"Climategate" could be described largely as a combination of poor science reporting--think of what might have been were that credulous Washington Post reporter to have had even an infinitesimal epsilon of perspective!--and a "shotgun slander": spin the content of the e-mails, the codes, etc. in the worst way possible, see what you can get away with, and never, ever, retract a falsehood. That isn't to say that some of the criticism hasn't been judicious or constructive--'bloggers Will Wilkinson, Megan McArdle, Tyler Cowen, and Robin Hanson, among others, had very judicious things to say--but that's been drowned out by anti-science types who are unable to or refuse to distinguish good argument from bad.
I suppose it's been improving. Last week "hide the decline" was the rage, followed by complaints that (gasp!) submitters of papers being allowed to suggest referees must be an evil conspiracy, and the Bizarro-world narrative that had concern for the integrity of the peer review process (e.g. the DeFreitas affair at Climate Research) was subversion of the peer review process. Now the complaint has settled on possible planned evasion of FOI requests and the supposed deletion of raw data from CRU servers.
The gripe about FOI request evasion is possibly legitimate; that of deletion of other people's data from CRU servers, less so. If I had to identify a party that could be harmed by it, I'd identify the CRU itself.
Suppose that the would-be "skeptics"--and I hate that term because it implies that everyone else is a bad scientist--decided to do something constructive (instead of producing the usual flood of obviously-wrong, long-debunked specious arguments) and attempted to duplicate one of the CRU temperature results. They have no reason to expect help from CRU--should scientists help people who incessantly libel them and look for cute-but-false arguments that their life's work is a stupid mistake?--but suppose that they find that following the published information in good faith, they can't duplicate the set. It's incumbent on CRU scientists, then, to publish clarifications or supplemental information that enables duplication. But deleting those files may be like throwing out lab notebooks: CRU might find itself lacking information necessary to duplicate their own results! It would seem that the only option would be retraction! That would be a coup for the "skeptics", one that IMO they would not deserve.
But wait, you say: the "skeptics" couldn't possibly do this, because the CRU has kept both the raw data sources and methodology secret. Think about it for a minute: would the rest of the scientific community use the CRU results if this were so?
The release of each CRU derived data set was accompanied by a peer-reviewed paper explaining the methodology and listing the sources. The CRU TS 2.1 temperature data, for example, were explained by an International Journal of Climatology article by Timothy Mitchell and Philip Jones.
From this article, someone who gets his hands on the same raw data should be able to duplicate the result. If the paper doesn't contain sufficient information to do this, it should not have passed peer review--explaining methods well enough to permit duplication is one of the universal standards for review, and complaints about this are common in referee reports.
The existence of this paper and others like it doesn't keep the credulous "skeptics" from saying that everything is secret. Libertarian 'blogger "CLS" is a prime example. To quote his comments section (linked):
They won't list a source for the data so you can't find it easily. And then you need to know how they massaged the figures, what assumptions they used, etc., in order to replicate their results or to find errors in the process, all of which is necessary before this can rightfully call itself science.
As far as I am concerned these men took all their work and flushed it down the toilet. By deleting the original data and refusing to discuss how they massage the original data to get their final results, they remove their claims from "scientific theory" entirely. Science requires replication and scrutiny and they made both impossible. By doing so they themselves took their "findings" and moved them outside the realm of science entirely. If I were a warmer I'd be furious with them.
Clearly they are listing sources, yet CLS says "They won't list a source." Clearly their papers discuss methodology, yet this CLS says they "[refuse] to discuss how the 'massage' the original data".
If nothing else, this illustrates that denialist, faux-sceptic, anti-science, or whatever you call it methodology hasn't changed: Tell the truth about the state of the science when it is convenient, lie about the state of science when it is not. Make false accusations about others at your leisure. The primary technique shall be Just Making Stuff Up. And when called on it, never explain, retract, or apologize.
"Climategate" has revealed interesting things about science politics and the need for a few things in climate science if not in science as a whole to change. But it has also made clear that the "skeptics"'s moral bankruptcy is on par with their scientific illiteracy. Their near-universal participation in the last week's lies--and not a peep from any of them speaking out against their fellows!--shows that this is not limited to a few bad eggs like Ian Plimer.
If you don't know something, Just Making Stuff Up, especially about the work of others, should never be an option.
|