7 ms·

'Climategate' scientist attacks bloggers

27 points by limist 17y ago

patio11 17y ago
Jones wants criticism delivered within the comfortable confines of the peer review process because he is skilled at how the game is played and knows who to talk to to get papers he does not like killed. Seriously, this is a man who should be sentenced to having his words quoted in every mention of him for the rest of his life. Example: Professor Jones, who once wrote to a colleague "I will keep them out if I have to redefine what the peer reviewed literature is", criticized bloggers for "hijacking the peer review process."
- pingswept 17y ago
  What is the antecedent of "them" in your quote of Jones?
  - jgrahamc 17y ago
    http://eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=419 http://eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=419 The other paper by MM is just garbage - as you knew. De Freitas again. Pielke is also losing all credibility as well by replying to the mad Finn as well - frequently as I see it. I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !
    - pingswept 17y ago
      Yeah, that's pretty bad.
      - alextp 17y ago
        I'm not so sure---I mean, I've sure read some papers that I'd love never to have been published, even if that means tweaking peer review a bit. EDIT: in a sense that the results are obviously false and come from either some ideological stand by the author or from some crude conceptual mistake that is hard to respond to.
    - avolkov 17y ago
      Evil climate scientists conspiring to prove global warming. Yeah right, this all looks like a private correspondence expressing personal opinions, and how the hell this thing could be treated as sinister?
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
tkeller 17y ago
Climategate 'scientist' attacks bloggers
- nollidge 17y ago
  Climategate scientist "attacks" bloggers
crux_ 17y ago
Fun thought experiment: What if this was an epidemiologist criticising the blogosphere for spreading non-peer-reviewed doubts about vaccine safety? Or an evolutionary biologist attacking intelligent design bloggers? I'm guessing that most people on hacker news have pre-existing opinions on both of those issues in favour of the scientist; while for climate science it's significantly more split. However, if you leave aside personal judgements about the underlying truth, the situations are quite analogous.
- jerf 17y ago
  Did the epidemiologist in your question participate in deliberately preventing peer-reviewed studies about vaccine safety being published? Did the evolutionary biologist deliberately block peer-reviewed studies from being published? And then go on about how there's no peer-reviewed evidence? (The combo is more distressing than just manipulating the peer review process alone. Doing that you could argue is just firm belief that the other side isn't science, but then using that as an argument against their position makes it hard for me to conclude anything but malice here.)
  - crux_ 17y ago
    To answer your questions: Probably yes, and certainly yes. The intelligent design movement has made a whole documentary film about their systematic exclusion from the scientific process, for pete's sake! For a specific example, a biology journal associated with the Smithsonian published an intelligent design paper -- and as a result, its publisher was immediately forced out, and the newly installed publisher printed a complete retraction. Further, many evolutionary biologists don't just work to prevent ID papers from being published; they actively advocate shutting down any journals that do publish it... The thing is, if you believe that evolution is on solid footing, and the ID movement's attempts to cast doubt on it are junk science, then all of the above is perfectly appropriate -- but if you believe that evolution is actually a flawed theory, then all of the above is evidence of ideologically driven 'bad science'! The parallels continue.
    - Nwallins 17y ago
CWuestefeld 17y ago
Why don't they do their own [temperature] reconstructions? If they want to criticise, they should write their own papers Didn't Jon Graham-Cummings just publish an article about having done just this, and finding an error in the data? Of course, people like JGC couldn't do so before, because Jones and his colleagues kept the raw data secret. Edit: here's JGC's posting about his article: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1128782 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1128782

27 points by limist 17y ago

Jones wants criticism delivered within the comfortable confines of the peer review process because he is skilled at how the game is played and knows who to talk to to get papers he does not like killed. Seriously, this is a man who should be sentenced to having his words quoted in every mention of him for the rest of his life. Example: Professor Jones, who once wrote to a colleague "I will keep them out if I have to redefine what the peer reviewed literature is", criticized bloggers for "hijacking the peer review process."

pingswept 17y ago
What is the antecedent of "them" in your quote of Jones?
- jgrahamc 17y ago
  http://eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=419 http://eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=419 The other paper by MM is just garbage - as you knew. De Freitas again. Pielke is also losing all credibility as well by replying to the mad Finn as well - frequently as I see it. I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !
  - pingswept 17y ago
    Yeah, that's pretty bad.
    - alextp 17y ago
      I'm not so sure---I mean, I've sure read some papers that I'd love never to have been published, even if that means tweaking peer review a bit. EDIT: in a sense that the results are obviously false and come from either some ideological stand by the author or from some crude conceptual mistake that is hard to respond to.
  - avolkov 17y ago
    Evil climate scientists conspiring to prove global warming. Yeah right, this all looks like a private correspondence expressing personal opinions, and how the hell this thing could be treated as sinister?
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]

tkeller 17y ago

Climategate 'scientist' attacks bloggers

nollidge 17y ago
Climategate scientist "attacks" bloggers

crux_ 17y ago

Fun thought experiment: What if this was an epidemiologist criticising the blogosphere for spreading non-peer-reviewed doubts about vaccine safety? Or an evolutionary biologist attacking intelligent design bloggers? I'm guessing that most people on hacker news have pre-existing opinions on both of those issues in favour of the scientist; while for climate science it's significantly more split. However, if you leave aside personal judgements about the underlying truth, the situations are quite analogous.

jerf 17y ago
Did the epidemiologist in your question participate in deliberately preventing peer-reviewed studies about vaccine safety being published? Did the evolutionary biologist deliberately block peer-reviewed studies from being published? And then go on about how there's no peer-reviewed evidence? (The combo is more distressing than just manipulating the peer review process alone. Doing that you could argue is just firm belief that the other side isn't science, but then using that as an argument against their position makes it hard for me to conclude anything but malice here.)
- crux_ 17y ago
  To answer your questions: Probably yes, and certainly yes. The intelligent design movement has made a whole documentary film about their systematic exclusion from the scientific process, for pete's sake! For a specific example, a biology journal associated with the Smithsonian published an intelligent design paper -- and as a result, its publisher was immediately forced out, and the newly installed publisher printed a complete retraction. Further, many evolutionary biologists don't just work to prevent ID papers from being published; they actively advocate shutting down any journals that do publish it... The thing is, if you believe that evolution is on solid footing, and the ID movement's attempts to cast doubt on it are junk science, then all of the above is perfectly appropriate -- but if you believe that evolution is actually a flawed theory, then all of the above is evidence of ideologically driven 'bad science'! The parallels continue.
  - Nwallins 17y ago

CWuestefeld 17y ago

Why don't they do their own [temperature] reconstructions? If they want to criticise, they should write their own papers Didn't Jon Graham-Cummings just publish an article about having done just this, and finding an error in the data? Of course, people like JGC couldn't do so before, because Jones and his colleagues kept the raw data secret. Edit: here's JGC's posting about his article: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1128782 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1128782