From the Climategate archives…
One of the most disturbing things we learned from Climategate is that academic peer-review can be startlingly superficial. Phil Jones, the director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (the source of the Climategate e-mails), told a UK parliamentary committee in March that, in all his years of publishing papers in reputable journals such as Nature and Science, no one has ever asked to examine his raw data or his computer code.
… to a new research tool.
Canadian blogger Hilary Ostrov and Australian computer programmer Peter B. have given the climate change world a gift this week. Since March they’ve been hyperlinking and annotating the 3,000-page Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released in 2007. The result is AccessIPCC.com.
Those of us who’ve been taking a close look at the 2007 report (also known as AR4) have identified numerous concerns. Now we have a tool to analyze it more comprehensively than ever before.
The more than 18,000 references on which the IPCC builds its case have been coded via an automated process. This means one can now visually scan a chapter and see which citations are of potential concern.
Check it out, and then send the link to your friendly provincial environment minister.
In this day, there’s no reason that software and raw data and cannot be published online as an adjunct to a scholarly paper. This is particularly relevant for publicly funded research of vital importance.
No peer review will ever look over computer code unless some computing error is blazingly obvious. These guys are scientists, not programmers. Looking at code would be beneath them, not to mention incomprehensible to them.
The same thing happens with statistics. Scientists specialize in their field, not in statistical methods. The abuse of statistics in scientific research generally would give statisticians apoplexy if they examined some of these papers.
This is what I kept telling all my more gullible friends from the very beginning of this scam.
“Such-and-so a scientist says blah blah blah climate disaster.”
“Based on what?”
“His computer models say blah blah blah climate disaster.”
“Has he released the source code for his model, the unadjusted raw data, and a methodology for reproducing his results?”
“Er, I don’t think so.”
“Then he’s lying. Any time a scientist refuses to release all of those things, everything he says is a lie. Count on it.”
This is obviously a racist program.
We should all be thanking our lucky stars these morons went into Climates Scientology instead of pharmaceutical development.
There would be millions of dead people based on their version of “science”
Just give them time.
Israel is worried about climate change, who thinks they are all kooks?
oh yeah and the Pope believes in climate change, looks like the muslims in Saudi Arabia are the last ones to notbelieve in climate change nice friends you have there
John:
So what?
TIDES Canada believes in supporting Climate Change activist organizations. http://tidescanada.org/pages/ar2009/
Checkout page 10.
The Pope believes we are stewards of the earth. The Saudis believe the earth should belong to them. Big difference.
“Man’s inhumanity to man has given rise to numerous threats to peace and to authentic and integral human development – wars, international and regional conflicts, acts of terrorism, and violations of human rights. Yet no less troubling are the threats arising from the neglect – if not downright misuse – of the earth and the natural goods that God has given us. For this reason, it is imperative that mankind renew and strengthen “that covenant between human beings and the environment, which should mirror the creative love of God, from whom we come and towards whom we are journeying”.”
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/messages/peace/documents/hf_ben-xvi_mes_20091208_xliii-world-day-peace_en.html
Raz’s intro sets out a series of characteristics of the AR4 report which would cause references or citations to be flagged.
The last two are interesting — PoC & JoC —
The Persons of Concern are 25 of the most prominent Climate Scientists & the definition of Journal of Concern is any journal for which a PoC has written. This entails that all references & citations for Science, Nature, etc [that is, the most important science journals] would also be flagged.
These two categories seem aimed particularly at the first volume of the report, on the actual Climate Science. When Raz did her thing, the first Volume passed with flying colours & she was reduced to including such references as “Karl Popper 1934” & “Isaac Newton 1675” in her little black book of non-peer-reviewed references.
If you look at the table at the other link provided
you can see how this operates —
References & Citations
Vol One — Physical Science Basis PoC — 966 JoC — 11 772
Vol Two- — Inpacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability PoC — 401 JoC — 4 556
Vol Three– Mitigation of Climate Change PoC — 73 JoC — 689
Neat eh? Reading this “powerful new research tool” [if anyone does — see Raz’s sample] will warn you 11 thousand times that this statement refers to a paper in Science, Nature, Climate Science etc.
It is amazing the amount of busywork that can be produced by enthusiastic amateurs, & without a single disussion or refutation of ANY proposition or claim to be found in the AR5 report.
This is all very antediluvian, but when I was in junior high and then high school, I was a great science enthusiast, entering the school science fair every year, and nearly always progressing to district and state levels. After looking the project over, the very first things the judges, at every level of competition, would ask to see were my raw data and my analysis of same. Later, as an engineering student, we were drilled on the importance of presenting the raw data and analysis as sections of every report presented to a decision-maker, even if we thought only the summary sections would be read. In practice, I found that this is indeed the professional expectation; no one pays for a report that does not have the raw data and all details of its analysis appended. Apparently, modern high-budget science is carried out in a manner that once would not have passed muster in a small engineering department, not to mention a junior high school science fair!
The climate is and always has been in a state of flux. So what? 20,000 years ago we in Canada and a large part of the USA would have been under a four mile thick ice sheet. Anybody notice that after a good rain and a few days of blistering hot weather, the plants go wild. Ask a farmer what a wet June and July followed by a very hot August does for his crops. Personally, I’d rather live in a warmer climate than a colder one, cause I like to eat. So do the animals who either feed on plants or on other animals who themselves feed on plants. Oh, and ocean levels have been rising since then, too. All that solid di-hydrogen monoxide turned into liquid and had to flow downward.
“No peer review will ever look over computer code unless some computing error is blazingly obvious. These guys are scientists, not programmers. Looking at code would be beneath them, not to mention incomprehensible to them.”
Granted. It would, however, enable other researchers to run the software after the paper is published when they attempt to duplicate or further the results.
This would result in errors or deficiencies being caught after publication. Better late than never.
This climate change anxiety is somewhat like a computer virus, it strikes where defences are down.
Basically, the media and leftist politicians can fan the flames (quite literally in Israel) wherever the numbers come up warm in the weather lottery.
As almost anyone with half a brain must realize by now, the global climate machine randomly distributes warmer and colder than normal regimes around the globe and so, sooner or later, anyone prone to this anxiety will “cash in” with the required background warmth to make their bleatings seem somewhat realistic to a skeptical public. When it turns cool, they go into hibernation until the next warm spell.
Thus it has been the case that in 2010, the main bleatings offered were heard in the eastern U.S. which had a monumentally hot summer, and now Israel where they had a very warm and dry year in general (even by their standards which are Mediterranean to start with).
I’m sure if February 2011 sees a big thaw in western Canada we’ll be hearing all about it non-stop on the local media, who remain silent through every cold spell except when they make a feeble effort to pin that on climate change too.
The public must be totally used to this by now. It is neither subtle nor particularly intelligent, and those who claim we should “keep our eye on the ball” should perhaps think of a different kind of balls and develop some.
Because within the profession from which I’ve been blacklisted, somebody actually still in the Temple of Climatology needs to stand up and tell the high priests that they worship a non-existent deity. But I guess a paycheque beats integrity.