by Anthony Watts
There has been a lot of buzz about the Menne et al 2010 paper “On the reliability of the U.S. Surface Temperature Record” which is NCDC’s response to the surfacestations.org project. One paid blogger even erroneously trumpeted the “death of UHI” which is humorous, because the project was a study about station siting issues, not UHI. Anybody who owns a car with a dashboard thermometer who commutes from country to city can tell you about UHI.
There’s also claims of this paper being a “death blow” to the surfacestations project. I’m sure in some circles, they believe that to be true. However, it is very important to point out that the Menne et al 2010 paper was based on an early version of the surfacestations.org data, at 43% of the network surveyed. The dataset that Dr. Menne used was not quality controlled, and contained errors both in station identification and rating, and was never intended for analysis. I had posted it to direct volunteers to so they could keep track of what stations had been surveyed to eliminate repetitive efforts. When I discovered people were doing ad hoc analysis with it, I stopped updating it.
Our current dataset at 87% of the USHCN surveyed has been quality controlled.
There’s quite a backstory to all this.
In the summer, Dr. Menne had been inviting me to co-author with him, and our team reciprocated with an offer to join us also, and we had an agreement in principle for participation, but I asked for a formal letter of invitation, and they refused, which seems very odd to me. The only thing they would provide was a receipt for my new data (at 80%) and an offer to “look into” archiving my station photographs with their existing database. They made it pretty clear that I’d have no significant role other than that of data provider. We also invited Dr. Menne to participate in our paper, but he declined.
The appearance of the Menne et al 2010 paper was a bit of a surprise, since I had been offered collaboration by NCDC’s director in the fall. In typed letter on 9/22/09 Tom Karl wrote to me:
“We at NOAA/NCDC seek a way forward to cooperate with you, and are interested in joint scientific inquiry. When more or better information is available, we will reanalyze and compare and contrast the results.”
“If working together cooperatively is of interest to you, please let us know.”
I discussed it with Dr. Pielke Sr. and the rest of the team, which took some time since not all were available due to travel and other obligations. It was decided to reply to NCDC on a collaboration offer.
On November 10th, 2009, I sent a reply letter via Federal Express to Mr. Karl, advising him that we would like to collaborate, and offered to include NCDC in our paper.. In that letter I also reiterated my concerns about use of the preliminary surfacestation data (43% surveyed) that they had, and spelled out very specific reasons why I didn’t think the results would be representative nor useful.
We all waited, but there was no reply from NCDC to our reply to offer of collaboration by Mr. Karl from his last letter. Not even a “thank you, but no”.
Then we discovered that Dr. Menne’s group had submitted a paper to JGR Atmospheres using my preliminary data and it was in press. This was a shock to me since I was told it was normal procedure for the person who gathered the primary data the paper was based on to have some input in the review process by the journal.
NCDC uses data from one of the largest volunteer organization in the world, the NOAA Cooperative Observer Network. Yet NCDC director Karl, by not bothering to reply to our letter about an offer he initiated, and by the journal not giving me any review process opportunity, extends what Dr. Roger Pielke Senior calls “professional discourtesy” to my own volunteers and my team’s work. See his weblog on the subject:
Professional Discourtesy By The National Climate Data Center On The Menne Et Al 2010 paper
I will point out that Dr. Menne provided thanks to me and the surfacestations volunteers in the Menne et al 2010 paper, and I hear through word of mouth, also in a recent verbal presentation. For that I thank him. He has been gracious in his communications with me, but I think he’s also having to answer to the organization for which he works and that limited his ability to meet some of my requests, like a simple letter of invitation.
Political issues aside, the appearance of the Menne et al 2010 paper does not stop the surfacestations project nor the work I’m doing with the Pielke research group to produce a peer reviewed paper of our own. It does illustrate though that some people have been in a rush to get results. Texas state Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon suggested way back at 33% of the network surveyed that we had a statistically large enough sample to produce an analysis. I begged to differ then, at 43%, and yes even at 70% when I wrote my booklet “Is the US Surface Temperature Record Reliable?, which contained no temperature analysis, only a census of stations by rating.
The problem is known as the “low hanging fruit problem”. You see this project was done on an ad hoc basis, with no specific roadmap on which stations to acquire. This was necessitated by the social networking (blogging) Dr. Pielke and I employed early in the project to get volunteers. What we ended up getting was a lumpy and poorly spatially distributed dataset because early volunteers would get the stations closest to them, often near or within cities.
The urban stations were well represented in the early dataset, but the rural ones, where we believed the best siting existed, were poorly represented. So naturally, any sort of study early on even with a “significant sample size” would be biased towards urban stations. We also had a distribution problem within CONUS, with much of the great plains and upper midwest not being well represented.
This is why I’ve been continuing to collect what some might consider an unusually large sample size, now at 87%. We’ve learned that there are so few well sited stations, the ones that meet the CRN1/CRN2 criteria (or NOAA’s 100 foot rule for COOPS) are just 10% of the whole network. See our current census:
When you have such a small percentage of well sited stations, it is obviously important to get a large sample size, which is exactly what I’ve done. Preliminary temperature analysis done by the Pielke group of the the data at 87% surveyed looks quite a bit different now than when at 43%.
It has been said by NCDC in Menne et al “On the reliability of the U.S. surface temperature record” (in press) and in the June 2009 “Talking Points: related to “Is the U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable?” that station siting errors do not matter. However, I believe the way NCDC conducted the analysis gives a false impression because of the homogenization process used. As many readers know, the FILNET algorithm blends a lot of the data together to infill missing data. This means temperature data from both well sited and poorly sited stations gets combined to infill missing data. The theory is that it all averages out, but when you see that 90% of the USHCN network doesn’t meet even the old NOAA 100 foot rule for COOPS, you realize this may not be the case.
Here’s a way to visualize the homogenization/FILNET process. Think of it like measuring water pollution. Here’s a simple visual table of CRN station quality ratings and what they might look like as water pollution turbidity levels, rated as 1 to 5 from best to worst turbidity:
In homogenization the data is weighted against the nearby neighbors within a radius. And so a station might start out as a “1” data wise, might end up getting polluted with the data of nearby stations and end up as a new value, say weighted at “2.5”. Even single stations can affect many other stations in the GISS and NOAA data homogenization methods carried out on US surface temperature data here and here.
In the map above, applying a homogenization smoothing, weighting stations by distance nearby the stations with question marks, what would you imagine the values (of turbidity) of them would be? And, how close would these two values be for the east coast station in question and the west coast station in question? Each would be closer to a smoothed center average value based on the neighboring stations.
Essentially, in my opinion, NCDC is comparing homogenized data to homogenized data, and thus there would not likely be any large difference between “good” and “bad” stations in that data. All the differences have been smoothed out by homogenization (pollution) from neighboring stations!
The best way to compare the effect of siting between groups of stations is to use the “raw” data, before it has passed through the multitude of adjustments that NCDC performs. However NCDC is apparently using homogenized data. So instead of comparing apples and oranges (poor sited -vs- well sited stations) they essentially just compare apples (Granny Smith -vs- Golden delicious) of which there is little visual difference beyond a slight color change.
We saw this demonstrated in the ghost authored Talking Points Memo issued by NCDC in June 09 in this graph:
Referencing the above graph, Steve McIntyre suggested in his essay on the subject:
The red graphic for the “full data set” had, using the preferred terminology of climate science, a “remarkable similarity” to the NOAA 48 data set that I’d previously compared to the corresponding GISS data set here (which showed a strong trend of NOAA relative to GISS). Here’s a replot of that data – there are some key telltales evidencing that this has a common provenance to the red series in the Talking Points graphic.
When I looked at SHAP and FILNET adjustments a couple of years ago, one of my principal objections to these methods was that they adjusted “good” stations. After FILNET adjustment, stations looked a lot more similar than they did before. I’ll bet that the new USHCN adjustments have a similar effect and that the Talking Points memo compares adjusted versions of “good” stations to the overall average.
There’s references in the new Menne et al 2010 paper to the new USHCN2 algorithm and we’ve been told how it is supposed to be better. While it does catch undocumented station moves that USHCN 1 did not, it still adjusts data at USHCN stations in odd ways, such as this station in rural Wisconsin, and that is the crux of the problem.
Or this one in Lincoln, IL at the local NWS office where they took great effort to have it well sited.
Thanks to Mike McMillan for the graphs comparing USHCN1 and USHCN2 data
Notice the clear tendency in the graphs comparing USHCN1 to USHCN2 to cool off the early record and leave the current levels near recently reported levels or to increase them. The net result is either reduced cooling or enhanced warming not found in the raw data.
As for the Menne et all 2010 paper itself, I’m rather disturbed by their use of preliminary data at 43%, especially since I warned them that the dataset they had lifted from my website (placed for volunteers to track what had been surveyed, never intended for analysis) had not been quality controlled at the time. Plus there are really not enough good stations with enough spatial distribution at that sample size. They used it anyway, and amazingly, conducted their own secondary survey of those stations, comparing it to my non-quality controlled data, implying that my 43% data wasn’t up to par. Well of course it wasn’t! I told them about it and why it wasn’t. We had to resurvey and re-rate a number of stations from early in the project.
This came about only because it took many volunteers some time to learn how to properly ID them. Even some small towns have 2-3 COOP stations nearby, and only one of them is “USHCN”. There’s no flag in the NCDC metadatabase that says “USHCN”, in fact many volunteers were not even aware of their own station status. Nobody ever bothered to tell them. You’d think if their stations were part of a special subset, somebody at NOAA/NCDC would notify the COOP volunteer so they would have a higher diligence level?
If doing an independent stations survey was important enough for NCDC to do to compare to my 43% data now for their paper, why didn’t they just do it in the first place?
I have one final note of interest on the station data, specifically the issue of MMTS thermometers and their tendency to be sited closer to building due to cabling issues.
Menne et al 2010 mentioned a “counterintuitive” cooling trend in some portions of the data. Interestingly enough, former California State Climatologist James Goodridge did an independent analysis ( I wasn’t involved in data crunchng, it was a sole effort on his part) of COOP stations in California that had gone through modernization, switching from Stevenson Screens with mercury LIG thermometers to MMTS electronic thermometers. He sifted through about 500 COOPs in California and chose stations that had at least 60 years of uninterrupted data, because as we know, a station move can cause all sorts of issues. He used the “raw” data from these stations as opposed to adjusted data.
He writes:
Hi Anthony,
I found 58 temperature station in California with data for 1949 to 2008 and where the thermometers had been changed to MMTS and the earlier parts were liquid in glass. The average for the earlier part was 59.17°F and the MMTS fraction averaged 60.07°F.
Jim
A 0.9F (0.5C) warmer offset due to modernization is significant, yet NCDC insists that the MMTS units are tested at about 0.05C cooler. I believe they add this adjustment into the final data. Our experience shows the exact opposite should be done and with a greater magnitude.
I hope to have this California study published here on WUWT with Jim soon.
I realize all of this isn’t a complete rebuttal to Menne et al 2010, but I want to save that option for more detail for the possibility of placing a comment in The Journal of Geophysical Research.
When our paper with the most current data is completed (and hopefully accepted in a journal), we’ll let peer reviewed science do the comparison on data and methods, and we’ll see how it works out. Could I be wrong? I’m prepared for that possibility. But everything I’ve seen so far tells me I’m on the right track.
If doing a stations survey was important enough for NCDC to do to compare to my data now for their paper, why didn’t they just do it in the first place?
We currently have 87% of the network surveyed (1067 stations out of 1221), and it is quality controlled and checked. I feel that we have enough of the better and urban stations to solve the “low hanging fruit” problem of the earlier portion of the project. Data at 87% looks a lot different than data at 43%.
The paper I’m writing with Dr. Pielke and others will make use of this better data, and we also use a different procedure for analysis than what NCDC used.
Oh, and it’s “aspersions” not “aspertions,” since we’re being nitty here.
Gregg E. (03:58:28) :
“I was in Nyssa, Oregon yesterday evening and noticed a Stevenson screen next to the parking lot of the Amalgamated Sugar plant. I don’t know if it’s a USHCN station.”
Probably –I collected a Stevenson Screen at a sugar plant parking lot in S. Dakota. I sort of get why wastewater plants and airports (they’re public infrastructure and tend to have significant green space) get used. I have wondered why sugar plants seem to be popular tho –other than they seem to have 24/7 guards available to take readings. If yours was like mine, I’d bet that Stevenson Screen was close to the guard house.
Of course the other thing all three have in common. . . they generate a lot of heat. They’re probably mini-UHI all by themselves, even when “out in the country”.
Folks are throwing the term “public domain” around pretty lightly. Publication of a copyrighted work on the internet does not magically void the copyright. The copyright attaches to any original work, regardless of registration. Works enter the public domain because the statutory protection has expired, or the author disclaims the copyright, or the author has no legal standing to claim copyright (government publications for example) or in the absence of a claim of authorship, the provence of the original work cannot be determined.
Copyrighted material that is published, whether here or in print can be reproduced in a limited manner under the doctrine of “fair use”. Thus a passage from a journal article can be quoted by another author, but the party doing the quoting cannot copy the original work under the guise of fair use. I can reproduce a limited piece of the Beatle’s White Album in a music review to discuss a chord progression or vocal technique, but I cannot reprint the entire songbook note for note. The Menne paper crosses way over the bounds of fair use and I am sure they damned well know it. It is nothing more than a contemptible effort to diminish Anthony’s (and everyone else’s) efforts, or to incite Anthony to join into a pissing contest with a skunk. AW should be commended for disdaining this provocation. As the saying goes, “you don’t have to show up at every fight you are invited to.”
>> Pat Frank (16:13:29) :
… The issue is that Anthony owned the scientific priority of his own data. Prof. Karl had no right to publish on it first, and neither did Dr. Menne. They chose to abscond with Anthony’s right to priority. That is a serious breach of scientific ethics. <<
The issue is even bigger than that. Since Karl and Menne have demonstrated their lack of ethics here, how can we believe anything they publish? These are the gatekeepers of the US temperature data, also used by GISS and CRU. This lack of ethics makes all three surface data records suspect.
George:
Thanks for the reply. Where do you think they fudged the numbers? Note that the station classification was from surfacestations.org. Most of the temperature data is older than the (pretty recent) surfacestations.org data so it would be pretty hard to pre-fudge that for the study. Do you think they used a bogus methodology? As I understand it, at least for the unadjusted series, what they did was pretty simple. So it should be pretty easy to replicate (or contradict if it was fudged as you say). I imagine that our host, Pielke and/or the latter’s students are working on the replication (if they haven’t done it already) for their reply.
@Phil M (20:21:05) :
“You can’t make data freely available on the internet and then sue someone for downloading and discussing it. No, we’re not talking lawsuits in this forum. But I feel the principle is the same. ”
You’ve switched context on me now. I was responding to your startling tossing of “anything on the internet” into the public domain. . .now you’re back to talking about just Anthony’s work.
There are of course “fair use” provisions in the law, and the legal right to analyse and review pretty much anything that appears anywhere (and not just the internet) so long as while doing so one doesn’t go beyond “fair use” in reproducing protected material. I’m not suggesting that what Menne did was illegal –I’m just rather strongly protesting your stated idea that Anthony’s work, and the entire internet!, are in the “public domain”. They aren’t.
And of course, any author may agree to make their work public domain if they individually choose to do so –Wikipedia works like that. But Anthony most assuredly has not, and to make that point, surfacestations.org includes the following notice:
“Unless otherwise noted, all text and images contained on this web site are the property of surfacestations.org and/or its affiliates, parents, subsidiaries, or licensors, and are protected from unauthorized copying and dissemination by United States copyright law, trademark law, international conventions and other intellectual property laws.
© 2007, 2008, 2009 surfacestations.org. All rights reserved.”
Again, I’m not suggesting Menne broke the law –I am insisting that “public domain” is not the defense for that, however.
Richard Sharpe (22:19:31) :
As Boris pointed out, it can be pretty easy to let an unintentional misspelling sneak through. I guess I was little tired and trying to mash-up “disparaging” and “aspersions”. I guess we both look stupid?
While I always enjoy a spirited discussion, your comments seem to be written as personal affronts towards me. I have no interest in engaging you or anyone else in those types of discussions. Also, as I pointed out to another person, this conversation seems to be circular in that it boils down to a simple difference of opinion. To me, your argument indicates some course of legal action as a logical next step. Perhaps your energy would be best directed towards that endeavor.
From NAS:
” ‘Fair use’ exceptions enable scientists and educators to use copyrighted materials — such as published research papers — for free or at reduced costs, if the information is used for research, teaching, or other specific purposes.”
Now, this particular passage closely follows a reference to publicly funded data, so I’m not sure how it applies in this case. I look forward to someone providing more information here, as I haven’t the time.
http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=5504
I suggest we all write to the journal that Menne’s recent paper is being published in and protest the clear lapse in professional and scientific ethics demonstrated by Menne et all.
Let them know that the world is watching.
geo (06:02:04) :
Clearly, it was my off-hand, and incorrect, usage of “public domain” that introduced some confusion here. I was trying to articulate the point you just made – Menne, et al. broke no laws. I’ll choose my words more carefully in the future.
Since The Other Side is now coming out in favor of transparency and data access, and it may eventually become settled policy, let’s remember then to renew our quest for the data Steig has withheld.
——–
Strawman. A distance of 30 meters would be fine with us. (It’s the official minimum.) The objections are almost all to sitings within a dozen feet or so.
A car thermometer is fit for its purpose, which is NOT, as your strawman claim would have it, to “provide useful climate data.” Rather, it is simply to detect whether there is a gross temperature difference between urban and rural locations. If a large number of these anecdotal (actually instrumental) observations confirm one another, the evidence is strong. (Such measurements can be falsified or confirmed by siting and comparing meteorological thermometers in the nearby rural vs. urban locations the car thermometer is comparing, if any critic cares to do so, so in principle the claim is a scientific one.)
The data collecting instruments needed to detect the signal of global warming from the vast noise of weather are not attempting to detect a gross anomaly, but a tiny one. Therefore, there’s no hypocrisy in demanding that they be more accurately calibrated and fine-tuned, etc.
Evan – you are having too much fun! This subject is serious!
Yes.
Anthony and Evan,
I sincerely hope the upcoming paper will include some field checks of recent station data, using calibrated thermometers located at various distances and directions from existing USHCN stations.
It should not be too difficult to get thermometers that are reliable to within 0.1 to 0.2 C and use them to fact check existing stations. (Hourly or more frequent readings please.) One issue would be how long you need to have the fact checking thermometer in place, but for large UHI effects it shouldn’t take long. Perhaps as little as a couple weeks and certainly no more than 2 months to estimate the delta.
After that the questions is how many bad and good stations do you need to field test this way. 10 each? 20? 50? Also of course, how many reference testing sites do you need around each USHCN site you are checking, and how far away do you need to go when macrosite issues are evident? Obviously getting absolute references for a large sample of existing stations is probably beyond the scope of anyone but the feds.
I find it rather unbelievable that 30 years into the AGW scare that we haven’t already verified (or quantified the error of) the accuracy of temperature measurements (and their weekly/monthly/yearly averages) at each site with actual field tests, and instead NASA/NOAA/NCDC are developing algorithms to “homogenize” the data, throwing away data, making up data out of thin air, etc.
Perhaps we can hope for such a large scale effort to begin after Obama leaves office in 2013.
Roger Knights (09:08:43)
Excellent response to Phil M. When Phil makes the comments you quoted:
“Phil M.:
My amusement was aimed at the offering of anecdotal dashboard/car temperature readings as evidence of UHI. Apparently, a large number of folks here think that siting a climate station 30 meters from a building is a catastrophe, but temperature readings from an instrument mounted in a moving vehicle are somehow providing useful climate data.”
It’s quite obvious he has an agenda, and/or a serious ignorance of what constitutes valid data. I don’t recall anyone here referring to poor USHCN sensor siting as a “catastrophe”. That’s just an absurd comment as the issue is that the temperature readings will be affected towards warming.
And indeed car thermometers can collect quite valid evidence of the delta from urban to suburban to rural. Since no one is claiming an absolute accuracy, or even a delta accuracy to less than one degree, Phil’s comment is roughly equivalent to suggesting that the human eye is insufficient to judge that there is a difference in outdoor light between sunny and cloudy days.
My anecdote is that my car thermometer perfectly matches the nearby local airport station on cloudy days, or at night. On sunny days the heat from the road surface makes it read higher, of course. When I drive from my suburban house to out of town the delta is 2 to 4 degrees cooler on average, and when I drive downtown it’s 2 to 4 degrees warmer on average.
Should I infer from this, Phil, that the temperatures downtown are the same as in the rural areas outside of town??!! Or should I assume that my car’s thermometer is completely unreliable in any area but near the airport thermometer that it matches so well?
“[REPLY – As Anthony was the one compiling the data, it was his prerogative to make the invite, which he did.”
The account that heads this thread says: “In the summer, Dr. Menne had been inviting me to co-author with him, and our team reciprocated…” So from this statement it appears that the invitation came from D Menne. But perhaps the sentence is missing some information.
“Dr. Menne, on the other hand, would have been welcome to join Anthony and would have been free to make any contribution he cared too, but he did not so join. This is not a legal point, rather, it is one of courtesy and noblesse oblige, regrettably neither of which was forthcoming.”
I think it’s been established that Menne wanted only the data. I don’t see any ethical point here, but if you’re referring to the jump on publication, possibly.
Interesting, though, that this issue has really only come to the fore in the past week or so. The “How not to…” series has been running for some time now, with plenty of judgements about the quality of the US surface stations. But people still value getting published in a reputable peer-reviewed journal.
Is the ushcn_station list freely available on the web:
Ok time to put this to rest:
1) I run http://www.surfacestations.org
2) There are 1221 … The US Historical Climatological Network is what they are surveying. Our surveyors select from the USHCN master list, which you can see here: http://www.surfacestations.org/USHCN_stationlist.htm
…
Posted by: Anthony Watts at September 23, 2007 12:00 AM
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/007079.html
Watts reference
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2007/06/05/surfacestationsorg-is-ready-and-your-assistance-is-needed-by-anthony-watts/
i.e. the data is well referenced by watts and others on the web.
In the mene papaer ther is no direct quoting of the watts’ document
It’s data is referenced
It is acknowledged as a source of data.
the use policy for the site is:
Intellectual Property Rights
Unless otherwise noted, all text and images contained on this web site are the property of surfacestations.org and/or its affiliates, parents, subsidiaries, or licensors, and are protected from unauthorized copying and dissemination by United States copyright law, trademark law, international conventions and other intellectual property laws.
Copying has not occurred
Dissemination has not occurred
The data has been accessed, but then all the watts/pielke links invite people to access the data.
The data is placed on line for public viewing.
Compare this to the childish prank of CRU mole posts on this and climate audit – data was discovered and dowloaded from a location not referenced on any public facing page (this falls into computer misuse act).
Watts has been preparing his surface station for over 2 years. When will the document be published? Is it surprising that Menne jumps the gun with the data as it is?
steven mosher (10:04:15)
In the case of Anthony he posted his data (photos)
posted his method ( rating system)
and will publish his result, journals willing.
ridiculous! You are suggesting that the rating is all about personal impression of the photos? Surely data should be analysed for dicontinuities etc.?
“free the data, Free the code, free the discussion”
REPLY: Free your name “tfp”. I don’t like coward trolls that can’t put forward anything positive or relevant. This has been explained to you and you persist with your our version of reality. So far you’ve done nothing but complain on this blog, at least Mosh and I have done something, he wrote a book, I did a nationwide project with hundreds of volunteers and published a booklet on it. I have a peer reviewed paper, albeit with data borrowed from me, and another on the way. Besides launch complaints from the comfort of cowardly anonymity, what have you done? Quite frankly I’m tired of you. Put up or shut up time buddy. Prove to us your your self imagined “galactic hero” status. And ahead of time, just so you know, I’m not the least bit concerned if you are offended. Have the integrity to put your name to your challenges. Don’t want to meet me in the open? That’s fine, but don’t come here anymore wasting my time. – Anthony
Which is why you can’t measure temp in two separate places, average them, and expect something meaningful as a result.
Unprecidented link removal at surface stations!
http://web.archive.org/web/20080325080148/www.surfacestations.org/
Not the link to the data base in 2008
http://www.surfacestations.org/
Note – no more links
REPLY: wrong-o, still there in the FAQs, bottom of page. But no longer updated online, but will be published in the SI when the paper comes out. Note my challenge to you above. I’m not going to waste any more time with you otherwise. – A
tfp (18:26:28),
Apples & oranges. Anthony’s data belongs to a private citizen; Briffa’s belongs to the taxpayers. And please, no malarky about secret agreements. We’ve seen that the same people share the data with anyone they feel like sharing it with, and agreements be damned.
And your post @18:10:50 defending the obvious lack of professional ethics by Menne, et al. makes me wonder where you draw your own ethics line.
Didn’t you read the account of what Menne did? He wrote: “If working together cooperatively is of interest to you, please let us know.” Then he went ahead and used Anthony’s data anyway, without saying a word about it. That’s some HE-RO you’re so eager to defend.
If Menne did me and my colleagues in that underhanded way, I would have responded a lot stronger.
Anthony this is why I will not post under my real name:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2010/jan/27/james-delingpole-climate-change-denial
“Within a few minutes of the comments opening, they had published the man’s telephone number and email address, a photo of his house (“Note all the recycling going on in his front garden”), his age and occupation”
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100024152/monbiot-an-apology/ Damocles on Jan 28th, 2010 at 2:23:
“I’ve got to say that I saw the comments on that blog and I was rather shocked.
Bue then you pulled it and that was a redeeming act.”
I’m sure you get similar.
I do not want to expose my family to hate mail/death threats/abuse. My pseudonym is my firewall.
I have posted analysis on scientific threads/ I have posted comments like the above where I see unfair bias. Its your blog do what you will!
REPLY: OK Fine, final question then. Your electronics company there in the UK has a contract with the U.S. Navy for some avionics test systems. Somebody takes that design, reverse engineers it, and sells a product based on your work. Is that fair use?
That’s the case with me here. All my pages have a copyright notice on them. I did the work for over two years, and Menne et al took the work and made something from it without permission, against my protestations even. Unless you are prepared to say your company’s designs should be fair game for anyone to use and profit from, I suggest you kindly refrain from criticizing my project further. – Anthony
Unfortunately I’m starting to lose faith in the scientific process. I know people are- well people and will have their biases. But I at least expect people to be upfront and honest in their work. You’re taught that the data will lead to the conclusion but now the conclusion comes first and the rest is politics.
I do think the appearance of “Is the US Surface Temperature Reliable?”, Watts, 2009 does muddy the waters here a bit on the appropriateness of what Menne did. While not peer-reviewed, it was more than the typical internet posting as well. It raised serious claims from a respectable cache of detailed data. No author, having gone that far, it seems to me, has the right to expect that anyone who has doubts about the claims made in such a publication, in such circumstances, and with a good deal of publicity, should just sit around and wait (for how long?) to leave the claims made in such a published source uncontravened if they feel they need contravening.
I left a “Record” there out of the title and acronym of Anthony’s fine Heartland paper. Sorry about that. . .
geo (19:58:29) : | Reply w/ Link
I do think the appearance of “Is the US Surface Temperature Reliable?”, Watts, 2009 does muddy the waters here a bit on the appropriateness of what Menne did. While not peer-reviewed, it was more than the typical internet posting as well. It raised serious claims from a respectable cache of detailed data. No author, having gone that far, it seems to me, has the right to expect that anyone who has doubts about the claims made in such a publication, in such circumstances, and with a good deal of publicity, should just sit around and wait (for how long?) to leave the claims made in such a published source uncontravened if they feel they need contravening.
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If the author has doubts about what is being discussed on the open internet boards, he/she should go and gather his/her own data, and not use data gathered by somebody else to publish the contradiction. It is unethical in scientific circles. And the scientific magazine who publishes this, and the peers who review it without stopping it forfeit their title to “science” and “scientific”. Using somebody else’s data is ethical in science after it has been published in peer review literature and referencing it there. One could stretch that to conference proceedings, where there is no “peer review” except by the conference peers.
The internet boards are something like science workshops, where people throw ideas around that are not yet published. Even in such a case, if somebody tries to preempt an original idea from somebody else, picked from the discussions, one would have to be very careful not to be found “stealing”.
The Heartland publication is a bit beyond “internet posting”, however.
There is some culture shock here, and there’s going to be some roiling over the next several years while it gets sorted out. I think the discussion of that point is what I enjoyed most about Mosh & Fuller’s book.
If Anthony’s Heartland pamphlet had been a peer-reviewed paper in a major academic publication, all the usual (tho too often ignored or diddled) rules about data archiving would have applied, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation at all.
I just think it would have been cleaner for Anthony to wait to “popularize” his work (ala the Heartland piece) until after the academic publication of whatever academic paper he produces. I don’t see any reasonable reason to think the Menne paper would even exist without the Heartland publication.