5 ms·

The Real Problem With the Climate Science Emails

40 points by Perceval 17y ago

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
pradocchia 17y ago
Are there any open source-style projects underway yet to fix up the code & data? I keep thinking this is the next obvious thing to do. The climate models must be specified somewhere in the literature. Data can be munged. What stands in the way? Is the data in some legal netherworld that prevents redistribution?
- flynth 17y ago
  There were some stories published recently how difficult it is to gain access to the raw data. CRU and organizations like it have exclusive access to it and as referenced in few of those emails(they refer to people asking for access as "loons trying to disprove") are quite reluctant to give the control away. Why give something so valuable away when by just creating pretty graphs out of it you can secure government funding, place in most reputable science journals and hundreds of citations a year from people having to cite YOUR papers instead of the real data which they can't access?
  - rbanffy 17y ago
    I understand their concern. It's easy to imagine loons (or worse) getting access to the data, publishing findings that prove the warming is indeed caused by the decline in the pirate population, getting airtime in Fox News and other similar media outlets and making, thus, it true to a large chunk of the populace. We don't need people, deliberately or not, spreading disinformation.
    - ErrantX 17y ago
      The trouble is the concern that this might already be happening. At least with the data out there the serious scientists have a very strong compunction to "get it right".
      - rbanffy 17y ago
        Yes, but what if even a small oil company "invests" a couple hundred millions funding studies that - oddly enough - find all those other studies that point to global warming are wrong? What if there is a ton of money in media outlets to voice those reports? It would be foolish to disregard such a threat.
        ErrantX 17y ago
        Im not unconvinced the reverse isn't happening. In the UK a number of green pressure groups fund the research; this is seems as perfectly acceptable. But I am not sure I agree.
        rbanffy 17y ago
        It could be a reaction to the funding research aimed at refuting man-made global warming gets.
    - MarkPNeyer 17y ago
      So you think that the world is better served when science is done behind closed doors? People will spread disinformation regardless of whether they have access to climate models or not. This sort of attitude flies in the face of the open source philosophy.
      - rbanffy 17y ago
        Closed doors? No way! I said I understand their concern that many well funded groups would certainly spread even more disinformation if they had a dataset to base it on. In the current state of affairs, you can bet many people will publish wrong results for money, fame or any combination of both. It's not about you arriving at a correct answer, but if someone can be trusted to do real analysis on the data and not spin it in ways that suit their purpose. Not all news outlets have a strong peer-review process for publishing news. Not all research organizations do real research. If some of the scientists that have access to this dataset are right, the delay in addressing climate change caused by such confusion could mean our extinction. I would not even suggest this as a correct course of action if there weren't so many different economic interests at play. Lots of people stand to lose a staggering amount of money and they won't place truth above their yearly bonuses, with little concern if a billion or so people die of thirst in the next 100 years.
  - pradocchia 17y ago
    Wasn't some of the hitherto secret data included in the hacked emails as attachments? How much is still unavailable? I wish the AGW folks would get out in front of this and stop acting like partisan hacks. As it stands today, many people have written off AGW as a fraud, nevermind whatever other other evidence may exist. Appeals to science and its trappings of legitimacy will fall on deaf ears if the researchers at the CRU all keep their positions and the data is not made publically available.
    - yummyfajitas 17y ago
      I suspect the folks at CRU are keeping quiet in the hopes that the media, the people funding them and policy makers will ignore it. So far, that seems like a pretty reasonable hope: Here is the media completely ignoring the issue of data deletion, utterly shitty code and scientific misconduct: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/21/science/earth/21climate.html?_r=1 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/21/science/earth/21climate.ht... Here is a policy maker ignoring it: http://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2009/11/25/25climatewire-obama-announces-2020-emissions-target-dec-9-22088.html http://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2009/11/25/25climatewire-obama-...
robotrout 17y ago
... the fact is, everything we know about carbon dioxide indicates that it has a greenhouse effect, because it is more efficient at passing sunlight through to the earth, than at allowing that energy to reradiate back into space as heat. As much as I hate to beat a dead horse, I find myself compelled to spell out, for those that may share her confusion, that there is no "indication" that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. We just know, for sure, that yes, CO2 is a greenhouse gas. That has never been in debate, by anybody. Monkeys know that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. The debate is, and always has been, whether the 3.2% of atmospheric CO2 emitted by humans, which comprises 0.28% of the greenhouse effect on earth (counting water-vapor) is actually significant enough to be the cause of measurable extra warming, above and beyond the warming that would occur anyway, here in the waning years of the latest ice-age. It's never been about whether CO2 was a greenhouse gas or not.
- WilliamLP 17y ago
  > whether the 3.2% of atmospheric CO2 emitted by humans 313 ppm in 1960 to 383 ppm in 2009 is 3.2%? Or is there indication that this increase isn't human caused? > which comprises 0.28% of the greenhouse effect on earth It's 9-26% for CO2, according to Wikipedia. (Which is a surprisingly large range.) Why the disparity with your figure? I don't know anything about climate science, and I don't have an agenda, but I'm just wondering if your figures are based on anything.
  - sp332 17y ago
    The indication that this isn't human-caused is just adding up all the CO2 output by cars, industry, etc. and subtracting from the amount of CO2 that has been added to the atmosphere in the same time period. I think it accounts for about 5%, but I'm not sure I read that right. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_the_Earth%27s_atmosphere http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_the_Earth%27s... Since water accounts for up to 85% of greenhouse effect (including clouds), that means man-made atmospheric CO2 accounts for 0.75% or less of the greenhouse effect.
    - WilliamLP 17y ago
jacquesm 17y ago
The bigger problem with posts like this is that they fail to appreciate a very simple truth: Either humans are affecting the climate or they don't. If they don't then it doesn't matter, if they do then we should study to what extent. Reduction to extremes shows that we do, after all, every organism affects the biosphere simply by being alive, and we do a lot more than just being alive. So the question to answer is not whether or not global warming is 'real' or not. If it is we'll find out eventually. We need to find out long before it becomes evident whether or not we have a positive, a negative or a neutral effect. If the planet is heating up and we can't influence it we can stop the debate. If the planet is warming up or cooling down and we can influence it we first need to ask ourselves if influencing it is a good thing, and if we can we need to figure out the best way to go about it. The current 'fix' to me looks more like development aid in disguise, where rich countries give poor countries some money so the rich countries can continue to pollute much like they did before. That certainly won't solve anything, in the words of Douglas Adams, it isn't the green pieces of paper that are unhappy. It is us that will be unhappy if we do not take these issues seriously. One of the bigger issues with the climate science emails is that anything that is developed outside of the light of day usually can't stand the light of day. So we need transparency and really well performed very well checked science, where each and every result is available to all parties. With the adversarial nature of the subject I don't doubt there will be plenty of interpretations of the data so we don't have to worry about finding people to 'peer-review' the data. The upside is that by the time that the truth will be out it will be unassailable, whatever it is. Open source is a great model to apply to science, many eyes works well for finding bugs, whether it is in software or in climate models that shouldn't make too much difference. And then once we all agree on the facts we can look for a solution, if we have to, and if there is one.
- yters 17y ago
  Why don't people focus more on the benefits of global warming? The scenarios I've heard of are on the scale of 10s-100s of years, plenty of time where we can plan a good response. Plus, there's the question: mightn't the earth work better when it is warmer? There are so many different ways to go with global warming, even if it is true, but we're constantly just told to be scared out of our minds about it and do whatever the experts tell us will save our hides. A sure recipe for manipulation if there ever was one.
markbnine 17y ago
Thought it interesting how the programmers hinted in their code at problems with the climate model. These were not informative comments. They were disclaimers. I see them all the time. People put them in their code when they are too lazy to properly figure something out. They often say something like, "Yeah, I know. This is an awful hack. Fix later." Quote from article: Programmer-written comments inserted into CRU's Fortran code have drawn fire as well. The file briffa_sep98_d.pro says: "Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!" and "APPLY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION." Another, quantify_tsdcal.pro, says: "Low pass filtering at century and longer time scales never gets rid of the trend - so eventually I start to scale down the 120-yr low pass time series to mimic the effect of removing/adding longer time scales!"
- jgrahamc 17y ago
  That code's not FORTRAN it's IDL.
petewarden 17y ago
Here's a good summary of the fundamental science behind the climate change consensus: http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2009/11/blame_it_on_the_satellite http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2009/11/bl... It's a complex, messy subject, and as an engineer I hate the reliance on computer models to make predictions, but the dramatic increase in CO2 levels is a fact. It's plain common-sense that a big increase in one of the inputs to the climate has a good chance of causing disruptive change. There's also accumulating evidence from independent sources that the temperature is rising, but pretend it wasn't there, would an increase in CO2 from 313ppm to 383ppm over 50 years worry you?
- mhartl 17y ago
  It's plain common-sense that a big increase in one of the inputs to the climate has a good chance of causing disruptive change. It is rarely noted (but undisputed) that the baseline climate response is logarithmic in carbon dioxide concentration (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius#Greenhouse_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius#Greenhouse_eff...). Since, absent feedback effects, exponential increases in CO2 levels lead to linear temperature changes, it's likely that common sense is not a reliable guide.
  - anthonyb 17y ago
    So what's the response in temperature when CO2 increases like this? http://www.economist.com/images/mt_blog/democracyinamerica/chart5a.jpg http://www.economist.com/images/mt_blog/democracyinamerica/c... Is that geometric? Or worse?
    - yummyfajitas 17y ago
      Assuming that graph is an exponential increase in CO2, then there will be a linear (not geometric) increase temperature. So it's considerably better, not worse. A little calculus goes a long way.
      - anthonyb 17y ago
DanielBMarkham 17y ago
Bearing this in mind, I think most people--including me--missed the biggest part of the climate emails story. ...the CRU's main computer model may be, to put it bluntly, complete rubbish...The emails seem to describe a model which frequently breaks, and being constantly "tweaked" with manual interventions of dubious quality in order to make them fit the historical data. These stories suggest that the model, and the past manual interventions, are so poorly documented that CRU cannot now replicate its own past findings. The interesting thing here is that having a bad model should have been okay -- you'd expect science to iterate a lot over the course of a few decades as it learned more and more about the climate. But for some reason it wasn't okay to be wrong any more. And whenever that moment passed it stopped being science and started being a religion, at least to some of those involved. Religions have "us against them" they have the elite and the unwashed masses, they have "we know the solution, just tell me your problem" They frequently have end-of-world predictions, a hierarchy of who can form dogma, a culture of secrecy, an emotional and visceral response to anybody who questions their beliefs, etc. I'm not trying to beat a dead horse, only to say once again that this story is much more than just about the politics of climate change. It's about how professional science and professional scientists carry out their business. It's very easy to get emotionally wrapped up with whatever you're doing, especially if you think you're saving the world. It's critical that we establish sort of system of ethics to make thinking and acting like this anathema to professional scientists no matter what field they are in.
- dantheman 17y ago
  A big difference between "climate science" and other sciences is that other sciences make predictions and perform tests. The duty of the scientist is to bend over backwards telling you all the ways that their results may be flawed. Also, climate scientists have strong incentive for there to be AGW. If it turns out AGW isn't happening then most will be out of work, and their expertise will be deemed relatively useless.
hop 17y ago
Pretty amazing none of this info been open to peer review. Shouldn't their conclusions be replicable by others? Do they just write conclusion papers?
- tome 17y ago
  No scientist of any kind ever publishes his/her source code, as far as I am aware.
  - waterlesscloud 17y ago
    Why not?
    - tome 17y ago
      I really don't know. I imagine it's because they're poor programmers. Scientists rarely have formal training in good software development practice as far as I can tell. They just seem to pick it up as they go along.
  - gvb 17y ago
    Some do. - http://www.openscience.org/blog/ http://www.openscience.org/blog/ - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_research http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_research - http://www.google.com/search?q=open+science http://www.google.com/search?q=open+science
nazgulnarsil 17y ago
the entire debate is moot. even if we are causing global warming and the worst case scenarios are true, the way we're going about curbing it is out of fantasy land, not engineering and economic fact.
uuilly 17y ago
Nobody seems to be mentioning that a major source for climate research has made a shameful mockery of the scientific process. Regardless of whether their conclusions are right or wrong, they are doctoring numbers to fit their desired conclusions and sidelining scientists who raise doubts. As scientists and engineers this should disgust us. The sanctity of the scientific process is a much bigger deal than climate change. It embodies all our technological decisions and it cannot be tainted. It would be as if the supreme court was burying evidence to convict people they thought were guilty. It's wrong. Even if we think it achieves the right result. Once you lose faith in the system, it ceases to be useful.
- pradocchia 17y ago
  Once you lose faith in the system, it ceases to be useful. Lost faith will be a dominant trend for the foreseeable future, not limited to science. Sadly.
rbanffy 17y ago
I think we are all failing to realize this is no longer a scientific discussion. It's politics. It's about allocation of resources, changing industrial bases and more or less changing, or not, a whole planetary economy. Did anyone really expect all the political and economical interests to sit quietly and not try to interfere with scientific research that could be a matter of life and death to them?

40 points by Perceval 17y ago

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

pradocchia 17y ago

Are there any open source-style projects underway yet to fix up the code & data? I keep thinking this is the next obvious thing to do. The climate models must be specified somewhere in the literature. Data can be munged. What stands in the way? Is the data in some legal netherworld that prevents redistribution?

flynth 17y ago
There were some stories published recently how difficult it is to gain access to the raw data. CRU and organizations like it have exclusive access to it and as referenced in few of those emails(they refer to people asking for access as "loons trying to disprove") are quite reluctant to give the control away. Why give something so valuable away when by just creating pretty graphs out of it you can secure government funding, place in most reputable science journals and hundreds of citations a year from people having to cite YOUR papers instead of the real data which they can't access?
- rbanffy 17y ago
  I understand their concern. It's easy to imagine loons (or worse) getting access to the data, publishing findings that prove the warming is indeed caused by the decline in the pirate population, getting airtime in Fox News and other similar media outlets and making, thus, it true to a large chunk of the populace. We don't need people, deliberately or not, spreading disinformation.
  - ErrantX 17y ago
    The trouble is the concern that this might already be happening. At least with the data out there the serious scientists have a very strong compunction to "get it right".
    - rbanffy 17y ago
      Yes, but what if even a small oil company "invests" a couple hundred millions funding studies that - oddly enough - find all those other studies that point to global warming are wrong? What if there is a ton of money in media outlets to voice those reports? It would be foolish to disregard such a threat.
      - ErrantX 17y ago
        Im not unconvinced the reverse isn't happening. In the UK a number of green pressure groups fund the research; this is seems as perfectly acceptable. But I am not sure I agree.
        rbanffy 17y ago
        It could be a reaction to the funding research aimed at refuting man-made global warming gets.
  - MarkPNeyer 17y ago
    So you think that the world is better served when science is done behind closed doors? People will spread disinformation regardless of whether they have access to climate models or not. This sort of attitude flies in the face of the open source philosophy.
    - rbanffy 17y ago
      Closed doors? No way! I said I understand their concern that many well funded groups would certainly spread even more disinformation if they had a dataset to base it on. In the current state of affairs, you can bet many people will publish wrong results for money, fame or any combination of both. It's not about you arriving at a correct answer, but if someone can be trusted to do real analysis on the data and not spin it in ways that suit their purpose. Not all news outlets have a strong peer-review process for publishing news. Not all research organizations do real research. If some of the scientists that have access to this dataset are right, the delay in addressing climate change caused by such confusion could mean our extinction. I would not even suggest this as a correct course of action if there weren't so many different economic interests at play. Lots of people stand to lose a staggering amount of money and they won't place truth above their yearly bonuses, with little concern if a billion or so people die of thirst in the next 100 years.
- pradocchia 17y ago
  Wasn't some of the hitherto secret data included in the hacked emails as attachments? How much is still unavailable? I wish the AGW folks would get out in front of this and stop acting like partisan hacks. As it stands today, many people have written off AGW as a fraud, nevermind whatever other other evidence may exist. Appeals to science and its trappings of legitimacy will fall on deaf ears if the researchers at the CRU all keep their positions and the data is not made publically available.
  - yummyfajitas 17y ago
    I suspect the folks at CRU are keeping quiet in the hopes that the media, the people funding them and policy makers will ignore it. So far, that seems like a pretty reasonable hope: Here is the media completely ignoring the issue of data deletion, utterly shitty code and scientific misconduct: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/21/science/earth/21climate.html?_r=1 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/21/science/earth/21climate.ht... Here is a policy maker ignoring it: http://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2009/11/25/25climatewire-obama-announces-2020-emissions-target-dec-9-22088.html http://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2009/11/25/25climatewire-obama-...

robotrout 17y ago

... the fact is, everything we know about carbon dioxide indicates that it has a greenhouse effect, because it is more efficient at passing sunlight through to the earth, than at allowing that energy to reradiate back into space as heat. As much as I hate to beat a dead horse, I find myself compelled to spell out, for those that may share her confusion, that there is no "indication" that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. We just know, for sure, that yes, CO2 is a greenhouse gas. That has never been in debate, by anybody. Monkeys know that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. The debate is, and always has been, whether the 3.2% of atmospheric CO2 emitted by humans, which comprises 0.28% of the greenhouse effect on earth (counting water-vapor) is actually significant enough to be the cause of measurable extra warming, above and beyond the warming that would occur anyway, here in the waning years of the latest ice-age. It's never been about whether CO2 was a greenhouse gas or not.

WilliamLP 17y ago
> whether the 3.2% of atmospheric CO2 emitted by humans 313 ppm in 1960 to 383 ppm in 2009 is 3.2%? Or is there indication that this increase isn't human caused? > which comprises 0.28% of the greenhouse effect on earth It's 9-26% for CO2, according to Wikipedia. (Which is a surprisingly large range.) Why the disparity with your figure? I don't know anything about climate science, and I don't have an agenda, but I'm just wondering if your figures are based on anything.
- sp332 17y ago
  The indication that this isn't human-caused is just adding up all the CO2 output by cars, industry, etc. and subtracting from the amount of CO2 that has been added to the atmosphere in the same time period. I think it accounts for about 5%, but I'm not sure I read that right. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_the_Earth%27s_atmosphere http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_the_Earth%27s... Since water accounts for up to 85% of greenhouse effect (including clouds), that means man-made atmospheric CO2 accounts for 0.75% or less of the greenhouse effect.
  - WilliamLP 17y ago

jacquesm 17y ago

The bigger problem with posts like this is that they fail to appreciate a very simple truth: Either humans are affecting the climate or they don't. If they don't then it doesn't matter, if they do then we should study to what extent. Reduction to extremes shows that we do, after all, every organism affects the biosphere simply by being alive, and we do a lot more than just being alive. So the question to answer is not whether or not global warming is 'real' or not. If it is we'll find out eventually. We need to find out long before it becomes evident whether or not we have a positive, a negative or a neutral effect. If the planet is heating up and we can't influence it we can stop the debate. If the planet is warming up or cooling down and we can influence it we first need to ask ourselves if influencing it is a good thing, and if we can we need to figure out the best way to go about it. The current 'fix' to me looks more like development aid in disguise, where rich countries give poor countries some money so the rich countries can continue to pollute much like they did before. That certainly won't solve anything, in the words of Douglas Adams, it isn't the green pieces of paper that are unhappy. It is us that will be unhappy if we do not take these issues seriously. One of the bigger issues with the climate science emails is that anything that is developed outside of the light of day usually can't stand the light of day. So we need transparency and really well performed very well checked science, where each and every result is available to all parties. With the adversarial nature of the subject I don't doubt there will be plenty of interpretations of the data so we don't have to worry about finding people to 'peer-review' the data. The upside is that by the time that the truth will be out it will be unassailable, whatever it is. Open source is a great model to apply to science, many eyes works well for finding bugs, whether it is in software or in climate models that shouldn't make too much difference. And then once we all agree on the facts we can look for a solution, if we have to, and if there is one.

yters 17y ago
Why don't people focus more on the benefits of global warming? The scenarios I've heard of are on the scale of 10s-100s of years, plenty of time where we can plan a good response. Plus, there's the question: mightn't the earth work better when it is warmer? There are so many different ways to go with global warming, even if it is true, but we're constantly just told to be scared out of our minds about it and do whatever the experts tell us will save our hides. A sure recipe for manipulation if there ever was one.

markbnine 17y ago

Thought it interesting how the programmers hinted in their code at problems with the climate model. These were not informative comments. They were disclaimers. I see them all the time. People put them in their code when they are too lazy to properly figure something out. They often say something like, "Yeah, I know. This is an awful hack. Fix later." Quote from article: Programmer-written comments inserted into CRU's Fortran code have drawn fire as well. The file briffa_sep98_d.pro says: "Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!" and "APPLY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION." Another, quantify_tsdcal.pro, says: "Low pass filtering at century and longer time scales never gets rid of the trend - so eventually I start to scale down the 120-yr low pass time series to mimic the effect of removing/adding longer time scales!"

jgrahamc 17y ago
That code's not FORTRAN it's IDL.

petewarden 17y ago

Here's a good summary of the fundamental science behind the climate change consensus: http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2009/11/blame_it_on_the_satellite http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2009/11/bl... It's a complex, messy subject, and as an engineer I hate the reliance on computer models to make predictions, but the dramatic increase in CO2 levels is a fact. It's plain common-sense that a big increase in one of the inputs to the climate has a good chance of causing disruptive change. There's also accumulating evidence from independent sources that the temperature is rising, but pretend it wasn't there, would an increase in CO2 from 313ppm to 383ppm over 50 years worry you?

mhartl 17y ago
It's plain common-sense that a big increase in one of the inputs to the climate has a good chance of causing disruptive change. It is rarely noted (but undisputed) that the baseline climate response is logarithmic in carbon dioxide concentration (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius#Greenhouse_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius#Greenhouse_eff...). Since, absent feedback effects, exponential increases in CO2 levels lead to linear temperature changes, it's likely that common sense is not a reliable guide.
- anthonyb 17y ago
  So what's the response in temperature when CO2 increases like this? http://www.economist.com/images/mt_blog/democracyinamerica/chart5a.jpg http://www.economist.com/images/mt_blog/democracyinamerica/c... Is that geometric? Or worse?
  - yummyfajitas 17y ago
    Assuming that graph is an exponential increase in CO2, then there will be a linear (not geometric) increase temperature. So it's considerably better, not worse. A little calculus goes a long way.
    - anthonyb 17y ago

DanielBMarkham 17y ago

Bearing this in mind, I think most people--including me--missed the biggest part of the climate emails story. ...the CRU's main computer model may be, to put it bluntly, complete rubbish...The emails seem to describe a model which frequently breaks, and being constantly "tweaked" with manual interventions of dubious quality in order to make them fit the historical data. These stories suggest that the model, and the past manual interventions, are so poorly documented that CRU cannot now replicate its own past findings. The interesting thing here is that having a bad model should have been okay -- you'd expect science to iterate a lot over the course of a few decades as it learned more and more about the climate. But for some reason it wasn't okay to be wrong any more. And whenever that moment passed it stopped being science and started being a religion, at least to some of those involved. Religions have "us against them" they have the elite and the unwashed masses, they have "we know the solution, just tell me your problem" They frequently have end-of-world predictions, a hierarchy of who can form dogma, a culture of secrecy, an emotional and visceral response to anybody who questions their beliefs, etc. I'm not trying to beat a dead horse, only to say once again that this story is much more than just about the politics of climate change. It's about how professional science and professional scientists carry out their business. It's very easy to get emotionally wrapped up with whatever you're doing, especially if you think you're saving the world. It's critical that we establish sort of system of ethics to make thinking and acting like this anathema to professional scientists no matter what field they are in.

dantheman 17y ago
A big difference between "climate science" and other sciences is that other sciences make predictions and perform tests. The duty of the scientist is to bend over backwards telling you all the ways that their results may be flawed. Also, climate scientists have strong incentive for there to be AGW. If it turns out AGW isn't happening then most will be out of work, and their expertise will be deemed relatively useless.

hop 17y ago

Pretty amazing none of this info been open to peer review. Shouldn't their conclusions be replicable by others? Do they just write conclusion papers?

tome 17y ago
No scientist of any kind ever publishes his/her source code, as far as I am aware.
- waterlesscloud 17y ago
  Why not?
  - tome 17y ago
    I really don't know. I imagine it's because they're poor programmers. Scientists rarely have formal training in good software development practice as far as I can tell. They just seem to pick it up as they go along.
- gvb 17y ago
  Some do. - http://www.openscience.org/blog/ http://www.openscience.org/blog/ - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_research http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_research - http://www.google.com/search?q=open+science http://www.google.com/search?q=open+science

nazgulnarsil 17y ago

the entire debate is moot. even if we are causing global warming and the worst case scenarios are true, the way we're going about curbing it is out of fantasy land, not engineering and economic fact.

uuilly 17y ago

Nobody seems to be mentioning that a major source for climate research has made a shameful mockery of the scientific process. Regardless of whether their conclusions are right or wrong, they are doctoring numbers to fit their desired conclusions and sidelining scientists who raise doubts. As scientists and engineers this should disgust us. The sanctity of the scientific process is a much bigger deal than climate change. It embodies all our technological decisions and it cannot be tainted. It would be as if the supreme court was burying evidence to convict people they thought were guilty. It's wrong. Even if we think it achieves the right result. Once you lose faith in the system, it ceases to be useful.

pradocchia 17y ago
Once you lose faith in the system, it ceases to be useful. Lost faith will be a dominant trend for the foreseeable future, not limited to science. Sadly.

rbanffy 17y ago

I think we are all failing to realize this is no longer a scientific discussion. It's politics. It's about allocation of resources, changing industrial bases and more or less changing, or not, a whole planetary economy. Did anyone really expect all the political and economical interests to sit quietly and not try to interfere with scientific research that could be a matter of life and death to them?