Guest post by Professor Robert G. Brown of Duke University.
Not all scientific research is equal, in terms of its probable impact on humanity. If one is studying poison dart frog species in tropical rain forests, getting a number wrong or arriving at an incorrect conclusion will generally have very little impact on the life of somebody living in California, India, China, or for that matter, in the tropical rain forests in question.
On the other hand, medical research has a profound impact on us all and has a long history of abuse, both deliberate and accidental. From the egregious claims of snake-oil salesmen whose very name has come to be the universal metaphor for “science” subverted to special interest to modern cases of confirmation bias and manipulation of data in e.g. drug testing, because of the potential for profit from medical science and technology it has proven to be necessary to defend the public against bad science. All medical research at this point is strongly regulated at or before the point where the rubber meets the road and actual patients might be adversely affected or killed by bad science or self-serving deliberately manipulated science.
Some of the key standards of this regulation of research include transparency and reproducibility, as well as the near-universal use of double-blind experiments to prevent the pernicious advent of confirmation bias, backed up by the threat of liability if the research process is deliberately subverted because of any sort of vested interest (including the simple desire to “be famous”, or “win tenure”, or “keep one’s grant funding”).
Engineering is a second place where doing science (in this case applied science) badly is dangerous to the public weal. If a bridge, a car, a space shuttle is designed poorly or carelessly, society ultimately pays a significant cost. In this case the needs of engineering firms and private individuals for protections of intellectual property are carefully balanced against the need to protect society. Consequently, the building of bridges, cars, and space shuttles — with or without proprietary components — is subject to oversight, inspection, and again, legal liability.
Climate research has long since passed from the realm of being a tiny discipline with a handful of researchers whose mistakes had almost no impact on humanity to being an enormous, publicly funded research machine that has a huge impact on the public weal. Whether or not you agree or disagree with the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) hypothesis, there is no denying that it has a huge impact on people all over the world. Quite literally every human on earth is currently at risk either way relative to the conclusions of what is still a relatively small community of scientists with a remarkably homogeneous point of view.
Whether or not these scientists are honest — do or do not sincerely believe their own conclusions is not an issue (any more than it often is in the case of medical research or large scale engineering projects); what is important to the general public is that the scientists at this point have a clear interest that potentially conflicts with their own. At risk (to the scientists) is: loss of (enormous) funding; loss of prestige; loss of political power and influence. Many of them have staked their entire reputation and career on stating conclusions as near-certain scientific fact that have a multi-trillion dollar price tag to society associated with their conclusions — however objective and well-intended — turning out to be correct or incorrect.
This dwarfs the potential damage that could be done even by unscrupulous drug companies, by medical researchers seeking to make a name for themselves, by incompetent physicians and all of the other scientific activities in the general field of medicine that are so tightly regulated. It dwarfs the damage that can be done by a faulty braking system in an automobile, by whole cities of buildings that cannot (as it turns out) withstand earthquakes, by faulty O-rings in space shuttles. It dwarfs even the damage that can be done by unregulated banking systems leading to global financial collapse that lower the standard of living “suddenly” on a worldwide scale. It is larger than the combined probable damages from all of these activities put together over any reasonable time scale.
I must emphasize that from the public point of view, this risk is in some sense symmetrical. Taking global steps such as creation of an entire cap and trade financial instrumentation in order to combat CAGW is without any doubt enormously expensive and the loss in this case is certain and immediate. However, as proponents of CAGW theories are quick to point out, society is required to make some kind of wager regardless because the cost of doing nothing if their hypothesis is true may also be extreme.
However, it must be carefully noted that one is balancing a multi-trillion dollar and immediate certain cost against a future possible cost that is by no means certain. It is simply a matter of responsible governance that the cost-benefit of this risk be soberly and, above all, openly assessed. Furthermore, both regulation and liability are absolutely necessary — indeed, long overdue — in any scientific endeavor that has long since left the ivory tower of pure research and become the basis for such far-reaching policy decisions.
Unfortunately, climate research that not only has impacted, but has led the way in the public debate and scrutiny that should correctly attend the collective expenditure of vast amounts of wealth that could otherwise be put to better use has not, thus far, been conducted in an open way. Critical data and methodology have been hidden and treated as if they were proprietary by the scientific researchers involved, in spite of the fact that the data itself has rather often come from governmental organizations or is the direct product of research funded entirely by public research grants, as in most cases is the published work itself. That this has occurred, and continues to occur, is not at issue here — the evidence that this has occurred and continues to occur is conclusive and indeed, ongoing. The simple fact of the matter is that whatever the truth of the hypothesis, the methodology and data used to support it are largely hidden, hidden well enough that it is routinely true that they cannot easily be merely reproduced by a third party, let alone the conclusions be intelligently and critically challenged.
In the ivory tower it is not unreasonable or uncommon for this sort of practice to exist, at least for a time. Scientists’ only “commodity” of value at a research University or government organization is their ideas and their research work, and theft of both is far from unknown. It is perfectly reasonable for individuals to initially hide their research goals and methods from everyone but perhaps a small set of trusted collaborators until they are proven to the satisfaction of the researcher, lest some key discovery or idea be co-opted or pre-empted by a competitor.
Even in the ivory tower, such obfuscation is supposed to — and typically does — come to an end when a work is published. Publication is the final goal of the research process in the ivory tower of the University (and often in a government laboratory) and in both cases there is a careful separation between work that is done with an eye to obtaining a patent or protected intellectual property and work being done (especially work being done with public funding) for open publication with no related rights being preserved.
Once a scientist has published in the latter case, it is expected that they will make both methods and data public upon request and invite others to reproduce and either verify or criticize the methods and any results derived from them. Anything less is a corruption of the scientific process that — when it works correctly — eventually rejects error and advances the sound. This process is often imperfect — even with levelling/protecting structures such as “tenure”, there are differential rewards to scientists based on how well they keep key ideas, methods, or even data back to maintain an advantage over their competitors and it is not uncommon for only part of the story to be told in any given publication, especially early on in the development of a new idea.
Although one can therefore understand the origins of this sort of reticence and inclination to hide research methods and data or share them only with carefully selected collaborative colleagues, and although one might even still respect this right up to the point of publication in climate research, in the specific field of climate research the public stakes are too high for this practice, however common it might or might not be in the study of poison dart frogs or the physics of graphene, to be tolerated.
The conclusions of modern climate research are almost exclusively based on published results such as the (now infamous) “Hockey Stick” graphs produced by Mann, et. al. and data sets such as HadCrut3. HadCrut3 itself is currently made readily available, but only as processed results obtained by some means from streams of raw data that are not. It is, in fact, essentially impossible for a third party to take the actual data used in the current HadCrut3 snapshot published by the Met Office at the Hadley Center, feed it to the actual code used to generate the processed data, and verify even the very limited fact that the data and the code do indeed produce the same result when run on different computers, let alone that the methodology used to produce the result from the data is robust and sound.
It must once again be emphasized that public policy decisions that have been made, are being made, and will be made in the future based on the raw data and methodology used will cost every living person on earth on average several thousand dollars, at least. Again this is stated without prejudice concerning whether or not the published temperatures are, or are not sound, or whether CAGW is, or is not, a well-supported scientific hypothesis. If it is true and we do nothing, it will cost thousand of dollars per living person and many lives over decades. If it is false and we spend money like water to prevent it anyway, it will cost thousands of dollars per living person and many lives over decades; in addition, it will do incalculable cost to the credibility of “the scientist” in the minds of the public that further amplifies this monetary damage by altering the profile of government funded research and the level of trust accorded to all scientists in the public eye.
I am writing this article to call for new legislation to address this issue, legislation that creates direct oversight for climate researchers whose work directly impacts the decision making process directing this enormous but unavoidable gamble. I am writing this as a citizen that is already paying for decisions based on the “certain” conclusion of CAGW — if this conclusion is certain, then it is certainly true that it can be transparently certain, with the entire process used to arrive at it right back to the original raw data open to public and scientific scrutiny not only by those that agree with it but by those that honestly disagree with it or merely have doubts that it is true and would like to verify it for themselves.
I would suggest that this legislation be soberly and conservatively drafted so that it in no way hinders climate researchers from carrying out their research but adds the following requirements that must both precede and follow any published result that impacts the decision process.
a) All numerical code, and input data (that is, the raw input data including any that is for any reason available from one’s source but not included in the computation, along with the provenance of all the raw data) used in arriving at some conclusion must be openly published in an immediately usable form and made readily available to anyone in the world as of the date of publication in any journal, public presentation at conferences or workshops, or publication or inclusion as a reference in policy document such as IPCC reports.
This legislation shall apply to publications based on proprietary data as well as data from public sources. The immense cost of the public decisions based on such publications and the risk of corruption of the results cherrypicked or data that might have been altered in hidden ways by vested interests is too great to permit data to be used or selected from any source that cannot be checked in its entirety, including the data that is left out.
Note well that this precise measure is indeed needed. The FOIA has already proven to be inadequate to compel the release of code and data used to generate datasets such as HadCrut3 or the “Hockey Stick” or “Spaghetti Graph” curves that currently support many of the conclusions of climate researchers.
Note also that this is hardly a burdensome requirement. It is sound practice already to carefully provide provenance and good organization for one’s raw data, to provide sound backup and revision control for the computer code used to process the data that permits “snapshotting” of the code actually used to produce a result, and to archive both for any given publication in case one’s methodology is ever called into question. The only additional requirement this imposes is to set up a website and put the data and code snapshot there with a short piece of documentation accompanying it that frankly will be of as much benefit to the researchers in the long run as it is to anyone seeking to download code and data to check results. Nowadays the cost of this is so low as to be “zero” and in any event is trivially within the means of any grant funded climate research program that almost certainly is already using one or more web servers to disseminate both results and data.
b) The establishment of a board of governance for the science with the specific and narrow purview of addressing abuses of the open scientific process. The need for such a board, and the need to staff it with people who are completely disconnected from climate or environmental research or any political organization or corporate organization with any possible interest in the outcome is clearly demonstrated in the occult Climategate conversations where it is revealed that certain researchers working in the field are far more concerned with “causes” and “winning the PR war” than with the science and are willing to deliberate tamper with data and methodology to hide results that confound their desired conclusions or to directly and deliberately subvert e.g. the objectivity and independence of the journal review process to suppress competing points of view right or wrong as they might be! The only place such discussions should occur is openly, in the literature itself, in the form of critical counter-articles or published comments, not in behind the scenes efforts to discredit editors or have them fired.
Note well that implementing provision a) will make tampering with data or methods far more difficult, but not (as evidence from medical research abuses reveals) impossible, and nothing (so far) seems to have worked to maintain any semblance of fair play in the public debate — on both sides of the climate issues. Even if the only sanction used by the oversight board is public censure and the probable elimination of future funding, those are probably enough in a world where one’s scientific reputation and ability to continue work are one’s greatest treasure.
c) The establishment of personal liability for any work that is published wherein it is later shown that the researcher did knowingly and deliberately manipulate data or methods so that their arguments lead towards a predetermined end (confirmation bias, cherrypicking data) without openly indicating what was done and why in the publications. Again, there is ample precedent for such liability (and the corresponding governance and oversight) in all scientific and technical endeavors that directly impact on the public weal, in particular in medical research. There should be considerable freedom under this rule to make honest mistakes or to pursue unpopular or popular conclusions — one of the major purposes of provision a) above is that it should ensure that there should never again be a good reason for sanctioning a researcher after the fact of publication by guaranteeing transparency — but just as would be (and historically, often has been) the case when it is determined that a published medical study where the researcher or corporation sponsoring the research “fudged” the data and as a result patients died or suffered losses makes the researchers and/or sponsors legally liable for the damage, there need to be at least limited liability and public sanctions in climate research to provide a strong disincentive to academic dishonesty or the protection of interests that, in the end, are not strictly the pursuit of scientific truth.
Needless to say, no researcher can afford to pay the true liability cost of a mistake in a ten-trillion dollar public policy decision driven by their work, but actual overt dishonesty and work performed with hidden/vested interests cannot be allowed to proceed unpunished, either. This has proven to be absolutely true in countless other, far less costly, realms of scientific, economic and sociopolitical endeavor — wherever an unregulated marginal advantage exists to be exploited by an unscrupulous individual, sooner or later such an individual shows up to exploit it. There is far too much at stake here not to protect the public good.
To conclude, much of what happens on this and other blogs, e.g. Climate Audit, is ultimately fruitless. Much energy and time is expended discussing this abuse or that abuse of good scientific methodology without any real hope of putting it right or on e.g. FOIA requests and other straightforward (but openly obstructed) attempts to simply understand how various numbers that purport to show anomalous warming were generated. The place progress has been made is primarily in a very few, but extremely significant cases (e.g. the deconstruction of the infamous “hockey stick” graph that at this point is completely discredited in spite of having dominated public discourse and public policy decisioning for over a decade) when access has been obtained to raw data and actual computational code. Mistakes that may well have misdirected hundreds of billions of dollars of public money could easily have been averted by legislation like that suggested above mandating a completely open and above-board process.
Those who advocate the CAGW hypothesis should welcome such legislature — if they have nothing to hide and their results can indeed convince “97% of scientists” as claimed, then they should make it easy for those scientists to not just read their published results (working from hidden data) but to be able to verify how their work advances from the hiddent. They, and their “cause”, can only benefit from a completely data-transparent process if their conclusion is correct.
Advocates are mistaken in treating the CAGW hypothesis as a public relations problem to be solved or a cause to be fought for in the first place (terms bandied about in a most disturbing way in the Climategate communications however they were intended), often discussed as alternatives to the far simpler option of publishing papers that address and attempt to refute competing claims, ideally acknowledging points where they might have a point. Scientific discourse has no room whatsoever for either of these as the popularity of an idea is irrelevant to its probable truth, and “causes” smack of either political or religious thinking, both of them ultimately irrational in different ways. An idea is held to be correct when it is well-supported by a mix of good fundamental science, reliable data, and openly reproducible, openly critically examined methods, and any good scientist will always bear in mind the fact that however much they “like” their own conclusions, they could be wrong.
There is little that is certain in science, and good science is honest about the uncertainties even when — perhaps especially when — there is a lot at stake.
Yes, this is a high standard of truth, one that will take time to achieve, especially in a field as complex as climatology, where many results are obtained by means of rather complex computational or statistical methods that rightly should be closely scrutinized as it is all too easy to either “lie” with or be honestly misled by an incorrect model (again this happens so often that we have a whole terminology such as “garbage in, garbage out” to describe it) or incorrect statistical analysis — the latter especially is a bete noire in sciences (and medical research) with far less impact on the public purse than climate research.
Nowhere are the stakes higher; nowhere is the oversight lower and the methodology ultimately more deliberately hidden than it currently is in climate research. And why? If CAGW is indeed true, a truly open process of research and decision making should be openly and even enthusiastically embraced by supporters of CAGW, because it will equally well compel skeptics of CAGW to provide full access to their methods and data and reveal possible vested interests. How often have we all heard the litany “anyone who criticizes CAGW is supported by the oil industry” (and seen scurrilous allegations to that effect in the ongoing discussion revealed by Climategate). Well, here is an opportunity to provide objective oversight and liability in the unlikely event that this is true — but in both directions.
I would therefore strongly suggest that a sympathetic advocate be found who would sponsor the a-b-c rules above as actual legislation to govern all climate research, publicly funded or not, that is actually used to influence large scale public policy decisions. Indeed, I would call on all climate researchers and journal editors to enforce “voluntarily” compliance with rule a) whether or not such legislation is ever written! Climategate 1 and 2 documents have clearly, and shamefully, revealed that many climate researchers currently knowingly and deliberately refuse to make either data or code/methods publicly available even when proper FOIA requests have been made. Journals such as Nature or Science have a deep responsibility to ensure transparency in any papers they choose to publish that have such a huge real cost and impact on public affairs either way their hypotheses are ultimately resolved. Papers published in climate science that specifically address the issue of global warming, including papers published in the past, should be given a reasonable opportunity to provide provenance and access to raw data and methods and, if that provenance is not forthcoming for any reason, the papers should be publicly repudiated by the journal and withdrawn.
Perhaps we could call it “Mcintyre’s Law”, since few people have fought this battle more frequently, and more fruitlessly in far too many cases, than Steve Mcintyre.
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Smokey: I think you excel in hyperbole. There is no need to be insulting and mean-spirited. The expression of disagreement does not require harsh language.
The “science” that you speak of does not exist Smokey. I read a ton of criticism, but very little well documented, empirical research. Where are the scientists from the skeptic camp writing conducting research in the Arctic; where are the oceanographers from your “clique” publishing their studies of the words changing oceans; how about glaciologists and their work on the world’s vanishing glaciers. I could go on asking these real questions Smokey and please be aware I’m not being rhetorical.
AS I said earlier, if everyone conducts acceptable research and publishes their work, we will know that the truth will have been clarified and we can reasonably conclude that the world is as the scientists describe.
Robert Brown says: @ur momisugly December 3, 2011 at 8:08 am
…. I won’t even bother to go down the list of things that are features of your daily life that would not exist if it were not for the government funding of research….
Ayn Rand, alas, got it wrong. Not completely wrong, of course. It’s just the the optimal point for a rational society is somewhere between the poles of Ms. Rand and Mr. Marx. Both the endpoints are clearly unsuitable in well-known ways. In between, finding the optimum is a difficult problem in multivariate optimization on a time varying surface, it is surfing the wave as the wave itself changes. But we digress…
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I am not sure I agree with that.
As far as I am concerned on the one hand we need capitalism, private property, the right of contract and the freedom to innovate and produce with rewards for doing so. On the other hand as civilized people we need the “cooperation” to handle big projects, take care of the helpless and tackle the pure research that advances our civilization.
I do not call this needed “Cooperation” by the name of “Socialism” or “Collectivism” or “Marxism” because it is not, even though many will try to tell us it is. The key point with all forms of “Collectivism” is that the group — ultimately “the state” — is more important than the individual. With “Cooperation” the free individual along with others can decide what projects to support because the project advances both his welfare and that of others.
It is a subtle but very important difference and I think one of the points that Ayn Rand was trying to get across. We do NOT have to subordinate our welfare and wishes in order to be civilized. AND it is very very dangerous to make the group more important than the individual because the is the road to tyranny.
This is the big point that Marx forgot. “The State” is always composed of people and you never ever want to make those people in power — “The State” — more important than the individuals they govern, because then the interests of the state (the people in power) can be used to justify any type of atrocity, as we have seen in practice where “Collectivism” was the justification for the government.
As more than one great leader has said the price of freedom is Vigilance. That is where we as citizens have fallen down. We have ignored our governments, many do not even bother to vote and therefore we have allowed a small clique to takeover without even being aware that it has happened.
“Free government is founded in jealousy, not confidence. It is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind those we are obliged to trust with power…. In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in men, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.” — Thomas Jeffferson, 1799
“Voting is no substitute for the eternal vigilance that every friend of freedom must demonstrate towards government. If our freedom is to survive, Americans must become far better informed of the dangers from Washington — regardless of who wins the Presidency.” — James Bovard
To keep a vigilant eye on those who govern, I want a small local government. As the EU and the UN has shown the larger and farther removed the governing body is from those they govern, the more room for “Hanky panky” and down right criminal fraud there is.
Hugh Pepper,
You don’t seem to understand how difficult it is for a skeptical scientist to get published in a climate journal. That’s why we have to ferret out the truth here. So, to answer your points:
The ocean heat is not accelerating, as was universally predicted by the alarmist scientists and their followers. To paraphrase J.M. Keynes: when the facts changed, he changed his mind. Sea level rise is decelerating. Why do you insist that the oceans show anything but nartural variability? Isn’t it time to change your mind?
And glaciers advanced during the LIA, crushing villages in their paths. They have been receding since then. It is evidence of natural global warming. But there is no evidence that human CO2 emissions have any effect at all on glaciers. Your belief system is the only basis for assuming that, because there is no scientific evidence to support it.
Why do you think Michael Mann, Phil Jones and their cohort fight transparency of their methods, data, code and metadata tooth and nail? We’re not talking nuclear defense secrets here, it’s essentially just long term weather. Transparency is essential for the scientific method to work, so other scientists would be able to replicate what the climate charlatans are claiming. But the emails show those people conspiring to use every underhanded method they can think of to thwart FOIA requests. That means they have plenty to hide, no?
So Hugh, if you’re not carrying water for them, explain why they should be allowed to jettison the scientific method in favor of secrecy. Why should this particular climate clique be exempt from transparency, when it’s taken for granted in other scientific fields? While you’re at it, explain why they conspired to wreck the careers of anyone who had a different point of view than theirs? And not just once, but time after time, year after year. And they had some success in getting otther scientists fired, and causing mass resignations from journals. Explain for us how that is A-OK.
The answer to problems is not more government spending. It’s less. The problem in climate isn’t endemic through all science and doesn’t call for the creation of yet another bureacracy. The comparison with medicine was ridiculous. It takes 10+ years to get a new drug approved. Ya figure that’ll work out for scientific publishing?
I can hardly believe all the otherwise sane conservatives here that are so ready to throw good money after bad in this pursuit. The answer is to throw the bums out of government who support climate science and stop funding the crap with tax dollars and stop listening to the asshats who practice it. It’s not complicated and it results in less spending not more.
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Dave Springer says:
December 3, 2011 at 12:17 pm
Oh c’mon Rob. Regulation of science only works for science. Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming is a religion. It’s therefore protected by the 1st amendment in the United States.
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Dave you come up with some goodies, but that is the best one yet.
ROTFLMAO…
davidmhoffer says:
December 3, 2011 at 3:17 pm
…..The analysis of the data should be contracted to private industry. Contractors that produce quanitifable and verifiable results….
When you get paid to collect data, analyze it, and produce a result, you get the result you want. When you get paid to answer a question to the best of your ability based on the data available, you get to bid on the next contract by doing a good job on the last one.
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In theory I agree, unfortunately it is always the low ball bid not the best who is hired.
Dave Springer says:
December 3, 2011 at 4:09 pm
….I can hardly believe all the otherwise sane conservatives here that are so ready to throw good money after bad in this pursuit. The answer is to throw the bums out of government who support climate science and stop funding the crap with tax dollars and stop listening to the asshats who practice it. It’s not complicated and it results in less spending not more.
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SANITY at last.
I would go a step further. The USA has PLENTY of laws and Regs. for example the 2010 Federal Register was 81,405 pages long.
Some where in that mess is sure to be laws and regulations that can be used to HANG these SOBs. We know that Phil Jones took DOE money and many of these people work at US government agencies or take grant money. Misuse of funds comes to mind if they were lying about their findings. HECK Phil Jones losing the raw data is probably ILLEGAL! If the DOE paid for it then it was not his to lose. Think how the US government would react if the pilot misplaced Air Force 1 !
Hugh Pepper;
Where are the scientists from the skeptic camp writing conducting research in the Arctic; where are the oceanographers from your “clique” publishing their studies of the words changing oceans; how about glaciologists and their work on the world’s vanishing glaciers. I could go on asking these real questions Smokey and please be aware I’m not being rhetorical. >>>
But you are. Contrary papers are being published and if you would bother to read them you would know what a totaly bogus statement you’ve just made is. You don’t even have to work hard to find them. You’ll find all kinds of threads right here on WUWT which are based on exactly the papers you are trying to pretend don’t exist, and the discussions frequently feature input from the people that wrote them. You’ll also find warmist papers as the subject of various threads, and unlike the skeptic papers, when tough questions are asked, the authors of those papers are no where to be found to defend their work. They refuse to disclose their methods, their code, their data, or even respond with an explanation any better than “trust me I’m a scientist and you have no right to question me and you are too stupid to understand the answers anyway”.
You defend the indefensible with the most inexcusable defense of them all, which is that there isn’t any contrary evidence published. That sir, is an outright lie, and the briefest of perusals of the content on this site proves that.
While I agree with the majority of the article and think he makes very lucid reading I do take exception to this statement:
“All medical research at this point is strongly regulated at or before the point where the rubber meets the road and actual patients might be adversely affected or killed by bad science or self-serving deliberately manipulated science.”
The FDA is bought and paid for by the large pharmaceutical companies. When two thirds of the scientists at the FDA are afraid to speak up you know something is wrong. The number of drugs that have gone public only to be later withdrawn and shoddy research exposed along with blatant coverups of failed tests is staggering. Record fines do nothing because the fines are not close to what was made by the drug.
Climate science does not own the “sold their soul for 30 pieces of silver” category. So it is not just one area of science that needs to be cleaned up but ALL.
2kevin
“Yes, that’s why deregulating the banking sector led to such prosperous results for so many as recently seen.”
The markets for money and credit were at all relevant times regulated by the following:
Securities & Exchange Commission
Commodity Futures Trading Commission
Federal Reserve System
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation
Financial Industry Regulatory Authority
Office of the Comptroller of the Currency
National Credit Union Administration
Office of Thrift Supervision.
And that’s just at the federal level, and just in the USA. Whether you look at the GFC from interventionist theory (government has the competence and selflessness to manage the economy) or the Austrian theory (government printing money causes depressions) the interventionists lose the argument. Since the price and supply of money and credit were at all relevant times regulated and manipulated by government, and since the steering mechanism of a market is its price mechanism, that disposes of your argument. You can’t justify more intervention until you’ve justified the last lot. Good luck with that.
But the point is, it is simply not valid to look on a welter of chaos arising out of an area of governmental activity, and assume that the problem is not enough governmental activity.
A similar critique applies to the whole problem of AGW.
“Your argument is to maintain the status quo for essentially a right wing anarchist ideology”
No, my argument is that climate science should be funded voluntarily, not by taxes.
As for Robert Brown’s defence of government funding of science, this also flies instantly to an accusation of “ideology”, This appears to be a boilerplate argument alleging but not proving that someone else’s argument is false. What about you, Robert? Does the same criticism apply to your theories of government? And if it does, how does that advance the argument? And if not, why not? You just perceive truth directly without need for resources to reason do you? Please define ideology.
“Well, you could try looking at the evidence, instead of spouting ideology… no, I suppose not.”
Experience cannot beat logic, and the evidence doesn’t support your argument, because just because a government provides a service doesn’t mean that
• only government can do so,
• government does so better, or even passably well
• no-one would provide it if government didn’t
• people i.e. society would prefer the government service to whatever else they could have bought with the same money.
So you haven’t got to square one in answering my critique of government funding of climate science.
Furthermore facts don’t interpret themselves. That requires theory, and your theory that we create net benefits by governmental provision of climate science cannot withstand critical scrutiny.
The fact that nobility in the past funded science by coercion is not an argument in favour of government funding science by coercion, nor against voluntary funding of science.
“The evidence, in other words, that civilization benefits from government works funded by “coercion” is so vast as to be (in my opinion) conclusive.”
I don’t know why you put quote marks around “coercion”. If you are suggesting tax is voluntary that is wrong both in fact and law – it’s a compulsory exaction. And if you are suggesting that people pay tax because they want the services government provides, then according to that theory, if tax were abolished people would just keep sending government a cheque for the same amount as they now pay and the revenue effect would be no different.
The question is not whether government works produce benefits, it’s whether they produce net benefits all things considered. Obviously if we count only the benefits and not the costs, anything will seem beneficial. It’s not legitimate to assume what is in issue, which is what your argument amounts to.
The question that needs to be answered is *how would you know* whether a particular governmental action – say funding climate science – produces net benefits for all concerned with its costs? We do know that people considered the alternative uses of the funds to be more valuable than what government did with them, otherwise tax would not have been necessary to get them, would it?
The most ethical solution is also the simplest and most practical. Those who want climate science should pay for it, and those who don’t want it should not be forced to.
In a word, freedom.
Skiphil @ur momisugly 12.06
I have yet to fully read this interesting post,
however in regard to open data this webpage may be of interest to you and others (2002+)
http://creativecommons.org/tag/au
A significant issue with data collections remains with the epistimology chosen. Which in turn informs methodology and methods; as has been discussed in the WUWT post modern science threads some months ago. Nomenclature is a significant issue also as parameters become shape-shifters. Classification systems for data collections are to my knowledge here in Australia under govt statutory legislation. Perhaps the EU?
Differences in copyright law as between US and Australia are discussed.
The Productivity Commission (Aus) released a paper in ?2005 on reduction in red tape.
IF the premises of the research were incorrect (ie no hypothesis), or incorrectly used to inform policy to begin with presumably a ‘reduction in red tape’ will not assist efficiency gains in govt programs or expenditure .
Additionally linkage of datasets between govt agencies could have ‘unintended [frightening] consequences’ given what is being written of the activities of the CAGW industry and what is well known about previous regimes that owned and controlled the release of ‘data’.
Hugh Pepper says:
December 3, 2011 at 3:28 pm
AS I said earlier, if everyone conducts acceptable research and publishes their work, we will know that the truth will have been clarified and we can reasonably conclude that the world is as the scientists describe.” ]
We have evidence that you post here – Do you actually read the posts / threads here?
When the VERY BASE of the data goes missing…
When upside down Mann evidence…. Graphic grafting… is upheld….
When manipulation…is upheld
Your idea of truth…is not able to come to light.
Justin J @4.59
Your excellent comments just noted.
Well stated.
Dr Brown,
I firmly support…. A
I firmly support government grants require complete transparency and should be incorporated into the language of acceptance for the grant.
Hugh Pepper says:
December 3, 2011 at 3:28 pm
“AS I said earlier, if everyone conducts acceptable research and publishes their work, we will know that the truth will have been clarified and we can reasonably conclude that the world is as the scientists describe.”
Michael Mann is living proof that that’s a big “if”.
Rather than setting up a funding model for publications I would suggest the Government should simply ban any public funded researchers from publishing behind paywalls as a condition of funding. Then let private enterprise sort out the solutions.
Hugh Pepper says: December 3, 2011 at 3:28 pm: “where are the oceanographers from your “clique” publishing their studies of the words changing oceans”
Here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/12/01/hiding-the-decline-down-under-inconvenient-papers-censored/
Are there laws governing scientific conduct already on the books?
Judiciously enforcing such laws might obviate the need for additional mandates — as well the alternative being proposed here – storming the citadels of climate science with pitchforks and torches.
As for a governing committee, one might be wary of the unintended consequences. I can think of a dozen or so people I might actually fear in such a position of authority. Everybody has a different definition of the “bad guys” in this fracas.
Gail Combs @ur momisugly 4.37pm
Yes, sanity at last.
Thank you.
I read the main post as speaking of artefacts. And measuring thereafter.
When we ALREADY have (more than enough) laws and morals (and ethics) developed and in place in western society and when we deal with developing nations. .
Smokey;
>>It’s amusing to see someone like Hugh so terrified of the black cat in the dark room. But when honest science turns on the light… there is no cat. And there never was.
Is this cat something like Schrodinger’s cat? 🙂
Steven F. Hayward highlights an 1989 email “from the late Stanford environmental scientist Stephen Schneider (who turns up in many of the emails in both Climategate features):”
Because such blatant advocacy is overriding the ethical requirements of science , I strongly affirm Robert Brown’s proposed legislation as critically needed.
Exposition of the problem is excellent. A legal requirement of transparency in publicly-funded research is reasonable. But a “board of governance” coupled with personal liability could be easily abused.
If exposing climatic malfeasance through blogs and published articles is “ultimately fruitless,” it will be in part because legislative and oversight processes are corrupted. Consider how much legislation is “soberly and conservatively drafted.” Note the recent ‘whitewashes’ that exonerate the climate cabal of bad behavior. If it suits the powers that be, a governing authority would be used to further the ’cause’, not disrupt it.
David,
Thanks for the S. Hayward (S Schneider) reference. The emails released indicate how some climate scientists grappled with the moral dilemma noted by S. Schneider. Unfortunately, many climate scientists sacrificed the scientific method for their advocacy positions.
“Just ask: how much of this would have happened if climate science was funded voluntarily?”
None of it, because there would be no climate science. Seriously, it would be lovely if people would stop saying what really are amazingly silly things. Yes, climate science has been horribly abused, twisted to turn questionable support to expensive conclusions. That is no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater, just a very good reason to:
a) Continue investing in climate science, perhaps at a more reasonable level. There are some questions that truly do need to be answered. So you don’t like AGW, how about the end of the Holocene? Is it due to start next year (or next solar cycle)? Has it already begun, and is the “decline” being momentarily masked by CO_2? What really is the effect of CO_2 versus solar effects?
The main point is that once you strip away the hysteria associated with possible catastrophe, there are 7 billion very good reasons to continue to improve our knowledge of the heliogeodynamics of climate and weather. The ability to plan for even the moderate “extremes” of dry years, hot years, wet years, cold years not “globally” but in many distinct localities is easily worth billions — NOAA, NASA, and weather has paid for itself tenfold, nay, a hundredfold, over the decades in ever improving ability to predict hurricane trajectories and strengths, predict the rough expected strength of hurricane seasons, and more.
I live in NC at one end of nature’s hurricane bowling alley and work in the summers right on the NC coast. NOAA saves on average hundreds of lives and hundreds of millions of dollars a year in NC alone, where a big, bad, storm can cause a billion dollars of damage in a day. Compare the damage done by the unpredicted, unobserved 1900 Galveston hurricane (or any of the really bad hurricanes from the pre-satellite era) and then stop spouting nonsense. What we really need is better prediction, more precise forecasting, a deeper understanding of storm formation and structure and steering. Every year it gets a little bit better, and all because of federally funded research.
b) Clean up the science. This is really so very simple to do. It could happen tomorrow if the journals, impelled to do so by Climategate 2 and a certain amount of public furor, decided to. As I said, Nature could decide tomorrow to respond at long last to M&M, allow them to write and submit a paper to Nature to be a long-overdue rebalancing cover story, and formally withdraw/repudiate MBH. After all, a member of the hockey team itself openly acknowledge in CG2 that M&M were right because he replicated their results! That alone is prima facie grounds for reconsidering the article and giving M&M their long overdue shot.
Alas, while that would be very helpful it would in my opinion not be enough. As several others in this thread have argued quite eloquently (not just me), there are plenty of public arenas where a certain standard of openness and liability are legally mandated, because we have learned to our great cost that Adam Smith’s invisible hand is all too easy to use to dip into our pockets on the back of fraud, deception, wishful thinking, religious thinking, and from pure greed, not the healthy Ayn Rand noble capitalist sort but the “screw the world, I’m gonna get mine” sort. Rand portrayed an idealized human being as John Galt — how many humans do you know that can live up to that kind of standard? “One” would probably be an exaggeration.
c) Stop the bleed. The reliable temperature data from the last 30+ years (e.g. UAH) don’t indicate global cooling, they indicate at least a modest amount of warming. A sober consideration of the numbers we have that are reliable suggest that there has been irregular warming since the LIA. In my opinion, the best “uncorrupted” studies of temperature suggest that global temperatures are best tied to solar activity in ways that are far from clear, partly because there are so few uncorrupted studies of temperature and the corruptions that have occurred have (CG2 reveals) often been deliberately designed to erase the correlations that suggest the causal connection.
This doesn’t make the question “What fraction of the post-LIA warming is due to CO_2?” an invalid scientific question, or one that we should not invest in answering with public money. What it does do is take some of the urgency out of it. This is especially true right now, when sheer economics is finally starting to affect the rate at which CO_2 is produced completely outside of Kyoto. Simple extrapolation of some of the existing technologies being developed — largely with government grant money in Universities, where every dollar spent also supports the educational and development infrastructure that is our greatest asset, as it produces each new generation of scientist, engineer, physician, entrepreneur, computer geek — suggests that in 20-30 years energy production based on burning carbon will be actively decreasing no matter what treaties are signed, simply because it will be cheaper that way. At the moment there is no real reason for the government to do more than maintain the support for much of this research, and perhaps to help subsidize pilot projects from which we (the people, and the companies that serve our energy needs) can learn about the real costs of implementation of different competing technologies without making an absurd profit that effectively transferred from the tax base into private pockets.
Under the circumstances, I think that the right thing to do is dismantle the IPCC completely, lock, stock, and barrel. It has proven to be corrupt from the very beginning. Not completely corrupt — things are never as black and white as they are painted — but again CG2 reveals behind the scenes evidence that at the very least the IPCC itself has almost from the beginning been far less interested in objective scientific truth than in increasing its own importance and power. It has to go. Maybe in a decade one could try again, with a much smaller commission with a much more limited scope and little power, or maybe in a decade nobody will care.
The Kyoto treaty needs to be formally repudiated, as being based from the beginning on a mistake. They can all blame MBH, why not? Oh my, we were fooled by MBH and that’s why we all panicked. It won’t be true (rather the opposite — MBH gave them what they needed to bring Kyoto about and thereby entrench their power and put them in the position to advance a political agenda that has nothing to do with CAGW, an agenda that wears CAGW like a mask.
Finally, carbon trading in general needs to be immediately and permanently suspended. Those that are heavily invested in it, whether or not they are actually part of the swindle, should lose their shirt. That’s good old Capitalism at work for you, take a risk on being able to fool all of the people all of the time (or take a risk because you are enough of a fool to be taken in by those trying) and you deserve to lose your investment. Evolution in action — with their money gone, their power in future political discussions will be reduced as is entirely appropriate. Hopefully, Al Gore’s substantial investment will go down the tubes with the rest of them, and all of the profits he planned to “contribute” to agencies that had the sole purpose of making money from carbon trading even faster (as far as I can tell) will go down as well.
In the end, we might be able to have a rational discussion about what the risks are, what the benefits are, and what it might be reasonable to invest in technologies that preserve our oil and coal resources (and thereby reduce CO_2 emissions not as a primary goal but as a secondary side effect). In the meantime, we can try to do some good science that might — over 20-30 years — help us understand what the climate is doing, whether CO_2 is a major driver, a minor driver, or nearly irrelevant past a point of saturation we’ve already reached, how the decadal oscillations work, how clouds are formed and what influences H2O based greenhouse and albedo effects, what the ocean is doing in all of this, and more.
One thing is far from static — we have every more powerful computational resources to bring to bear on the problem. Once we put a stake through the heart of confirmation bias in the field — where IMO the next generation of scientists who enter climate research will be zealots the other way in reaction to the scandal, bending over backwards not to be alarmist or religious about their work — we might, actually, be able to build some global climate models with real skill at explaining the past through the present and perhaps even predicting the future.
This is the sort of thing that actually interests me — I’ve thought very seriously about building a global neural network that is trained on highly multivariate historical data until it becomes a nonlinear “brain” that has empirically learned and encoded the underlying physics with no possible mechanism for inserting confirmation bias into the result. One could then proceed to make it gradually and cost-effectively more powerful until it works and predicts the future with high skill, and use it as a numerical laboratory to help build physics–based models with the right features and right numbers. That would be a very cool project, and one I’m well-qualified to advance.
But until the problems with the input data are cleaned up, it cannot succeed. 30 years of reliable temperature data are not going to be enough to create a model valid over 300 years or 3000 years, and to be able to test model validity we have to have a TARGET — an accepted representation of global temperatures that RUNS back 3000 or more years. And I’m busy with other projects, and have no track record in this field, making the getting of funding unlikely. And I’m getting to be an “old guy” — I have one or two more major projects in my career, at most.
This latter remark is entirely relevant to the original discussion. If you think climate research can be privately funded, please send me 10 million or so privately funded dollars, care of Duke’s office of research support and I’ll get cracking on building a neural network based Earth simulator. I’m certain it will be worth all sorts of money one day (if it works). You get to risk your money, I get to risk all of the work and time I put in, we’ll differentially split the eventual rewards as it produces products that range from the ability to predict the wind and perhaps the sun on some suitable time-space granularity to the ability to forecast first frost in Idaho so the potato farmers know when to get their harvests in by. Surely they’ll pay us for that information, you think?
Mind you, it might cost more like $50 million or even $100 million before the Earth simulator actually works. Or it might work with only $1 million spent in hardware and human time (including my own). But surely private enterprise won’t mind taking all of those risks, and can think of some way of monetizing the output. Right now, of course, public enterprise funds this sort of thing, assumes the risks, limits the rewards to nearly nothing (fame, tenure, job satisfaction, a living), and spreads the benefits around to everyone — by giving farmers in Idaho our best possible weather forecasts, we increase their profits and decrease the price of potatoes for everybody else. The same investment protects the world’s coastlines from hurricanes and typhoons. It gives people a chance to lay in a few days worth of food before major snowstorms so that they aren’t snowed in and starving. It helps farmers weather droughts — not enough, of course — droughts are bad medicine — but knowledge is better than ignorance, even if you can’t do much about a bad thing.
rgb
“When you get paid to collect data, analyze it, and produce a result, you get the result you want. When you get paid to answer a question to the best of your ability based on the data available, you get to bid on the next contract by doing a good job on the last one.”
I don’t think either of these are true. I know plenty of people who are paid to collect data, analyze it, and produce the results that the data supports whatever they are. The vast bulk of weather prediction done by NOAA is not only reliable, it is very reliable, and the raw data is easy for private companies to access and they do access it and process it themselves. If you want to address hurricanes in particular, go to something like the Weather Underground tropical weather page during hurricane season and read the actual products and the comments on how they are produced. This is not a closed process, nor is it a monolithic one. All of your objections simply do not exist in the real world. There is both competition between models and a rather large dose of well-informed human judgement, and they do a damn fine job of predicting the spatiotemporal evolution of hurricanes anywhere from 3 to 5 days ahead, accuracy improving as the time interval shrinks. I spend the summer with this page literally open on my browser at all times (hurricanes interest me in addition to being relevant to my teaching schedule and the preservation of my personal possessions, staring out my back window through the Beaufort inlet straight down hurricane alley).
It is also untrue that corporate work is particularly better at doing this sort of thing. What it is is more expensive. Often a lot more expensive. And there are lots of nonlinearities in the way resources are allocated and jobs are accomplished.
Competition is good. And sometimes the private sector does a better job than the public, sometimes the other way around. In the end, though, nothing does a better job than human judgement, thoughtfully applied, by people that love their work. I see happy people doing work that they love, well, way, way more often in the public sector than in the private sector, in matters like this, although historically there have been a few exceptional companies where you could find it in the private sector as well.
rgb