by Eli Kintisch
Update 11/25 3:20 pm: Grifo clarifies in an interview that the group "does have concerns" about the alleged behavior of some scientists in this case. "If a US scientist deleted emails persuant to freedom of information act requests, that's reprehensible," she says. "Ultimately a lack of transparency doesn't work."
Yesterday I asked Francesca Grifo, senior scientist and director of the Scientific Integrity Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), about the possibility that the University of East Anglia's Phil Jones was asking colleagues to delete emails requested under information requests. Citing a busy schedule, she declined to be interviewed, instead sending the following statement through a spokesperson:
We expect a high degree of scientific integrity by scientists, whether they be in university labs or federal offices. But what may or may not have happened does not change the science - ice sheets are melting, sea level is rising and the top ten hottest years since 1880 include 2001 through 2008.
UCS's Peter Frumhoff has also downplayed the issues raised by the emails, stating in a press release that the emails show:
scientists at work, grappling with key issues, and displaying the full range of emotions and motivations characteristic of any urgent endeavor.
In an email to Insider, University of Colorado, Boulder, policy expert Roger Pielke Jr. takes issue with the UCS response:
The comment from UCS reflects the exact sort of thinking that got climate science into this mess, specifically, an inability to differentiate the health of the scientific enterprise from the politics of climate change. It is possible to attend to both at the same time. As important as climate change is, it does not justify abandoning standards of scientific integrity. The reality of climate change and the need to respond does not excuse the sort of behavior revealed in the emails.
It is astonishing to hear scientists questioning the science of climate change based upon a set of personal emails extracted from a single server at a single university over a finite period of time. Of course the "deniers" will take the implied behavior of these individuals and use it to cast doubt on an entire field of scientific inquiry with multiple lines of independent evidence developed over a century, but I'm stunned to see scientists themselves so naive as to be drawn into contributing to this cynical obfuscation. This then leads to non-scientists like Sandra ("Dear scientists" above) leaping from a debate about the statistics of proxies to worrying that she will be unable to pay her utility bills if the US begins to pricing carbon.
It seems clear the question about the destruction of FOI requests will be pursued, but those who are jumping in with broad criticism about the entire field based on these emails are just adding to the media frenzy that was the sole purpose of those who perpetrated this criminal theft in the first place. By stoking these fires you enable people to make claims that all key climate data sets are private, placing decades of scientific observations vital to sound public policy in jeopardy of losing credibility. The "data not being available" is an old denier standard that is easier to understand than the scientific debate itself, so that's what gets written about, despite the fact that massive amounts of climate data are readily available to the public but rarely examined (http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/).
We practice science in a political world. This DOES NOT excuse or condone unethical behavior of individual scientists in response to legitimate requests for data, but anybody who thinks that this question is what is actually fueling the present public debate needs to wake up.
This will shake out to have been a tempest in a teapot. Much ado about nothing.
Whatever the true climate situation (and there are things like the opening of the Arctic Ocean that are sort of hard to explain otherwise), this is going to deal a nasty blow to the concept of peer review, which has apparently been manipulated for some time in this field.
The peer review process is fundamental to the practice of scientific validation, and here it's been corrupted. The response from the rest of the scientific community is going to be *brutal*, because this bunch, by their own estimation, have been successful in undermining the claimed neutrality of peer review.
It's about the money. Peer review ("the worst possible system, except for all the others that have been tried from time to time") has been the response to schemes like special earmarking, and now it's all been tainted, quite possibly irreversibly.
Climate science is about to be vivisected in public. Without anesthetics.
"A commun declaration of the governements present at Copenhagen to make available to everyone, by law, the datas and methods relating to climate change, would probably be received favorably by all parties involved in this débate and serve to dispel many doubts."
Hear hear!
As a genomics researcher, I take for granted that lightly-processed data is deposited in public databases such as GenBank, and I would not consider any assertions about a genome to be publicly credible until the DNA sequences were publicly released.
If climate change researchers want their conclusions to be taken seriously by the public, they need to find a way to make their data publicly accessible in a timely manner.
Dear Scientists,
My cousin who was raised with me died in Vietnam. Later my family learned that the gulf of Tonkin incident, the reason for the war, was a lie.
Today I am having a very hard time to pay my bills. I know that if my energy bill doubles that I will have to live without electricity or lose my home. It is very hot where I live and I am not so healthy. I know that food prices will also double and I will not have that much to eat.
If the future of earth is at stake, it is like a war that has to be fought and I understand this.
All I am begging you is that someday my children do not learn as I learned about my cousin, that all that happened to me was based on a lie. TY - Sandra
Little wonder the AAAS coverage/responses have been as tepid as they have,,, as AAAS had already 'settled' the science for us all~
Concerning Woodfin V Ligon's post on the need of inventing a new system to publish raw datas:
I'm not sure that creating a new kind of scientific press which only treats in datas and "objective conclusions" would be so easy to put in place. However, I just came across a proposal by Eric Raymond, a respected figure of the open-source community:
"Open-Sourcing the Global Warming Debate".(esr ibiblio org)
Coming from an engineering background, I am not aware of all the usages and traditions of the scientific community. But it seems to me that research on Climate Change is not "any science" anymore considering the magnitude of what is potentially hanging above our heads.
This exceptionalism is even more blatant when it comes to groups like CRU and IPCC which advise political bodies on policies which engage the future of the whole biosphere.
A commun declaration of the governements present at Copenhagen to make available to everyone, by law, the datas and methods relating to climate change, would probably be received favorably by all parties involved in this débate and serve to dispel many doubts.
As a retired scientist, I can say that I am not shocked or surprised by any of the matters discussed in the emails. For the most part, these folks are just arguing about the science. But there are many issues beyond the science that arise when one reads these emails that many non-scientists might well find disturbing. For example, we find the data is not as iron clad as the scientists would have us believe. These scientists actively refuse FOI requests in order to cover up this fact. Furthermore, we get the very strong impression that many of them are less interested in hard science and more interested in the impression the data ultimately presents. Some readers will conclude that perhaps we need to wait just a bit. After all, if we are to believe these scientists,(and perhaps we should) we are discussing nothing less than the fate of the earth. And then we read these emails...and we have to conclude with these non-scientist observers that we really have to see the original data.
And clearly, given that almost all science is paid for by the citizens, can't we reasonably ask why the citizens should not have access to the real data completely uncontaminated by the "opinions" of the authors? Consider just how many jpegs would be equivalent to the volume of material that was hacked! Not very many. Have them post it all on Google. People are arguing about the volume but I submit that for all of science it would be a drop in the bucket.
Another idea comes to mind which might reduce some of this in-fighting. Mind you this is a very radical thought but this is very serious business and we badly need to get it under control I believe this mess really reflects the long standing need for a major shift in "science publishing" so that "data" and "opinion" are very clearly separated.
I believe, there should be one group of journals which deals only with data--real data. It should be very, very difficult to get a paper into one of these "data" journals. The description of exactly how the data was acquired should be exceedingly detailed. If the data is in fact flawed, it should be possible to reproduce the data to the extent that the flaw in logic or procedure would be apparent. The greatest error a scientist could make should be any attempt to present his "data" as something it is not.
Of course, the devil is always in the details and, for example, it is often the case that scientists attempt(for all sorts of reasons) to make a case by measuring only part of a system. A primary "data" journal cannot stop this practice but it can make it much more obvious that the data is only partial. Many limitations are, of course, very real as in the case of instruments which simply won't produce data above/below a certain wavelength. Such limitations should be very carefully denoted as a part of the data. Given the power of today's search engines, we should never have to worry about overlooking data. A careful search should produce it all.
There should be another group of journals that I would consider "secondary" that deal only with peoples opinions drawn on the "data" in the primary journals.
There might be a "hold" of several months that allowed the scientists who acquired the "data" to be the first to make conclusions based on the new "data".
The problem is that "conclusions" are always opinions. Two different people can often reach very different conclusions based on the same data. We need a way to separate the facts and the opinions. Using the system proposed here, popular publications would know if a scientific publication was "fact" or "opinion". Their articles could be clearly based on "fact" or on "opinion". Currently even the "best" journals are not immune to politics. The tone of these emails clearly shows exactly how the scientists are really politicians. This is no surprise because they are just people. There is always a reason to take a particular stand. Such tendencies should not be allowed to influence data. After all the "data" is what we citizens are paying for. Politics should influence only the "opinions"
This is a very serious issue. We are not discussing something arcane like the reality of dark energy. If global warming is real this is well beyond serious. Perhaps it is time to make some fundamental changes.
Leonard, don't worry about peer review, poor judgment or other cover for these criminals. Real scientists have doubted these fools for quite some time. These are not some misguided egg heads. These are people that have gained or have stood to gain personally from their lies. Let's look at prosecuting these fraudsters to the fullest extent of the law. Willful fraud in order to secure government taxpayer grants and/or funding of their activities may be one charge. How about conspiracy to commit fraud, racketeering (RICO), perjury,money laundering, treason..?
The misbehavior of the CRU doesnt' really impact our qualitative understanding of global warming, but an alarming degree of our quantitative understanding of it is influenced by the work of those scientists who have been misbehaving.
Does it matter if the magnitude of warming is half or twice what we currently think? Does it matter if there really was a Midieval Warm Period? I think that this is critical context for the current political debate, and these guys have now muddied the water.
I agree with the previous commenter. I would also add that the union of concerned scientists is really more of a political group than a scientific one. They don't have a problem with the behavior because they're already bought into the political outcome. Again, politics not science.
I, for one, am a concerned scientist. The statistical tricks and questionable paleoclimate proxies that the CRU folks are defending, are not scientifically defensible, and I'm concerned that the entire "scientific concensus" rests on them.
There are a number of questions that should be separately recognized and assessed with respect to the hacked emails:
1) The most important is: does the behavior of the scientists involved significantly weaken the collective AGW position that warming is real, that it will probably continue with business as usual, and that such warming will probably subject humanity (and ecosystems) to severe risks? The answer to this one should be a resounding, NO.
2) Has the behavior of a few of these scientist revealed poor judgment about scientific and legal protocol? YES.
3) Does this episode reveal (again) that the scientific peer review process is imperfect, and can stand improvement? YES.
Journalists must weigh their responsibilities to the public carefully, so that the weight that they give to discussion of questions like 2 and 3 will not easily be perceived as changing the answer to questions like 1.
It's a tall order, but extremely important.
The comment that "the top ten hottest years since 1880 include 2001 through 2008 " is more important is rich in irony since that claim is typically made with reference to the CRU temperature series which is the core of the code released in the leak. It may well be that the claim is correct and that the code is providing the right answers but without the leak we had no idea how the temperature series was created. With it we know, and the details are not pretty.
Claims like the one made need proof and without the leak and the partial success of FOI requests to NASA and NCDC we would have to simply take the claims on trust. Taking scientific claims on trust with no attempt to understand how the claim is reached is not part of what I would consider the scientific method.
I'm rather concerned about the scientific ability of this particular "concerned scientist"