7 ms·

Climate Scientists refuse subpoena from Congress

55 points by stillsut 11y ago

basseq 11y ago
Good. The only purpose to reviewing internal communications was to find a red herring to use as a lever to undermine the scientific method. Providing details about the research and the methods presented is reasonable for a peer review, but this is someone with a political axe to grind.
guelo 11y ago
These Republicans are shameful. The sad part is that they will all be dead when their grandkids are cursing their names for assisting in the destruction of the environment.
- noobermin 11y ago
  Most likely, their obstinant attitude will be whitewashed in history by those on their side.
- vox_mollis 11y ago
  These Republicans are shameful You know, the left has their own variety of anti-science denialism.
  - guelo 11y ago
    Is your point that when criticizing politicians one is required to criticize other political groups at the same time?
searine 11y ago
Fucking Lamar Smith. What a piece of shit.
leothekim 11y ago
"Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) wants thousands of e-mails among scientists and NOAA’s staff of political appointees that he thinks will show that the researchers had something to hide when they refuted claims that global warming had “paused” or slowed over the past decade." Apparently climate change science is not in the published research itself, but can only be found by going through someone's email. What bald-faced douchebaggery.
- CamperBob2 11y ago
  It's indeed an exercise in douchebaggery, but the fact is, Smith has the right to subpoena the emails. They're public property. If you saw The Martian, you might remember the arguments among NASA managers about how much information on Watney's predicament should be revealed to the public. It was pointed out that their only legal option was to lay it all out there. That's pretty much how government agencies actually work, and it's not a bad thing.
  - mjn 11y ago
    The actual power being used here, the Congressional subpoena power, doesn't have anything to do with whether something is public property or not, so that isn't the basis they're claiming. It's a general quasi-judicial investigatory power, which can be used to compel any person to both appear physically, and turn over any documents in their possession that Congress, in their sole discretion, believes might be important to decisions made by Congress. That obviously has significant scope for abuse, which is why Congressional subpoenas tend to be controversial, especially if they're fishing expeditions.
    - CamperBob2 11y ago
      Regardless of the legal details, they don't get to keep their .gov emails private if someone with the proper authority requests them. That's part of the deal when you sign on with Uncle Sam.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > Smith has the right to subpoena the emails. Government officials, exercising their office, do not have "rights" from their office, they have "powers". Its important to distinguish between those concepts. Smith has the power to issue subpoenas, and Congress has the power to impose consequences if it believes that valid subpoenas from its officers have been denied (there are some options for judicial enforcement as well, but they are both less likely to be legally available and more practically difficult to apply if they are available against executive officers, so are mostly irrelevant.)
lemevi 11y ago
Why would emails be more important than the data? The data should speak for itself, only a politician is looking for "gotcha" phrases they can print in huge letters for a poster board that they put up while making speeches denying global warming. It's not that these politicians don't understand how science works, they understand how to manipulate people to favor legislation that is actually against their interests. Edit: For those that are suggesting that you need the emails to verify that scientists aren't making up the data, the data itself includes information on its providence. All the information you need to trust the data come from independent verification of the data and from information in the data itself. You don't need emails to verify research, but if you did then there's a problem with how research is published.
- oberstein 11y ago
  The data should speak for themselves. Unfortunately people who don't know statistics think they can't, because as we found out from emails, the data were "manipulated" via statistical methods: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_c... Honestly I'd rather we press scientists of all sorts for all their source code and modeling tool configurations including the raw data that hasn't been post-processed to hell in an "acceptable" way (recalling that the statistics involved in generating p-values were "acceptable" for psych journals until recently).
  - gaius 11y ago
    Any science based on simulation, any member of the public should be able to download, compile and run on their PC and get exactly the same results. It's the only way to be completely transparent. C and FORTRAN compilers are free.
    - mrow84 11y ago
      It's important to recognise that a lot of the model runs are done on super-computers, and the runs themselves aren't always easy to replicate from a practical point of view, because of things like resource limitations and configuration issues. I certainly agree that things should be open sourced, probably allowing for some kind of embargo system for publication, but we shouldn't allow a rhetoric to develop suggesting that people should be making things easily replicable, because that essentially means making very portable and resource-flexible code, which is not trivial, even in less complex domains, as I'm sure many people on this forum recognise. As an example, many models make use hundreds of cores via MPI (along with preposterous amounts of RAM), and whilst I am no expert, I get the impression that porting such things to more commodity hardware is essentially impossible. As an aside, I have seen more bad-faith practice (i.e. manipulation of results) in industry than in science, and have spent approximately equal periods of time in both.
markusbrutus 11y ago
What? 4 comments already and no ManBearPig joke? Al Gore has done climate science a HUGE disfavor. I am cereal.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
Karunamon 11y ago
On one hand, the aims of the politicos here are bald-facedly wrong. On the other hand, good luck with that whole "refusing a subpoena" thing - courts don't generally look upon that with favor, and besides, NOAA is a public institution, so the emails are public record, regardless of the aims of the people seeking them. Being in a contentious field is not free license to ignore the law, and it tends to make people think you're hiding something when you do this.
- tobltobs 11y ago
  Following your logic the emails of politicans should be public record also, shouldn't it? Who on the NOAA part does ignore a law? And if you don't let complete strangers in your house, do you hide something?
  - Karunamon 11y ago
    Of course they should - at least the ones pertaining to their official duties. I do not understand your next two questions.
    - lutorm 11y ago
      You know Congress is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, right? They just happened to exclude themselves from that one.
      - Karunamon 11y ago
        Yes, but I'm saying they shouldn't be excluded :)
- joshkpeterson 11y ago
  But breaking the law has a place in protest.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > On the other hand, good luck with that whole "refusing a subpoena" thing - courts don't generally look upon that with favor Courts generally (there are rare circumstances in which there are exceptions) aren't more than minimally involved in dealing with Congressional subpoenas to the executive branch, so how favorably they look on something generally is probably irrelevant here. Of course, Congress on its own can impose consequences if it so chooses, so there's that.
gavanwoolery 11y ago
Politics and science really have no place together. Politics is about pushing the most favorable agenda, and science is about the pursuit of truth. Politicians and liars have always had close association. Politics and science are thus inherently at odds. That said, I have seen, on more than one occasion, scientists become untruthful for the sake of grants and political agendas (and this is not necessarily referring to global warming). The FDA is one example where money often trumps science. http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/10/common-decongestant-may-be-worthless-study-finds/ http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/10/common-decongestant-m...
- markusbrutus 11y ago
  Grants, careers and reputations aside there are fields like Mathematics where there can be no political agenda because the findings are not input to political decisions. Climate change is definitely not such a field and people are wary of agendas in either direction. Given the huge interests involved it is impossible for even the most well-intentioned layman to arrive at a safe conclusion without spending an unreasonable amount of energy (pun intended).
  - gavanwoolery 11y ago
    http://i.imgur.com/axlcWY1.jpg http://i.imgur.com/axlcWY1.jpg The above graph is the source data for the famous "Hockey Stick" graph. The one below it is similar data taken from another location (IIRC one was taken in Arizona, the other California). Why they chose to use one and not both is beyond me. So, there are some types of science that are more based on perception. (Note, I'm not saying that this instance invalidates anthropogenic global warming, just that sometimes people present the data that favors their hypothesis). The distribution of primes, on the other hand, relies on one set of data. We don't know everything about primes, and have some theories that may be invalid, but the data is isolated and irrefutable. This is how math is different IMO - it has a tendency to revolve around the nature of numbers rather than ever-changing real world measurements. There is a lot of money in climate science and green tech. A friend of my parents got a multibillion dollar grant from the government to develop a clean energy solution, for example. My usual disclaimer - I dont care one way or the other to what degree humans are warming the earth - I say act environmentally friendly either way.
Zikes 11y ago
That subpoena is fairly damning evidence that these politicians don't understand how science works. Instead of scrutinizing the published data they have to dig into communications - where all sorts of theories might be floated and dismissed - so they can find something to take out of context.
ghjkdfshjk 11y ago
I think the scientists should release all of their personal emails if these politicians are willing to submit themselves to the same level of transparency.
- TheSpiceIsLife 11y ago
  Wikileaks them both. Problem solved.
tptacek 11y ago
An important detail of the story that the headline doesn't highlight is that these scientists are employees of the government, and the communications being subpoenaed are work emails. It's hard to see from where NOAA gets the authority to turn Congress down on this.
a3n 11y ago
> “We are just trying to fully understand the full context of the decision-making process,” a Republican committee aide said of the demand for correspondence. I look forward to the day when all email between members of Congress are public by default, to fully understand the representation process that they conduct on our behalf.
sxcurry 11y ago
People like Lamar Smith should be properly called Climate Criminals. I foresee a day when there will be Nuremburg-style trials for the denialists.
clumsysmurf 11y ago
Lamar Smith is going after others too. "Representative Lamar Smith (R–TX), the chairman of the science panel of the House of Representatives, announced plans to investigate a nonprofit research group led by climate scientist Jagadish Shukla of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. He is the lead signer of a letter to White House officials that urges the use of an antiracketeering law to crack down on energy firms that have funded efforts to raise doubts about climate science." http://news.sciencemag.org/policy/2015/10/turnabout-house-republicans-say-they-ll-investigate-climate-scientist-requesting http://news.sciencemag.org/policy/2015/10/turnabout-house-re...
jerf 11y ago
I will avoid the cliche about how sites like HN have one opinion. But I do find myself wondering how many people here frothing at the mouth have, in other contexts, sung the praise of heavy government funding of science research. Or how many sing praises of government oversight. This is it. This is government funding in science research, and government oversight. The oversight committee has the right to perform oversight. In any healthy country, eventually, politicians you don't like will be in charge of the oversight levers, as naturally as day follows night. (Unless you live under eternal single-party control, in which case you've got bigger problems than science oversight committees.) There's no world where the government funds science research but just ships out the dollars with no regard for what happens afterwards.
rwallace 11y ago
It's perfectly okay to say all communication on a particular project of public interest should be open. Fine, set up a public mailing list and tell people to use that instead of private email. It's a lot less okay to lead people to believe their communications are private and then demand to read their email after the fact. What if Alice, in what she believed to be a private email to Bob, truthfully criticised Carol for being a vindictive jerk, and in the meantime Carol has climbed the political ladder and now has the power to sabotage Alice's career? If Congress or whoever wanted that sort of oversight, they should have said so upfront, not to try to apply it retroactively.

55 points by stillsut 11y ago

Good. The only purpose to reviewing internal communications was to find a red herring to use as a lever to undermine the scientific method. Providing details about the research and the methods presented is reasonable for a peer review, but this is someone with a political axe to grind.

guelo 11y ago

These Republicans are shameful. The sad part is that they will all be dead when their grandkids are cursing their names for assisting in the destruction of the environment.

noobermin 11y ago
Most likely, their obstinant attitude will be whitewashed in history by those on their side.
vox_mollis 11y ago
These Republicans are shameful You know, the left has their own variety of anti-science denialism.
- guelo 11y ago
  Is your point that when criticizing politicians one is required to criticize other political groups at the same time?

searine 11y ago

Fucking Lamar Smith. What a piece of shit.

leothekim 11y ago

"Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) wants thousands of e-mails among scientists and NOAA’s staff of political appointees that he thinks will show that the researchers had something to hide when they refuted claims that global warming had “paused” or slowed over the past decade." Apparently climate change science is not in the published research itself, but can only be found by going through someone's email. What bald-faced douchebaggery.

CamperBob2 11y ago
It's indeed an exercise in douchebaggery, but the fact is, Smith has the right to subpoena the emails. They're public property. If you saw The Martian, you might remember the arguments among NASA managers about how much information on Watney's predicament should be revealed to the public. It was pointed out that their only legal option was to lay it all out there. That's pretty much how government agencies actually work, and it's not a bad thing.
- mjn 11y ago
  The actual power being used here, the Congressional subpoena power, doesn't have anything to do with whether something is public property or not, so that isn't the basis they're claiming. It's a general quasi-judicial investigatory power, which can be used to compel any person to both appear physically, and turn over any documents in their possession that Congress, in their sole discretion, believes might be important to decisions made by Congress. That obviously has significant scope for abuse, which is why Congressional subpoenas tend to be controversial, especially if they're fishing expeditions.
  - CamperBob2 11y ago
    Regardless of the legal details, they don't get to keep their .gov emails private if someone with the proper authority requests them. That's part of the deal when you sign on with Uncle Sam.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > Smith has the right to subpoena the emails. Government officials, exercising their office, do not have "rights" from their office, they have "powers". Its important to distinguish between those concepts. Smith has the power to issue subpoenas, and Congress has the power to impose consequences if it believes that valid subpoenas from its officers have been denied (there are some options for judicial enforcement as well, but they are both less likely to be legally available and more practically difficult to apply if they are available against executive officers, so are mostly irrelevant.)

lemevi 11y ago

Why would emails be more important than the data? The data should speak for itself, only a politician is looking for "gotcha" phrases they can print in huge letters for a poster board that they put up while making speeches denying global warming. It's not that these politicians don't understand how science works, they understand how to manipulate people to favor legislation that is actually against their interests. Edit: For those that are suggesting that you need the emails to verify that scientists aren't making up the data, the data itself includes information on its providence. All the information you need to trust the data come from independent verification of the data and from information in the data itself. You don't need emails to verify research, but if you did then there's a problem with how research is published.

oberstein 11y ago
The data should speak for themselves. Unfortunately people who don't know statistics think they can't, because as we found out from emails, the data were "manipulated" via statistical methods: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_c... Honestly I'd rather we press scientists of all sorts for all their source code and modeling tool configurations including the raw data that hasn't been post-processed to hell in an "acceptable" way (recalling that the statistics involved in generating p-values were "acceptable" for psych journals until recently).
- gaius 11y ago
  Any science based on simulation, any member of the public should be able to download, compile and run on their PC and get exactly the same results. It's the only way to be completely transparent. C and FORTRAN compilers are free.
  - mrow84 11y ago
    It's important to recognise that a lot of the model runs are done on super-computers, and the runs themselves aren't always easy to replicate from a practical point of view, because of things like resource limitations and configuration issues. I certainly agree that things should be open sourced, probably allowing for some kind of embargo system for publication, but we shouldn't allow a rhetoric to develop suggesting that people should be making things easily replicable, because that essentially means making very portable and resource-flexible code, which is not trivial, even in less complex domains, as I'm sure many people on this forum recognise. As an example, many models make use hundreds of cores via MPI (along with preposterous amounts of RAM), and whilst I am no expert, I get the impression that porting such things to more commodity hardware is essentially impossible. As an aside, I have seen more bad-faith practice (i.e. manipulation of results) in industry than in science, and have spent approximately equal periods of time in both.

markusbrutus 11y ago

What? 4 comments already and no ManBearPig joke? Al Gore has done climate science a HUGE disfavor. I am cereal.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

Karunamon 11y ago

On one hand, the aims of the politicos here are bald-facedly wrong. On the other hand, good luck with that whole "refusing a subpoena" thing - courts don't generally look upon that with favor, and besides, NOAA is a public institution, so the emails are public record, regardless of the aims of the people seeking them. Being in a contentious field is not free license to ignore the law, and it tends to make people think you're hiding something when you do this.

tobltobs 11y ago
Following your logic the emails of politicans should be public record also, shouldn't it? Who on the NOAA part does ignore a law? And if you don't let complete strangers in your house, do you hide something?
- Karunamon 11y ago
  Of course they should - at least the ones pertaining to their official duties. I do not understand your next two questions.
  - lutorm 11y ago
    You know Congress is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, right? They just happened to exclude themselves from that one.
    - Karunamon 11y ago
      Yes, but I'm saying they shouldn't be excluded :)
joshkpeterson 11y ago
But breaking the law has a place in protest.
dragonwriter 11y ago
> On the other hand, good luck with that whole "refusing a subpoena" thing - courts don't generally look upon that with favor Courts generally (there are rare circumstances in which there are exceptions) aren't more than minimally involved in dealing with Congressional subpoenas to the executive branch, so how favorably they look on something generally is probably irrelevant here. Of course, Congress on its own can impose consequences if it so chooses, so there's that.

gavanwoolery 11y ago

Politics and science really have no place together. Politics is about pushing the most favorable agenda, and science is about the pursuit of truth. Politicians and liars have always had close association. Politics and science are thus inherently at odds. That said, I have seen, on more than one occasion, scientists become untruthful for the sake of grants and political agendas (and this is not necessarily referring to global warming). The FDA is one example where money often trumps science. http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/10/common-decongestant-may-be-worthless-study-finds/ http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/10/common-decongestant-m...

markusbrutus 11y ago
Grants, careers and reputations aside there are fields like Mathematics where there can be no political agenda because the findings are not input to political decisions. Climate change is definitely not such a field and people are wary of agendas in either direction. Given the huge interests involved it is impossible for even the most well-intentioned layman to arrive at a safe conclusion without spending an unreasonable amount of energy (pun intended).
- gavanwoolery 11y ago
  http://i.imgur.com/axlcWY1.jpg http://i.imgur.com/axlcWY1.jpg The above graph is the source data for the famous "Hockey Stick" graph. The one below it is similar data taken from another location (IIRC one was taken in Arizona, the other California). Why they chose to use one and not both is beyond me. So, there are some types of science that are more based on perception. (Note, I'm not saying that this instance invalidates anthropogenic global warming, just that sometimes people present the data that favors their hypothesis). The distribution of primes, on the other hand, relies on one set of data. We don't know everything about primes, and have some theories that may be invalid, but the data is isolated and irrefutable. This is how math is different IMO - it has a tendency to revolve around the nature of numbers rather than ever-changing real world measurements. There is a lot of money in climate science and green tech. A friend of my parents got a multibillion dollar grant from the government to develop a clean energy solution, for example. My usual disclaimer - I dont care one way or the other to what degree humans are warming the earth - I say act environmentally friendly either way.

Zikes 11y ago

That subpoena is fairly damning evidence that these politicians don't understand how science works. Instead of scrutinizing the published data they have to dig into communications - where all sorts of theories might be floated and dismissed - so they can find something to take out of context.

ghjkdfshjk 11y ago

I think the scientists should release all of their personal emails if these politicians are willing to submit themselves to the same level of transparency.

TheSpiceIsLife 11y ago
Wikileaks them both. Problem solved.

tptacek 11y ago

An important detail of the story that the headline doesn't highlight is that these scientists are employees of the government, and the communications being subpoenaed are work emails. It's hard to see from where NOAA gets the authority to turn Congress down on this.

a3n 11y ago

> “We are just trying to fully understand the full context of the decision-making process,” a Republican committee aide said of the demand for correspondence. I look forward to the day when all email between members of Congress are public by default, to fully understand the representation process that they conduct on our behalf.

sxcurry 11y ago

People like Lamar Smith should be properly called Climate Criminals. I foresee a day when there will be Nuremburg-style trials for the denialists.

clumsysmurf 11y ago

Lamar Smith is going after others too. "Representative Lamar Smith (R–TX), the chairman of the science panel of the House of Representatives, announced plans to investigate a nonprofit research group led by climate scientist Jagadish Shukla of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. He is the lead signer of a letter to White House officials that urges the use of an antiracketeering law to crack down on energy firms that have funded efforts to raise doubts about climate science." http://news.sciencemag.org/policy/2015/10/turnabout-house-republicans-say-they-ll-investigate-climate-scientist-requesting http://news.sciencemag.org/policy/2015/10/turnabout-house-re...

jerf 11y ago

I will avoid the cliche about how sites like HN have one opinion. But I do find myself wondering how many people here frothing at the mouth have, in other contexts, sung the praise of heavy government funding of science research. Or how many sing praises of government oversight. This is it. This is government funding in science research, and government oversight. The oversight committee has the right to perform oversight. In any healthy country, eventually, politicians you don't like will be in charge of the oversight levers, as naturally as day follows night. (Unless you live under eternal single-party control, in which case you've got bigger problems than science oversight committees.) There's no world where the government funds science research but just ships out the dollars with no regard for what happens afterwards.

rwallace 11y ago

It's perfectly okay to say all communication on a particular project of public interest should be open. Fine, set up a public mailing list and tell people to use that instead of private email. It's a lot less okay to lead people to believe their communications are private and then demand to read their email after the fact. What if Alice, in what she believed to be a private email to Bob, truthfully criticised Carol for being a vindictive jerk, and in the meantime Carol has climbed the political ladder and now has the power to sabotage Alice's career? If Congress or whoever wanted that sort of oversight, they should have said so upfront, not to try to apply it retroactively.