Climate scientist (Phil Jones) admits sending 'awful emails' but denies perverting peer review

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/mar/01/phil-jones-climate-science-emails-select-committee-hearing

Climate scientist admits sending 'awful emails' but denies perverting peer review

In his first public appearance since the beginning of the emails row Phil Jones tells MPs he will be cleared of accusations

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/mar/01/parliamentary-climate-emails-inquiry">Read our live coverage from the hearing

David Adam, environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Monday 1 March 2010 18.27 GMT

Phil Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, told a parliamentary inquiry that there was nothing in the hundreds of emails released on to the internet last year that supported the claims.

"I was just commenting that those papers weren't very good," Jones said. "There is nothing that that me or the CRU were trying to pervert the peer review process in any way."

In his first public appearance since the emails were released in November, Jones faced repeated questions about the way the CRU failed to make publicly available the raw data and computer codes needed to reproduce its work. "It is not standard practice to provide codes and methods," he said. "Perhaps it should be."

He said much of the raw data were available from other sources, such as Nasa, and that there was nothing to stop somebody repeating his calculations and constructing their own temperature records. "There is nothing rocket science in them," he said of his academic publications.

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[Birthmark]

1. Jones gives a fair assessment

I don't really blame him for his actions. Years of harassment can contribute to a person acting in frustration and anger, as Dr. Jones clearly did. But I can easily imagine myself doing the same thing under similar circumstances, or worse.

[Statistical]

2. The part that I don't get it...

"It is not standard practice to provide codes and methods" then it isn't peer reviewed. It isn't science IMHO if everything isn't made available to the public for scrutiny.



I don't care how smart you think you are you likely made mistakes. Getting those mistakes into the open and corrected is an important part of the process.

Take encryption for example:
Lots of very smart people though they came up with "bulletproof" encryption algorithms. WEP (Wifi), CCS (DVD), A5(GSM), Crypto1 (Smart cards), DES (govt security) were all broken and some rather easily.

On the other hand open-source encryption algorithm give you the secrets. You can freely access the algorithm for AES.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Encryption_Standard

You can design your own encryption/decryption engine for it. Despite being open those algorithms remain strong. Flaws in algorithms are caught early (before implementation) and the best design "wins". Often times the best design comes from unexpected places.


Science needs to be open. EVERYTHING should be made available. The raw data files, the compiled data, the algorithms, the theories, the proofs, the projections, etc.

EVERYTHING.

There will always be deniers. People still deny there was a moon landing. However you don't need 100% just a super majority around the globe. You are more likely to achieve that by being transparent.

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. 'Peer review' doesn't mean giving everything to everyone at any time

It's about a formal review stage (of papers, research proposals or other things) where some qualified scientists (ie 'peers') look at the work before it's published, give criticisms, corrections and suggestions where necessary, and perhaps say "don't go ahead" because it's not of acceptable quality.

It may be that, with the onslaught of climate change deniers, it will be better to make everything open (not just up to the CRU, of course - the data in this case comes from national meteorological organisations), and tell them to put up or shut up.

For instance, there's a blogger who, fed up with the accusations from Anthony Watts and others that temperature gauges had been removed to distort the warming record, actually re-did the analysis himself to work out what effect the loss of gauges has had. It took him a couple of weeks, but he proved that the loss of gauges has had no noticeable effect, and that Watts and D'Aleo had lied about some things. Most importantly, it's clear that they had never even attempted to do any similar analysis before their accusations of fraud. They just saw that many gauges had stopped appearing in the global network, and then made up stories of fraud and data manipulation.

The blogger is now going to write this up as a paper - though, as he says, it may not be accepted for publication, because it doesn't show anything new in scientific terms, just that Watts has been unjustly smearing scientists without evidence. But he'll put it all out in the open anyway, because it's becoming clear that the deniers are not behaving like responsible scientists (hell, not that many of them are scientists), and so they need to be exposed as smear merchants who aren't actaully interested in the science, just in disrupting the work of actual climate scientists.

[Statistical]

4. That blogger is part of the solution.

For something as global and controversial as this we need 100% transparency.

It will allow people outside the IPCC and other agencies to validate the work and provide support. A kinda of grass roots scientific effort. For every false claim by a denier so "open source" scientists can quickly refute it.

Nothing wrong with large central agencies doing the majority of the work full time with paid positions but they can't be everywhere at all times.

I believe I saw a poll that shows belief in climate change is declining. Obviously the IPCC and other agencies current "internal" method is not working to bolster public opinion.