Once again, I was not defending that action, the big deal you are seeing here is doubtful anyhow, I can deduce now that most if not all of the original data is available to check and experiment with, otherwise the current awareness of AGW would not had occurred, looking back at the history, it is clear the data that was then available gave scientists the impression there was no need to worry about any warming.
That changed.
Logic tells me that most of the new data that pointed to global warming appeared decades ago, and it is available.
I mentioned it before, but it is now more clear than ever that you are avoiding bringing evidence that critics had no access to any weather data to make any experiments. I still think the deniers are making a big deal of Mann’s data release precisely because now that is the only moot argument they have. (Moot because, as your last cite and the RealClimate articles shows, there are more reasons to doubt the competency of these deniers by how they used the data.)
Maybe you can help clear up a bit of confusion. What exclusive data did Mann have? Did he have a network of private measurement stations? Or, is the data in question the subset he used for his work, along with any analysis.
I’m for open source, but as someone who has reused code for my dissertation and for internal projects, I can say the best thing climate scientists can do is to flood the deniers with source code. It will snow them under for decades.
His results and methods are public for checking, were checked, and were found to be innacurate.
Having his source code as well might have aided, sure, but wasn’t necessary given that people had already determined that the guy’s whole method was flawed. That they took him to court over it was most likely just to draw attention to the one study as a method to distract away from all the other studies that came to the same conclusion but didn’t have any errors and weren’t being run by some blowhard.
Well here, just to explain things more in-depth, the science community still accepts that private property is private property.
If I spend a million dollars making a particle accelerator and discover a new element, I’m not suddenly obligated to let any person who asks use my million dollar particle accelerator. Common sense will tell you pretty quick why that won’t work. But, there ain’t nobody who’s going to believe that I found the element unless someone else is able to replicate the test and gets the same result as me. And in order to be able to replicate it, I need to be able to supply sufficient documentation that anyone (with a million dollar particle accelerator) could do so.
This isn’t secrecy or laxness, nor is it even a bad thing. If one of the two particle accelerators is broken then you’re going to get different results. Independent verification without any taint of possibly flawed test apparatus is a good thing–which would happen if everyone was using the same hardware and software. And it’s taken as a given that any study is only as worthwhile as as many times that it has been independently verified.
Perhaps not the physical particle accelerator. But if the world is being asked to spend significant money on the basis of your research, then you better release the plans for the accelerator, the maintenance logs, and every last shred of data.
“all” was not released as you claim. Not “quickly” anyway.
Anyway, your reasoning leads to a very comfortable situation for people such as Mann. If they hold stuff back, but get caught anyway, then there’s no problem because the “error” got corrected. If they hold stuff back such that it prevents an “error” from being caught, then nobody knows so it’s no problem.
Given the stakes in this dispute, the only fair thing is for all researchers to release all information (data, failed models, source code, etc.) immediatately.
Are you saying that no more flaws were found once more things were released?
And given the stakes in this dispute, do you agree that all researchers should release all information (data, failed models, source code, etc.) with their publications?
There was a time that religious people believed the earth was flat,the sun revolved around the earth etc. But it seems to me that when science and religions disagree, it make take years, but science comes out as the winner. Saint Agustine in “The City of God” said it was impossible for the earth to be round. He was wrong and it took many years before the Pope admitted that Galileo was right where church and science disagreed.
Many of the comments there are disappointing: Dr Ash’s and Professors Hoegh’s and Lowe’s in particular compare poorly in comparison with the Dr Brook’s
It’s all interesting stuff, but I still have my barrel of salt and I’m still on the fence.
It’s not a good analogy. The fundamental difference between science and religion is that scientists are prepared to change their minds in the light of new evidence.
To turn the question around, how many people reject the possibility of climate change because they don’t want to believe it?
The basic concept of human induced climate change is pretty simple. Increase the amount of greehouse gasses in the atmosphere and the temperature of the planet will increase, as more of the sun’s heat is trapped. I have enough scientific knowledge to understand this, it’s not a question of ‘faith’. The difficulty is predicting the extent of any warming. Building a realistic climate model is very challenging. You have to identify the major positive and negative feedback mechanisms. An example of positive feedback is: temperature increases -> more Siberian permafrost melts -> more methane (a greenhouse gas) released into atmosphere.
Useful checking of climate models can be performed by using historical data and checking the results against real-life data, e.g. start you model at 1900 and see how well it matches the climate changes over the 20th century. However, predicting future climate is an extrapolation, which is fundamentally less accurate than interpolating data. Hence the large degees of uncertainty in temperature predictions for the next century.
And it’s possible that aspects of science can become more religion-like.
Ideally, a scientist should be like a prosecutor. He or she should be equally open to evidence that will undermine or support his or her position. Just as a prosecutor must turn over exculpatory evidence to the defense attorney, a scientist should disclose all aspects of his or her research to the public.
However, as the example of Mike Nifong shows, some prosecutors fall short of the ideal. They fall into the all too human trap of looking only for evidence that will confirm their position while ignoring and supressing evidence that undermines their position.
And sometimes scientists fall short of the ideal too.
Yes, of course they do. Scientists are subject to vanity and politics like the rest of us. However, the scientific method (publish your evidence, showing how you reached your conclusions so they can be peer-reviewed) provides a great deal of protection against individual errors and pet theories.
I used to find the analogy between religious and scientific dogma a good one, but in fact it’s very mis-leading. Scientic theories only become dogma when they are shown to make accurate predictions, and are replaced when other theories are shown to make better predictions.
I think it depends whether you take a short term view or a long term view. In the long run, science and scientists are pretty good about discarding bad theories.
I agree that is an important distinction to make, science is more likely to be more ‘dogmatic’ over a short time period than a long one (it takes time to disseminate and test new theories). However, that doesn’t make it a good analogy if you agree that ultimately science is not dogmatic.
