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.
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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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So (smiles) you sort of want a consensus on whether or not create a web site on THE consensus.
Hmmmm.
Duster says:
I stand by my first point. This data is social “science” of the worst kind that is being argued over here. It has nothing to do with climate and everything to do with politics.
I agree, and so I guess that means I concede your point. ☺
The interesting point you also miss Duster is if Brandon Shollenberger is guilty of hacking or trespassing as you want to call it there is an issue of negligence. There is a list a mile long of test cases and findings of negligence in the wake of hacks try Sony PS3, Target lately who lost credit card details.
It is clear that Brandon Shollenberger did not set out to hack SKS but if you want to claim damage from his actions and they were illegal then there is also a negligence case to be answered by someone at the SKS website. It is no different to Sony or Target losing personal credit card details the hacker did the act and a negligence case existed because the companies did not take adequate security measure and SKS would be facing the same issue.
In the light of the above it would indeed be interesting to know what the relationship is between SKS and University of Queensland because it make a case very interesting indeed.