After I published this story:
NCDC’s Dr. Thomas Peterson: “It’s a knife fight”
I wrote to Dr. Peterson to advise him that he had WUWT available to him for rebuttal should he wish. Here is his response verbatim. – Anthony
============================================================
In response to your kind offer, I have typed up the three relevant pages
of the notes I spoke from at that meeting, which I would appreciate you
adding to your forum. I had three lessons that I personally took from
Climategate. Here are my notes verbatim for lessons 2 and 3, which are
the relevant ones to this discussion. You can agree or disagree with the
points I made, but let’s at least start with exactly what I said.
Regards,
Tom Peterson
Lesson 2: If the fight isn’t fair, then don’t fight – and maybe don’t
fight even if it is fair
Only a small percentage of Phil Jones’ emails on that server were released
-The subset that was released was not random
–So it didn’t give a fair representation
-Releasing additional selected emails would make the fight fairer
–But not civil
There is a lot of incivility and ad hominem attacks out there
-We can’t control that
But we can control how we respond . . . or not respond
-Perhaps don’t even fight if the fight is fair
-Fights are never fun
–Even if you win them
The unfortunate downside is that some pseudoscientific nonsense can go
unchallenged.
Lesson 3: Collaborate with communicators
An aside from a Congressman after a hearing:
-You’re in a knife fight and need to fight back.
A science communicator:
-All scientists need to have their own blogs.
A good summary of similar issue though on a different topic by Michael
D. Gershon, M.D. (1999)
-“The experiments I conducted to this point gave me a feeling of
confidence that my work could withstand anyone’s scrutiny, which I
assumed (foolishly, it turned out) would be both logical and reasonable.”
Collaborate with communicators, 2
A scientist’s response to both knives and illogic tends to be more science
-Sound, rigorous, peer-reviewed science
-What we do best
-And in the end it will win the day
–Just ask Galileo
But unlike heliocentrism, we cannot afford to wait a century for views
on climate change to catch up to climate science
So partnering with communicators can help bridge the gap
-From nerdy scientists like myself to regular people.
Roger Otip says:
January 17, 2011 at 7:56 pm
The law is whatever it is, and that’s only really ever known for sure when it’s tested in court my legal friends tell me, but I’d say taking without permission correspondance that was intended to be private and publishing it is a tad unethical, unless one can clearly demonstrate that disclosure is in the public interest (not simply that the public are interested in it) and that that overrides any personal harm that could result from publication (I guess that applies as much to Wikileaks as to this).
Anyway, I suppose the next time I email a government employee I’d better be careful what I say, or perhaps I’ll use the phone instead.
We are at the interface between the electronic web based technology and the laws that used to apply for posts etc.
What people do not realize yet is that writing up thoughts in an electronic format and trusting on the electromagnetic waves to deliver them to their recipient is not like the postal system. It is more like wall newspapers, where young men write “John loves Linda” and any passer by reads it. Most ignore it, unless they know a Linda.
Scripta manent, meaning “written stuff persists”, now has a corolary, “and anybody might intercept it”.
With search engines and smart hackers-for-fun there is no privacy in the electronic world , something the coming generations have to assimilate.
Keep to snail mail for privacy. Even phones are recorded on computers.
“-Releasing additional selected emails would make the fight fairer
–But not civil”
History is not filled with civility in the quest for truth.
Ergo, is the call for civility a quest for lies?
The same people that will cry fowl at the the medieval persecution of scientific persuits, not acknowledging the lack of civility in attainment of scientific freedom, now call for civility against scientific freedom, lest exposure of bad science and ego’s fall. Science for the sake of science?
Wether it’s the squabbling over the “Hobbits” hominids because it doesn’t fit a concensus that is based in theory only, anyway. Or, the concensus of Dr. Hawass in his overbearing assurtions of Egyptology providing, once again, civility in place of debate.
Science should be a Donnybrook, let the best science win.
Doubtless if Peterson had been around in the early 1700s he would have been an avid fan of the phlogiston theory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlogiston_theory
Do they still teach at schools how the scientists of the day can be so very very wrong in their theories?
@roger Otip
This is just a re-wording of the precautionary principle.
A brief analog: My ex-wife and I used to argue over whether to go see what our first baby daughter was squawking about. I’d tell her she needed to not respond immediately, that sometimes babies just squawk and then calm down. Early on she asked, “But what if she puked and is lying in it?” Well, of all the things that might have been bothering the baby, lying in puke wasn’t the most urgent, not by several magnitudes.
Climate scientists have pulled up every form of “puked and lying in it” poppycock since AGW was first considered a possibility – from rising sea level to coral reefs to ice sheets falling into the ocean to leaving our grandkids a desert planet, everything but “the sky is falling.” As soon as facts refuting one of the claims are brought into the argument, they shift to one of the others, giving us skeptics (not Trenbreth’s “deniers”) a moving target – a moving target that we’ve gotten pretty adept at hitting.
Peak oil has been dredged up by every Boy That Cried Wolf since Malthusian Paul Ehrlich told us not only oil but all our raw materials were going to run out – soon. As has happened many times since Ehrlich, we’ve found new oil fields right and left and are no closer to running out now than we were in 1975.
No, the world did not puke and it is not lying in it. We do not have to run scared every time an alarm is sounded by the same crowd. That was the lesson of that Boy Who Cried Wolf, wasn’t it – that after a while people stop listening? What is it about “false alarms” do you not understand?
My nomination for quote of the week.
Feet2theFire said:
Dr Peterson has forgotten that science is a bit like pregnancy-you can’t be a little bit pregnant and in science you can’t be a little bit dishonest. [one email is sufficient]. In Oz we had the sad spectacle of a scientist winning fame for noting the connection between thalidomide and birth defects. He became so enthused that he fudged the results that didn’t fit until his staff were compelled to expose the matter and he duly went to goal. In my estimation the actions of the climate enthusiasts were as bad and they would be wise to be humble amd polite lest they be judged by less complaisant committees. Geoff Broadbent
Roger Otip says:
January 17, 2011 at 9:09 pm
Steve McIntyre
Surely you agree that it is hypocritical for Peterson to complain about uncivil language from others while he himself makes defamatory slurs
I think there is a huge difference between something said publicly and something said privately – and in that I include something that was meant to remain private and that the author believed would remain private.
#######
Let’s take the example of Steve Mc saying (god forbid) Snarky things about Mann.. in PUBLIC. What’s a poor Mann to do? Of course he has many options. He knows exactly what Steve is saying.
Now lets look at Mann’s private behavior. What he said to newspaper reporters in private, what he wrote to other scientists who would have to review McIntyres work.
what he said to editors. Far more damage is done by those private mails that steve has no chance to respond to.
In all of his private communications with me and his public communications, steve has never suggested that Mann is a fraud. His position is clear in private and public.
Mann got an inquiry to “clear” his good name. Doesn’t Steve deserve one to get his good name back? Don’t we need to see all the dastardly things they said about him in private?
“A good summary of similar issue though on a different topic by Michael
D. Gershon, M.D. (1999)
-“The experiments I conducted to this point gave me a feeling of
confidence that my work could withstand anyone’s scrutiny, which I
assumed (foolishly, it turned out) would be both logical and reasonable.””
So are you saying that scientific work no longer has to withstand scrutiny? That is NOT science.
“A scientist’s response to both knives and illogic tends to be more science
-Sound, rigorous, peer-reviewed science
-What we do best
-And in the end it will win the day”
Please define “winning the day”? How can you win anything if you haven’t already set a goal – and by doing so you already have a preferred outcome. This is NOT science.
Please Dr. Peterson, do answer these worrysome questions.. I have no knife 🙂
That only some of the emails were leaked raises the very interesting question of the process by which the leaked emails were selected. Tom Petersen invites us to infer that some malicious person went through all Phil Jones’ emails and picked out only the most incriminating. I find this unlikely. So if not all emails were leaked, how were the leaked ones selected?
As I understand it the CRU was resisting/ignoring several FOIA requests at the time. It seems quite likely that data responsive to these FOIA requests may have been assembled at some point just in case, but then not actually released. Perhaps what was dumped on the net was such a cache of assembled information.
William McClenney says:
“Personally, I rather doubt it is possible for this long practicing scientist to effectively communicate the contempt that we hold for the rather young science of climatology, and the even lower esteem that we have for climatologists. ”
Now here I think I can mount a defence of the subject. Climate is a long term phenomena and any change occurring over periods of less than a decade really aren’t meaningful. So, in essence we can boil down the whole of this global warming “theory” into 16 decadal measurements from 1851 to 2011.
Now that we’ve had the first measurement of this century, what have the climate “scientists” got to do for the next 9 years of the decade except speculate and discuss the last 16 data points?
There is simply so little real data in global warming “science” that the whole of the measurement system could be done by three people almost literally sitting in the pub once a month with a laptop spreadsheet whilst watching football on TV.
That’s the science of global warming and what on earth was left to these guys to do for the remaining 99% of the time except make wild speculations and because they can’t honestly create new data, what other alternative did they have to expand their subject other than to try to find new ways to “interpret” the same data to better “explain” their speculative theories.
The devil makes work for idle hands, and perhaps if those in related fields like geology and archaeology and weather forecasting had paid closer attention to what these guys were doing, then they would have paid more heed to what the data really said rather than what they wanted it to say and we wouldn’t have created such a contemptible subject.
“But unlike heliocentrism, we cannot afford to wait a century for views
on climate change to catch up to climate science”
Precautionary principle. So why the hell aren’t we building massive installations up in space to counter the proven threat of asteroids dropping on our heads? Oh, I know, the luddites in the green movement wouldn’t like that, it would in no way damage capitalism and probably get us no closer to their socialist utopia.
6/26/2007. 12:10pm
“Does the Congressman[Linder] know what he is asking for? I’m afraid the answer is yes and no.
Yes: I personally expect the Congressman knows exactly what he is asking for:
he is asking for all the information that we use so that the climate skeptic folks at climateaudit.org can try to find problems with our methodologies and results…..”
Guess who wrote that mail? You won’t find it in the climategate stack of stuff.
No this isn’t a tease for more better stuff to follow.
To continue what I was saying. Global warming “science” is really the “science” of 16 data points and the next one isn’t due for another decade.
If some gets appointed to a senior post today, they can spend 9 years of a honeymoon period making wild speculations about past data without the cumbersome detail of any new data to contradict them.
Then, after 9 years of wild speculation, they can ignore any new data that doesn’t agree with their wild speculation as “an outlier”, giving them another 10 years a free time to continue with their wild speculation aka “science career”, finally retiring on a huge government pension just before the next result is due.
In other words, this is a subject where the senior guys can spend their whole career at a senior level pontificating from on high about their pet politically inspired view of the world without ever once having the burden of explaining why their “theories” didn’t match the data.
But unlike heliocentrism, we cannot afford to wait a century for views
on climate change to catch up to climate science
Seems the esteemed Dr. James Hansen concurs.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/jan/17/china-style-dictatorship-of-climatologists/
http://hauntingthelibrary.wordpress.com/2011/01/12/hansen-us-democracy-not-competent-to-deal-with-global-warming-calls-on-communist-china-to-save-humanity/
http://motls.blogspot.com/2011/01/hansen-chinese-communists-have-to-lead.html
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2011/1/12/more-green-tirades-against-democracy.html
Somehow I missed hearing about these enlightened views of Dr. Hansen until I noticed the Washington Times piece, where Climate Depot was mentioned. Went there, found these links.
I think all WUWT readers should examine Dr. Hansen’s remarks. And wonder exactly what Hansen’s fellow (C)AGW-accepting climatologist Dr. Peterson means by “…we cannot afford to wait…” As well as what “we” are willing to do instead of waiting.
Re my previous post:
I read, I wrote, I proofread, I checked there were no WUWT articles about it, then whipped up a snack and ate, proofread again, hit Post…
And find Anthony had slipped in his piece!
*groan* Well at least the other links are nice to have.
How can Dr P know that the released Climategate emails were a biassed sample?
I suppose good ole honest Phil told him.
How about he gets ALL GOHP’s emails and lets us decide.
Nick wrote (8:29 am):
“On the basis of prediction, they have failed dismally, The theory is wrong.”
Aye, there’s the rub. If Dr. Peterson wishes to stand or fall by the content of his science, may he make falsifiable predictions. A statement such as “If the UAH MSU stays below +0.6C for the next decade, at New Year 2021 I will concede defeat and declare the AGW theory refuted,” would show his integrity.
From Brent Hargreaves on January 18, 2011 at 2:49 am:
From this would come the deadline of “before New Year 2021” for Dr. Peterson et al to maneuver the installation of “qualified individuals” to facilitate the “scientifically valid adjustments” to the UAH satellite records to ensure that doesn’t happen. ☺
Dr. Stone’s devastating critique of Peterson’s Caribbean paper is at:
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2009/08/05/comment-on-%E2%80%9Crecent-changes-in-climate-extremes-in-the-caribbean-region-by-peterson-et-al-2002%E2%80%9D-by-rj-stone/
Note that Dr. Pielke the Elder changed the domain of his blog a while back.
Dr. Peterson writes:
A scientist’s response to both knives and illogic tends to be more science
-Sound, rigorous, peer-reviewed science
A statement which I would have immediately agreed with 20 years ago, but what climategate has demonstrated is yet another example of the failure of peer review in science. The delusion that since everyone who is working in the same area agrees with ones conclusions then ones research findings must be true may be of no consequence if one is studying mating habits of mosquitoes. In the area of climate “science” the incestuous relationship between statist politicians and proponents of CAGW threatens fundamental freedoms and external auditing of CAGW conclusions is mandatory.
The effect of factors unrelated to the subject being studied is well known in medical research and researchers are required to list in detail the sources of their funding and if they sit on pharmaceutical company advisory boards. The role of politics in climate “science” is paramount and I am immediately suspicious of any research that is funded by a government which will use the results as the basis for increased regulation or to increase taxes. Scientists working in such areas should be subject to the same sort of scrutiny as medical researchers who have to indicate whether they own significant amounts of stock in the drug company whose drug they are researching.
Almost two decades before climategate, Dr. E. Suter published a paper entitled Guns in the medical literature, a failure of peer review which provided an damning indictment of the research findings of researchers who had anti-gun views and published numerous papers supporting their views in such prestigious journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine. This was an example of political interference with science and fortunately the majority of Americans saw through the invalid conclusions from this “peer reviewed” research.
When I see a medical paper in the area of pharmacology whose funding is from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, I immediately downgrade the significance of the paper in my mind as my experience has been that researchers funded by NIDA tend to publish alarmist interpretations of pharmacology. As one of the primary drives of most grant supported scientists is to obtain future research grants, then publishing papers whose views reflect those of the granting agency occurs.
Climate science is not a difficult discipline. The raw data is available to anyone who has a computer and sufficient disk storage for temperature records. 20 years ago performing calculations of mean world temperature required computing capacity which was only available to universities but now every person with a PC has the equivalent of a 1980’s supercomputer on their desktop. This is an area which is well within the reach of any amateur climatologist and people who frequent WUWT have an impressive array of academic credentials. If they fail to replicate results of “peer reviewed” climate science then it is likely that the inbred climate “science” establishment is at fault, not the non-government grant supported amateur scientists.
It is no longer sufficient to state that a paper is “peer reviewed”, but one must also indicate the source of the research grants and personal interest that the authors of the paper have in their conclusions. I only hope that climategate doesn’t lead to a massive public distrust of science.
“But unlike heliocentrism, we cannot afford to wait a century for views
on climate change to catch up to climate science…”
And there we have it. Scientific enquiry not required when you know you are right. He is then a soothsayer not a scientist: the precautionary principle trumps all.
Dr Peterson and his chums had plenty of time to engage in civilised, scientific discussion with other scientists and the general public but took the view they did not see why they should. The pervading reason as emphasised by Dr Jones in one of his uttering, and echoed by Dr Peterson that people might try to prove them wrong, or they would get bogged down in “pseudo-scientific nonsense”. Hubris!
I found this quote attributed to Darwin of which Dr Peterson should take note:
“False views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is done, one path towards error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened”.
Graham says:
January 17, 2011 at 5:26 pm
“–Just ask Galileo” (re heliocentrism, no doubt!)
If only. He would turn in his grave at the thought that his lonely courageous stand against a corrupt or pig ignorant establishment would be twisted so perversely in defence of to-day’s corrupt or pig ignorant establishment.
@ur momisugly ScientistForTruth January 17, 2011 at 10:03 am:
“Heliocentrism would have caught on a lot quicker if he hadn’t tried to paint those who were sceptical of his views – including the Pope, who was originally his friend – as ignorant fools.” They were just that.
********************************************************
No, this is naive. Sure, some scientists and historians and playwrights have distorted the history to make Galileo’s position seem like a “lonely courageous stand against a corrupt or pig ignorant establishment”, but that is just junk history. Sure, the Roman Catholic church was a corrupt establishment; everything else in that sentence is false. The establishment was by no means ‘pig ignorant’, nor were those who defended geocentrism ‘ignorant fools’. Sure, by and large, the establishment didn’t agree with Galileo, though many Jesuit astronomers did. Although the counter arguments now seem to have been wrong (no parallax detected, vertical projectiles not falling sideways etc) Galileo had no real answers to the objections. Although he had abandoned the Aristotelian idea of geocentrism, he still clung to the idea that circular motion was essential, even though Kepler showed that the planets move in ellipses. Galileo was rude to Kepler, and just about anyone else who didn’t agree with him. Had he published his work as a theory there would have been no problem, but he went about promoting it as a fact and regarding everyone else as stupid who did not agree with him: he was arrogant and unpleasant to the point of rudeness. Considering he enraged one of his best friends (who became Pope) by breaking his agreement with him and painting him into a dialogue as a fool, and for persisting in publishing his views when Europe was fighting the bitter Thirty Years War over religion, Galileo was lucky not to come out worse than he did. Yes, Galileo was right on a few things, we now know with the benefit of hindsight, but the establishment was not ignorant (though it was, ultimately, wrong) and Galileo should not be painted as some sort of martyr for science – he would have been far more effective if he had behaved reasonably and honourably.
“-Sound, rigorous, peer-reviewed science
-What we do best
-And in the end it will win the day
–Just ask Galileo”
I agree with the first and third lines. The problem is with the second line. Unfortunately much of climate science may be peer-reviewed, but much of it is demonstrable garbage, more propaganda than science. But I believe that in the end honest science will indeed win the day. I just hope I live to see it. Unfortunately for Dr Peterson it will be the sceptics who will win, and it is the scientists who have abandoned science for political and personal gain who will lose.
“Just ask Galileo”.
Ummmm, Dr Peterson, you seem to have forgotten something rather important. In his day Galileo was the sceptic. He was a “the world goes around the sun denier”. Of course, in the long run scientific sceptics often turn out to be right.
In fact Galileo is a hero of mine precisely because he was a sceptic.
Chris
Chris Wright says:
January 18, 2011 at 5:46 am
“In his day Galileo was the sceptic. He was a “the world goes around the sun denier”. ”
Think you mean “the sun goes around the world denier”.
Why all this adulation of Galileo, anyway? He didn’t believe that the planets were attracted to the sun but that they went in perfect circles because that was perfect motion – an Aristotelian dogma. He opposed Kepler who had data showing that the planets move in ellipses – and Kepler knew about the sun’s attraction: he was within a whisker of Newton’s law of gravitation, and was trying to figure out what the ‘power’ of the distance factor in the denominator should be. When Newton postulated that it was a square law he proved it by demonstrating that this was consistent with Kepler’s laws. In 1604 Kepler had published showing the inverse square law for light. The first published work defending heliocentrism, after Copernicus, was by Kepler in 1596, which he sent to prominent astronomers and patrons in 1597, and he worked out the laws of planetary motion in several important publications up to 1621. Galileo only built a telescope in 1609 after he learned how to make one when in Venice, and others were using telescopes before him and drawing pictures of the moon. Kepler improved telescopic optics in 1611 by substituting a convex lens for an eyepiece, allowing much higher magnification. Kepler’s ‘Epitome of Copernican Astronomy’ (seven books, completed 1621) was read all over Europe and by 1630 was the most popular astronomy textbook, supporting heliocentrism, with planets following elliptical paths due to helio-attraction (unlike Galileo’s idea of perfect circular motion, where they moved in perfect circles because they were NOT acted upon by a force – a bastard Aristotelian concept). Galileo’s ‘Dialogue concerning the two chief world systems’ came out in 1632, very, very late in the game, and Galileo’s troubles through this were almost entirely his own making: political and personal rather than scientific.
Dr. Peterson,
Thank you for taking the time to respond.
Here is some feedback, based on years in finance, operations and international dispute resolution:
– the defense of the e-mails fails. The selected release more than shows probable cause to investigate whether those exposed in the e-mails were up to what they appear to have been doing. The reasonable approach in normal industries when leaks like this occurs is to investigate more, not less. Each of the four ‘inquiries’ carefully avoided doing any sort of actual reviews.
Positioning yourself to defend the continued non-investigations does not put you on the side of the angels.
– in light of Tuscon, why do you keep using violence-laden metaphors? I am not aware of opinion leaders in the skeptics community implying violence. I am, however, aware of a distressing number of AGW opinion leaders who do. Do you want to join that unseemly group?
The fight is about non-falsifiable theories of AGW promoters, their efforts to hide data, suppress dissent and demean critics, all to the effect of imposing radical, amazingly expensive polices that are shown to not work as intended or at all.
Why talk about knives and not fighting?
The fight will continue until the climate science consensus loses its social power.
– The focus on marketing (messaging) is a tell that you do not really have the science.
The more you focus on the marketing efforts, the more plain that is.
Just some notes from the field.
I urge you to consider them.