First, correcting an error that originated with the blog The Hockey Schtick about not giving appropriate credit. Marcel Crok writes on De staat van het klimaat
One of the basic principles of blogging is to give credit when credit is due. I always try to mention the source of my information and most blogs do this using an acronym like h/t (hat tip). This week one of my own blog articles was not referred to as the source for another blog article on The Hockey Schtick. This blog then alerted WUWT? who brought the same news quite loudly and then also Steve McIntyre picked it up and Bishop Hill.
Marcel, I always try my best to give credit where it is due, and had I known, you would most certainly have been cited. I agree, knowing of your original blog post would have saved much trouble and speculation. I’ve also left a comment with The Hockey Schtick, asking him to credit you. By way of compensation, I’ve added De staat van het klimaat to the WUWT blog roll. That said, the post did generate quite a bit of discussion, always a good thing. Marcel writes of a guest post by Koutsoyiannis:
A blog post earlier this week about an EGU presentation of Eva Steirou (a researcher in the group of Demetris Koutsoyiannis) on temperature data homogenisation created some stir in the blogosphere after Watts Up With That? and Climate Audit paid attention to it. Koutsoyiannis has now written a guest blog to give some first reactions.
Demetris Koutsoyiannis writes:
I believe that science blogs have offered a very powerful means in scientific dialogue, which is a prerequisite of scientific progress. I have very positive personal experiences. In 2008, a poster paper in EGU, “Assessment of the reliability of climate predictions based on comparisons with historical time series”, was widely discussed at blogs and this was very useful to improve it and produce a peer-reviewed paper, “On the credibility of climate predictions” , which again was widely discussed at blogs. In the follow up paper, “A comparison of local and aggregated climate model outputs with observed data” we incorporated replies to the critiques we have seen in lots of blog comments.
In comparison, the formal peer reviewed system, while in principle encourages post-publication discussion through formal Commentaries and Replies, was able to offer us a single Commentary for the second paper (none for the former), which also gave us the opportunity to clarify our methodology (and feel safer about it) in our reply, “Scientific dialogue on climate: is it giving black eyes or opening closed eyes? Reply to “A black eye for the Hydrological Sciences Journal” by D. Huard”.
Writing about the complaints that this was a presentation, and not a paper yet, he says:
But we plan to produce a peer-reviewed paper (unless we have made a fatal error, which we hope not) and we keep studying the topic more thoroughly. That is why we think that we are lucky to have received all these comments from the blogs. I did not have the time to read them all, let alone to assimilate them, so I will not provide replies here. From first glance I find most of them very useful, whether they are positive or negative.
…
But of course these are scientific disagreements and it is fine if scientists disagree. Some arguments, though, fall into other categories, such as arguments from authority or ad hominem. Well, I am familiar with such arguments within scientific transactions, formal (paper reviews) or informal (in blogs), but they are always saddening and also make it necessary to refer to personal information in order to reply.
You can read the entire guest post here, it is fascinating reading.
Koutsoyiannis makes an interesting point about blogs -vs- traditional peer review. Traditional peer review is a slow and arduous process, taking months, sometimes years, and in my opinion is a holdover from a much slower time pre-Internet and email. Usually less than a dozen people are involved in that process. Blog review of papers, presentations, and topics is like an insta-launch, where citizens and scientists alike spar in sometimes a gladiatorial style over broad issues as well as minutiae. Hundreds and often thousands of eyes and minds are brought to bear, often picking the carcass clean of errors until nothing is left.
For all its warts, science blogging has a purpose and a place in today’s world. I happen to think that the occasional errors like this one, where by accident, credit wasn’t given, actually work to improve things in the long run, because as we all know:
Source: XKCD – Duty Calls
Thanks for pointing out this blog post by Marcel Crok. However, his blog post was not the “source” of the posting on The Hockey Schtick. The “source” was a tipster who only provided this link:
http://itia.ntua.gr/en/docinfo/1212/
from which I wrote my own interpretation, extracted and transcribed slides and the abstract, and created my own post.
I don’t know where the tipster found this link and therefore don’t consider this an “error” or lack of courtesy, but nonetheless give Marcel credit for having found this link to a very interesting presentation and for the additional information provided by his 2 posts.
I am also not the source of the confusion about this paper being “peer-reviewed” as I never claimed that it was in my post. Having “presented papers” at over two dozen international scientific conferences myself, I am well aware that the purpose of meetings is to present and discuss new research findings often prior to even writing a paper and submitting it to formal peer review. Nevertheless, the scientific community still calls this “presenting a paper” even though the written version often hasn’t yet been prepared or submitted for formal peer-review.
I, of course, agree that credit for finding interesting links should be acknowledged when known.
Yes if I understand your question, the open source software model is a useful point of comparison, vs the proprietary software developers where the software is only released for “beta testing” after it is fairly far along in its development cycle and often there are imbedded in the code assumptions about how to handle issues and code certain modules which lock in the developers per-conceptions of what the public want in the product.
Often we find that the developers in that model add bells and whistles that the majority of users have no interest in and will never use, and make assumptions about how the user will interact with the software that may not mirror reality.
The AGW community is doing the same thing. Imbedded in their models at very core levels are assumptions about what the climate is doing, and when the model output does not match reality they fiddle with the knobs to try to get the match they want but never consider the idea that perhaps some of their core assumptions are bogus.
It is like the pride of authorship of a writer that makes him blind to faults in his novel, or equally bad the blindness of an editor to a different style of writing than what he likes.
Larry
This is an excellent thread, once again the best of WUWT at work. I agree with pretty much everything said so far. I too think blogs are really important for the future of science.
BUT
There is a big caveat. I have seen at least two instances here where I felt the peer-reviewing process failed signally. I remember two because they left a bad taste in my mouth which has still not completely gone, probably because the core issues have not yet been sufficiently addressed or sufficiently compensated elsewhere.
The first failure was the review of the Sky Dragons book. What caused the failure was the disproportionate focus on the contribution of one individual who is known here as holding a rather strange singularity of interest with the sun. Not only was this contribution removed; the problem was compounded by material that came to light about this individual. In the whole process, valuable material in the rest of the book was simply drowned. In the sense of book review, Amazon manages far better IMHO.
The second failure was the handling of Ned Nikolov and Karl Zeller. I know there were faults on all sides. But the upshot is almost certainly that WUWT lost a lot of competent readers at that point. Still, I always try to find the positive in everything, and the upshot for me was, in the end, good, no, more than that, astounding…
…I went back to the material to check, check and check again. I obsessed with the science of Nikolov and Zeller for a long time, finally got my head round their maths, found it really worked as they said, found their assessment was correct, that the IPCC S-B equations are wrong… so next I started a wiki for Climate Science where I might get their material in a form that not only read far more easily but also was open to updating and correction… but then ran into the problem of their apparent contravention of the Second Law of Thermodynamics… so I dived into that… read up the lives of Kelvin and Maxwell, travelled up to Scotland to come as close to their spirit and legacy as I could… then I dived into the utterly amazing work of Graeff who has verified experimentally what Loschmidt said 150 years ago, challenging Clerk Maxwell’s interpretation of the Second Law… and upholding Nikolov and Zeller… I travelled to Germany to meet Graeff because I wanted to get to the bottom of his experiments and claims… omg it all holds up, this is Nobel-quality material but the universities won’t take on replication because… because… because Nobody Challenges The Second Law of Thermocynamics (except perp.mob.nutcases)… well actually Prof Sheehan has been running conferences on 2LoT and he’s interested in Graeff… so now the wiki is on hold (asleep not dead) while I “gird up my loins” to do this replication myself (with anyone else interested) that the universities should be doing but are not. Well, not so far… heck who am I to be making these claims, retired, no science degree… but it’s needed and it promises to correct something so fundamental that Climate Science has been wrong-footed right from the start…
… ye gods. Anthony and Willis, what have you launched me into???
🙂
btw I agree with Philip Bradly, great cartoon.
I fully agree, the traditional peer-review model is obsolete and should be augmented by open access blog review.
Many of the most important discoveries in science are made when there is cross-fertilisation of ideas from different disciplines. But that becomes harder as knowledge grows exponentially and subjects of study become subdivided, specialized and compartmentalized.
Climate scientists go to conferences to meet other climate scientists. People from related disciplines will attend, of course, but experts in unrelated subjects will not.
If scientists want make use of the Internet but still restrict review of their work to other scientists then surely they could do this on forums where the membership is restricted and everyone’s qualifications are known. However, I think they would be wrong to (only) do this.
Everybody has some expert knowledge in something. Sometimes an insignificant piece of information from one area of expertise can be highly significant in another. Science blogs are important not only because they provide a forum for scientists but because they enable anyone and everyone to contribute. There is no way of knowing where the next insight will come from and innocent questions are often the most insightful.
I’ll give two examples from my own experience. They are only to illustrate a point. I don’t think either is particularly significant or likely to lead to someone’s eureka moment but I have no way of knowing.
1. Some have suggested mitigating global warming by modifying the albedo of urban environments e.g. using white (or lighter coloured) roofing materials. Many mocked this idea but I think it has merit. It reduces urban heating and the building’s requirement for air conditioning and (in some situations) heating.
One little-known factor that effects the whole sustainability/cost-benefit analysis is that lighter coloured roofing materials also often last longer. Because of thermal stress, the manufacturers of polymer coatings for profiled metal roofing sheets typically give a 30 year guarantee for the lighter colours in their range but only 20 for the darker ones.
http://www.cagroup.ltd.uk/docs/Technical%20Notes/TN-46%20Rev%200%20Colorcoat%20HPS200%20or%20Colorcoat%20Plastisol.pdf
2. The urban heat island effect is well known. Some warmists choose to dismiss it. Agricultural land use also changes the albedo of the earth but not always by increasing it, as some scientists seem to suggest. I knew this long before I had heard the terms UHI or climate change as I used to hang glide. Any hang glider (pilot) will tell you that a ploughed field is a good place to catch a thermal. If you want to see a small heat island in action just look at where the birds are circling.
http://tinyurl.com/cxn245j
P.S. I’m a big xkcd fan too. If you haven’t seen this one, it’ll crack you up
http://xkcd.com/556/
Reply to Faux Science Slayer
Could you tell us some of the faux science you have actually slain, O Mighty One!
Though the mouse that roars
Attracts the cat
The lion ignores
The silly prat
So I hunt my prey
Around the house
And to all I say —
I slay the mouse
David Ross says:
July 20, 2012 at 2:01 pm
I agree with all of what you say.
I also argue for increased albedo roofing. There are good reasons why in many hot sunny locations, houses are painted white.
I live in a hot sunny location (Perth) and pretty much all new roofs are of reflective metal that look white from above, and which keep the house cooler in summer.
Although the downside is that it makes houses colder in winter. It occurs to me that someone who invents a roofing material that changes from low to high albedo at around 25C or by the flick of a switch, will get very rich, and save more energy than all the world’s renewable energy projects put together.
Anthony, thank you very much for this and the previous post. I was really glad to see some misunderstandings being resolved here, as well as the comments by Marcel Crock, Hockey Schtick and Victor Venema, who all contributed with their own blogs in this discussion. I thank all three–and of course all commenters (and will acknowledge them if the paper gets published).
Victor, almost all EGU journals (not only Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics) have an open and public review process (see a list in http://www.egu.eu/publications/open-access-journals.html and follow the link “Papers in Open Discussion” in each one). In my view this is a great progress and I hope other professional societies, like AGU, will follow the example of EGU. But as you correctly point out, in practice the number of reviewers/commenters is small–as yet.
The blogs attract comments more easily, because of the more informal style. I had some experiences where papers were in open review in an EGU journal and at the same time discussed at blogs. While the blog discussers were aware that they could post a comment at the official journal site, they did not. This I understand very well and I would say I like it, because it is more democratic and dismantles the idea that a journal is a unique space where all experts and authorities are pent.
In conclusion, I believe that a synergistic interaction of blogs and journals provides the best service for the scientific progress.
Demetris Koutsoyiannis says:
July 21, 2012 at 3:55 am
“Anthony, thank you very much for this and the previous post. I was really glad to see some misunderstandings being resolved here, as well as the comments by Marcel Crock, Hockey Schtick and Victor Venema, who all contributed with their own blogs in this discussion.”
I saw on Victor’s blog some rant about the WUWT posts and skeptics overall, also justifying homogenisation with the need to correct for UHI.
This is an alibi for the homogenisation as it is done.
We all know the UHI effect to be real and introducing a significant difference in the temperature between the urban and natural environment, on the other side the adjustments for UHI are so minuscule or non-existent that it is a misdirection to talk about it.
Bill Tuttle;
Full marks! I MUST obtain the Decca CD re-issue of the vinyl recording I had, now unplayable. I hunger for those tunes and lyrics …