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.
. 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.
And yet is exactly what is done as shown by the Met Office Conditions of Use: http://badc.nerc.ac.uk/data/surface/met-nerc_agreement.html
“Arrangements have been set in place whereby bona fide academic researchers working on agreed NERC-endorsed scientific programmes may obtain access on favourable terms to UKMO data (and associated software). To streamline the process, UKMO is providing relevant datasets / software ‘wholesale’ to NERC and NERC will then undertake the subsequent sublicensing and distribution to individual scientists………
Data sets must not be passed on to third parties under any circumstances. Any scientist requiring data which happens to have been supplied already to someone else, even within the same institute or programme of research, must first approach one of the NERC Data Centres, who have agreed to maintain records of data users for UKMO.”
REPLY: and they are going to publish it now that the pressure to do so is there http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8396696.stm
REPLY: and they are going to publish it now that the pressure to do so is there http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8396696.stm
‘They’ being the Met Office which always had the ability to do that if they so chose, the CRU and other researchers did not based on the terms of the agreement. Clearly the statement in Nature was not ‘rubbish’ as you asserted.
There is no guarantee that the other 188 other countries will be willing to publish their data, in which case we’re no better off.
Phil. (23:01:40) :
REPLY: and they are going to publish it now that the pressure to do so is there http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8396696.stm
“‘They’ being the Met Office which always had the ability to do that if they so chose, the CRU and other researchers did not based on the terms of the agreement. Clearly the statement in Nature was not ‘rubbish’ as you asserted.
There is no guarantee that the other 188 other countries will be willing to publish their data, in which case we’re no better off.”
The Met never had the “ability” to release the data from the other “188 countries” on their own authority, and they give no guarantee now that they will, only that they are attempting permissions. CRU was in no different a position than the Met is now when CRU provided Webster with the data, and clearly what Nature claimed is rubbish:
“the national meteorological services will provide data sets only when researchers specifically request them, and only after a significant delay.”
Glenn:
FOI requests were sent for any non-disclosure agreements, all CRU could come up with were three documents, none of which prohibited release of data for non-commercial purposes. They then claimed that these documents were representative of agreements they made with almost everyone, and yet there was not one single non-disclosure agreement produced which prohibited release of the data received from any country.
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=6789
Dear Anthony,
The post above says “there may in fact be a few people who deny any warming has occurred in the past 100 years (it has)..”. How do we know “it has”? It seems likely from the data that the thirties – i.e nearly eighty years ago – were warmer than now. We actually don’t have accurate enough measurment to know how warm it is now with respect to only forty years ago, let alone 100. I have a sneaking feeling – not very scientific I know – that if you were to take out the UHI effect from the current land station data, and various other corrections and quality control measures from the historical data, you might find that, in an historical context, we are cooler than we think. Certainly there were not that many accurate thermometers in the world one hundred years ago that we are able to give a very precise value of what the global mean temperature was back then.
The trees implicated in the “hide the decline” scandal seem to think we have cooled quite a bit recently. I am coming to the point that I would rather trust the trees than the manipulated data.
A once well loved big publication
Used to inform and enthrall the nation
But hubris and lies
Have caused it’s demise
Now it’s prints fluff and disinformation
[snip]
Why was there so much ice in the Bering Straights in 1958 that the Nautilus couldn’t go underneath while that ice is absent today?
Cargo ships, without escorts, traversed the Northeast passage this last summer. Where are the records of any ships doing that prior to 1900?
What happened to the winter ice on the Great Lakes. The lakes are no longer freezing as they did thru-ought the 1920’s and 1930’s, the supposed, warm period.
You can deny all you want but great ice deposits of the world are still melting.
Pangolin (19:20:34),
Global ice cover is increasing. Unless you want to argue with the NOAA: click
Pangolin (19:20:34) : ..You can deny all you want but great ice deposits of the world are still melting.
Glaciers have been melting since 1850, have you only just noticed?
We are recovering from the little ice age, the coldest it has ever been in the last 10,000 years. Would it not be natural for the glaciers to advance during that period and retreat since the recovery?
The question to ask is – Is the present situation unprecedented or alarming? And the answer to that is – I think not.
“The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consul Ifft, at Bergen, Norway.
Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers, he declared, all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met with as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm.
Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared. Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts, which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.”
US Weather Bureau
Year of that report – 1922
Think about the Medieval Warm period when it was even warmer.
PS – The Article “Battle lines drawn over e-mail leak” has been restricted. I managed to put in a few comments before that, unfortunately not proof read, and with mistakes.
http://www.nature.com/news/2009/091202/full/462551a.html
Before nature snips my comments – have a look and let me know what you think.
People still read Nature? !
haha…..I know plenty of scientists of all fields, being one, and NONE of them have any good words to say about Nature. Unless of course they have a vested interest. Nature is a tool for corporate scientists, and to spread controversy and pety insults against their competition. Nature has and always will be a tool used to try and discredit reliable science by way of accusations and labels. For example “denialists”.
Besides the AGW scam, Nature has also been complicit in delaying the efforts of scientists who are researching methods of Nuclear Fusion. A type of energy source that could power the entire world for extremely low cost(basically free), and without any of the detrimental effects of every other energy source. It has absolutely no negative effects or dangers implicit with its use. Contrary to what some might believe, fusion causes no nuclear waste or fallout.
Given that, Nature has continued to attempt to bash and tarnish the reputations of good scientists rather then publish scientific arguments.
For example; A hit squad lead by Nature of jealous scientists from a competing research group caused one very good scientist to be placed under investigation, who eventually had to hire a lawyer who advised him from researching the topic for which he has advanced the most out of any other scientist in the field.
Their basis?
They claimed he faked the data, or was “mistaken”. They claimed a plutonium source from across his lab triggered a signature for which he confused with the signature of Tritium. First of all here is no way a plutonium signature can be confused with a Tritium signature. And second of all the source was too far away to produce a signature. BTW, a tritium signature is evidence that nuclear fusion did in fact occur, which would prove his theory known as Sonofusion or Bubble Fusion. He provided all his data and figures and despite their lack of any significant reason, Nature still published hit piece after hit piece. Since then he has been ostracized from the science community despite the dismissal of 10 charges of fraud and misconduct.
Long story short, Nature is a tool for the unscientific PTB, who want to stifle the truth.
Here are a few background articles
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4270297.stm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon/experiment_prog_summary.shtml
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1C1CHMB_en-USUS295US304&q=sonofusion&aq=f&oq=&aqi=g2
such a cool word play between issue as in magazine and issues as in troubles:) love the pic, where did you get it BTW?