'Climategate' scientist attacks bloggers

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2010/02/climategate-scientist-attacks-bloggers.html

by limist • 16 years ago

27 47 16 years ago

patio11• 16 years ago

Jones wants criticism delivered within the comfortable confines of the peer review process because he is skilled at how the game is played and knows who to talk to to get papers he does not like killed. Seriously, this is a man who should be sentenced to having his words quoted in every mention of him for the rest of his life.

Example: Professor Jones, who once wrote to a colleague "I will keep them out if I have to redefine what the peer reviewed literature is", criticized bloggers for "hijacking the peer review process."

pingswept2• 16 years ago

What is the antecedent of "them" in your quote of Jones?

jgrahamc• 16 years ago

http://eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=419

The other paper by MM is just garbage - as you knew. De Freitas again. Pielke is also losing all credibility as well by replying to the mad Finn as well - frequently as I see it. I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !

tkeller• 16 years ago

Climategate 'scientist' attacks bloggers

nollidge2• 16 years ago

Climategate scientist "attacks" bloggers

crux_12• 16 years ago

Fun thought experiment: What if this was an epidemiologist criticising the blogosphere for spreading non-peer-reviewed doubts about vaccine safety? Or an evolutionary biologist attacking intelligent design bloggers?

I'm guessing that most people on hacker news have pre-existing opinions on both of those issues in favour of the scientist; while for climate science it's significantly more split. However, if you leave aside personal judgements about the underlying truth, the situations are quite analogous.

jerf2• 16 years ago

Did the epidemiologist in your question participate in deliberately preventing peer-reviewed studies about vaccine safety being published? Did the evolutionary biologist deliberately block peer-reviewed studies from being published? And then go on about how there's no peer-reviewed evidence?

(The combo is more distressing than just manipulating the peer review process alone. Doing that you could argue is just firm belief that the other side isn't science, but then using that as an argument against their position makes it hard for me to conclude anything but malice here.)

crux_12• 16 years ago

To answer your questions: Probably yes, and certainly yes. The intelligent design movement has made a whole documentary film about their systematic exclusion from the scientific process, for pete's sake!

For a specific example, a biology journal associated with the Smithsonian published an intelligent design paper -- and as a result, its publisher was immediately forced out, and the newly installed publisher printed a complete retraction. Further, many evolutionary biologists don't just work to prevent ID papers from being published; they actively advocate shutting down any journals that do publish it...

The thing is, if you believe that evolution is on solid footing, and the ID movement's attempts to cast doubt on it are junk science, then all of the above is perfectly appropriate -- but if you believe that evolution is actually a flawed theory, then all of the above is evidence of ideologically driven 'bad science'! The parallels continue.

guelo• 16 years ago

What evidence do you have that any papers where blocked? The papers discussed in the email - McKitrick and Michaels (2004) and Kalnay and Cai (2003) - where both published and even referenced in the IPCC.

One frustrated scientist doesn't have the power to "redefine what the peer-review literature is"

JunkDNA2• 16 years ago

I'm not so sure they're as analgous as you might think. In this case, a central part of the controversy surrounds allegations (based on the leaked emails) that the researchers at East Anglia were attempting to manipulate the peer review process itself. In my opinion, this is by far the worst part of the whole climategate fiasco. If you assume all their research and methods are solid, it is still inexcusable to try and prevent contradictory evidence from going into the literature.

A good example of this is Barry Marshall's initial work on stomach ulcers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Marshall). The common wisdom until the 1980's was that they were caused by spicy food and stress. Marshall and a colleague had isolated Helicobacter pylori from the gut of patients afflicted with stomach ulcers. They were unable to show the bacteria were the causative agent (a crucial point if you're alleging infection). Nevertheless, his initial paper was published. Subsequently, he actually drank a flask of the things to prove that they caused stomach ulcers (and later published those results). This wasn't 50 years ago either, it was only in 1984. His initial paper could have easily been spiked by the reviewers since extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. But it made it through, even through it contradicted the position of the vast majority of physicians. I often wonder what would have happened if his peers had spiked his initial paper and labeled him a crazy 'stress caused ulcer denier' who should be marginalized for threatening the safety of patients.

crux_12• 16 years ago

You think allegations of peer-review manipulation don't exist for vaccines or intelligent design?

http://justgetthere.us/blog/archives/Scientific-Censorship-o...

(The allegations of censorship far pre-date the email leak -- the leaked emails simply added fuel to the fire.)

(Edit: one too many "don't"s)

pyre2• 16 years ago

While some of the bloggers are just using this to add fuel to the fire of the "there is no such thing as Global Warming" movement, the evidence against what these 'scientists' were doing is pretty damning.

What we have here is a dishonest person that fudged his work in a dubious manner attacking other people who used the evidence of his transgressions to further their own political goals. It's literally like the pot calling the kettle black. Though there are probably some moderate bloggers caught in the middle somewhere, but that happens when you make blanket statements with things like "all bloggers" in them.

crux_12• 16 years ago

So, if these 'scientists' were trying to get a publisher fired and a journal shut down for publishing a paper that cast doubt on the scientific consensus, would that be pretty damning in and of itself?

I don't think so: That was the exact situation when a paper was published that attempted to cast doubt on evolution, and I believe that, far from being damning, it was fully justified.

Whether you judge that action as censorship most foul, or simply upholding standards, depends thoroughly on how you felt about it in the first place.

vannevar5• 16 years ago

<quote>I'm guessing that most people on hacker news have pre-existing opinions on both of those issues in favour of the scientist; while for climate science it's significantly more split.</quote>

I'm not sure this is true. There is currently an energetic astro-turfing campaign under way on HN and other social media sites that makes the denier community look larger than it really is, certainly among the more educated population that you expect to find on HN.

If creationists start taking a similar interest in HN, you'll come to think that there are a lot of creationists here too.

tdoggette• 16 years ago

What evidence is there of widespread astroturfing on climate change, specifically on HN?

crux_12• 16 years ago

Sort of like when Stormfront invaded reddit? ;)

I don't think so. People with a libertarian mindset, which is plenty consistent with a community of mostly US-based entrepreneurs, would naturally find the policy recommendations that follow from climate science being true to be very much against their principles; it's only natural that scepticism of that science would be given heavier weight.

fauigerzigerk3• 16 years ago

Aren't you overestimating the political importance of HN a little bit if you speak of an astro-turfing compaign?

Speaking for myself, I can tell you what made me a skeptic but by no means a denier and by no means a follower of anyone's campaign. It's the certainty in a context that doesn't allow for certainty.

There are scientists who claim to be able to predict the behaviour of a whole host of complex systems and their interaction for decades and centuries in advance. Not just the biology but also the economics and the sociology. The costs of climate change over 50 years. Stuff like that.

I know a thing or two about scientific methods, but I have never heard of a method that even claims to be able to make such predictions with any kind of certainty. And I don't know of a single instance in the history of mankind when such long term predictions have ever been reasonably accurate.

So in a situation that has uncertainty written all over it I'm faced with a massive, emotionally charged, almost hysterical, political and media campaign that yells CERTAINTY at me and comes with that kind of moral righteousness that I'm very suspicious of in any context.

I guess that makes me a denier of sorts. A denier of certainty.

pg• 16 years ago

I've noticed no suspicious patterns. The users who comment on stories about climate change are the same ones who comment on other stories.

DanielBMarkham3• 16 years ago

You realize, of course, that one-third of medical research turns out to be wrong, and a high percentage of the remaining studies are usually either mis-reported or mis-understood by the professional community. Link: http://www.livescience.com/health/091026-medical-research-fr...

(I remember reading a much higher ratio, but I think that was from a decade or so ago)

The reason why this is not more of a scandal? Twofold.

1) Doctors are wise to this. They rarely recommend sweeping changes based on a few studies.

2) The fraud and errors are out in the open. In most places the politics has not "gotten ahead of the science" where the researchers are actually rooting for the outcomes to fit one narrative or another.

Neither of these are true about this particular topic. Great expensive changes are being requested, millions or billions are already being spent at the fringes of this issue with the damage to endangered habitats being "exaggerated" by climate change, and for many, many scientists (not all or even the majority, but a lot)? They already know what the answer is, and scientists or studies that don't fit with that narrative get excluded, shunned, de-funded, and ostracized.

Not trying to be snarky, but does that explain the differences well enough for you?

crux_12• 16 years ago

Also not trying to be snarky... but what's your point here? It seems to be an explanation as to why you personally find one scientific community trustworthy, but not another. Fair enough.

But this: "excluded, shunned, de-funded, and ostracized" is exactly -- word-for-word -- the alleged situation for vaccine-autism researchers and "darwinist" sceptics. I don't see where you've demonstrated any real divergence in the parallel dynamics between the scientific consensus and its external critics.

(edit: added 'parallel' for clarity)

CWuestefeld• 16 years ago

Why don't they do their own [temperature] reconstructions? If they want to criticise, they should write their own papers

Didn't Jon Graham-Cummings just publish an article about having done just this, and finding an error in the data?

Of course, people like JGC couldn't do so before, because Jones and his colleagues kept the raw data secret.

Edit: here's JGC's posting about his article: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1128782

'Climategate' scientist attacks bloggers

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