News Flash : Global Warming Scientists employ bad science practices

hoax is

Here, one of the best talks about a hoax.

Your spelling and grammar indicates that you are a reasonably intelligernt fellow, so I must assume that you did not read the actual InterAcademy Council report before forming you opinion, or, at least, deciding to accept the NY Post's opinion.

Here is a link to the Conclusions chapter of the report:

ons.pdf

Please read and report back to us.

It's all about the science: "The goal of having proportional representation by developing countries, both at the government level and among scientists, is not disputed either by the IPCC or the Committee. But clearly there is still some way to go if the increased number of developing country participants is not to be construed by some as geographic window-dressing rather than meaningful participation."

Oh, it's not about the science after all. But we already knew that-- we've seen the Climategate source code.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

The conclusions document you posted does seem to conflict with where the NY Post was going.

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James Arthur is too ill-informed - and too ideologically blinkered - to be aware that Climategate did not involve any source code. The e- mail files that were stolen and published did reveal a fair amount of anger and impatience amongst the climate scientists who had been swapping the e-mails - they were (not unreasonably) irritated by the denialists who were asking for vast volumes of raw data with a view to mining it for stuff that they could tout as contradictions, and occasionally let fly inappropriately intemperate outbursts, but there was nothing there that suggested that anthropogenic global warming isn't as well established as an scientific theory can be.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Sure. The NY Post article concentrated on the few lapses that have been found in the IPCC report. The Inter-Academy Council mentioned them, but in the context that the IPCC was under-funded and under- staffed for the task it was now being expected to handle.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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The commentator overreached a bit. Or, maybe you don't read bureaucratese--it's a dead language.

Here's how Goggle translates it:

TEXT: "The IPCC should develop and adopt a rigorous conflict of interest policy[...]" TRANSLATION: There were conspicuous conflicts of interest.

TEXT: "The Committee found that some existing IPCC review procedures are not always followed and that others are weak." TRANSLATION: The science is firm, peer review is strong, and those Himalayan glaciers?--looks they're toast.

TEXT: "The IPCC should encourage Review Editors to fully exercise their authority to ensure that reviewers=92 comments are adequately considered by the authors and that genuine controversies are adequately reflected in the report." TRANSLATION: Review editors routinely ignore peer-reviewers' criticism.

TEXT: "The IPCC should adopt a more targeted and effective process for responding to reviewer comments[...]" TRANSLATION: Review editors routinely ignore peer-reviewers' criticism.

TEXT: "[...] many statements in the Working Group II Summary for Policy Makers that are assigned high confidence, but are based on little evidence." TRANSLATION: "IPCC-harvested science is of the highest caliber."

TEXT: "IPCC=92s guidance [...] urge[sic] authors to [...] apply subjective probabilities of confidence to conclusions[...]" TRANSLATION: "All the IPCC's statements are factual beyond controversy or dispute, with a strong nose and a hint of cherry and oak, mixed with wild flowers."

TEXT: "Moreover, the apparent need to include statements of 'high confidence' [...] led authors to make many vaguely defined statements that are difficult to refute, making them therefore of 'high confidence.' Such statements have little value." TRANSLATION: "The IPCC's Summary For Policy-Makers is golden. You can take this s**t to the bank, Bro."

-- Cheers, James Arthur

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Your sources are impeccable, as usual. There was source code, and I read some of it. Horrible.

"The archive - a carefully curated 160MB collection of source code, emails and other documents from the internal network of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia - provides grim confirmation for critics of climate science. But it also raises far more troubling questions."

We discussed it here, you included. Other analysis located actual cheating in the code, mere fudging, and comments on the sad and confused nature of their methods and data.

Anyway, thanks for trying.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

....along with the major ice shelves at the poles!

--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: snipped-for-privacy@netfront.net ---

hoax is

According to Alcoholics Anonymous, coincidence is just God's way of keeping his anonymity. ;-)

Cheers! Rich

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Indeed.

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Reviewers reviewing reviewers who review reviewers.

It would be a lot nicer if independent groups--using their own programs and data--could just duplicate one another's results. You know, science.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

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Hell, graduate students have been writing bad code since 1964 and probably earlier - I wrote some bad code back then, and subsequently corrected a lot of bad code written by other - younger - graduate students. Science seemed to manage to survive back then, and presumably the system has a had a little more practice at coping with the problem since then.

Your desire to discard anthropogenic global warming as a whole because you don't like some of the code you found is just one more example of your enthusiasm for wishful thinking.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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James Arthur is posing - unconvincingly - as a Google translating engine, while acting as an obviously biassed commentator

There were occasional points where a conflict of interest could not be excluded.

The claim about the Himalayan glaciers melting soon was ill-founded, and nobody - except James Arthur - has claimed anything different.

Editors do ignore peer-review comments from time to time. Referees don't always agree, and when this happens one of the refereees reports has to be discarded. In an ideal world, the editors get a third referee, but this does require finding a third, independent, expert who is prepared to take the time to do the job - and finding two referees in the first place can be difficult enough.

Senior academics in high prestige positions forget how difficult it is for people with less clout to find people to produce peer-reviews, and have similarly exaggerated ideas about the quality of the referee's reports that editors have to work with.

Real translation - the statements in the working group summary are produced by fallible human beings. The peer review process catches a lot of errors, but can't be expected to catch every error.

Real translation - the conclusions to working group summary are produced by fallible human beings. The peer review process catches a lot of errors, but can't be expected to catch every error.

Real translation - the apparent need to include statements of 'high confidence' lead the authors to produce unspecific generalities that don't mean much, don't tell anybody anything useful and aren't worth disagreeing with.

James Arthur's desire to convert this into a blanket comment about IPCC's Summary for Policy Makers has lead him to slightly more flagrant-than-usual example of wishful thinking, or - as I see it - outright lying.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

at--

I didn't say the code was poorly written, I said they cheated. They changed the calculations to make the output support their hypothesis.

Code that says fudge_factor =3D manual_constant * years_elapsed print "predicted temp =3D"; modeled_temp + fudge_factor

isn't inept, it's dishonest.

For example they added in manual fudge-factors with comments to the effect that "I had to do this, otherwise our data and model don't produce the warming we want."

We discussed all this already.

They also dumped their raw data. Maybe you'd support performing multiple mystery manual selections and transformations on various data sets, not keeping track of which datasets had been modified how, by how much, or transformed how many times, then discarding the original and intermediate data sets to use the resulting output as if it were raw data.

Well, support it you must, because that's what they did.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

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that--

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contains the comment "In an editorial, Myles Allen wrote that contrary to its treatment by some commentators the code was entirely pedagogical and was not used for any research or analysis associated with the scientific publications showing the existence of global warming.[39] "

Reference [39]is to " Myles Allen (11 December 2009). "Science forgotten in climate emails fuss | Comment is free". London: The Guardian.

te-change-phil-jones. Retrieved 2010-01-05."

Myles Allan will certainly know more about the subject than you do.

In other words, bad code written by graduate students learning to master that aspect of their work.

You have pontificated about what you'd like the hacked data to mean. You seem to think that reiterating your ideologically based certainties constitutes some kind of discussion, when in fact it is merely spreading crude propaganda.

The raw data doesn't appear to have formed any part of the 160 MB of data hacked from the University of East Anglia server (which isn't a great deal of data - I routinely swap ten times as much between my desk-top machine and my lap-top whenever I go to Australia and come back). It seems unlikely that the "raw data" would have been stored where graduate students could have dumped it, and correspondingly likely that the "raw data" that the graduate students were dumping was merely a copy of properly archived material that the graduate students had been given to play with.

As a pedagogic excercise carried out on throw-away copies of the raw data. Back in the late 1960's I was pretty paranoid about preserving the raw data that I'd generated. I can still tell you where the original paper tapes and the punched cards that I generated from them ought to be. The magnetic tape that carried the same data belonged to the Chemistry Department, and I don't know what they did with it after I'd got my Ph.D. I can't imagine that the climate researchers are any less paranoid, and the fact that you can think that they'd "throw away" the original data is pretty clear evidence that you don't have a clue about academic scholarship in action.

That's what it suits you to think they did. In reality, you are looking at a sandpit, and trying to persuade us that the mud pies you have found are representative of the serious scientific output of the department involved.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Since the IPCC was put together to report on the published literature and publish their conclusions in a form that was accessible to the public, it's difficult to see how you can describe their jobs anything other than reviewing the literature.

The IAC's report is a review of the IPCC's performance as reviewers.

The NY Post's item on the IAC report isn't a review but an opinion piece, fairly obviously written by someone who doesn't know enough to have an informed opinion, but with an obvious denialist political bias

- one that you mayy not recognise as a bias, as you happen to share it.

They do. If you knew anything about the science involved - as opposed to knowing what you like to think about the science involved - you'd be aware of how utterly moronic this statement happens to be.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen