Rather than go quietly, they seem to be ramping up:
UQ and climate change research 20 May 2014
The following is a statement from UQ acting Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research and International) Professor Alastair McEwan.
Recent media coverage (The Australian, 17 March 2013) has stated that The University of Queensland is trying to block climate research by stopping the release of data used in a paper published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.
This is not the case. All data relating to the “Quantifying the Consensus on Anthropogenic Global Warming in the Scientific Literature” paper that are of any scientific value were published on the website Skepticalscience.com in 2013.
Only information that might be used to identify the individual research participants was withheld.
This was in accordance with University ethical approval specifying that the identity of participants should remain confidential.
=============================================================
Source: http://www.uq.edu.au/news/article/2014/05/uq-and-climate-change-research
This is the first news we’ve heard of an getting an ethics approval by Cook, and the raters are known and even acknowledged in the paper. See this screencap from the Cook paper:
Click to access 1748-9326_8_2_024024.pdf
It seems the ultimate straw man argument.
And, what supposed harm would the knowledge that a few people did some ratings on this paper cause, especially when all of them are already widely known?
Brandon Shollenberger responds:
Suppose it truly is important to keep the identity of raters private. Why then did I just load this image at Skeptical Science:
That shows the identity of 11 raters, and it’s been viewable on Skeptical Science for a couple years now (archived for posterity here). So too has this one (archived here):
This one also identifies nearly a dozen individual participants. It’s true we only found out about these images because of a hack, but that hack happened nearly two years ago. Surely the authors of the paper shouldn’t leave confidential information in a publicly accessible location for two years, even if people have already seen it.
Read it in entirety:
http://hiizuru.wordpress.com/2014/05/20/university-of-queensland-doubles-down-on-hiding-data/
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Brandon Shollenberger says:
May 20, 2014 at 1:19 pm
Cold in Wisconsin, right now I know I want to have ratings for two different things:
1) Endorsement of the greenhouse effect
2) Endorsement of the idea humans are responsible for the majority of the observed warming.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I’m not sure what you accomplish with those two categories. Endorse the GHE? My expectation is that you’ll wind up with 100% or close to it. As for your second category, you’ll find lots of papers that begin with the premise that this is true and then go on to analyse something completely different in that context, which is completely different from providing a science analysis to show that the premise is correct. So I’m not sure what these two categories accomplish.
UQ had played all their cards and that’s when Brandon decided to call their bluff. And what was their hand? http://tinyurl.com/pr3be2g. Great stuff.
leaked / hacked SkS forum (ref purpose consensus project – 97%)
2012-01-28 09:43:00 Great post by Simon Donner
[ref – http://theenergycollective.com/simondonner/75145/rolling-punches?ref=user_profile_other_posts_by ]
John Cook
This is a great post and I encourage all SkSers to consider his notion of the “long game”. What we’re doing with our climate communication is a marathon, not a sprint, and we need to adjust our strategy accordingly.
While it’s fun getting into stinks with Pat Michaels and Anthony Watts, we should be thinking more long-term than spats with denier blogs.
The Consensus Project is an example of taking a longer view – developing a long-term campaign of seeping the notion of a “strengthening consensus” into the public consciousness.
We should be thinking of other long-term projects that while not providing the immediate hit of a short-term controversy, will have a longer-term effect on the public perceptions of climate change.
It might be enlightening to see if a target consensus value i.e. “97%” was discussed before the data was actually collated.
Barry Woods comment May 20, 2014 at 9:21 am “The Consensus Project [TCP], 2012-01-19 Marketing Ideas” by JC might ahead some light on this.
In the list JC wrote:
“•Climate Communicators: There needs to be a concerted effort (spearheaded by me) to get climate communicators using these results in their messaging. I’ve been hooking up with a lot of climate communicators over the last month and will be hooking up with more over the next few months so will be discussing these results with every climate communicator I can get hold of, including heavyweights like Susan Hassol and Richard Somerville, to discuss ways of amplifying this message.
Also Ed Maibach is doing research on the most effective way to debunk the “no consensus” myth so I hope to contact him and hopefully include our results in his research. The more we can get climate communicators incorporating our results into their messages, the better.”
I wonder if “97%” came up in these discussions as a target goal. Of course this would require a FOIA request to be honored that reveals all the communications JC and other team members had with any “Climate Communicator” such as Susan Hassol, Richard Somerville, and Ed Maibach, or any other marketing personal they communicated with before the official results were known.
The raters images at SkS are interesting. One rater that stands out is dana1981. Look at Image 2 covering 19/02/12 to 08/03/12 (US= 02/19/12 to 03/08/12). Dana1981’s figures are a dead straight line from 25/02 to 07/03. On 08/03 there is nothing. This must have been an oversight, as Image 3, covering 19/02/12 to 15/03/12 (US= 02/19/12 to 03/15/12) , continues this dead straight line. In fact in 19 days dana1981 manages to go from reviewing 250 to 1100 images. That is 50 per day. This mystery reviewer seems to have some very regular habits.
I didn’t read the comments but the idea anyone would find data on Skepticalscience.com to be anything other than questionable is silly.
Skepticalscience.com is a spin start to finish — why a University hangs its hat on this site is disturbing.
Unless I’m missing something, “Cook”ing the books = Skepticalscience.com
@ur momisugly DanMet’al says: May 20, 2014 at 11:13 am
“I would have thought that the response rates to a survey request from a supposedly respected climate scientist (i.e. Cook) on such an important topic would get a much higher hit rate than an anonymous marketing survey appeal.”
Maybe that’s just it. The non-responders had no respect for Cook or his cohorts.
Why does all of this bring to mind the legal Maze of the Mannotaur?
I’m not a lawyer but I don’t think any of this Cook-ing the books stuff is anything to get steamed up about. They’ll stew in their own juice.
This story has been fun for a while, but if there’s nothing interesting in the actual data it’s all stink no poop. Why TF does UQ bother responding.
davidmhoffer, that we might get ~100% agreement on the first statement is intended. Skeptical Science got a value of 97% by mixing my 1 and 2 together. If we split them apart, we’ll find one is higher and the other is lower. That shows a central flaw of their approach. It’d also mean everyone could say, “I’m part of the consensus.”
As for my 2, the fact many of those papers wouldn’t be offering evidence for the consensus position is irrelevant. Most material which makes up a consenus does not seek to offer evidence for the underlying consensus. It seeks to build upon that consenus. It’s neither surprising nor remarkable. It’s just a limitation on what you can say about the data.
It’s also something of a non-issue. There are a lot of papers in the Cook et al data set rated as “Endorse AGW” even though they don’t say anything about how strong a role humans have played. A re-analysis like I describe could easily wind up with results like:
Consensus 1 – 99.8%
Consensus 2 – 30%
Consensus 3 – 5%
I think that’d be useful result.
The data-hiders seem to think “confidentiality” is a magic Get Out Of Jail Free card. It’s laughable how many inappropriate appeals to something they have no particular interest in there have been.
Objective science! This is totally the same as physics.
It makes you ashamed to be living in this country when these clowns come out to play! Like in so many things in this once great land, they have become a law unto themselves. There has been two cases (as far as I know) in other areas where the High Court of the land have harpooned these types, declaring that they had no power to implement such rules. Next action please! More money please!
Just when you think they must have reached the bottom of the cesspit of ‘climate science’ at the University of Queensland the members of their varsity team (SkS) prove you wrong!
Why would anyone believe a word they say?
At least there is no danger of any science getting in the way of their politics and religion. The pathetic childishly written threatening ‘legal’ letter in an attempt to continue to block freedom of information requests and freedom of speech shows they now think they are some sort of ‘Climate Police’.
It appears that the data requested should have been supplied as it was under a ‘creative commons license’ to facilitate ‘open access’ and was already available on the SkS site!
Does ‘freedom of information’ and the ‘creative commons license’ only apply if the requester is a sympathetic convert of ‘the team’?
Thanks Joe Public for your response –
Unfortunately, too many folks think that the issues in Cook’s 97% consensus paper can be resolved via a different and better analysis of Cook’s data (i.e., if we know more about the paper/analysis, we can find its faults). Maybe, but with “Garbage IN”, no analysis of data can really derive a meaningly conclusion — for or against.
I believe Cook’s data is Garbage & subsequently cooked (Yewwww!). Given such bad (biased and uncertain) data, no analysis method can extract a meaningful (true) conclusion. Bad definitions, bad criterion, sloppy evaluation etc. The entire Cook assessment seems to have been an ad hoc analysis structured to derive a pre-conceived conclusion. Yes, I am biased Yet, I have no doubt I’m not the only one, on either side of the debate.
Dan
Anthony, the date of the article published in the Australian – (The Australian, 17 March 2013) – is wrong. It was actually published on 17th of May, so I was going to point it out to you. Before I did, however, I checked the UQ news page at http://www.uq.edu.au/news/article/2014/05/uq-and-climate-change-research … and that’s where the wrong date came from.
Yet, the “UQ and climate change research” page has this comment at the bottom:
“Media: communications@uq.edu.au, ph +617 3365 1120.
*This statement has been updated to reflect the correct publication date of The Australian article.”
Something’s not right with that University when they can’t even correct an error without making another error in the process…
Still, the date should read “May”, not March. The ink itself is ok, it points to the right article.
Baerbel Winkler also did not rate any papers. Her contribution was to identify the email addresses of authors to be contacted for the survey. For this, she gets to be a joint author!?!
Jan Christoffersen, you seem rather certain of that. May I ask, how do you know she didn’t rate any?
Only information that might be used to identify the individual research participants was withheld.
=============
How is it that a University, supposedly a seat of higher education, can’t tell the difference between researchers and participants?
for friggin’ sakes. the researchers are not research participants. the participants are the people under study – the people that wrote the original papers – the 97%.
the researchers are the people conducting the study, and they are not covered by confidentiality. Quite the opposite. You want to know who conducted the research to make sure they didn’t have an axe to grind.
Our is the U or Q now claiming that what was being studied was not the published research papers, but rather how the Raters rated the papers? Because I don’t see it. Unless Cook was studying the Raters and not the papers being rated, the Raters have no claim to confidentiality. Which is self-evident in the way Cook and SKS have freely identified the Raters.
Thus, the U of Q is apparently trying to mislead, by confusing researchers and participants and mixing them all together as research participants. Under this “formula” not even Cook could be identified as an author, because he was a participant.
So, you have this group of humans who be it a large number or a small number just happen to answer the teachers questions as taught life long by “Red Commie Redistribution of Wealth” PHD’s of the World Wide U.N. University’s of note.
The suprise should be that its not 100%. It may be the ones who are in the 3% are in fear of their lives should they be exposed as not going along. They are the ones who hired atty’s to keep the info under raps.
albertkallal says:
May 20, 2014 at 11:57 am
So the reviewers and people who “peer” review this paper are to be a University secret? How can one trust and even know that the paper was then reviewed? Perhaps the review was by someone named Mr. Rubber Stamp!
==========
Kangaroo Courts operate behind closed doors. Is U of Q using Kangaroo Review?
Given the list of reviewers and the limited time [frame] for review versus the significant quantities of abstracts to be ‘graded’, there may be some issues of misappropriated time, i.e., was the work done during the course of their nominal business hours and was this tantamount to fraudulent time charges? Might be interesting to sniff that one out…
*time frame* not *time from*
Chuck Nolan says:
May 20, 2014 at 11:02 am
==========
Correct, the Raters are researchers, not participants.
Consider: a professor gives a test to a group of students, to “research” how well they have learned a subject. The students are the study participants. A Teaching Assistant (TA) then marks the papers. The TA is not a participant. The TA did not take the test. The TA is assuming the role of the researcher, to assist the professor in conducting the study.