5 ms·
> That would never fly in the sciences. Or would it? http://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/mcintyre-grl-2005.pdf http://climateaudit.files.wordpress
by sigil 14y ago
> That would never fly in the sciences.
Or would it?
http://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/mcintyre-grl-2005.pdf http://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/mcintyre-grl...
Regardless of what side you come down on w.r.t. this particular issue (and I realize it's a sensitive one), the fact that global policy was influenced by a paper that used secret, buggy Fortran code to manipulate a data set is extremely concerning. This is not good science.
Publishing data and source code should be a requirement these days.
- j_baker 14y agoI don't think it matters what side you take; the study you link to has long been debunked. http://www.skepticalscience.com/broken-hockey-stick.htm http://www.skepticalscience.com/broken-hockey-stick.htm
- sigil 14y agoI don't think it even matters what study we're talking about. A publicly-funded scientist who withholds "proprietary" source code used in a result of this magnitude is not doing good science.
- PakG1 14y agoThe interesting question to me is whether any government policy was decided on this before it was debunked. I can't see any evidence of that necessarily, but would love a confirmation. Otherwise, isn't this exactly the type of thing that people are upset about regarding Reinhart-Rogoff?
- bromang 14y agoThere is no serious rebuttal or debunking of Mcintyre contained within that post. Even if we ignore the details of that specific controversy, it is still obvious that there are 1) big problems in the climate science community with regard to data and replicability (see climateaudit for more than you could ever want) 2) massive statistical problems with reconstructions. See Mcshane and Wyner 2011.
- woodchuck64 14y agoNot a good example. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_controversy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_controversy, the above conclusion was itself discredited and finally: "The test in science is whether findings can be replicated using different data and methods. More than two dozen reconstructions, using various statistical methods and combinations of proxy records, have supported the broad consensus shown in the original 1998 hockey-stick graph"
- sigil 14y agoBut the result wasn't discredited: there was in fact a normalization error in Mann et al's original findings, and we didn't find out until 8 years later because the data manipulation code was "proprietary." Meanwhile, everyone proceeded as if it were fact. We need to raise the bar of skepticism and with it the burden of proof. Show me your raw data. Show me your code for manipulating that data into the final result. I'm honestly surprised that publishing data + paper + a source code repository isn't required in order to be taken seriously these days.
- woodchuck64 14y agoNot according to http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=121 http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=121 "7) Basically then the MM05 criticism is simply about whether selected N. American tree rings should have been included, not that there was a mathematical flaw? Yes." "8) So does this all matter? No."
- bromang 14y agoThis is not a credible source.
- twog 14y agoPublishing data and source code is the exact problem we are trying to solve at my startup, http://banyan.co http://banyan.co