No, I just can’t get over my amusement that you think this actually means anything. Like I said, a “letter to the editor”. Anyone who reads a newspaper or journal knows how rigorously those are reviewed :rolleyes:
Like I said, I’ll stick with the actual working scientists for my science facts.
I became aware of and looked at and critiqued Arthur’s response to Monckton on July 23. Could you point me to any post that I made on July 23 or after that date which takes on a different light because you now know this fact?
Also, why is having participated in this way relevant? You have participated in threads over on ClimateAudit and, as I seem to vaguely recall (correct me if I am wrong), you may have even been personally involved in make requests to them (and perhaps even freedom-of-information requests?) regarding the data or computer code of certain scientists. Does that mean that you should always have to mention this fact whenever you complain about data or code not being released or archived or whatever, so that we know your biases?
I can’t get over my amusement that you think you understand the review process at Nature Magazine. If you think that “Communications Arising” in Nature Magazine are not rigorously reviewed, I’d suggest you try writing and submitting one someday, you might learn something … three rounds of reviews for mine, with three different reviewers. :rolleyes:
You see, this is the difference between me and you. I go out and do the shovel work. I don’t just read the papers. I actually do the math to see if they got it right, and if I understand it right. In a similar vein, my statements about “Communications Arising” are based on what I have done and experienced, not on some fantasy about how it works.
And me, I stick to facts for my science facts. Unlike you, I am totally indifferent to their origin. I prefer for them to be true rather than patting myself on the back for believing only the claims that have impeccable blue-blooded scientific provenance.
w.
jshore, as always, it’s a pleasure.
Like I said, I don’t claim that you are in anyone’s pay.
My only point is full disclosure. You were commenting here on a situation that you were a participant in. This gives your views a different color and slant. Not a bad color and slant, just a different one.
I come back to my previous analogy. It’s like judging a beauty contest where your daughter is a participant. It will color and slant your views. Which may not be a problem for the other contestants, but only if you state your conflict of interest in the clear for all to see.
You co-wrote or were an advisor on one of the papers we are discussing here. The problem is not that you defend and comment on the paper, or any other paper in this discussion. The problem is that you are not an independent commentator but are an actor in the process, and are actually one of the intellectual authors of that paper.
This gives your views a different weight. It doesn’t make them wrong, it just gives them a different appearance. If a man is the father of one of the beauty pageant contestants, then we look at him jumping up and down and saying “Isn’t she beautiful! She’s just the perfect embodiment of truth!” in a different way than if we know he is an independent judge.
That’s why, as you know, the journals make everyone declare any conflicts of interest.
In regards to your question, I don’t recall being the author, co-author, or advisor on any of the papers and studies that we have discussed here, although our discussions have been quite wide-ranging so I might have overlooked something.
Also, please be clear that I don’t think that you deliberately concealed that you were involved in the interactions under discussion. It’s just that the onus is on you to reveal it, which did not happen.
w.
intention, thanks for the response. I am confused, however, when you claim, “You co-wrote or were an advisor on one of the papers we are discussing here.” Where were we discussing Arthur’s response to Monckton before you brought it up yesterday? (And, by the way, “co-author” is clearly not correct, even “advisor” is probably not the best term…I am just acknowledged by Arthur for providing a critical reading of it…or something like that.)
Surely, if someone had brought up Arthur’s response, I would not have commented on it without mentioning the fact that I had a small part in helping him with it. However, I don’t recall ever talking about Arthur’s response here. In fact, in a quick perusal, I haven’t even found any posts here that I made actually discussing the substance of Monckton’s paper that were made after I had seen and commented on Arthur’s response on July 23.
But, that’s not quite the question I asked, is it? And, in fact, unless you have a better answer to my previous question above than I think you do, that is also not an accurate analogue to my particular case.
I never said that ClimateAudit was a “paragon of scientific accuracy and nuance”. Please refrain from attacking me for things I didn’t say.
What I said was that RealClimate censors scientific opinions that they don’t agree with, and ClimateAudit does not. While you may not like that, it’s a fact.
How do I know? Because I’ve been censored at RC myself for polite, clear, scientific questions, as have a number of people I know. I even wrote back to RC to say, in a friendly way, that their own posting policy does not allow censorship of clear, polite scientific questions … but in a twist worthy of Godel, that post was censored as well. Self-referential censorship, a new phenomenon for the 21st century … “The first rule of censorship is … you don’t talk about censorship.” (with apologies to Fight Club).
Heck, there’s a whole raft of people who’ve been bitten by it. Random quotes from the web:
For me, the blatant censorship at RealClimate of any attempted scientific posts that do not agree with them is a good thing, because due to this most egregious flouting of the mores of both science and common courtesy, only the most hidebound believers, the scientifically challenged, and the seriously inattentive folks still recommend them as a resource. Everyone else knows that science is incompatible with the censorship of scientific ideas, and that if a site does censor polite, clear, well-stated scientific views, there’s most likely a very good (but very ugly) reason for the censorship.
w.
PS - And back to the OP, I also feel the same way about the APS response to the Monckton paper, I think it’s wonderful. Putting their scarlet-letter notice on his paper did nothing but generate discussion of the issues, and hugely increased the readership of the Monckton paper. And got jshore an honorable mention as well. What’s not to like?
Sarcasm just doesn’t get enough credit these days. You certainly implied climateaudit was a rolemodel for scientific openness and “nuance” in comparison to realclimate. And might I add, PERSONALLY, when it comes to my science, “nuance” is the last thing I want.
The amount of review =/= the rigour of the review, but that’s of little moment. Like I said, it’s still essentially comment on the actual scientific papers, not papers themselves. And I’ve no reason to write one, as I generally agree with the climate science papers I see published, but nice tu quoque.
I* know* how it works, I just don’t overinflate the importance of a forum that, IMO, Nature essentially maintains as a public release valve for contrarians. If naysayers had a real case to make, they’d be publishing actual papers in Nature, not just nitpicking other articles (and then dining out on it forever after).
By the way, along the lines of how some other sciences use computer models, here is an article in the New York Times that talks about the early universe based entirely on computer simulations. There’s not a speck of data in there that I can see, which is quite unlike the Chapter 9 of the IPCC report that I was pointing to, which uses computer models in the comparison to and interpretation of observational data. (Although to be fair, there are probably other papers where simulations of things that there is observational evidence for were compared to the actual observational data in order to gain confidence in the models, just like in Chapter 9 of the IPCC report.)
Here’s the leading paragraphs of that article:
Re-reading this, I realize that one of things that I think annoys me sometimes and probably annoys other scientists is how you (and many others in the “skeptics” movement) are the self-appointed experts on what constitutes science and the proper conduct of science and so forth, particularly when you are the one entering into the scientific realm that many of these scientists have inhabited for a lot longer than you.
In regards to how one should moderate a blog like RealClimate, I think there is no one best way. There are advantages and disadvantages of any method. In particular, if you allow an unmoderated free-for-all you get a low signal-to-noise ratio, if on the other hand you clamp down too heavily or don’t allow comments at all you risk limiting the flow of ideas. The balance one strikes depends on what one is trying to achieve with the particular forum.
It is worth noting that scientific journals are peer-reviewed precisely to increase the signal-to-noise ratio. One can think of this as limiting the free flow of ideas (and, in some ways, argue that it is even less justified since scientists should be better than most at being able to weed out and reject the contributions not worth their time). Yet, peer review is still considered to be very useful.
In the blogosphere, things range from unmoderated or weakly moderated to the other extreme such as Roger Pielke Sr.'s blogs where comments are simply turned off completely. Again, there is no one way that is absolutely correct. I think that Pielke’s choice is a little heavy-handed in that it does not even allow one to ask questions of clarification, let alone challenge anything…but that is just a personal view and that does not mean that his blog does not have some interesting things to read.
As for the implication in your last sentence, I would caution you against flattering yourself too much with the idea that the “censoring” of your comments means that your comments or questions are unanswerable or otherwise too uncomfortable for them. There could well be other reasons. For example, I don’t think your oft-repeated statement here that the amplification of temperature trends in the tropical troposphere is somehow specific to the mechanism of warming due to greenhouse gases falls into that category at all. I think it is just scientifically wrong. However, I could see how the folks at RealClimate might make the decision that allowing you to repeat this wrong statement again and again is not in the best interests of advancing the discourse and thus decide to “censor” it.
My best to you as always.
duplicate post
Oh, and I might add that how heavily a forum appears to be “censored” might depend on where you sit on the issue. For example, I remember seeing complaints (e.g., from Tim Lambert) regarding censorship over at ClimateAudit. This was probably when that JohnA fellow was moderating…and my vague impression based on limited experience and anecdotes is that such heavy-handiness has become less prevalent once he moved on.
Anyway, I tend to take these back-and-forth complaints of “Your censoring more than I’m censoring” with somewhat of a grain of salt.
jshore, I said science was incompatible with censorship. Rather than deal with that issue in any fashion, you responded with your usual ad hominem:
OK, so I’m a flaming asshole for not getting a PhD first before pointing out to you that RC censors people and that censorship is incompatible with science … so what? That doesn’t address the issue, although it was a very good attempt at dodging the question.
As far as I can tell, you’ve been inhabiting the realm of science for so long you’ve forgotten what it is all about. It’s not about ad hominems, or dodging the tough questions, or how long someone has been a scientist. It’s about truth and transparency and replicability and falsification, and it’s not about censorship.
You have said a whole lot of unpleasant things about about me, which may make you feel better, but which says absolutely nothing about the question of censorship. God damn it, jshore, DISCUSS THE QUESTION AT HAND, your unending ad hominem attacks on people’s qualifications are pathetic, tiresome, and aggravating.
So to return to the question, are you claiming that the censorship at RC is compatible with science?
Or if not, exactly what don’t you like about the claim that censorship at RC is incompatible with science?
Or, if my claim is correct that a) censorship is incompatible with science, and b) RC censors scientific questions, why are you so unwilling to take a stand on the question?
And don’t bother repeating how much it upsets you when one of us plebians has the temerity, the unmitigated gall, to question your scientific knowledge, you’re a long time inhabitant of the scientific “realm”, how dare a newcomer question you, you have a PhD … just answer the fucking question. Where do you stand on the censorship at RC?
In all of our discussions, you have yet to say that any single thing that any scientist has done is in any way outside the bounds of propriety, or even slightly incorrect. What, are you all saints? Phil Jones tells Warwick Hughes that he won’t share his climate data because Warwick will try to find something wrong with it … but you are silent as the sphinx when asked about that, you see no evil, hear no evil, and by gosh, you’ll speak no evil about anyone.
Well, actually, not anyone, just people who have higher education qualification. Me, I’m fair game for your papal pronouncements on my failings, but you won’t say a word about Phil Jones’ admitted statement.
It’s like doctors refusing to comment when another doctor has cut the wrong kidney out of a surgical patient … standing up for your colleagues is fine, but taken to the extent you and other long-time inhabitants of your rarified “realm” have taken it, it just make it look like one of the requirements for a PhD is to check your conscience at the door and swear to never cross the thin blue line by criticizing another scientist.
What annoys me, what turns my stomach, is when scientists like yourself see censorship and other crap like Phil Jones’ statement, and then you very pointedly shut up and look the other way, followed by an attack on the messenger when someone points out that the emperor has no clothes … sorry, old man, but a PhD is not necessary to recognize censorship.
Am I a “self-appointed expert on what constitutes science”? No, by no means. But when Michael Mann makes up a folder, and hides results in it that he knows undercuts his “Hockeystock” paper, and then names the folder “CENSORED” and publishes what he knows is wrong, I don’t need to be an expert to know that’s not science. He’s made it too easy, no expert is necessary.
When RealClimate censors the polite, scientific questions of both well known scientists and people like myself, sorry, jshore, it ain’t science, and no amount of puffing and pounding your chest and saying what amounts to ‘trust me, I’m a long time scientist, I know what science is’ will make it science. Scientists don’t censor, they put their ideas out where people will subject their ideas to hostile questioning … and then they actually have to have the balls to answer the questions, or their ideas are discredited.
And if they are unwilling to do that, jshore … it ain’t science, no matter how many PhDs they might have.
w.
PS - I have asked you the following twice before, and as is far too often your habit (see the prior part of this post), you’ve just blown it off.
But I don’t give a shit how long you’ve been an inhabitant of the “realm”, so I’ll ask it again:
Suppose in your field (physics) someone claimed to have discovered say cold fusion. Upon investigation, you find you can’t replicate his method, so you politely ask him to explain how he did it.
He tells you to bugger off, says him telling you how he did it would be “giving in to intimidation”, and refuses to reveal how he achieved cold fusion. However, he continues to claim that his result is solid science, and say that the US should spend billions of dollars on a cold fusion program based on his results.
Now, my question is, would you believe him? Would his results constitute science? Is he justified to withhold his results? Should major policy decisions be made based on his work if the results can’t be replicated?
Once you’re done with that, please distinguish that situation from the situation with Michael Mann and the Hockeystick …
Speaking of straw men. . . .
intention, I think tomndebb responded more concisely and eloquently to what you said than I can. I will answer your one specific question though:
The problem with your analogy is that we disagree on the facts. The right to have enough information to replicate results has never meant that a scientist has to give me his entire computer code, which is his intellectual property. (And, in fact, in some cases, not even his to give. I have written papers in journals using computer code that I could be fired for giving to a scientist who asked for it because it is not mine to give away, it is my employer’s…and they would never allow me to give it away. Mann is apparently not in such a position but that doesn’t mean that he loses all right to his intellectual property.)
Also, I have previously told you that “replication” as practiced in science doesn’t mean what you think it means. I have challenged you to find any papers published in physics journals that give enough information that one could replicate them in the sense that you want to be able to…i.e., of getting the exact numerical results. You have never taken up that challenge. (I am sure you could find a few, probably ones that are theoretical enough that they don’t really do any numerical computations at all…but you would probably find the number to be pretty darn small.) What giving information to allow for replication actually means is that the scientist has given enough details so that others can duplicate his methods and check that the results agree in the sense that they give the same basic physical result…not that they give identical numerical answers.
In my post, I tried to explain to you why I think you end up in this situation where you feel all these scientists are allied against you and you guys are being persecuted and mistreated and so forth. Alas, I guess my post has fallen on deaf ears.
At any rate, I am off on vacation so I will be posting little or nothing for the next week. My best to you and everyone else reading this thread.
Oh, one more thing…As for asking me to condemn certain fellow scientists, I am sure that not all the scientists involved are paragons of virtue but I am not going to condemn them on the basis of just one side of the story…especially when I have found in the cases that I have learned more that this one side is not very reliable at giving an unbiased version of the facts. And, frankly, I have better things to do with my time than to try to launch an investigation to try to learn the full story (besides in many cases I really wouldn’t know where to start).
I’ve encountered a previously-respected Indian paleontologist who, it turned out, had made much of his data up out of whole cloth - over 25 years and 400 papers - before a fellow scientist did the legwork to prove him a fraud. I was taught it in my Geology class, in fact. So no, scientists know we aren’t perfect. But that’s not the same as the (effectively) conspiracy theory which the denialists allege.
See, it’d be one thing if RC was a lone voice in the blogosphere advocating AGW. But it’s not.
And if RC chooses to censor its comments, so what? It doesn’t claim to be a peer review journal, it’s a weblog. One that I’m sure is heartily sick of the (IMO) well-documented effort by corporate interests to discredit the science by encouraging people to saturate the ether with scientific-seeming nonsense.
See, this would be less laughable if the RC articles weren’t often packed with references to actual peer review literature, while the CA threads are all “look what this graph looks like when I (cherry)pick* these* numbers from the data and do *this *maths on them”.
If the CA “scientists” are such hot-shots, let them publish…or perish.
jshore, thanks for your reply. Have a marvelous vacation.
When you come back, you might take a shot at answering the questions. These were regarding a man who claimed to have achieved cold fusion, but whose results cannot be replicated. I had asked four questions, none of which were answered. I will rephrase them, in an attempt to clarify them:
Is an unreplicable result believable, and in particular, would you believe it?
Does an unreplicable result qualify as a data point in the unending scientific quest for knowledge?
Is he justified in with-holding the information necessary to replicate the study?
Should major policy decisions be based on unreplicable work?
You see, that was one of many problems with Mann’s study. It could not be replicated. There was a lot of man-hours put into trying. Until he finally revealed his data and some of his code was found on his server, it couldn’t be even crudely replicated.
Now, I’m not talking 26 decimal places as you seem to think. Part of the reason that the hockeystick could not be replicated was that he had made a mathematical error. (For math geeks, he was doing principle component analysis without first centering the full dataset. He called this a novel statistical method. Wegman called it as an error.)
This part of the method was not described in his published work, so, absent the code, there was no way to replicate it. None. He also extended one of the tree ring records so that he could add it to the 15th century dataset where (coincidentally) it made that period look cooler … which could not be replicated with the archived dataset, only with Mann’s altered dataset.
But I digress. Unreplicable. Even today it can’t quite be done, because some of the underlying data is unarchived and some of the underlying code is unknown. Unreplicable.
So. Should we make major policy decisions based on unreplicable studies?
You keep referring to intellectual property, which is certainly a valid defence and a perfectly good reason for a man to keep his code secret.
But should major policy decisions be made on the basis of secret code?
Should results which can only be achieved using secret code be called scientific results?
Doesn’t sit right with me, but I guess YMMV …
w.
PS - in a funny turn of events, one of the things that Steve McIntyre discovered was that all but one of the precipitation datasets used in the original 1998 Hockeystick were mislabeled. Some were given a latitude and longitude that placed them on another continent, with Maine getting the rainfall for Paris. This was discovered and brought to Mann’s attention in, hang on … in 2003. In Mann’s latest opus, 2007, he still hasn’t fixed it … not a good sign for the validity of the results.
Nor, curiously, has he fixed his incorrect principle components math, despite it being noted by both the NAS and Wegman as being incorrect. It is typical of all of the studies that claim to have “confirmed” the Hockeystick.
More information here … WARNING: site may contain humorous statements, facts, citations, references, and mathematics.
And yet the National Academy of Sciences generally disagrees with you that Mann’s reconstruction stands out. The figure here is particularly helpful: http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=11676&page=2#p200108c09960002001
Huang’s borehole temperatures, Hegerl’s multiproxy, and Moberg’s multiproxy, all shown in the figure on the linked page, show the same general pattern as Mann’s as far as recent industrial influence on climate is concerned. People with a distinct interest in stalling policy on global warming always seem to focus on Mann and pretend the other reconstructions don’t exist.
BZZZZT. Assumes facts not in evidence. First you have to show that there is an “industrial influence on climate”. Then you can talk about the pattern. You are correct, however, that they show the same general pattern as Mann’s.
That’s a crock of shit, all of the subsequent proxy reconstructions have received careful examination, and have revealed common problems. You are quite correct that Hegerl’s multiproxy and Mobergs multiproxy show the same pattern of distortions as Mann shows.
What you seem to be unaware of is that the same flawed proxies (Bristlecones which the same NAS you approve of said not to use, Thompsons unarchived Guliya and Quelcaya series, the unarchived Tornetrask reconstruction, the substituted Polar Urals series, Yamal, and all the rest) are used in all of these tree ring studies. So, here’s the first rule of proxy studies:
If you use garbage proxies, you will get garbage answers.
Now you want to tell me, as though it were some kind of huge revelation, that the garbage proxies all give the same garbage answers … well, yes, wevets, they do agree, but they’re still garbage.
I’ve pointed out these problems with the proxies many times, but no one seems to have had the [snip] to actually take a look and report back on the question. There seems to be a strange reluctance of the folks here to actually look beyond the lovely, glittery surface veneer to see what the flawed proxies are actually doing, and what the authors are actually doing.
Come back when you understand the Polar Urals substitution, or when you can talk intelligently about Linah Abaneh’s thesis and how it affects the Sheep Mountain bristlecone results. At that point, we can discuss this further. Until then, you’re just repeating claims of significance which have neither practical nor statistical foundation.
w.
wevets, I realized that I hadn’t provided any citations for my claim:
So, here are some references:
MOBERG is discussed here, and here, and here, and here.
BRIFFA is discussed here.
HEGERL is discussed here, and here.
Let me leave you with these:
I can provide you with specific citations for any study you care to name, they’ve all been very carefully examined and discussed at length. As this list shows, your claim that people “pretend the other reconstructions don’t exist” is typical AGW nonsense.
My best to everyone,
w.