UPDATE: Mickey points me to the comment thread related to his article which he characterizes as "tongue in cheek" -- I've copied a few of Mickey's additional comments below.Mickey Glantz is a longtime friend and mentor. A few days ago he had this letter in the Boulder Daily Camera, based on a posting at his new blog:
In response, Thomas Chase, a professor and climate modeler at the University of Colorado (and former student of one Roger Pielke, Sr. and a valued colleague of mine at CIRES here at CU) had this letter to the editor, published yesterday:Let`s be honest. We have all said things on e-mail ranging from serious to silly to stupid. We have all sent curt responses based on the fact that those receiving it understand the c
ontext of the abbreviated message. I am not condoning or excusing the sometimes dumb, sometimes uncaring and sometimes deceptive comments that have appeared in the so-called "Climategate" so-called "scandal." That situation will be sorted out by others, most likely investigative committees. Yes, the e-mails were illegally hacked. Nevertheless, they are now public. So, the public will read them and they have through the media. E-mailing has its consequences.
There is no question in my mind that the integrity of both the scientists and of e-mail security has been damaged. Others will assess that level of impact. But here I want to call for a level playing field. It`s a good faith challenge to the climate skeptics who are using "climategate" (also called "emailgate") to discredit the science of climate change, though they cannot discredit the impacts of a changing climate on people today and in the future.
I call upon the climate change skeptics ---- political, scientific and media ----to share with the world a block of their unbroken, years-long chain of e-mails about climate change. I am asking them to do this on a voluntary basis in order to show us that they are super human and do not share the human frailty of "loose lips" that the rest of humankind is subject to.
Doing so would provide outsiders an even broader context in which they can evaluate the content of the e-mails that had been hacked and released from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (involving scientists at Penn State and at NCAR). Let society be the judge about the words and motives of all involved in the climate change issue at the political, scientific and media levels, and let society be the judge on the merits of the finding and interpretation of the science of climate change.
After all, isn`t turn about fair play? Or what is good for the goose should be good for the gander as well, no?
It is nice to see a few fresh voices entering this discussion. Climate science will be better for it, wherever you stand on the issues.Michael Glantz offers an interesting challenge to climate scientists whose opinions differ from the party line ("Skeptics, show us your e-mails"). I am one of those scientists. This is, however, an impractical challenge because there is no way to remove all personal information involving one's self and countless others.
However, because I
teach and do climate research at the University of Colorado, I do assume all my e-mails are the property of the Colorado State Government and if necessary could be examined in depth by the appropriate officials. I am confident that there would be no e-mails, even if "taken out of context," which would indicate (as the Climatic Research Unit e-mails do) that I was trying to rig the peer review process or trying to keep contrary information out of international summary documents. But these are relatively minor issues.
The real challenge to all scientists is to actively challenge the validity of their conclusions by seeking and supporting independent reproduction of their results. This is the foundation of science: intellectual self-criticism. The single biggest scandal revealed in the emails from the Climatic Research Unit is the lengths they went to refuse outside requests to make data and methodology available over the course of years including discussions about resisting Freedom of Information Act requests. Something like this would never show up in my e-mails. I have always enthusiastically aided anyone trying to reproduce or refute my results.
That the work produced by the Climatic Research Unit is not completely and independently reproducible because the data and methods were actively hidden from public scrutiny indicates that whatever was occurring over time at the Climatic Research Unit, it was never related to science.
UPDATE
Some additional comments from Mickey from the Camera comment thread:
I agree that there is an arrogance of climate science. i worked with them for 34+ years. i refused to work on the ipcc after the first one in 1990 because of politics of scientific information and manipulation. BUT, i have come to believe in various ipcc findings about global warming. i know the naysayers and later called skeptics (and now a.k.a. deniers). my concern is how to get back to objectivity -- AND civility --- on the part of both sides. I fear it is not possible. science suffered from the exposure of these emails but i fear the scientific establishment instead of improving the waay it operates, made a circle with the wagons to protect itself rather than correct itself.
20 comments:
Science hasn't "suffered" from the Climategate email disclosures. Science suffered from the unethical data-hiding and blackballing of skeptics revealed in Climategate. Blaming the emails is like blaming an X-ray for detecting a tumor. Transparency with the public is the cure.
re: "and now a.k.a. deniers".
Lo, nothing to be learnt from Climategate and so nothing changes.
I wonder how many times that Mickey Glantz has used the word "denier" in his email exchanges with colleagues?
Perhaps a Freedon of Information request is this moment flying all the way to the University of Colorado Boulder just to find that out.
I know that such a perhaps would certainly gum up the works. Maybe another perhaps would be better. Since the CCB is commited to public outreach and education, perhaps they can inform the world how many times the word "denier" has been used by the CCB staff members to describe those it believes are skeptics on climate change.
JeffID of the Air Vent (where the FOIA papers were first announced) had a message about this:
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/01/08/some-thoughts-on-blog-moderation/
He also posted on Glantz forum who answered:
hi,
i think your comment is excellent. thanks.
i worked at ncar for over 34 years and saw what happened to results that did not fall into an expected range; often it had to be reworked to fit into the range.
the bigger impact i hope will be on the ipcc structure and function. several lead authors have already been on 2-3 of the ipcc assessments. can we expect them to admit a past oversight or error? i think the ipcc has to change these lead authors to get new blood into the leadership. i imagine some of those regulars will be in the 5th ipcc assessment. but should they be?
mickey
He should have stopped after the first sentence: "Let`s be honest". Thus far it's the honesty that's been missing. The emails only confirmed what the skeptics had been saying for a long time - that the lead authors of the IPCC had not been honest or fair in their public representations of the state of the science, had been preventing replication and subverting the peer review process.
Climategate should have been a lesson learned but there are still too many people coming out with the "out of context" or "scientists are like this" garbage. Stop telling us this broken thing is still ok and just fix it already! Start with producing the raw data (not the "value added" stuff) so the work can be replicated by 3rd parties just like in every other discipline that policy depends on! After it's all replicable then -and only then- you can make your pronouncements about what's still right or wrong!
What a strange disconnet Dr. Glanz and others have irt AGW.
They know the process is deeply flawed, apparently including the work product of many promoters and the IPCC itself, but they still believe.
Why?
If Boeing engaged in a substantially compromised process to design an airlplane, and it was exposed as in cliamtegate, would anyone still fly the airplanes they built?
When I read a commentary that begins, "Yes, the emails were illegally hacked," I shut down. Nothing that follows is worth reading given the assumption that has no basis in fact or findings. To my knowledge, how the emails came to be made public has not been established. There are many possiblilities. Picking one and stating it as fact seems to point to an agenda.
"There is no question in my mind that the integrity of both the scientists and of e-mail security has been damaged."
and
"...though they cannot discredit the impacts of a changing climate on people today and in the future."
1. the "integrity" of email security is not in question - that's an attempt at misdirection.
2. more importantly, he calls into question the integrity some of the world's leading climate scientists, but not the work they've done? As if the two are independent?
Just as the Team demands that McIntyre do his own research - instead of respond to his critiques of their work - this is just another ploy to avoid respond to the specific issues raised by the CRU emails. Just like Judith Curry tut-tuts but never discusses any actual climate science issues - only "process" concerns that "someone" has done "something" wrong and shouldn't do it again. If you could get away with that in court, the jury would never actually look at evidence, only whether the defendant made a reasonable argument.
The "integrity" of email security comment set me off, too.
It is amazing to me that these guys had any expectation of privacy with regards to their email accounts. I have never been under any such illusions, whether concerning my work or home email. Send it out into the aether, and who knows where it will end up. Their emails were subject to disclosure before they were hacked. The first illegality was in their trying to avoid the FOIA requests.
I'm also wondering about this phrase (from Glantz): "though they cannot discredit the impacts of a changing climate on people today and in the future."
Some skeptics question that climate impacts people? Well, I wore my coat today, so I am clearly not a denier. I recognize that I must adapt to changes in the climate in order to survive. If he means specifically-human-caused-climate-change-effects, which effects would those be?
In the comments section Mr Glantz states:
"i have been around climate science (but work on the impacts of climate on society and society on climate) since 1972. so, yes i track climate issues but am focused for the most part on climate variabilities and extremes. today it is difficult to get funding for year to year or decade to decade variability and extremes UNLESS it is linked to climate change. it is just the way it is now. i know most of the players."
I admire his honesty in admitting his funding depends on linking to "climate change". And if AGW is not a "crisis" then funding goes down for a lot of people. I suspect it is rather difficult to be a climate scientist and a skeptic of the "crisis" and still support one's family.
'E-mail security' is an oxymoron.
It's only secure if you encrypt it and I'd be very surprised if employers allowed their employees to encrypt emails sent on the company system without specific authorization.
I must have seen over 100 articles that essentially repeat what Glantz is saying: nothing here, move on. Chase has the proper perspective of a scientist!
I'm beginning to question the basic intellectual competence of many climate scientists in the alarmist camp. Science is an exercise in logic. The particular nature of the evidence may differ from other disciplines and specialties, but science is still about rational examination of evidence and the construction of logical arguments about what the evidence might mean. When people use badly flawed logic, I have to question their ability to do science.
A lot of the comments and "arguments" advanced by the alarmists (whether re: Climategate, the hockey stick, peer review, the evil fossil fuel companies, the IPCC, "green jobs" et al) demonstrate a fundamental lack of logic. The more they write and speak, the more damage they do to their own credibility.
Glantz' argument here is just plain stupid. He damages his credibility as a thinker because of the lack of logic underlying what he wrote. This isn't a popularity or a morality contest between two groups of people. We aren't playing Santa Claus -- intent on proving who is naughty and nice. This is a multi-faceted argument among a very large group of people whose views are incredibly diverse on all kinds of different aspects of the science.
Of course, if climate scientists would: 1) adopt the scientific method regarding transparency and insist on replication, and 2) stop using the appeal to authority fallacy, we could all focus on the science. Motivations and bad manners would be irrelevant. It's only when someone demands to be trusted without verification that revelations of their lack of trustworthiness even starts to become a concern.
"BUT, i have come to believe in various ipcc findings about global warming."
What does this mean? What findings? The IPCC assessment reports (e.g., AR4) run to thousands of pages, and have thousands of what could be described as "findings."
To state that one has "come to believe in various ipcc findings" is essentially meaningless, without further clarification of what one previously believed, and which IPCC findings changed one's mind about which facts.
I read the blurbs again, and I agree with Stan: there is something fundamentally illogical with all the statements from the "warmers" that suggest that the "climategate" emails are no big deal and represent nothing but normal human interactions. It is time for climate scientists to start admitting that they are a VERY big deal! As pointed out by these "deniers", they don't directly disprove the AGW hypothesis, but they demonstrate to a very LARGE audience (many of us already knew virtually everything that has been revealed) that some of the leaders in climate science were engaging in all sorts of "poor science" (to be kind). They will also cause thousands more people to investigate the work of McIntyre and others; and that WILL damage the AGW hypothesis severely; because without the hockeysticks, there just ain't much out there to support the hypothesis. Especially not that the models have also been shown to be GIGO junk (IMHO, of course :) ).
A panel discussion at MIT touched on this issue: http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/730.
Lindzen suggested that it would be an interesting project to study the EAnglia emails and was later challenged by an audience member to release his own emails to be dissected. Kerry Emanuel also hoped that sceptic emails could be reviewed, implying that the CRU emails would not be so far out of the ordinary. Lindzen, like Chase, replied that none of his emails would reveal similar problems.
"BUT, i have come to believe in various ipcc findings about global warming."
That "belief" is the same mistake made by the authors of the emails. They started believing in the theory of anthropogenic global warming rather than using the scientific method to test it for validity. They let that belief color everything the did, from data selection to data analysis.
I forgot to say above:
"Glantz, you impudent slut!" ;-)
Thanks, Dan, for the link to the MIT site. I liked what this fellow had to say:
The email controversy, says Stephen Ansolabehere creates uncertainty about the scientific debate, and will lead to greater scrutiny by the public – which is “healthy.” Since climate change is a grand scale problem with impacts on multiple dimensions of society, the “question we must ask ourselves now is, “Who will police science and how can science maintain credibility as it gets into public debates?” Scientists, as private citizens, are free to engage in political debates, but “must be especially careful about maintaining research standards and methods.” Scientists will find in the future “they must be even more scrupulous about maintaining research standards because more is at stake than getting the next paper published…”
I think that most sceptics would favor the inspection of their emails if all correspondence between IPCC lead authors would also be made available; see for example here that right now this is not the case:
http://climateaudit.org/2008/06/20/fortress-cru-2/
mcrock hits nail on head:
If all e-mails between skeptics and all e-mails between AGW promoters are released, who will be shown to be doing what?
Post a Comment