From Andrew Orlowski, the Register UK:
In Parliament’s enquiries into the Climategate Affair, Graham Stringer MP was surprised to learn that the CRU team couldn’t produce the same result twice.
“When I asked Oxburgh if [Keith] Briffa [CRU academic] could reproduce his own results, he said in lots of cases he couldn’t,” Stringer told us. “That just isn’t science. It’s literature. If somebody can’t reproduce their own results, and nobody else can, then what is that work doing in the scientific journals?”
Full story (well worth the read, please support the online advertiser driven Register by visiting) here (h/t to WUWT reader “Rational Debate”).
In case you’ve never seen it, the Journal of Irreproducible Results actually exists, and can be found here. They have an interesting book, Extreme Weather as it is linked to “global warming”.
I’m pleased to be from Manchester when i see Graham Stringer MP fighting the lonely fight. We have a proud history of independent thought.
Hooray! It was only a matter of time! Now CRU can join in the fun!
I… I just don’t understand.
I can see, if you do an experiment and take measurements to get a result, and then try again and can’t reproduce it, how that’s not reproducable.
But how does that work in dendropaleoclimatology or whatever it’s called now? You have a bunch of measurements. You put them through some bunch of statistics. You get an answer. How can that be unreproducable? How can you get different results? Or does it mean that if they go out and sample more trees they get different answers?
I thought you had to be as stubborn as a mule to publish there.
I’m groaning on the inside.
[snip – this is nothing more than trolling for donations, which is the first thing that pops up “in your face” on your website, further, your email address (ending with @twitter.example.com) is fake, so, I’m putting you on the automatic moderation list for double blog policy violation, further posts will not appear without the express approval of a moderator – Anthony]
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“If somebody can’t reproduce their own results, and nobody else can, then what is that work doing in the scientific journals?”
Whoa!
That’s a brief, but adequate, description of much of the CAGW by CO2 concept, is it not?
“Or does it mean that if they go out and sample more trees they get different answers?”
Probably, that’s what he’s referring to. That would be the reason why they have to cherry pick the right data to get the ‘right’ results.
Ah yes,
Tea leaves and tree rings – and shoes and ships and sealing wax – and other fanciful things…
Mike
Andrew Orlowski has been writing interesting bits on climate for El Reg for a while (he writes some other very good stuff on IT as well) and it is interesting to see how the comments have changed over the past couple of years. From unmitigated bile (well, it is a site that encourages flames) to a lot more support for the skeptical viewpoint.
As always, commentors on web-sites are a self-selecting bunch so this is hardly a representative survey, but the change is note-worthy.
Results in this field are strongly influenced by the choice of datasets and choice of processing of those datasets.
If you aren’t meticulous in documenting (and archiving copies of) your choice of data, the code you use to manipulate that, the tunable parameters to those routines that you might supply at runtime, and any manual adjustments you decide are justified (even if that justification is thin), you’ll run into trouble with reproduction.
I think that’s the idea. Run your model until you get the results you like then publish the results. Hide the data, call anyone who can’t reproduce your results an evil, shill for the nasty oil companies. Then cash your grant checks from WWF, Green Peace, NOAA, BP, etc.
And herein lies the true undoing of the scientific “consensus.” What, precisely, does the consensus believe – the data (not the models) are open to revision to align with expectations? Such an acceptance further classifies that “literature” as fiction.
Data can neither be created nor destroyed*
*Note: Except at the CRU where full exoneration and affirmation of the resulting science are obligatory to maintain the sanctity of consensus.
To the person who said (in the leaked CRU emails):
“OH [frig] THIS. It’s Sunday evening, I’ve worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I’m hitting yet another problem that’s based on the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform data integrity, it’s just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they’re found.”
Someone should buy that person a beer as that person has personal integrity – about the only person who has show any from that group. That and the person who leaked the emails 😉
“If somebody can’t reproduce their own results, and nobody else can, then what is that work doing in the scientific journals?”
The simple explanation is outright it’s fraud as evidences in the Climategate data dump!
CRU seem to be good at losing data, as Dr Jones admitted. I expect that, one winter day, somebody threw some logs on the fire……oops, we wanted to keep those tree-rings – now we won’t be able to reproduce the results. Damn!
I have come across a very important technology called heterogeneous computing on that website, theregister, that many WUWT readers may be interested in. A great video explaining and demonstrating the technology can be watched here:
http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/AFDS-Keynote-Herb-Sutter-Heterogeneous-Computing-and-C-AMP
Briefly it provides some convincing arguments that we are now entering the second phase of the third revolution in computing, which is a super computer on every desk, and even every pocket.
I will be heavily invested (intellectually) in this next year when the enabling software, called C++ AMP, comes out next year, and already have most of the skills required to get started.
We might even be able to soon run our own climate model software on our home super computers, correctly adjusted to the proper values of CO2 climate sensitivity of course.
But ladies and gentlemen… it’s post-normal science, so reproducibility doesn’t matter! What matters is that the political end justifies the “climate science” means–just make up any old thing and if critics don’t like it, call ’em “deniers”, or “flakes”, or whatever else comes to their pea-brained minds.
About time this is getting a lot of attention. It has taken a long hard struggle by many struggling longer and harder than I have (kudos to those many salient folks), but it appears the battle toward re-establishing normalcy is beginning to bear fruit.
Dave et al says:
“If somebody can’t reproduce their own results, and nobody else can, then what is that work doing in the scientific journals?”
Before jumping to conclusions about the “work”, don’t forget there is an equally valid conclusion: that the real culprit is that the journals are not the “scientific journals” they proclaim to be.
“Why?” I ask myself do these “Scientific” journals need to scrape the bottom of the barrel and print this kind of rubbish? What is it that has happened to “science” whereby there isn’t enough decent science left to kick this rubbish out?
Darn, they used up the “One Tree To Rule Them All”, and so can’t ever reproduce the results without that tree. Nobody expects an exact replication of things via proxy measurements, but an approximate independent replication is the minimum necessary for the data/theory to withstand the rigors of the scientific method. Maybe I will design a “One Tree To Rule Them All” coffee mug and put it up on my Zazzle store with all profits going to Anthony. It is “Oli Si Sai Veli Saes Eir” in Elvish.
Dave says:
July 7, 2011 at 7:39 am
“If somebody can’t reproduce their own results, and nobody else can, then what is that work doing in the scientific journals?”
The simple explanation is outright it’s fraud as evidences in the Climategate data dump!
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or uninitialized variables in a program (and several other newbie programming errors) which depending upon programing languages used etc… can lead to no two runs producing the same results.
It’s what ‘science’ is now. There must be many real scientists turning in their grave. Shame. isn’t it. After all, science is (was) the last refuge. Over here in the UK (and I suspect in many countries) our anti-drug policies are based on ‘feeling’ rather than science. When the chief scientist to advise our government on the mis-use of drugs pointed out that cannabis is less harmful than alcohol and tobacco, he was promptly sacked!
tips page very slow! – but if this shows CRU is fit for the JIR –
the following link show an aptitude for pointless results!
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/news/releases/archive/2011/first-climate-survey-results
read, laugh and then weep – all you british taxpayers! Guess that multimillion pound sooperdoopercomputer came in handy for that task, eh?
Peter Bocking lives.
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When will the warmists admit, now that NAS has inadvertently confirmed coal does not contribute to AGW, they were wrong? Is Obama still intent on bankrupting the coal mining industry.
Clearly, not only is the climate chaotic but so is the “science” at CRU. I want my tax payers money back from them. Breaking news in the UK is that Rupert Murdoch has set the standard for dealing with disfunctional organisations, he’s just closed down the News of the World (at last) following the exposure of their culture of phone hacking private citizens. I hope the University of East Anglia can learn something from that example concerning the future of CRU.