Temperature Data Wants To Be Free 489
An anonymous reader writes "The UK's Met Office Hadley Centre and University of East Anglia have been refusing access to the data used for their global climate averages and scientific studies. A copy of the data has leaked, and attempts continue to accomplish the release of the data by whoever maintains it. Excuses have included confidentiality agreements which cannot be verified because no records were kept, mention of the source has been removed from the Met Office web site, and IPCC records were destroyed."
Re:What are they trying to hide? (Score:5, Interesting)
This sort of thing would make anyone suspicious (Score:4, Interesting)
This is the first time I've seriously begun to question whether or not the global warming studies are in fact legitimate. If they won't allow free access to the data, so others can verify results or run it through alternative (or more refined) climate models, then the very obvious question becomes "why?"
What exactly is it they so keen on hiding that they'll remove all source citations from their publicatons?
NOTE: I am not about to buy into the fossile-fuel-funded arguments that global warming "isn't real"...it's very real, as anyone living in the northern lattitudes can trivially see. Even in London it's obvious that insects and plantlife that never used to thrive this far north now do...but anectdotal evidence, even as widespread and pervasive as this, is no substitute for rigorous scientific study, and I repeat the question: what the hell is it these people are trying to hide? There's no excuse for keeping data that is so fundamental to scientific inquiry, and has such a profound effects on public policy, secret.
Open Source Science is the path through the dark (Score:2, Interesting)
Opening Science is the way forward, the path through the darkness, the endarkenment of closed source science.
If's it's paid by the public purse it must be OPEN data that anyone can see and audit.
Science is based upon the notion of being able to validate or invalidate in whole or in part the "claims" made by various "hypotheses" put forward.
When you "BELIEVE" science you're just another religion.
When you can't audit the work of scientists whose work is the basis of public policy then you and the public are being endarkened and kept excluded. But why? For what or whose agenda?
As long as the data, the methods, the algorithms, the statical analysis, the step by step procedures are kept secret the work is suspect to scientific fraud.
Have the guts to open your science to the light of day, it will in the end be better for it once it's vetted by more eyes and brains and math nuts and others poking holes in it.
ANY AND ALL CLAIMS MADE BY PEOPLE WHO KEEP THEIR SCIENCE CLOSED AND SECRET is suspect of FRAUD. What are they hiding? Are they simply embarrassed to admit that they might be wrong? That they've made mistakes? That they are afraid that others might gain an edge in the grant process and shut them out of funding?
Open Source Science is the way forward through the darkness into the light that empower verification and falsification and thus progress EITHER way!!!
This site has some excellent quotes and articles on the topic: http://www.pathstoknowledge.com./ [www.pathstoknowledge.com]
"The meaning of the world is the separation of wish and fact." - KURT GÖDEL
"According to Peirce's doctrine of fallibilism, the conclusions of science are always tentative. The rationality of the scientific method does not depend on the certainty of its conclusions, but on its self-corrective character: by continued application of the method science can detect and correct its own mistakes, and thus eventually lead to the discovery of truth".
A guiding principle for accepting claims of catastrophic global events, miracles, incredible healing, invisible friends, or fill in the blank is:
"extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." - Carl Sagan
"Two important characteristics of maps should be noticed. A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness." - Alfred Korzybski
"Science is a search for basic truths about the Universe, a search which develops statements that appear to describe how the Universe works, but which are subject to correction, revision, adjustment, or even outright rejection, upon the presentation of better or conflicting evidence." - James Randi
"Hypotheses are nets: only he who casts will catch." - Novalis
Re:This sort of thing would make anyone suspicious (Score:4, Interesting)
(Please let me know where I can get some of that mythical fossil-fuel-funds for all the posts I do on this subject .. )
I live in the northern latitudes (Sweden). There's absolutely nothing unusual about the weather/climate today, if you're prepared to go decades and centuries back in time when comparing. And why shouldn't we? Who on earth came up with the crazy idea of some sort of stable weather-utopia where the climate of 1988 (or whatever) is the "true" climate of the world?
The sun drives the clouds and the winds, and the ocan cycles. Those have wavelengths of 30-60 years, it seems. That coincides really well with the decades of cooling, warming, cooling and warming we've seen the last century.
Re:This sort of thing would make anyone suspicious (Score:2, Interesting)
WAIT before you leap to conclusion. This article cites only blogs which are known to misrepresent science and actions pertaining to them. The accused - in the blog world, that would be realclimate, which unlike Watt's and climateaudit is run by climate scientists - have not had time to answer yet.
The denialists have played this game many, many times before. Example: recently, the blogs were up in a huff because a denialist polar bear researcher had been denied a seat on some board. The news even reached slashdot before anyone got time to ask people from the board in question. But when someone did, it turned out the researcher in question was not eligible, on account of not being active in polar bear research any longer.
When serious accusations like this come out (especially from the denialists, who have been known to paint themselves as victims if their mails were not responded to quickly enough) you got to wait and hear what the accused side has to say before jumping to conclusions.
Re:Obviously a conspiracy!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
Are you serious, or is this a parody?
Re:This sort of thing would make anyone suspicious (Score:1, Interesting)
It's not broken (Score:5, Interesting)
It is that submitter, or Slashdot itself, linked to it through nyud.net. Apparently the site doesn't allow that. Just take that out of the URL, it works fine. The site in question is run by Steve McIntyre. While certianly not a disinterested party (then again people who are involved in something are rarely disinterested) he does have some credibility. He was one of two people who worked on the whole "hockey stick controversy" in terms of showing that the model used to generate the graph was flawed (the model generated a similar shape graph with random inputs).
Some nice data for you (Score:2, Interesting)
My conclusion so far: it's very unlikely not to be co2 responsible for most of the warming we've observed since the 70s, it's likely to get much worse, and there don't seem to be any viable alternative explanations.
Indeed they do! (Score:2, Interesting)
See
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Anthony_Watts [sourcewatch.org]
"Watts was a speaker at the International Conference on Climate Change (2009) organized by the Heartland Institute think tank. Watts is also listed as a speaker for the Heartland Institute's June 2009 Third International Conference on Climate Change."
Nice gigs. Wonder whether he was given a nice hotel for that...
Or Lindzen:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Richard_S._Lindzen [sourcewatch.org]
"He is one of the leading global warming skeptics and is a member of the Science, Health, and Economic Advisory Council, of the Annapolis Center, a Maryland-based think tank which has been funded by corporations including ExxonMobil."
Ah, the joys of being in a quango!
Roy Spencer?
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Roy_Spencer [sourcewatch.org]
"Since February 2004 he has been a columnist for TCS Daily writing over forty columns, almost entirely on the the topic of global warming. Until 2006, TCS Daily was run by DCI Group, a lobbying firm that works for ExxonMobil."
Plimer?
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ian_Plimer [sourcewatch.org]
"He is a global warming sceptic and a non-executive director of three mining companies: Ivanhoe Australia, a subsidiary of Bob Friedland's Ivanhoe Mines, as well as CBH Resources and Kefi Minerals."
How about McIntyre:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Stephen_McIntyre [sourcewatch.org]
"Stephen McIntyre has worked in mineral exploration for 30 years, much of that time as an officer or director of several public mineral exploration companies. McIntyre is also a headliner at the International Conference on Climate Change (2009), a gathering of climate change skeptics in New York from March 8th-10th. "
(remember that ICCC is funded by the Heartland Institute).
McKitrick:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ross_McKitrick [sourcewatch.org]
"Ross McKitrick is an Associate Professor in the Economics Department at the University of Guelph, Ontario, and, since October 2002, has been a Senior Fellow at the Fraser Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Vancouver, British Columbia"
"For example in late 1999 defended the Fraser Institute when it criticised proposals for an Endangered Species Act in Canada. "
All on the oil-based gravy train!
Concealment of decisive evidence (Score:5, Interesting)
The thing I cannot understand is this. We have a bunch of scientists, lots of them. Starting with Michael Mann in front of Wegman, but including Jones, Thompson, lots of really well known and respected people. They have all done work which supposedly proves that the human race on Earth is facing catastrophe. They supposedly have decisive evidence for this, in the form of data and code.
We then have a lot of sceptics who allege that the data does not exist, is not as described, and the code used to process it does not do what it is said to do, and that there is no such threat as described, or at leas that there is no evidence for one.
You would expect the scientists to immediately produce their evidence and their code and to silence debate once and for all. It would be so simple, it would just be end of story, and now lets focus on what to do about it all. But they do not. Instead they refuse to reveal anything. Jones, for instance, refused to even reveal the names of the stations in China on which his study was based. Mann would not reveal the algorithm which generated the hockey stick to a Congressional Committee. Thompson is silent. Yet supposedly this secret evidence proves decisively, contrary to the claims of sceptics, that the future of the human race is under severe and imminent threat?
It makes absolutely no sense. They never give any reasons for refusing that make any sense either. Sometimes it is commercial considerations. What commercial considerations can there be that outweigh the possible extinction of humanity? Sometimes it is, as Jones once is reported to have said, that they do not want people trying to poke holes in it. WTF??? Sometimes, as with Thompson's ice core data, there is just silence.
It is very hard to believe that this wonderful evidence really exists, and really is as represented. Or maybe it is, and they really do not want to convince everyone of the threat? I don't know, but the story as told makes absolutely no sense. Something is not right here.
Re:This sort of thing would make anyone suspicious (Score:4, Interesting)
We have excellent data on global climate back about 850ky, good data back to 60mya, and some data back as far as bya
[citation needed]
I wasn't aware we had time-traveling climate researchers or time-traveling meteorological instrumentation to *accurately* measure all the various datapoints. My impression was that accurate & meaningful meteorological data wasn't recorded farther back than a couple of centuries, if that, and that many very-relevant measurements weren't even recorded for much of even that relatively-short (in terms of geologic time) span of time.
From what I've been able to gather, most of the ice-core and similar geologic records seemed to indicate that CO2 was a lagging factor in warming, not a leading factor. As in; it got warm, then CO2 went up, not the other way around.
The reluctance to release the data and the destruction of data is a red flag that something isn't kosher. They have to have known that doing this would only fuel the anti-climate change factions, so it would seem logical that what is being hidden must be pretty damning evidence that their current theories are bunk.
However, there's a ton of grant money to be had by the climate scientists and much power & control to be gained by government by promoting a climate crisis, so it isn't too surprising.
Strat
Re:In fact you should scrutinize it yourself (Score:5, Interesting)
This is all true of course.
The problems start because you've got a lot of people in "science" who are not acting in good faith, who for various reasons are heavily invested in seeing theories "proved wrong". We've seen this throughout this history of science, but not since Galileo v The Holy Roman Catholic Church have we seen such heavily funded actors who have so much at stake to see theories not only "proved wrong" but discredited to the point that nobody wants to do that research any more. Then, those same actors blame the original researchers for acting in bad faith.
There's a real poisonous element working at the edges of the scientific community these days.
Re:100% worthless (Score:2, Interesting)
The quality of the original data has a very real impact on the outcome of the studies.
Nearly three quarters of the surface temperature collection stations in the U.S. are located within 10 meters of an artificial heating source.
Re:Indeed they do! (Score:3, Interesting)
Ah! I see Mr. McIntyre has been involved with "several public mineral exploration companies". I wonder if any of those "minerals" happen to be bituminous?
Re:100% worthless (Score:3, Interesting)
I recall looking in depth at the claim of a y2k error at the time it was news. It wasn't true. There was a change over from one dataset to another dataset round about the year 2000, and some dispute of the baseline to use to combine that data. It had nothing to do with y2k, which is specifically a class of computer bugs where a year is only stored as 2 digits. The "y2k" name McIntyre attached was to try and milk the story as if there was a bug, and there was no such thing.
Re:Tinfoil hat time? (Score:4, Interesting)
He is a member of the IPCC review panel and has more than a couple peer reviewed papers on the subject.
Re:CO2 (Score:1, Interesting)
Please. The poor people in Africa card?
What is killing people in Africa is tin pot Marxist dictators and Muslim extremists.
Re:Concealment of decisive evidence (Score:0, Interesting)
I would be satisfied with the peer-reviewed published paper that demonstrates that mankind's contribution of CO2 to the atmosphere is a major driver of global climate. Apparently such a paper does not exist, since I've never gotten an answer in 10 years asking for it.
The whole IPCC project is based on this assumption, Hansen's sworn, scientific testimony before congress in 1988 was based on that assumption, Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize with that assumption, but they seem to have lost the actual research that proved it.