Climategate: Violating the Social Contract of Science (Updated)
Updated: Chris Horner and CEI today announced their intent to file suit if necessary to force NASA to release documents relating to the ongoing Climategate controversy.
Today, on behalf of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, I filed three Notices of Intent to File Suit against NASA and its Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), for those bodies’ refusal — for nearly three years — to provide documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act.
The information sought is directly relevant to the exploding “Climategate” scandal revealing document destruction, coordinated efforts in the U.S. and UK to avoid complying with both countries’ freedom of information laws, and apparent and widespread intent to defraud at the highest levels of international climate science bodies. Numerous informed commenters had alleged such behavior for years, all of which appears to be affirmed by leaked emails, computer codes and other data from the Climatic Research Unit of the UK’s East Anglia University.
This is especially interesting:
[CEI is requesting files] relating to the content, importance or propriety of workday-hour posts or entries by GISS/NASA employee Gavin A. Schmidt on the weblog or “blog” RealClimate, which is owned by the advocacy group Environmental Media Services and was started as an effort to defend the debunked “Hockey Stick” that is so central to the CRU files. RealClimate.org is implicated in the leaked files, expressly offered as a tool to be used “in any way you think would be helpful” to a certain advocacy campaign, including an assertion of Schmidt’s active involvement in, e.g., delaying and/or screening out unhelpful input by “skeptics” attempting to comment on claims made on the website.
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On November 19, 2009, climate science was severely shaken by the release of a collection of email messages, together with a collection of data and data processing programs, that were alleged to have been stolen, or hacked, from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU). (See here and here for previous PJ Media coverage.)
So what is this “climate science” of which we speak? Trimmed down to the essentials, what scientists really do comes down to these steps:
- Look at something happening.
- Think of a way to explain what’s happening.
- Make a convincing case, based on evidence and experiment, that this is the best known explanation. Part of this “convincing case” is providing enough information so that a knowledgeable person could, if necessary, perform the same experiments and get the same results. (This should really include some weasel-wording about “within experimental error,” but that’s a technical detail. What’s important is that the knowledgeable third party can get close enough to the same results to satisfy that third part.)
- Submit that convincing case to other knowledgeable people to review, in order to see if they also find it convincing. This is what is called peer review.
- Publish that convincing case for the rest of the world, where the results can be seen, commented upon, and challenged.
- Every so often, others perform the same experiments and confirm or question the results.
Step 4, peer review, is essential to this whole process. To be useful, a peer review should:
- be done anonymously, so that reviews are uncolored by fear of retribution or expectation of reward.
- be done independently, by disinterested third parties; it’s generally bad form to have close associates of the authors doing the reviews.
This is really all about trust. If Professor A. Einstein publishes E=mc2, the fact that the publication has been peer reviewed, the publication includes enough detail that you feel confident it could be replicated, and the results are then subject to challenge means that you can trust what’s in the publication. “Science” is a social contract — an agreement that allows scientists to trust what they’re told by their fellows.
So let’s look at a few of these emails. (All links are to email texts in the searchable index on the website anelegantchaos.org.) Here’s an email from Phil Jones at the CRU to Ben Santer at Lawrence Livermore (quoted in Santer’s reply, email # 1233249393):
With free wifi in my room, I’ve just seen that M+M have submitted a paper to IJC on your H2 statistic — using more years, up to 2007. They have also found your PCMDI data — laughing at the directory name — FOIA? Also they make up statements saying you’ve done this following Obama’s statement about openness in government! Anyway you’ll likely get this for review, or poor Francis will. Best if both Francis and Myles did this. If I get an email from Glenn I’ll suggest this.
This appears to be Jones informing Santer of the contents of a submitted paper ahead of time, which would seem to say it’s not really an anonymous process. What’s more, the paper criticizes Santer’s own work, and this email appears to suggest that Santer will be a reviewer; this doesn’t seem very independent.
I’ve mentioned this piece of work in the context of the financial panic, but it bears repeating here. McKitrick & McCullough produced this: http://www.fraserinstitute.org/commerce.web/product_files/CaseforDueDiligence_Cda.pdf
The pernicious effects of politicizing cannot be swept under the rug.
When billions are involved, all bets are off.
Senator Inhofe said somethings on the floor of the Senate that fit in nicely with Charlie’s excellent piece. Here’s a sample:
”
Here is what Chapter 8 – the key chapter in the report – stated on this central question in the final version accepted by reviewing scientists:
“No study to date has positively attributed all or part [of the climate change observed to date] to anthropogenic causes.”
But when the final version was published, this and similar phrases in 15 sections of the chapter were deleted or modified. Nearly all the changes removed hints of scientific doubts regarding the claim that human activities are having a major impact on global warming.
In the Summary for Policy Makers – which is the only part of the report that reporters and policy makers read – a single phrase was inserted. It reads:
“The balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate.”
The lead author for Chapter 8, Dr. Ben Santer, should not be held solely accountable. According to the journal Nature, the changes to the report were made in the midst of high-level pressure from the Clinton / Gore State Department to do so. I understand that after the State Department sent a letter to Sir John Houghton, co-Chairman of the IPCC, Houghton prevailed upon Santer to make the changes. The impact was explosive, with media across the world, including heavyweights such as Peter Jennings, declaring this as proof that man is responsible for global warming.
Notably, polls taken shortly afterwards showed scant support for the statement. The word “discernible” implies measurable or detectable, and depending on how the question was asked, only 3- 19 percent of American scientists concurred.
In 2001, the third assessment report was published. Compared with the flaws in the third assessment, those in the second assessment appear modest. The most famous is the graph produced by Dr. Michael Mann and others. Their study concluded that the 20th century was the warmest on record in the last 1,000 years, showing flat temperatures until 1900 and then spiking upward – in short, it looked like a hockey stick. It achieved instant fame as proof of man’s causation of global warming because it was featured prominently in the Summary Report read by the media.
Since then, the hockey stick has been shown to be a relic of bad math and impermissible practices. Dr. Hans von Storch, a prominent German researcher with the GKSS Institute for Coastal Research – who, I’m told, believes in global warming – put it this way:
“Methodologically it is wrong: rubbish.” ‘
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Speeches&ContentRecord_id=21cc88ec-cca6-4a61-8c2e-78fa8de4850d&Region_id=&Issue_id=
He is demanding changes in the way the IPCC operates to make sure it returns to the procedures Charlie says are necessary for solid scientific work.In its absence, the work of the folks at CRU isn’t science. It’s what our mutual friend Rick Ballard calls Climate Scientology.
Good article, Charlie.
As you suggest, the belief in social contracts, or covenants, is for science and other aspects of a free society, an under-appreciated (too many scientists prefer to think of their work in the heroic terms of breaking down social orthodoxies, as in the popular understanding of Galileo) but necessary pre-condition. In thinking about what kind of shared understanding is necessary to freedom, we can appreciate that a free society can’t try to spell everything out in advance. In building a “social contract”, unlike say a business or legal contract, building shared faith or trust is really the problem and you can’t specify in advance all the foreseeable contingencies that might be involved in getting the job done. Rather, like the US Constitution, you are best to consider only basic terms or conditions for building shared faith in a common system of government, for allowing a free market to emerge, the minimal conditions for people to engage each other in discovering and constructing their shared reality and then discovering what they really believe and will contract as they engage in more specific agreements.
Anyway, I think any guilty parties in this apparent fraud should be forced to go back to contract school. We should have laws for situations like this which allow the judge to impose harsh jail terms, say forty years (for a fraud that, allegedly, aimed to have profound effects on the global economy, human minds, and government policies this does not sound too harsh to me), but allow the guilty to make a free bet on a significant early release by specifying what they really believe the temperature trends will be over those forty years, what new understandings in climate science will come to the fore, e.g. what they think the relative importance of the role of CO2 will be held to have by future scientists. And then they should have to set about constructing the terms of the covenant by which their bet will be weighed and judged at points along the road (to be agreed to by the sentencing judge and perhaps other parties). Might be revealing.
Science is a social contract between fellows researchers…?
No wonder Barrack Obama was elected. He knew that if he blew enough smoke up enough fellows rear ends he could fry their brains into believing that he was the messiah bearing the gifts of hope and change that the entire human race was waiting for.
Science is exact. Science is measurable proof. Science has nothing to do with social behavior, trust, betrayals, politics or e-mail messages.
In addition to E=mc2 Einstein stated that light bent (curved) at an angle of approximately 17 degrees (if my memory serves me right) as it circled the sun because of the sun’s gravity; not because of the light’s speed.
One hundred; or thereabouts years later scientists mathematically, by physics and via astronomy confirmed that Einstein was 100% correct. A distant star was not beside the sun, but behind it at an angle of 17 degrees from where astronomers accepted as scientifically correct.
Then they turned around and proceeded to swallow the biggest, sloppiest hoax that has ever been pulled off on the human race; Al Gore’s Global Warming Crap.
And instead of being terribly embarrassed by the fact that anyone with the intelligence level of a plant has known that the whole thing is pure hogwash all along; they are now waiting with baited breath hoping, begging, even praying that the current e-mailgate scandal can be written off as phony.
You left out the best part of Dr. Hans von Storch’s post …
“The scientific method only works when fellow researchers can implicitly trust the results offered by their colleagues.”
No, it only works if you can verify (or unverify as the case may be) a hypothesis by experimentation, and someone else can repeat the experiment, just to make sure you didn’t screw everything up.
Trust has nothing to do with it.
And, this ain’t science…’cause you can’t test the hypothesis (in this case the hypothesis is is that man’s activities are causing atmospheric temperatures to rise) experimentally, and that is an essential requirement of scientific method.
Climatology is, IMO anyway, an interesting field of study…but it ain’t science.
Which is too bad, because scientific method rules when it comes to figuring out how things work.
I’ve often wondered what the term “political science” meant. Now I know.
Iowahawk Geographic: The Secret Life of Climate Researchers
I find it most interesting that http://www.tnr.com/is not touching this scandal with the proverbial ten foot pole. This publication has long been in the front of environmental issues from a liberal Democratic Party perspective. The silence is deafening. I interpret it as a tacit admission that their side in deep trouble. They may even sense that the global warming crusade is fatally damaged. I think it’s also safe to predict that a cap and trade bill will not get through both houses of Congress.
#5 HDL, so tell me: how did Einstein’s original paper on special relativity originally get published? Were there social aspects, human aspects, in that.
Oh, and you don’t recall correctly. It’s more like 17 seconds, 1/3600th of what you have. That’s the Eddington experiment.
Ah, blessed relief! Next target: the lunatics in the Waxman-Boxer Gang.
Let us all say Thank You to the insider who blew the whistle. I find it horrible to realize that the police are trying to identify this hero, and that he could go to prison for doing the right thing.
Meanwhile I hope the villains (Mann, Briffa, Jones & Co.) will all be fired; nothing less will clean up the mess and send the right message.
The Piltdown Man fraud conned many of the leading scientists of that era. There may not have been any complicity by these exalted specialists. They were apparently gullible because of fear of possible excommunication from the inner circle. Reputations, careers, financial rewards, were all on the line. At the end, the hoax was revealed after less than one hour of laboratory experimentation! These intimidated credential experts were made to look like total fools.
Albert Einstein said that he was very lucky not to have earned a university position. His lowly position at the patent office allowed him the freedom to pursue his original and iconoclastic study of time, energy, and space. A young professor would have been harassed to do something allegedly serious instead of discussing scientific matters with his friends at the local coffee shop.
Thanks Charlie for the excellent job of posting and explaining these CRU e-mails.
I find it interesting to contrast your and Pajama media’s actions in this matter with those of the BBC Science reporters. While you have been actively pursuing these documents, and doing an outstanding job of analyzing them and presenting them to the public, the BBC, which I would argue is probably the most reputable and influential News Organization on the planet, has very specifically refused to publicly report on this CRU document dump at all. Their head Climate Science Correspondent is Richard Black, who is identified in the CRU e-mails as an individual who’s reporting is very favorably viewed by the AGW proponents.
Black has access to all the major players in AGW, is familiar with all the topics under discussion, and is the BBC’s top Climate Science reporter. The biggest story in Climate Science in 50 years has dropped into his lap and what do we get from him and the BBC? Silence.
For 3, going on 4 days now, he has posted nothing on the story, except 3 addendum’s to his 20 November post wherein he roots for the upcoming Copenhagen summit.
Black’s first addendum told readers that “for legal reasons” all comments to his Copenhagen post had been censored, because some had referred to the CRU Document dump.
A day later his second addendum told readers that because of “legal reasons” comments would now be allowed, but not any comments that included pastes from the CRU documents, nor any comments that included links to sites that might have comments or links to the CRU documents.
Black’s 3rd addendum, out a few hours back, tells us that now, because the CRU documents are in the public domain, they can be mentioned, but legal restrictions still apply as to what you can say and link to, so standby for censorship of your comments.
As for himself, Richard Black, BBC Climate Correspondent, has posted nothing on the CRU Document dump matter, but invites you to comment on his previous story celebrating the upcoming Copenhagen Conference, wherein he tells us that something must be done about the projected sea water warming of 5 to 6 degrees Centigrade.
I thank you for simply pursuing the story and the science, in stark contrast to the appalling exhibition of censorship exhibited by the BBC.
>Black has access to all the major players in AGW, is familiar with all the topics under discussion, and is the BBC’s top Climate Science reporter. The biggest story in Climate Science in 50 years has dropped into his lap and what do we get from him and the BBC? Silence.
Black is also mentioned as their go-to guy inside BBC, see, eg, letter 1255352444.
Charlie Martin quotes an email from Phil Jones to Santer:
“With free wifi in my room, I’ve just seen that M+M have submitted a paper to IJC on your H2 statistic — using more years, up to 2007. They have also found your PCMDI data — laughing at the directory name — FOIA? Also they make up statements saying you’ve done this following Obama’s statement about openness in government! Anyway you’ll likely get this for review, or poor Francis will. Best if both Francis and Myles did this. If I get an email from Glenn I’ll suggest this.”
This email shows that Jones has inserted himself as a diabolical editor between the actual editor and his reviewers. Jones is manipulating the editorial process to illicitly gain a result favorable to his views. There is no question that this is subversion of the scientific process. In addition, it is an assault on the actual editor and the journal he edits. This is madness. Jones has created a cult around himself and his views. No ordinary scientist would put up with this kind of thing.
#14 daddy
Well, I predicted this response (or rather, lack of response) from the Beeb. I can’t say I’m surprised that I was correct.
I’m disappointed in the Beeb, but I’m not surprised.
As for the American MSM, I’ll be very surprised if they don’t launch a full-court press to “spin” this situation as meaningless. After all, The Agenda Must Be Saved At All Costs.
Including the cost of ignoring facts, and malfeasance. We are, after all, dealing with people who believe absolutely that they have a duty to lie to the people in pursuit of a “greater good”.
With themselves defining that “greater good”, of course.
clear ether
eon
#13 David Thomson. You have absolutely nailed it. And this is the local coffee shop where friends discuss the concerns of our times, free of the cant of university group think.
I make it point to look for your comments daily. I hope you start a blog.
This is what happens when criminals take over science and government.
…researchers can implicitly trust the results offered by their colleagues.
Bullshit, Charlie.
The scientific method does not require “trust” and in fact implicitly rejects the concept as a basis for deciding on validity. A scientist publishes all the data, including those data which do not support his hypothesis, and the precise method by which the data led him to the conclusion(s) stated. Others then attack both the data and the method of analysis; if the data and method survive such attacks the conclusion can be regarded as useful — “true” is a religious concept, not a scientific one.
Allowing trust into the system as a way of deciding on validity corrupts it and allows the sort of clubby, in-group exclusivity displayed by the CRU emails and documents. The “peer review” process is another method of creating not scientists, but a clique of mutually supporting liars and error propagators.
A scientist does not trust his colleagues in the sense you mean it, nor does he expect trust. Science is contentious; if it isn’t contentious, it isn’t science. It was trust that led to this debacle. Instead of trusting those people, other scientists should have been attacking them — if they were correct, their work would have survived the attacks and thereby been validated.
Regards,
Ric
“Peer review” means several different things. Its common meaning today is the process by which anything which may rock the boat is kept out of the journals. But its broader meaning is part of what makes science function. Work, published or not, can be duplicated by other qualified persons (ie, “peers”), and errors and frauds eventually exposed.
But even the limited-sense “journalistic” peer review process is hugely overrated, even if honestly and competently performed. It is an intensely conservative process, in the sense that it supports groupthink and suppresses new ideas. There is something to be said for this, as it filters out some of the real moonbat stuff. But as a side effect, some pretty good babies are thrown out with the bathwater. Interesting that Einstein specifically was mentioned. The modern peer-review process for publications hadn’t yet come into practice in the early years of the 19th century, when Einstein’s really radical papers appeared. I suspect that if modern journalistic “peer review” had been at work, they would never have been published at all. Einstein had no “cred”; nobody wrote of him in the papers as a “highly-regarded physicist.” He was working as a patent clerk. He wasn’t the “peer” of “real” physicists, the ones safely ensconced in universities and government labs. So, no peer review for you, bucko!
The weak point of the journalistic peer-review process is that those “peers” are rivals and competitors, not just benign “colleagues”. That’s if the system is working right. If it’s actually being perverted by activists, then, of course, the system becomes a tool of obfuscation, and nothing like science at all. And we have to expect that the system will always tend to be dominated by people who are more interested in politics than in science. The greasy types always claw their way to whatever they perceive to be the top, in politics or business or art or science. Fortunately, science still works, even when individual scientists fail.
Charlie, thanks for your reporting on this.
Question: do you plan at some point to also report on the 3000 files that are not emails? Some of them are apparently related to code CRU used to model climate data. See the link below for example. This stuff is more arcane obviously — and the media seems to be ignoring it completely so far. But from what I can tell, at the very least these files suggest the modeling code CRU used was sloppy, poorly documented, buggy, and impossible to replicate even by their own programmers. It would be a great service for someone to sort this all out & translate in lay terms . . .
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/22/cru-emails-may-be-open-to-interpretation-but-commented-code-by-the-programmer-tells-the-real-story/
This appears to be more a form of Lysenkoism, although based on pedigree of standing by an in-group rather than just political ideology, which goes a good deal beyond what happened with Piltdown Man. That form of inward directed clique is a disaster for research as it purposefully cuts itself off from the rest of the scientific community based on its own internally derived mechanisms and associations. The aspect of political approval and funding that got attached to it, due to various reasons but all directed towards government based systems for controlling industry and energy generation, has its own inwards based viewpoint on humanity and productivity that is, itself, insular.
Together the shared veiwpoint of global warming then moving to anthropogenic global warming is one from bad science to bad politics, and it was backed by two sets of in-groups that had (and have) sway over funding from government. That shared basis, however, has different spins on it and the anthropogenic part puts humanity into the ‘bad actor’ category while holding nature up as the ‘good actor’. With such backing you can move from political ideology to social ideology akin to a religion, which ignores the geologic history of the planet and nature having caused the extinction of over 95% of all species over time. Benign mother nature has her problems and they aren’t that amenable to science (ex. megavolcanic eruptions like Toba or Yellowstone). By placing the big happy face on nature and the crimson mark on man, the movement from anything scientific based to something based on irrational and subjective viewpoints is complete.
That becomes a political, social and economic playground for ideologues and the in-group of scientists looked to be more than ready to play to that tune as it was job enhancing and lucrative.
Meanwhile a decade and more have passed since they should have put out the raw data for the mid-1990′s papers…. if you can’t show your data and your work, you are hiding something. If the work cannot be replicated, and can, in fact, be shown by multiple re-examinations to be wrong, then you will not have good conclusions and must re-think your work based on good and repeatable data sets. Instead we get folks trying to ‘fit’ the numbers to their graphs, ignoring that the numbers aren’t fitting the graphs and telling a wholly different story. But if you can pick and choose which data you present and then massage the ones you ‘like’ to fit… and show all the lovely government and public support you get…
The silver bullet is in the heart of the beast.
Getting the body to stop moving and its jaws from contracting around your neck is another matter, entirely.
Trust is a by-product of limited bandwidth. We don’t need trust. There is no reason to not publish all data, command line logs, mouse clicks, source code, input decks, etc., especially given that these are all paid for with public money. Let factions contend.
These scientists have done for the science of climate change what Dan Rather did for Journalism
There’s an element of trust. In journal articles the experimental procedure is described if anyone wishes to repeat the experiment. Sometimes skeptics will repeat the experiment. Scientists know they have a chance of being exposed if they decide to be sloppy or dishonest. “I did this…. I observed this….” suffices on trust to a large extent. There isn’t time to repeat all published experiments if you want science to move at the pace you have it moving.
There are probably life-saving drugs used today which are based on a stack of journal articles some of which have data and experiments, say about one of the molecules used in the drug, that were not repeated by skeptics but simply trusted. I did experiments in a lab for a well-respected chemist. They took months and stood on the shoulders of others in the lab who had taken years. I’m sure some of these experiments were trusted by the chemist’s colleagues. There simply isn’t time to send a guy off in a competing lab for six months to repeat some experiment.
It doesn’t make for a pack of lies. It makes for a house of cards. Sometimes houses of cards stand up. Sometimes the house is tall enough for you to step of the top and onto the surface of the moon; at other times some idiot screwed up the units, nobody checked, and your Mars lander crashes. If there was an error or a lie in the stack of experiments, then down the road the house of cards starts to fall. Investigators trace the problem back to the fault. Global warming turned out to be bogus over the last ten years. Somebody decided to snoop for no-goodniks and found them at CRU.
Science requires trust unless its moving at a snail’s pace is satisfactory to you. Scientists will lie. They’ll get found out when the lies interact with the world down the road. The lies impede the pace of science. But verifying every experiment would impede it more.
“…researchers can implicitly trust the results offered by their colleagues.
Bullshit, Charlie.”
You are pushing your argument a bit too far. A certain degree of trust is mandatory—or nothing can ever be accomplished. Ronald Reagan, however, said it best: trust, but verify. People may genuinely mean well. Still, they can be guilty of self-delusion. Subconscious factors such as worrying about earning a living and prestige can warp even the greatest of minds. A high I.Q. and a strong work ethic are not sufficient. One must also possess a certain degree of moral courage.
How was Albert Einstein perceived before being widely acknowledged as one of the greatest scientists of all time? Most people probably considered him to be a loser! The dude failed to obtain a university position—and was stuck working as a minor patent office bureaucrat. Einstein would not have been invited to best parties and other social gatherings. Some would have even felt sorry for him.
#20 Ric: Bullshit yourself, Ric. “Implicitly” really is wrong, but I don’t write the headlines. It’s not that scientists trust others “implicitly”, ie wholeheartedly, absolutely. It’s that the nature of the process is intended to allow you to trust because it allows you to verify.
#22 Kirsten, that’s actually my piece for today. I’d tell you what I think but then you wouldn’t come back tonight
#24 Timmah: You’re right that this is a function of limited bandwidth, but it’s not network bandwidth, it’s human bandwidth. Without the ability to “trust but verify”, you’d have to repeat everything back to Galileo throwing the cannonballs off the Leaning Tower to do physics. But you’re absolutely right that all the code and data should be available and archives. That’s what Steven McIntyre and others have been fighting for.
Einstein rejected peer review
Watson and Crick rejected peer review
The best solution is Open Science where ALL raw data, methods, code, etc are made available for outsiders to analyze and criticize.
Why would anyone accept peer review??? Would you accept a legal system where anonymous “experts” decided guilt or innocence? Why not laws passed by peer review? Its stupid on its face, but we have blindly accepted it for decades.
BTW, Climate Science is not the only science to be cursed by the current peer review system, it extends everywhere. I have heard Computer Scientists, what you would assume is a non-political discipline, complaining that much of what we “know” is wrong or at the very best not replicable.
Oh, and #14 daddy, first off, I see now that you mentioned Black’s connection with the CRU clique yourself. Somehow my eyes glazed past that at 4AM. Apologies.
That said, thanks for the kind words.
Charlie,
Kudos for your wonderful analysis. Keep at it. Somebody has to.
BTW, “implicit” is the antonym of “explicit” that is, unspoken but clear by implication. “I trust you implicitly” is therefore self-contradictory.
The Language Maven
“Peer review means several different things.”
Not anymore. Peer review was the soapbox the Alarmists always preached from. Now its synon with “fraud”.
#22 Kirsten, that’s actually my piece for today. I’d tell you what I think but then you wouldn’t come back tonight
lol
Looking forward to it!
Oh, on the peer review and Einstein thing: When Einstein published, peer review wasn’t common; in fact Nature didn’t institute formal, general peer review until 1967, twelve years after Einstein died. Einstein’s famous “rejection” of peer review came long after he was, well, EINSTEIN. But when Einstein published his first major papers, they were published in Annalen der Physik, which was edited by famous physicist Paul Drude (with associate editor Max Planck), and later by Wilhelm Wien, who himself received the Nobel Prize for Physics. So while it may not have had formal peer review as we see it now, it was certainly reviewed by peers before publication.
Second, that paper of Einstein and Rosen actually had a serious error that was caught by the peer reviewer; if someone hadn’t gone through back channels, it would have remained in the paper.
Peer review as we have it now actually became the custom to prevent the sort of thing we’re seeing with the climate papers: it prevents an editor from imposing his own opinions. If you pissed off a Drude or a Wien, you could kiss publication in Annalen goodbye.
There is a certain amount of trust involved- not for those scientists in the field, whom we expect to be responsible for their own analysis and conclusiions, but rather the vast majority of the world’s scientist whose own work has nothing to to with climate, but who have declared their agreement with the Warmists based solely on their (misplaced) trust in the integrity of the system.
That faith has just been kicked in the nadgers. It’s blatantly clear from these emails that the Wegman report was right- the Warmist cabal has hijacked and perverted the peer-review system for its own ends.
“Peer review” is a crock. Far from being at the heart of the scientific method,
it’s undermining the whole concept.
“Peer review” as actually practiced means one anonymous person saying yea or nay on
a piece of research for reasons that are never publicly revealed. Done well,
it’s a gift to the scientist whose work is being reviewed. Ideally the reviewer
finds problems, the researcher corrects them, and a better paper results. But
the ideal is often not the reality. More likely the reviewer never really spends
the time and effort the research needs and approves a work that has major problems.
Other scenarios are the anonymous reviewer knowing and disliking the author and
rejecting the paper on that basis. Or rejecting on the basis of the author’s politics.
Or all too common, rejecting a paper not because there are any identifiable mistakes,
but because the paper doesn’t agree with the reviewer’s favorite hypotheses.
The heart of the scientific method is that one publish the idea, the data,
and the methods that support that idea. Then others read and comment on
it. It’s the interaction with multiple, critical, and knowledgeable readers
that’s the key. The criticisms need to be public. No one person can validate
an idea. Different people know different things; they see things differently.
It’s only after a proposition has been tested in many minds and been commented
on by many people, that it becomes a real asset.
People that write something and expect others to believe it based on their authority,
based on their titles, and who hide their data, are not scientists. They are
frauds. They are opposed to the scientific method.
Unfortunately, “peer review” can be used, and is being used to support this
anti-scientific authority-based reasoning.
“Peer review” used to be called “referring,” as in referred journals. This is a
more honest descripton for what it is that science journals do.
Referring unfortunately inhibits peer review because most scientific communities are
small and scientists are well aware that it is their colleagues that will be referring
their papers in the future. Although difficult, it’s easier to deal with a public
spat, than the anonymous revenge that “peer review” lends itself too.
I don’t know of a way around this, because there are good arguments for referring,
but insisting that a referred work has actually been reviewed by the author’s peers
is disingenuous.
Some scientific publications have helped to create this problem by allowing researchers to
keep their data and methods secret. It’s not enough for just one anonymous reviewer
to see the evidence. Everyone needs to see it. We need to insist that every
paper be accompanied by an electronic store somewhere of the data and methods that are
referred to in the paper or were used be the reviewer who passed on the paper.
“Einstein’s famous “rejection” of peer review came long after he was, well, EINSTEIN.”
Einstein’s iconoclasm may have hindered him in his latter years. It is said that he rarely, if ever read peer review articles of those he disagreed with. We should never forget that Einstein accomplished little in roughly the last thirty years of his life.
Well, we have enough indicators here to say that Jones, Briffa, Santer and Michael “Piltdown” Mann himself (who seems to be the ringleader of the conspiracy) are frauds.
Their conclusions might be right or might not be, but their science they muster in support of those vehemently-held convictions is shot through with corruption.
And their journalistic mouthpieces — the BBC’s Black as mentioned above, and the NYT’s Andrew Revkin, a veritable Jayson Blair of science reporting — are exposed as participants in the fraud.
I don’t see a way back to credibility for the scientists, apart from eating a little crow and releasing their data sets (as they should have done years ago) — if the data actually exists in an incorrupt state, which it may not.
I don’t see any path to credibility for the journalists at all, but in their profession, unlike science, it doesn’t matter: no one has ever been hired by the BBC, the NYT, or the North Korean Ministry of Propaganda to engage in skeptical enquiry.
NewsBusters — Open Thread: ClimateGate reveals attempts to subvert scientific review
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/nb-staff/2009/11/24/open-thread
It’s interesting that the little debate that has erupted here parallels that which occurred at the birth of modern science. As the publisher’s blurb (http://press.princeton.edu/titles/2353.html) for Shapin and Schaffer’s book on Robert Boyle’s airpump reads:
In the aftermath of the English Civil War, as people were groping for new forms of political order, Robert Boyle built an air-pump to do experiments. Does the story of Roundheads and Restoration have something to do with the origins of experimental science? Schaffer and Shapin believed it does.
Focusing on the debates between Boyle and his archcritic Thomas Hobbes over the air-pump, the authors proposed that “solutions to the problem of knowledge are solutions to the problem of social order.” Both Boyle and Hobbes were looking for ways of establishing knowledge that did not decay into ad hominem attacks and political division. Boyle proposed the experiment as cure. He argued that facts should be manufactured by machines like the air-pump so that gentlemen could witness the experiments and produce knowledge that everyone agreed on. Hobbes, by contrast, looked for natural law and viewed experiments as the artificial, unreliable products of an exclusive guild.
The new approaches taken in Leviathan and the Air-Pump have been enormously influential on historical studies of science. Shapin and Schaffer found a moment of scientific revolution and showed how key scientific givens–facts, interpretations, experiment, truth–were fundamental to a new political order. Shapin and Schaffer were also innovative in their ethnographic approach. Attempting to understand the work habits, rituals, and social structures of a remote, unfamiliar group, they argued that politics were tied up in what scientists did, rather than what they said.
And, as Bruno Latour in his book We Have Never Been Modern writes:
Far from “situating Boyle’s scientific works in their social context” or showing how politics “presses in upon” scientific doctrines, they [Shapin and Schaffer] examine how Boyle and Hobbes fought to invent a science, a context, and a demarcation between the two. They are not prepared to explain the content by the context, since neither existed in this new way before Boyle and Hobbes reached their respective goals and settled their differences.
The beauty of Shapin and Schaffer’s book stems from their success in unearthing Hobbes’s scientific works – which had been neglected by political scientists, because they were embarassed by the wild mathematical imaginings of their hero – and in rescuing from oblivion Boyle’s poilitical theories – which had been neglected by historians of science because they preferred to conceal their hero’s organizational efforts. Instead of setting up an asymmetry, instead of distributing science to Boyle and political theory to Hobbes, Shapin and Schaffer outline a rather nice quadrant: Boyle has a science and a political theory; Hobbes has a political theory and a science. The quadrant would be uninteresting if the ideas of our two heroes were too far apart… But by good fortune, they agree on almost everything. They want a king, a Parliament, a docile and unified Church, and they are fervent subscribers to mechanistic philosophy. But even though both are thoroughgoing rationalists, their opionions diverge as to what can be expected from experimentation, from scientific reasoning, from political argument – and above all from the air pump, the real hero of the story.
[...]
Boyle carefully refrained from talking about vacuum pumps. To put some order into the debates that followed the discovery of the Toricellian space at the top of a mercury tube inverted in a basin of the same substance, he claimed to be investigating only the weight of the air without taking sides in the dispute between plenists and vacuists. The apparatus he developed… that would permanently evacuate the air from a transparent glass container was, for the period – in terms of cost, complication and novelty – the equivalent of a major piece of equipment in contemporary physics. This was already Big Science….
While a dozen civil wars were raging, Boyle chose a method of argument – that of opinion – that was held in contempt by the oldest scholastic tradition. Boyle and his colleagues abandoned the certainties of apodictic reasoning in favour of a doxa. This doxa was not the raving imagination of the credulous masses, but a new mechanism for winning the support of one’s peers. Instead of seeking to ground his work in logic, mathematics or rhetoric, Boyle relied on a parajuridical metaphor: credible, trustworthy, well-to-do witnesses gathered at the scene of the action can attest to the existence of a fact, the matter of fact, even if they do not know its true nature. So he invented the empirical style that we still use today.
Boyle did not seek these gentlemen’s opinion, but rather their observation of a phenomenon produced artificially in the closed and protected space of a laboratory. Ironically, the key question of the constructivists – are facts thoroughly construced in the laboratory? – is precisely the question that Boyle raised and resolved. Yes, the facts are indeed constructed in the new installation of the laboratory and through the artificial intermediary of the air pump….But are facts that have been constructed by man artifactual for that reason? No: for Boyle, just like Hobbes, extends God’s “constructivism” to man. God knows things because He creates them. We know the nature of the facts because we have developed them in circumstances that are under our complete control. Our weakness becomes a strength, provided that we limit knowledge to the instrumentalized nature of the facts and leave aside the interpretation of causes. ONce again, Boyle turns a flaw – we produce only matters of fact that are created in laboratories and have only local value – into a decisive advantage: these facts will never be modified, whatever may happen elsewhere in theory, metaphysics, religion, politics or logic.
So you see, science, as a human practise, cannot be understood absent certain understandings of the role of an honorable “gentlemen” observer/fact recorder. But the “peer” is a necessary but not sufficient part of explaining the overall scientific process. A genealogy of “peer review” would have to start at least here though of course our understanding of the “gentleman” goes far back into the history of aristocratic values and their social roles. Anyway, consider that there is a fundamental difference between science and other forms of human-focussed knowledge in that anyone who has a great revelation into human nature can be, say, an artist or religious leader and make a genuine contribution. If those of us without scientific credentials or at least some serious amount of formal education, have a genuine revelation in the natre of physics or chemistry, there is really little we can do with it. No one will listen to us, because we will not know how to represent our little revelation in a way that makes it presentable to those in the field. We won’t know how to relate it to the established understandings and limits of present-day science. Science is ineviatbly a guilded discipline and has to have the honour code appropriate to such. Of course, this has to adapt to new technology and the increasing demands for tranparency and it has to know that it cannot have the final word on how we interpret the causes or socio-political-religious implications of its facts. But if science begins with facts, we need to be able to trust the integrity of those few with the resources and training to create them in the first place.
I chose the blogging name “truepeers” because it is inherently paradoxical; you can’t specify exactly what is a true peer. But, at the same time, you can’t engage in this world, or any human world, without adopting, as a base assumption, some form of the paradox. Which reminds me of something a friend writes (http://gablog.cdh.ucla.edu/) :
Perhaps the assumption that certain moral and ethical dispositions (certain patterns in the relations between ostensives, imperatives and declaratives) are required for a healthy political economy would help account for and benefit from exploring the one time and place in history, so far as I know, that genuinely approximated a free market: the 19th century Anglosphere, the U.S. and Great Britain (and Canada?) in particular. One of the greatest accomplishments of early modern bourgeois culture was the conversion of aristocratic into republican values, as notions like “nobility” and “virtue” came to be attached to action and character as opposed to being markers of social class. The “gentleman” and the “lady” were critical results of this process, and these figures eased the transition from status to individuality, maintaining their currency until very recently—only the cultural revolution of the 60s decisively dealt them their death blow (how long before the terms no longer even grace our public restrooms?). The gentleman and the lady domesticated ancient notions of “honor,” directing them away from violence perpetuated in the name of tribal and patriarchal prerogatives and protection towards a harmonious balance between public and private life, centered on the division of sexual roles in the nuclear family. My point here is not that we can revive ladies and gentlemen, but simply that no account of free market economics would be complete without them— without the assumptions of upward mobility and generational transmission through discipline and effort, including female responsibility for sexual deferral and “manly” self-reliance, implicit in these “categories,” the daunting rigors of Victorian laissez-faire economics would be unthinkable. An originary political economy today, then, would likewise have to study the novel forms of individuality and family life emergent today. An unsentimental and disinterested observation of today’s children and youth—if we can impose upon ourselves the discipline restraining us from either marveling at their supposedly splendid new qualities or flunking them due to their deviation from a more familiar model—would certainly be a good place to start, especially given the almost absolute independence and simulated internal coherence accredited to the world of teenagers in particular by the contemporary market. Maybe the representation of children holds at least one key towards unlocking today’s political economy.
here is the email from Michael Man to Tim Osborn, stating flatly that Realclimate.org was at CRU’s disposal in their attempts to silence dissent on AGW. By silence, they agree to censor any articles or comments that are submitted to their publication.
From: “Michael E. Mann”
To: Tim Osborn , Keith Briffa
Subject: update
Date: Thu, 09 Feb 2006 16:51:53 -0500
Reply-to: mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Cc: Gavin Schmidt
guys, I see that Science has already gone online w/ the new issue, so we
put up the RC post. By now, you’ve probably read that nasty McIntyre
thing. Apparently, he violated the embargo on his website (I don’t go
there personally, but so I’m informed).
Anyway, I wanted you guys to know that you’re free to use RC in any way
you think would be helpful. Gavin and I are going to be careful about
what comments we screen through, and we’ll be very careful to answer any
questions that come up to any extent we can. On the other hand, you
might want to visit the thread and post replies yourself. We can hold
comments up in the queue and contact you about whether or not you think
they should be screened through or not, and if so, any comments you’d
like us to include.
You’re also welcome to do a followup guest post, etc. think of RC as a
resource that is at your disposal to combat any disinformation put
forward by the McIntyres of the world. Just let us know. We’ll use our
best discretion to make sure the skeptics dont’get to use the RC
comments as a megaphone…
mike
–
Michael E. Mann
Associate Professor
Director, Earth System Science Center (ESSC)
Department of Meteorology Phone: (814) 863-4075
503 Walker Building FAX: (814) 865-3663
The Pennsylvania State University email: mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
University Park, PA 16802-5013
http://www.met.psu.edu/dept/faculty/mann.htm
This is huge, here is an “independent non-profit” publication offering to shut out any dissent from the established “consensus”.
Re: 11 Charlie Martin, among other of his posts..
17 degrees, 17 seconds, who cares?
The point was that the same scientific experts; geniuses if you will that finally confirmed Einstein was correct are the empirical wizards that turned around and swallowed the phony global warming crap hook, line and sinker.
Then to put the cherry on top this Climategate mess is being referred as a violation of the Social Contract of Science which will put an end to the entire farce not because it is a scam; a lie from day one, but because the compromised e-mail messages reveals stuff that socially offends the consensus of a bunch of research fellows..
Where does this endless, unbearable junk come from..?
The point was that the same scientific experts; geniuses if you will that finally confirmed Einstein was correct are the empirical wizards that turned around and swallowed the phony global warming crap hook, line and sinker.
You know, there are a lot of people you’d get on with over on Ian’s thread.
#36 Mark: “Peer review” as actually practiced means one anonymous person saying yea or nay on a piece of research for reasons that are never publicly revealed.
Mark, this would be a lot more convincing if it were recognizable as the way peer review is actually done. I don’t know of any peer reviewed journal or conference that uses only one reviewer, and the reasons are always written out in detail, even if you don’t know who wrote them. In fact, peer review was invented to eliminate this problem: the mysterious Editor who rejects things for good or bad reasons.
Imperfect? You bet — this will probably be the textbook example of the imperfections for years to come. But, as Churchill said about democracy, it’s a horrible system but still 8 times better than our other choices.
Peer-review is not a so big scandal after all: if a journal intentionally publishes outragely insane everywhere incorrect paper, the reputation of the journal will drop to zero and community would abstain from publishing in the journal automatically. I know several journals I’ll not send a paper to. This could be the case here.
What I find crucial problem is the revelation that the guys were unable to reproduce their own results, let alone other were able to do it, see the programmer’s notes. Such results are not scientific by definition of “science” and anything based on these results should be considered unproved. What I do not understand is how much of the GW is based on these papers.
I have constructed complex models and know you can torture them into revealing anything you want. Also, long term weather and climate models are very complex and have so many interdependent variables that it is highly unlikely that any sane and knowledgeable person would actually take any serious actions based upon them their predictions. Certainly they would not agree to put their own assets or well being at risk based upon these predictions.
So I am very disturbed that the world’s societies would ever consider acting on any such predictions even absent the self-serving manipulations now being exposed.
BTW, I do not believe that all of these people are diabolically attempting to rip off the rest of us. I think for the most part they feel personally convinced about global warming but inadequately armed to convince anyone else or to fend off external challenges to inadequate modeling and uncooperative data. So they get secretive and “creative” since they “know” what is good for the rest of us.
Roger Pielke, Sr. is at Colorado State University, not the University of Colorado as noted in Mr. Martin’s 11/22 article.