lifted directly from Realclimate. Coult the author be a member of the team?
As with many other articles I read now, I will save this for posterity. How the world will laugh (or cry?) in years to come.
The Royal Society (in London) is currently celebrating its 350 year anniversay, claimed to be the first and oldest scientific society in the world. It has a great history. One of its earliest publications (in the late 1600s) was Newton’s Principia. However, its current declarations on global warming are a scientific travisty – for which it should be ashamed – and I hope will be embarassed by in the future.
(Historical anecdote – The original Principia has on the front the signature of Samuel Pepys – London’s famous diarist of the 1660s. Pepys, though not a scientist was a great lover of life and relentlessly curious about all things, including the new scientific discoveries of that time, becoming an early member of the RS. As a great adminstrator, who was well suited to be President of the RS for a time, which covered the time of Principia’s publication. See http://www.pepysdiary.com)
The list of “institutions” in which my faith is shaken grows by the day. I’venever subscribed to Nature, but assumed that the journal represented the pinnacle of scientific propriety. It is very disappointing to learn that such an overt bias exists there.
I used to read New Scientist but a lack of discourse on these events leads me to lump that magazine withe he rest of MSM. Sadly we no longer have Woodward and Bersteins, just journalism from press releases. Churnalism.
I once help the BBC in high esteem, probably for more jingoistic reasons than reason. Now I find I cannot justify that esteem. This undoubtably will have a knock-on effect in their other reporting as I no longer see the BBC as an independent entity, but an organisation for the enforcement of government policy. I have no reason to believe that this isn’t the case in other areas such Afganistan.
I was very interested in the forthcoming Google OS and was in favour of Google’s challenge to the conventional business model. Now I see suspicion caste on the search term rankings and find from wikipedia that Al Gore is a “senior advisor” to them.
I really do not want to become a conspiracy theorist, and I’m not there yet, but there does seem to be a broad agenda behind all of this to treat the populus as a herd of cattle to be milked financially by presenting a kind of “other reality” to which we must all subscribe without question.
I suppose that it was always thus, but I was happier when I was treated as an intelligent individual rather than taken for a mug. It now seems that I must get my news information from the full range of internet blogs (lunatic fringe included) and then reach a considered opinion by weighing the relative merits of all sides. This is the true value and curse of the internet – Solomon-like I must weigh EVERY issue myself rather than consider “informed” opinion.
I find myself wondering what the point of the MSM and politicians is anymore since I cannot rely on their informed comments especially in areas where I had little interest and to whom I readily deferred in the past.
Winge over. Apologies for the Loser-Length-Post to those of you who have read this far.
“Nature trick”
It must be embarrassing for them. The whole world
knows they were “tricked” into printing faked science.
What’s next for them…”The oceans are turning to acid
and will burn your face off.”
They have an office in the building where I work.
It annoys me to no end.