Ego, innit?

Hardly unusual, as you must know from hanging around here.

“If anything, I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right, regardless of the consequences.”

There’s clearly something wrong there, aside from the possibly illegal acts.

As for Monbiot, I expect him to apologies some other time for it, because oddly enough he gets things wrong like all the other journo’s do.

Or perhaps they might sue the person who wrote this:

“There appears to be evidence here of attempts to prevent scientific data from being released, and even to destroy material that was subject to a freedom of information request.

Worse still, some of the emails suggest efforts to prevent the publication of work by climate sceptics, or to keep it out of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign. Some of the data discussed in the emails should be re-analysed.”

No, not Lawson….George Monbiot!!

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/11/23/the-knights-carbonic/

On solar activity and its relations (negligible for the warming of the last 30 years or so):

http://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-global-warming.htm

Your point one makes no sense to me, because what else is stats except a method of modelling using numerical data? What statistics would you want anyway?

The point about total volume of CO2 in the atmosphere is a classic lie. Would you feel happy in a room wiht 1ppm of Cl2? Yet people complain that an extra 100ppm of CO2 is nothing. It is all explained in the latest IPCC report which can be found here:
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_ipcc_fourth_assessment_report_wg1_report_the_physical_science_basis.htm

The anthropogenic cause is knowne because of isotope ratios of C12 and C13 and C14. Moreover there are also feedback mechanism which increase the warming beyond that expected simply due to Co2.

Your points 5 and 6 are what we would like the govnerment, scientists and others to be getting on with, but people who think AGW isn’t real keep getting in the way and preventing action.
AS for point 7, I believe the Stern report looked at that, and the short answer is do something or we’re all fucked.

If the flat earth trolls are having to use Nigel Lawson as their great guide they really are fucked.

Lawson has no credibility on anything except wiping his own arse. And I would not put it past him to mess that up.

Nigel Lawson is right when he says in today’s Times:

No he is very wrong.

(a) the scientists have been manipulating the raw temperature figures to show a relentlessly rising global warming trend; (b) they have consistently refused outsiders access to the raw data; (c) the scientists have been trying to avoid freedom of information requests; and (d) they have been discussing ways to prevent papers by dissenting scientists being published in learned journals.

(a) No they haven’t. Raw data usually has systematic errors, these have to be removed. If Lawson says that this is manipulating data then he just does not under stand the scientific process.
(b) Of course outsiders are refused access to raw data. Raw data really is of no interest to anyone else: usually there are large amounts and only the people who gather the data know how the measurements were taken and hence what must be done to remove systematic errors. Documenting all of this is precisely what they do when they publish their npapers.
(c) What the fuck has FoI got to do with science? Science is open anyway: scientists’ raison’d'etre is to publish their work. FoI requests just get in the way of them doing science.

I have to add another stage, Stage 0. The editor of the journal has to select reviewer(s) who are knowledgeable about the subject. This is not a trivial process, and clearly if the work is contentious the editor must choose reviewers that can give an unbiased yet critical review. The reputation of the journal rests on its ability to find suitable reviewers. If a journal only chooses reviewers with a particular opinion (diogenes1960’s query) then its reputation will be that it is biased.

I have had many discussions about the peer review process with the advocates of “Intelligent Design” who contend that the peer review has an inbuilt bias against their belief^H^H^H^H^H^H theory. It is interesting that climate change deniers present the same arguments against the peer review process as the ID proponents.

Roger:

I’m afraid much of the current traffic on the CRU emails is very much of the wackaloon variety, hence the abject failure to understand the implications of Tim Osborn’s email.

The anti-AGW crowd are barking at the wrong end of the ‘hockey stick’ and complaining, absurdly, about scientists substituting data for the recent post-1960 period derived from dendroclimatological modelling with REAL data from actual weather stations.

If there are problems with the dendro-models, which is possible if not likely due to it being a very new branch of science, they lie in the data that pre-dates 1960.

Beyond that point, as Osborn freely admits in the email, the dendro-data is useless because its confounded by factors unrelated to temperature.

Understand that, and that the current obsession with the Osborn email stems from the mistaken belief that the post-1960 data shows a real cooling trend, which it doesn’t, and you understand why I described this as an RTA in slow-motion.

By obsessing over that issue, many of those commenting on that email are proving only that they haven’t got the foggiest idea what they’re gibbering on about.

the concept of peer review is interesting. Does it not tend to mean that ground-breaking ideas, or ideas that do not concur with the orthodoxy, get rejected

Not at all. In fact one Nobel Prize in the area where I worked (semiconductor physics) was awarded to someone who did not have a clue about the results he had generated. The individual (a rather arrogant German, who I had the displeasure of working for, for a while) was measuring a new material and generated some strange results. He wrote it up as a letter (ie a short, inconclusive paper) to a peer-reviewed journal. The reviewer, who was a competitor in the field, immediately recognised the results because it was exactly what he had predicted and was looking for. The reviewer, unfortunately, did not have samples as high quality as the German’s and so had been unable to see the effect. To his utmost credit, the reviewer returned the paper to the German with references to some theory papers on the phenomenon. The German re-wrote the paper (but did not include the reviewer who had pushed him in the right direction) and a few years later the German got the Nobel prize for the work in that paper. The reviewer didn’t get the Nobel prize, of course, but he did do the right thing.

One thing that I find with non-scientists is that they just don’t understand how scientists think. Non-scientists tend to think in terms of polemic competition – they think scientists are fighting each other. That is far from the truth. Scientists put their effort into scientific discovery. There is some competition about who will publish first, but by and large the process is positive, not negative. People who produce contrary theories still get published, but if the evidence cannot be found to reinforce their theory, their theory will still remain in the literature, but it won’t be treated as mainstream. I remember once making a minor experimental discovery in my work, and the theorists I worked with did not know how to explain it, but after a search in the literature a member of the team found an obscure paper from 20 years before in a German journal that predicted this effect quite accurately. This was the first time in 20 years that someone was able to provide results that proved that theory.

So I take it that when you responded to ‘As I write this, a coalition of the misguided, misinformed and, well, just plain old wackaloons, are heatedly pouring (sic) over the contents of the CRU’s mail server’, with ‘Not all those pouring (sic) over it are “wackaloons”, you meant to say that not all of those doing the poring were a member of at least one of the three groups mentioned by Unity.

However, taking into account that Unity’s sentence also related to the specific motivations of people doing said poring, namely looking “for any traces of ’something dodgy’ in a vain attempt to debunk anthropogenic global warming theory once and for all”, I would say that Unity was broadly correct. People poring over the contents for that reason really are either “misguided”, “misinformed” or “wackaloons”. Actually, considering the amount of effort which no doubt has to be put into sifting through all the contents I would say that quite a lot of people doing the poring do fall into the third category.

In one scenario, the data is released and the ’skeptics’ (lumping together those who have genuine questions about the reliability of the data and those who are intent on finding fault even where none exists) will do their best to question it. Some of the questions raised will be mad, some will be bad, but it’s hard to believe that any of them will be dangerous. And some of the ‘genuine’ skeptics may succeed in finding real flaws in how the data was gathered or processed, the result of which will be better science. If the facts point to catastrophic AGW, anything that moves us closer to the ‘true’ facts has to be a good thing.

In the second scenario, the data is withheld. The genuine questioners can’t ask their questions and may well be frustrated (and problems with the data may go undiscovered). The anti-AGW ideologues, on the other hand, do not have their case harmed at all. They gain as much – in face, probably more – credibility from the withholding of the data than they would do from the ability to scrutinise it. The only people benefiting from the withholding of this data, so far as I can see, is the conspiracy theory crowd who can now claim (with a rare, for them, legitimacy) that they’re not being allowed to see something important.

This causes a problem for people like me. I’m a natural skeptic about pretty much everything, and when looking at something I don’t understand (like climate models) I can only employ some basic heuristics. One is to trust the prevailing expert consensus; another is to trust those who seem most open and confident about their position. Regrettably, this situation puts those two at odds. I can see why CRU might not like the attentions of McIntyre and co., but they seem to have lost sight of the larger audience. The rest of us out here aren’t exactly pre-disposed to like McIntyre or his arguments, but as long as he can credibly claim to have been denied the opportunity to scrutinise the data, he gains credibility in the eyes of those who evaluate the situation on the basis of the behaviour of the two sides.

As far as I’m aware, climate science is a difficult business. It falls into the category of ‘complex systems’ which, like economics or some forms of medial science, is still quite poorly understood. Even the best scientists, the leading lights in their field, are going to be wrong about a lot of things. That doesn’t mean that their general prognosis is wrong (Newton was ‘wrong’ but his predictions were accurate enough), but it does mean that on many small points of detail their conclusions will probably not hold forever. In 30 years out climate models will be dramatically more sophisticated than they are now. The process by which we get from here to there will be one that involves the work of many scientists being overthrown by others. This belief gives me a strong bias against those who want to keep things secret or to protect certain positions against criticism. I’m sorry, because I am sure that much of the criticism will be unreasonable, wrong and silly, but I’m afraid that that’s life. I’d rather allow a hundred crackpots to look at the data if it means that one insightful person can take that same data and prove something useful with it.

(a) – There is no evidence of this.
(b) – Some raw data ha not been released due to proprietary issues. Other raw data is publicly available.
(c) – Possibly
(d) – They were concerned at the quality of the papers that one particular publication was accepting and that the editor was accepting material for reasons other than the quality of the scientific content. This, if true, is a valid concern as it undermines the peer-review process. Given that one paticular paper was so badly flawed that six members of the editorial board resigned in protest at the decision to publish it it would seem their concerns were reasonable.