Congressman Seeks Scientists' Personal Data 632
jfengel writes "The Washington Post reports that House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Joe Barton (R-TX) has requested raw data and personal financial information on three scientists who published a paper which claimed that temperatures rose precipitously in the 20th century. Colleagues (including other Republicans) are calling the investigation 'misguided and illegitimate.' Barton has long been an opponent of government action on global warming."
That's Fine. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Not black and white. (Score:4, Interesting)
Big words != Factual Paper (Score:3, Interesting)
Spatially resolved global reconstructions of annual surface temperature patterns over the past six centuries are based on the multivariate calibration of widely distributed high-resolution proxy climate indicators. Time-dependent correlations of the reconstructions with time-series records representing changes in greenhouse-gas concentrations, solar irradiance, and volcanic aerosols suggest that each of these factors has contributed to the climate variability of the past 400 years, with greenhouse gases emerging as the dominant forcing during the twentieth century. Northern Hemisphere mean annual temperatures for three of the past eight years are warmer than any other year since (at least) AD 1400.
While I think asking for personal data and computer codes is pretty far out of line, I think a review of the raw data and a detailed analysis of the "Spatially resolved global reconstructions" may not be asking too much.
A peek at the "multivariate calibrations" might be a good idea as well.
Ignore the Spin; Follow the Money (Score:3, Interesting)
Scientists aren't above bribery. If someone is publishing data and has an axe to grind, thats one thing. If someone is publishing data that is correlary to how much money their getting from someone with an axe to grind, that is another.
Public policy should be based on facts. So before scrubbing some clown, ask yourself: Did they follow the money? Or did they grind their own axe?
Re:Not black and white. (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, Nature requires that you disclose financial interest when you publish. http://www.nature.com/nature/authors/policy/compe
Re:Typical Republicans (Score:5, Interesting)
What's in Irving, why the headquarters of Exxon Mobile, one of the corporations most rabidly fighting any suggestion their products might be wrecking the climate. I doubt you are going to find many politicians from Texas, including the President, who are going to give global warming a fair hearing if they value there political careers and their power base in Texas.
Exxon is the one who hired Philip Cooney, Bush's chief of staff of the Council on Environmental Quality the day after he quit amid controversy. The irony of a former and now once again oil man heading anything on enviromental quality. He resigned when it was exposed that he had been repeatedly altering, or maybe doctoring is a better word, government reports on global warming to downplay it, to suppress data showing it might be happening and that burning fossil fuels might be contributing to it.
Scientists have responsed to Braton. (Score:3, Interesting)
"The real question we are faced with is not whether humans are changing climate. The science on this is clear, and decades of research have culminated in a scientific consensus on this point. The real question now is what we need to do about it. A Congressional committee concerned with energy could be - and indeed should be - a key player in exploring policy options to deal with the global warming threat. We hope that after studying the responses by the scientists, they will make a start."
This BBC artice [bbc.co.uk] quotes one of Barton's cronnies as saying "it's about time the science was put on trial". WTF - To be "science" means it is permanently "on trial" but this moron wants to "settle it in a court of law".
Re:Big words != Factual Paper (Score:4, Interesting)
Furthermore, asking for computer codes is ABSOLUTELY NOT out of line. In fact, there is a small controversy regarding the stability of the SVD routine used to process the data in this paper. All of this has been published and is part of the scientific literature and ongoing research.
Re:The Age of Reason ... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Not black and white. (Score:2, Interesting)
An earlier Washington Post article [washingtonpost.com] discusses their disagreement.
Re:Al Gore's presentation... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not black and white. (Score:2, Interesting)
In this case, we have researchers publishing in Nature. Nature is *the* preeminent scientific publication in the world. A top notch professor at Caltech (where I'm a graduate student) might get 4 articles in Nature _in their entire lifetime_. As a researcher, getting a paper or two in Nature practically guarantees me a associate professorship at a major university when I graduate. In other words, getting into Nature is quite difficult, and any article that's in there is peer-reviewed up the ass.
So, if this Congressman has any clue as to the process of peer review, he already knows that the study is reputable. He's just trying to inspire personal fear in climate change researchers.
Re:Not black and white. (Score:2, Interesting)
This is the theory, that scientists are unbiased researchers who follow the scientific method. This is not always the case. Please see my response to a slashdot article post about how 1/3 of all scientific studies are nonsense or falsified.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=155771&cid=130 61094 [slashdot.org]
Re:Read all about it (Score:3, Interesting)
All that stuff at climateaudit.com is the sort of hairsplitting that actually does go on all the time within science, normally without the sour misanthropic contempt that is being drummed up there.
The attention to this particular paper is obviously politically motivated. The fact that the world is in trouble because of greenhouse emissions is a physical fact. It is not a fragile proposition that falls apart if one tree ring study is incorrect. However, many people would like it if the theory were that fragile and if that pillar on which it supposedly rests were unsound.
What is extraordinary about Mann et al is not the quality of the work or the rigor with which it was performed. (It may well be wrong. Von Storch seems to think so, and he is surely a man to reckon with in such matters.) Left to its own devices, science will converge on truth.
What is extraordinary about the paper is the amount of hostile attention directed toward it, mostly from outside science.
It's about politics, not about r-squared, and a very unfortunate type of politics as well. It's usually called mudslinging, and its not really a novelty, but its use in science is an unfortunate new development. The participation in this degrading spectacle by a publication as influential as the Wall Street Journal and by a congressman are especially discouraging.
Re:Not black and white. (Score:3, Interesting)
Could you cite a reference on that because I've never heard any such thing. Not even the current round of complaints about the paper are making such dramatic claims. Rather the current claims seem to be centering on how certain proxy data was generated for some of the more distanct historical periods.
For some other papers that found similar results try here [realclimate.org] which lists several in the references, as well as providing some charts giving and overview of how the different studies compare.
Jedidiah.
Re:Not black and white. (Score:2, Interesting)
Why are you making up irrelevant crap? The gp posted a link to a story that had zero, zilch, nada to do with Lomborg's book. Here's the link again [slashdot.org] since you obviously didn't follow it the first time. This time, follow it. You'll see that it talks about a real, honest to god study. Next time, please follow along.
Your naivety is touching in the way you seem to think that scientists are somehow raised above general human behaviour.
Your illiteracy is touching in the way you seem to read all kinds of nonsense into what I wrote. I made no such claim that scientists were perfect, I do claim that the scientific method accounts for bias and imperfection and that it is the best tool we have to deal with it.
The only thing I had to say about the GP's reference to Lomborg was that GP's point was not articulated enough to be discerned.
Your claim that Lomborg's book has only meet with ridicule and without scientificly valid rebuttal is specious. Since his work was primarily an analysis of other studies and did not include any new data, then any criticism of his use of the results of other studies is valid scientific review. What I see from perusing the rebuttals and the rebuttals to the rebuttals and the rebuttals to the rebuttals to the rebuttals is primarily complaints about Lomborg cherry-picking the data to support his theories and ignoring data that contradicts his theories. Since this contradicting data is there for all to see, such criticism is far from being ad hominem.