Curry is not entirely wrong, but her statements are misleading on a couple of points.  First, while there were without argument advocacy-based attacks on AGW prior to the CRU email leak, there were also sound scientific questions and objections from qualified critics that were stonewalled.  Several of her statements seem to indicate that virtually all of the challenges to the AGW hypothesis prior to the leak were political in nature.  I am not convinced  that was her intent, but it needs clarification.  Second, ahem, scientific inquiry has been politicized since at least the time of Galileo.  It is highly disingenuous to pretend that all of the anti-scientific, tribal thuggery by the IPCC-connected climatologists is attributable to contention between those scientists with no intention to sway the political debate.  Mann, Jones, et al are the philosohical heirs of Stephen H. Schneider, whose principal career accomplishment was advocating the deliberate misrepresentation of science to achieve political ends.  In addition, there are dozens, if not hundreds of statements in those emails that clearly indicate that influencing politics was high on their agenda.

-AleG

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Dr. Curry deserves great praise for speaking out for scientific integrity on this issue.  The absence of other similar statements from the scientific community (where is the tone deaf AAAS for example?) speaks volumes of the group think, corruption and venality in the ranks.  It is scientists like Dr. Curry that will lead the effort to rebuild public trust (now severely damaged) in the scientific enterprise.

Dr. Curry said, "We need climate glasnost: openness, transparency, and freedom of information."

Dr. Curry, as a first step toward transparency and freedom of information, would you publicly release all emails that you have sent or received in the last twelve years like Phil Jones?
 

Terry,

I don't think Dr. Curry has any obligation to release her
emails.  Emails are personal, off-the-cuff kinds of things,
and they should by-and-large remain private.

I don't doubt that Dr. Curry does and has released the
"data and codes and metadata" that support her published papers.
I don't think it should be an option to refuse to do so and that
scientific journals should require the release of this information
as a precondition of publication.  This sort of disclosure should
be part of our definition of what science is.  For many, it has
been all along.

I don't understand those that claim to be scientists that defend
the secrecy that has surrounded many of the published papers.  It
seems to me that that secrecy in and of itself should have led the
assumption that something was wrong and the criticism and rejection
of those that practiced it.

 

If the work you are doing is going to effect changes that the people of the earth have to live with then you own it to us to see everything you do so we can go over it with a fine tooth comb.  You can expect opposition as long as you hide you data for the light of day.  You will not get away with using science for a political agenda

Disclosure: I got my PhD in Physics in 2002 at CU Boulder and was acquainted with Judy Curry during her time there through symposia, reasearch meetings (as well as a class of hers I audited in the mid 90s when I was starting out).

For starters, Dr. Curry, *thank you* for speaking out on this issue as a voice of reason - the voice scientists are supposed to have.  Making noise on the political stage, circumventing peer review, and cherry picking results to confirm a viewpoint are *not* scientific (and IMO the latter two are destructive even on the political stage) ... and I believe, unfortunately, as time goes on that there will unfortunately be more of these sorts of scandals.  Because it seems to me that these behaviors occur fairly regularly in climate.

I say "unfortunately" because I do believe there is substance to the idea of climatological changes as a result of human activities.  In fact, I have a hard time believing that anyone can simultaneously look at the amount of energy we've dumped into the atmosphere and say (with a straight face) that nothing will change!  Carbon in the atmosphere to absorb UV is analoguous at least to wearing a jacket to absorb body heat - on an 80 degree day, I don't know anyone who adds a jacket and then denies they're going to sweat.  That much could (should) be viewed as common sense, except that all the predictions that the earth will explode have completely derailed the application of logic here.

Policy should be based around intelligent risk management.  The degree of risk here is *anything* but settled, the view of what exactly will happen as a result of our activities anything but consensus; but I think the idea that *something* will happen *is* settled, and that for our long term well being we (by which I mean "the politicians") should address it.  How urgent is it?  Well, in the absence of other information you go for maximal entropy, ie. pick the middle ground and decide that your economic well-being is exactly as important as the environmental.  It's an engineer's or an economist's job to figure out how that balances out, and how to modify the balance as more information comes to light.

In the meantime, climatologists can go back to what it is they do best and remember the reason they chose science in the first place.  They need to figure out how, what, and why, and - when asked to do so - to advocate for objective truth when speaking to public officials.  If you find you're more interested in advocating for a position, then you need to leave science and work for a lobbying group.  Simple, really, at least in principle.

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The great thing about open source is that you end up dealing less with criticism if your methodology is sound. If it's not you've got bigger problems that your should be addressing.

Think about it- if all the CRU data and metadata and code was published, there would be a number of blogs arguing back and forth, asking and answering, challenging each other. If something truly was broken, well good! You should want to fix your study, right? But otherwise, there really is no need to get in there and hash it out when there will be other folks doing it for you. This is happening all over the blogosphere just this minute about this exact subject.

On the other hand, if your methodology is a total mess and you can't reconstruct your datasets... well, how long did you think you'd get away with that kind of sloppiness? The coverup is always worse than the crime.

Keith, thanks for commenting, I think.  Since you brought it up, where is there any evidence of, " circumventing peer review, and cherry picking results to confirm a viewpoint"?  Could you point to that anywhere?

I believe that what we have are years of emails that were picked through to find something that might read in an incriminating fashion.  So, if Dr. Curry is for "openness, transparency, and freedom of information" then she should have no problem releasing her own emails.

Dr. Curry, are you willing to release your own internal emails from Georgia Tech?



 

Climategate Could have been Prevented

This may or may not be fraud.  Some of it probably is and much probably isn't.  That is why it needs investigation.

The charge of fraud it is pretty serious alone, not even considering AGW claims either way.  The last case of fraud of this scope was the Enron Scandal (not counting Mr. Madoff), many accused of fraud at that time were in fact innocent, others plainly were guilty, convicted in a court went to jail according to the due process of our laws.

The good news of the Enron story is that we (the people) as represented in congress accomplished the passage of the Sarban-Oxley regulations which quite rightly concluded that shareholders in a corporation were entitled to the corporation properly documenting its business processes in the event that something goes wrong, a study of how the event occurred could be determined.

We those who pay for all scientific research either through taxation, or indirectly through the prices of products resulting from research are also shareholders in the efforts, and deserve no less such accountability.

Unfortunately Sarban-Oxley laws only apply to Corporations.  It is my opinion that Sarban-Oxley regulations should either be considered unconstitutional under equal protection rights, or be equally applied to academic institutions.  This would mean rigourus oversite of research work, and the independent archival of all data, emails and documents generated by any researcher. 
This of course would cause many academics I know to faint, but any intelligent academic must also admit that no academic would be even tempted to engage in the sort of behavior displayed by Michael Mann or Phil Jones, simply because they would know that their work (all of it) was open to public display.

If Sarban-Oxley regulations were applied to academic institutions climategate would have never occurred, and we would actually know for sure if AGW were true or not.  Now we don't, (my apologies to all of you who "want to believe" so badly that it is true.)  All the claims of (other independent) overwhelming evidence for AGW are now suspect.  Michael Mann and Phil Jones have shamed their colleagues and associates by their behavior.

Dr. Curry,  I applaud you in your efforts to point out that this is inappropriate science.  Ignore the circus for now.  It will pass.  Just keep plugging away at finding truth. I and many others will do the same.

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Keith,

Good comment, but it is important to resist doing "something" until we really understand the science for fear of making the situation worse.  There is a law of unintended consequences.  If we are going into a "Maunder-like" solar minimum that extra "jacket" (to use your term) will be very valuable counteract the cooling effects of a less-active sun.  Humanity, traditionally, has done worse in cooling periods than warming.

Am I saying that is going to happen?  No, because I don't know and neither does anyone else.  

Yes, I am an atmospheric scientist and I am perfectly OK with stating our lack of knowledge about climate processes.  The science is hardly "settled."

 

Scholars are timid people, in general, and ClimateGate is showing this.  Nobody in the field wants to say that the emperor has no clothes (perhaps partly because it's clear he would cut off their heads, or at least their publication flow and grant money).  As a result, though, nobody can trust climate scientists generally. Either they are in on the fraud, or unwilling to speak up about it. It has come to pass that being a trained scientist and having lots of publications and grant money should actually hurt your credibility in the eyes of any rational person, because that means you have a lot to lose from speaking your mind. An amateur like McIntyre has nothing to lose, so he is more trustworthy. And,of course, he can't make the Argument from Authority, so he's forced to disclose his data and make his reasoning clear, unlike the experts in the field.

    This is a Who Will Bell the Cat? problem for climate scientists. Nobody wants to stick their neck out except for brave souls like Prof. Curry, who will  get her head chopped off if her coup fails. The solution is perhaps to try a joint statement by twenty climate scientists, organized by the already-exposed Curry, so that nobody has to take individual responsbility for criticizing the climate establishment.

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"...contrarians and deniers..."

Why is it again that people get the impression AGW skeptics are partisans and not be taken seriously?

>>> We need to hear from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Academies what they think of this. ...This is a black eye on our whole field

This is the real problem here.  How is it possible that we have governmental bodies proposing drastic changes to our society and economy, all predicated on data sets that cannot be reviewed because they were destroyed and closed source computer simulation code that failed to predict the last ten years worth of cooling?

Now all we have left is "value-added" data (surely a euphemism for cooking the numbers if there ever was one) and recently revealed computer code comments like “Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!”

How are we to have any faith in the science community when this can be the state of affairs and there's hardly a peep from the industry's oversight organizations?  Instead, we get political machination to discredit any scientist with a dissenting opinion and endless cries of "the science is settled, the debate is over."

Yeah, the debate is over because any objective, dispassionate review of the current state of affairs surrounding the theory of anthropogenic global warming would surely expose it for what it is: a weak, unproven theory chasing endless government research grants.

And what happens when the earth doesn't warm for the last ten years and instead cools?  It is called a "travesty" by the very scientists claiming that disaster will befall us all if the earth warms.  The global warming scientific community wants the earth to be warming and will declare it so even in the face of contrary evidence.

The entire global scientific community has brought shame, derision and skepticism upon itself by allowing the global warming debate to unfold as it has.  Where were the brave souls who stood up and said they wouldn't sign on unless the simulation code could be reviewed?  Who among you dared suggest we not upset the global economy without having the original data and all of its subsequent "value-added" incarnations reviewed with an extremely critical eye?

Shame on all of you.

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Dr. Curry:  Scientists have no idea how to react to all the criticism being made about their science by advocacy groups, talk radio, etc.  . . . So what we are really seeing is the polarizing effect of the advocacy groups and the mainstream media, in forcing apparent partisanship of the scientists.

Comment:  What Dr. Curry fails to mention is the advocacy on the part of pro-AGW people, including Jim Hanson in the 1980s.  The tie-in with political advocacy was magnified with the Al Gore film, and sealed with the politically driven recent IPCC report.  Claims as to "who started it" is not my point, but that the partisanship of some scientists (e.g., Mann, Hansen) is neither forced nor merely "apparent".

Dr. Curry:  Scrutiny from [politically motivated] (sic) contrarians and deniers . . . .  [Later: ] Scientists should criticize the argument, not the person making the argument. The other fallacious criticism is "appeal to motive," . . . .  

Comment:  I think Dr. Curry is trying to practice what she preaches, but she also slips up at times, perhaps without realizing the inconsistency, at least while speaking. 

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CBI - I was struck by the same quote.  Dr. Curry leaves the impression that the criticism (and partisanship) came only from " from right-wing partisan(s)".

A question that no one seems to have asked - How do "climate scientists" get away with NOT showing their raw data, assumptions, tweaks and computer code?  Is the term "climate scientist" an oxymoron?

I attended the offshore Technology Conference in Houston this past summer where a panel discussion was held on climate change. About 300 people were in attendance. One of the panelists was Kevin Trenberth. He spoke passionately about climate change. So passionately that I thought at any time he might start sobbing. Further, if he was a trial witness and I was a juror, I would dismiss his testimony as unreliable. The panel took questions at the end of the session, but only written questions handed in and selected by the panel moderator, a nice way to omit inconvenient or embarrassing questions. My question, ignored, was how the climate models handle the position of the magnetic north pole, which had moved 1300 km northward in the past 100 years, and how that might influence the warming prediction for the arctic?  

AAAS is unlikely to handle this issue in a fair and balanced manner.  The overall tone in editorials and reporting has always been one of "this is settled science."  An odd position to take for a "science" magazine/journal, but such is as it is.  One would like to think that practioners of the scientific method accept that they are always one experiment away from "non-settled" science.  While this may be mostly true in bench science, fields susceptible to advocacy-driven science, where it is acceptable to go looking for data to prove the point, have corrupted the playing field.  Likewise, programs of study that have inserted the term "science" into their department titles, but are inherently unable (and in some cases, perhaps unwilling) to apply the requisite rigor in method and analysis to live up to the name, have not done the reputations of the experimental scientists any favors either.

"So, if Dr. Curry is for "openness, transparency, and freedom of information" then she should have no problem releasing her own emails."

If she's calling for anyone else to release their emails, absolutely. I didn't notice her explicitly calling for that, but maybe I missed it. Dr. Curry, whatever you want others to release, I trust you will also release yourself.

"the biologists, physicists and chemists... are thinking... [is that] this is a politically tainted field."

I'm one of those, and I've been leaning to that conclusion, I admit. The fact that the field can produce people like Dr. Curry, who writes sensibly about the virtues of openness and honesty and condemns dubious behaviour, is a point in its favour. The fact that she catches so much flak for doing so, however, is disturbing.

Hint to people concerned for the reputation of climate science: openness looks good. Willingness to engage critics looks good. Honesty looks good. Furtiveness looks bad. Circling the wagons looks bad. Making lame excuses for dubious behaviour looks bad.

So what we are really seeing is the polarizing effect of the advocacy groups and the mainstream media, in forcing apparent partisanship of the scientists

Self-serving rubbish. The notorious stars of the e-mails weren't turned into political activists by people who realized that the "science" stank to high heaven. They're activists, not scientists, which is why their science stinks. Cause and effect; not to be confused with each other.

We don't need "climate glasnost." What we need is something called "science." It's a methodology which has served us well for centuries. There are tens of millions of people who know perfectly well how to do it. These people can't be easily conned into believing that the junk science pouring out of East Anglia, NASA, and etc. resembles real science in any way. The secrecy, the double-talk, the obvious gaming of peer-review, and phrases like "the science is settled" are huge red flags to the scientifically sophisticated - and have been all along.

Forget investigations. Good science doesn't need an investigation, it just needs to cut loose from obviously bad science (or non-science). Just face up to the fact that much of what we've been told that we know about climate is garbage, throw it out, and start doing real (that is, honest) science. The climate won't go anywhere while we're dithering about - it's still there, waiting for competent study.

But don't forget, if you're trying to talk science, you can fool reporters, you can fool bureaucrats, but you can't pull the wool over the eyes of the large chunk of the general public who have serious scientific training. This may be the greatest casualty of this affair - the idea that alleged scientific work can only be evaluated by "peers," and the set of "peers" is limited to, at most, those who have burrowed into either academic or government bureaucracies. We now know better, and won't be so easy to fool the next time around.
 

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 I thank Judith Curry for being forthright enough to speak about this controversy; many of her colleagues in the field seem to desperately want to sweep it under the rug. I certainly sympathize with the view that one should have a reasonable amount of time to seriously study a data set before releasing it to the world. Certainly, though, after publication of any results that come from the data, both the data and the explicit methodology used for analysis should be released. Releasing the latter is more problematical than the former, I think, as there exists a wide range of analysis methods, some of which may be difficult to properly characterize. But, such characterization really <b>has to be done.</b> Others <b>must</b> be able to replicate the analysis.

  I should say that I'm a geophysicist who never gave much thought to this topic until about 4 years ago, when a friend brought to my attention the McIntyre & McKitrick criticism of the so-called hockey stick. What I found must repulsive about that controversy was the obvious reluctance of Mann <i>et alia</i> to release code or data: I was immediately suspicious of these fellows, and regarded them as frauds until proven otherwise. I am reminded of Richard Feynman's insistence that any scientific experiment must be reproducible to be believable. Really, this is <b>very basic stuff.</b>   I do object to Curry's suggestion that AAAS be sort of a judge in the controversy: AAAS has <b>long been</b> a political player, at least since Phil Abelson was editor of <i>Science</i>. Truly, it is simply not non-partisan in this affair. In fact, because of the rather huge amount of money involved, other formerly scientific societies (<i>e.g.</i>, AGU, AIP) have been similarly corrupted. It is a sad story, in my view.

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Quoting Keith Nordstrom,

I have a hard time believing that anyone can simultaneously look at the amount of energy we've dumped into the atmosphere and say (with a straight face) that nothing will change! 

I have a hard time believing that human activity is dumping more energy into the atmosphere than the sun already does. 

 

The public hears from the scientific community that the past has seen periods of great ice ages followed by warm periods in which even the Antarctic had forests, andthen we hear inanities like the phrase I  just quoted.  Human energy production is a fraction of what earth receives from the sun - it's not even equivalent to the variation in the sun's output! 

To speak of pollution, environmental damage from strip mining and overbuilding make sense to the public and produce a call to action.  To say the earth is getting warmer produces shrugs - it has done so in the past and will eventually get colder, who can change that?  A single Mount Pinatubo size eruption could produce more sulphuric acid and particulates than a year's worth of human activity, so why should we impoverish ourselves for an unproven hypothesis?

The dishonesty, data manipulation, and political motivation found in climate research damages the entire scientific community.  Climate scientists should admit the large margin of error in their research, avoid activism, and let the public debate be framed by environmental impact which is measureable: this amount of pollutant A causes damage B, and can be diminished by activity C.

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 This is total unmitigated fraud.

The emails weren't the only thing leaked.

Here's the hacked climate model source code explained by a software developer:

http://fascistsoup.com/2009/11/25/more-on-the-climategate-source-code/

 

Total fraud.

It is naive to think that University of East Anglia and Penn State are the only bodies implicated by climategate. What I fear is that many other organisations across the world are bulk deleting files and correspondence right now.

I call upon every person in a position to prevent such destruction from happening to do so, whether you are a Manager, Researcher or whistle-blower. Disclosure is vastly preferable to further cover-up.

I agree whole-heartedly with Dr Curry's call for climate glasnost. 

Her call for advice from the social psychologists, historians and philosophers as to how to deal with this situation is misdirected. You, we and the Team already know how science should be done. The asistance needed from the social scientists is to disclose how the field got into the situation of groupthink, partisanship secrecy and advocacy, and how to avoid it happening again. I suspect that the social phenomenon resembles that which inflicted the plague of postmodernism upon the world's English Departments, people supporting people who were 'one of us'.  I admit Dr Curry's reference to the mainstream media puzzles me. I investigated fifty six news reports in my local newspaper about AGW, and in every case they supported the consensus viewpoint. In fifty five of those cases, they distorded the original science or omitted the 'on the other hand' data. I know Dr Curry is not alone in seeing her media as being biased toward the skeptical viewpoint; perhaps the social scientists can explain how our honest observations should come to be so very different.

Dr Curry is one of the more open-minded in her field, and has demonstrated great moral courage over the years, for example in inviting Climate Audit's Steve McIntyre to lecture her students, and congratulating him on winning science blog of the year, and for her speaking up on the climategate scandal despite the disapprobation of some of her colleagues. Please accept my sincere gratitude and admiration.

That disapprobation is of course another example of the pathology into which the field has fallen. Another instance is the absurd spin AGW partisans have introduced into the presentation of the data, making themselves appear at best as clowns, at worst as dishonest partisans.Although that does seem to be rather the point of climategate, I suppose.

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I'm sorry, I should have realized people would respond to my comment.  But it's hard to get back to this sort of things sometimes.  Three responses:

• @Michael Suede: developers shouldn't comment on comments in other peoples' code, particularly when they have no idea what the code represents.  That code is tree ring data (not temperatures) and was taken completely out of context.  It's not a hoax or a conspiracy, just misrepresented.

 

@Mike Smith: we are "doing something" all the time, just like climate is changing all the time.  To adjust one's behavior to head off potential disasters, eg. built thicker walls along the seaboard in Louisiana, is common from both an engineering and risk management standpoint.  If you have strong evidence to support the idea that dumping massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere will help humanity either from a public health perspective *or* from a climate perspective (and from the former perspective at least the science is very sound) ... then by all means, let's add more.  But as I see it our *current* behavior is heedlessly changing something that has worked for our species for a long time.  We know that what we've had has been ok for both survival and productivity ... and thus I come back to the "intelligent risk management" argument. 

@terry: I'm not actually referring to evidence from the emails that were "cherry picked," but from behaviors I've seen evinced in the field.  The idea of a general model is itself wrong and unscientific - models are useful for specific problems, not for general queries (eg. String Theory is phenomenally accurate, but shouldn't be used for climate).  The fact that GCMs don't even get proper temperatures before "rescaling", involve wildly unphysical hacks to even keep them running, and typically produce weather that's virtually unrecognizable as such, makes them that much worse.  A model should be built to be broken because it's the failures of a model that teach you things about your system; but the typical reaction to anyone criticizing a GCM's output (and to be honest it's hard even to know where to begin) is poor at best.  In practice, this leads to papers not being published and proposals not being funded and therefore represents a stifling of knowledge.  This is a direct and obvious consequence of the scientist-as-activist paradigm, and as far as I am concerned that paradigm is fundamentally wrong.  You can mark my words if you like; but I expected this "Climate Gate" (stupid name), and I expect there will be more situations like it in the future - which I believe will continue to damage the very thing scientist-activists are trying to achieve.

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@Tom D: I agree wholeheartedly with your last paragraph.  The first couple ... not so much.  Lemme lay it out (forget the sun, which is actually just the biggest reason carbon is dangerous):

1. Carbon has been distributed around our globe in a cycle that was in large part independent of human activity for a large part of our history. 
2. We have *very* recently changed that cycle (~100 year timespan) in a significant fashion, demonstrably beyond anything we have done before (the deforestation of the Sahara being a possible exception to that). 
3. The carbon cycle is fundamental to climate and affects it at a first order level - it is a measurable part of the difference between our planet's climate and that of Mars. 
4. We have survived quite comfortably with the carbon cycle as it was before we began changing its trajectory.

Given that these four statements are inarguably fact, we should not take lightly the possibility that fundamentally altering the carbon cycle as we have been doing could have serious implications for our long term comfort and well-being.

In short, what we know to be true is sufficient to say that it makes sense to begin reducing the amount of carbon we put in the atmosphere.  It does not justify tanking the world's economy to do so, but it merits serious attention as a potential threat.  As far as I'mn concerned that's just common sense.

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