Weather Change
17th April 2010
You’ll recall the infamous Climategate emails that arose from an illegal hacking of the email servers at a leading climate change research group. The contents of those emails produced an extremely negative response from many outside viewers and led to a series of external investigations of the climate change researchers involved. The results on one investigation at the Climate Unit at East Anglia have been released and you can read the brief and very nontechnical report. The Conclusions are consistent with the rest of the report and are interesting.
1. We saw no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit and had it been there we believe that it is likely that we would have detected it. Rather we found a small group of dedicated if slightly disorganized researchers who were ill-prepared for being the focus of public attention. As with many small research groups their internal procedures were rather informal.
2. We cannot help remarking that it is very surprising that research in an area that depends so heavily on statistical methods has not been carried out in close collaboration with professional statisticians. Indeed there would be mutual benefit if there were closer collaboration and interaction between CRU and a much wider scientific group outside the relatively small international circle of temperature specialists.
3. It was not the immediate concern of the Panel, but we observed that there were important and unresolved questions that related to the availability of environmental data sets. It was pointed out that since UK government adopted a policy that resulted in charging for access to data sets collected by government agencies, other countries have followed suit impeding the flow of processed and raw data to and between researchers. This is unfortunate and seems inconsistent with policies of open access to data promoted elsewhere in government.
4. A host of important unresolved questions also arises from the application of Freedom of Information legislation in an academic context. We agree with the CRU view that the authority for releasing unpublished raw data to third parties should stay with those who collected it.
As someone with a good background in many of the areas of this report (government-academic relationship, team research, large scale research, heavy statistical emphasis) and a bad background in the content (I rode the Speech Tournament bus with Tom Skilling the WGN Weather Guy!), my reaction is somewhat negative to the report and its conclusions. For me, it is a nice way of publicly doubting a peer’s work that also reveals important inconsistencies in the polite doubters.
1. To call another’s work, “slightly disorganized,” is misleading. Disorganized work can hide a multitude of sins and is not characteristic of good science. How you know what you know is as important as what you know. Disorganized work diminishes the “how you know” part of this. Even without any deliberate malfeasance or deception, disorganized science is not to be trusted.
2. To label a professional response as “surprised” when confronting inferior methods, in this case, statistical analysis, is also misleading. This surprise speaks volumes about the poor quality of this climate research because the research is so damn statistical. As the review committee notes in other sections of the report, the East Anglia group does not collect original evidence (i.e. doesn’t go out in the field, cut down trees, pull the ring sample, etc.), but rather collects somebody else’s original data. The East Anglia group then conducts extensive statistical analysis of the data. The whole point of their science is statistical analysis. For an outside review group to politely say, “We’re surprised” is another way of saying, “We doubt you.”
3. I applaud this review committee’s concern about the lack of openness and transparency with Government information. The review committee notes this closed policy restricts researcher access information to Government sponsored and supported work. Unsaid is that the closed policy also restricts citizen access to taxpayer sponsored and supported work. Hey, if it’s Government, it belongs to Everyone.
4. I strongly disagree with the review committee’s concern about public scrutiny of research. Most of this particular research is paid for with taxpayer money and it most certainly should be in the public domain. While I don’t think that citizens should have any say while the work is being done, they certainly do have the right to the work in all published forms, including data sets (the files, not the original evidence). It is also wildly inconsistent with their criticism of Government opacity in Point 3. Transparency is good for both Government and Science.
Overall, I view this report as a negative evaluation of both the people at the East Anglia Climate Unit and their work. It casts significant doubt on what the researchers did and what they claimed. It is entirely possible that good science will produce the same conclusions, but this report says to me that we have no good science on climate change from this unit.