My real concern about all types of “secrecy” — loosely defined as failure to provide clear and readily available documentation of all algorithms and data — is that it enables laziness and sloppiness and devalues progress and rigor. Is this a cultural failing of climate science? I don’t know.

I think it may be a function of how well you are trained in the use of data. I made a data request yesterday to one of our database people for a policy paper I am writing and she promptly provided me with the finished tables, the pivot tables, and the raw data, plus documentation. It can be done, but I suspect it depends on the quality of the education you get and your supervision as a student learning how to do data analysis. Perhaps people who train primarily as data analysts vs. other sciences are better trained than those who merely use the data to analyse something else. In other words, the data is not the end, it is the means. When the data is the end for a person — aka data analyst — perhaps they take more care with its production and documentation than those for whom it is merely a means to an other end. YMMV.

Lay people like me read your blog and the comments. Please define the initialisms eg GHG (Green House Gases) and wplease write a one or two sentence summary or conclusion in lay terms that describes the meaning of the post in lay terms.

Dr. Thomas Still

PS Many of Benny’s contributors do not provide these aids to understanding, either.

…if those differences had been put in a table it might have been clearer…

he touches on a huge issue that, IMHO, has been retarding “auditor’s” (e.g. SteveM’s) efforts, and climate science generally, for years (if not decades): Data and methods are too often poorly documented, withheld, or presented in a way that is at best ambiguous and at worst uninterpretable. (If you want examples, this blog is full of them [yes, I should produce a list; but I am lazy, so let's "move on" ]).

Why does this happen? I really don’t know, but I suspect it, too, is just laziness rather than malice. Researchers prefer doing research and presenting lectures to documenting boring details about data and methods; and they have found they can get away with it. Perhaps this is true in all scientific fields, but I am not so aware of it.

It is, of course, likely that there is “sharing” among an inner circle of colleagues; but, if so, why not include everyone in the conversation? Doing so would help inspire confidence among the broader community, and — you never know — it might help advance the field. What we keep seeing here on CA is that “turning over the stones” reveals many surprises. Surprises lead to progress.

Should we expect that all science should be instantly reproducible? Of course not. But — and I’m making comparisons with other disciplines, ones that seem to be making progress — it should be sufficiently easy to reproduce cutting-edge work that smart graduate students, under the guidance of advisors, routinely choose to do so. It is through this process that science advances: By rigorously repeating another researcher’s work, students ponder each assumption and decision and develop a deep sense of understanding; they come to appreciate the generality, fragility, dependencies, and applicability of each result (as well as uncovering errors, which — as every researcher knows — are ubiquitous in real research). And, magically, science progresses.

My real concern about all types of “secrecy” — loosely defined as failure to provide clear and readily available documentation of all algorithms and data — is that it enables laziness and sloppiness and devalues progress and rigor. Is this a cultural failing of climate science? I don’t know. However, I am surprised by the slow rate of progress in climate science. Papers from 30 years ago often seem wiser and more informed than those appearing today. AFAICT, confidence intervals on GCM output have not improved at all. It seems that scientists in past decades — Hansen, for example — were more courageous about making testable predictions than are scientists today. For whatever reason, we now seem to get vague predictions more reminiscent of fortune telling than science.

Of course, it could be that I am completely wrong. I hope I am. The reason I worry is that on those rare occasions where debate has focused on topics I know something about — when “the curtain” has been pulled back — I have been appalled by the ignorance of the supposed experts.

I judge that for us who are here to learn, the personality part of the debate or who said what and when becomes a distraction from the real issues of climate science and an objective analyis of them.

Actually I find it easier to read the paper rather than a source code but then I have a background in Physical Chemistry, and I sympathize with your problems when working out of your comfort zone.
As I recall your original dilemma it was that you didn’t realise that the OTG was responsible for the difference between A & B in the ‘neartime’ (I believe that was your term). However a careful reading of the paper (pp 9361-2) shows that it was the only difference at the time of the paper. Of course subsequently it should become less important because of the reduced growth in CO2, CH4, N2O and Freons relative to A. Perhaps if those differences had been put in a table it might have been clearer, that’s what I did when reading it.

Steve: “Of course subsequently it should become less important ..” You’d expect that, wouldn’t you. Wait and see.

In cases where I get wrongfooted, while the Team may take that as evidence of singular stupidity, it usually is because of something opaque in the description – even if with hindsight, when everyone knows how the method actually works, the description sort of makes sense.

The problem with the the Hansen description is not that it doesn’t say that Scenario doubled the CFC11 and CFC12 for minor CFCs, but that it doesn’t set out clearly that this is the most important aspect of the differences between SCenarios A and B. Reading through it the first time, it seemed like an incidental point, just mopping up a minor and insignificant detail with a somewhat arbitrary assumption that was convenient but not material. IN fact, as I’ve already observed, it’s the major contribution to the Scenario A and B differences. I’ll show this in a graph in another post. I don’t think that anyone could read HAnsen et al 1988 straight through without the benefit of the commentary here and emerge with the understanding that the handling of incidental CFCs was the difference between the Business-as-Usual and “most plausible” scenarios. The scenarios look like they’re about something else – that’s all.

Paper, okay, yes, if one is aware of what the paper said first, versus learning what the spoken claims are first. What do you do when faced with two conflicting explanations? I’d take what was said, especially since the graph gives no indication that it covers CFC11+ or CFC12+ You’re criticising somebody doing what they did versus how you think they should have done it. At least Steve rectified it, and pretty quickly, unlike what others we could speak about often do; ignore the error and keep making it.

First of all as I said above there is no conflict, A is exponential, B is linear. In answer to my original comments Steve McI said that he was aware of the paper and in fact in his original posting had quoted from it and Steve was quite indignant at my suggestion that he had missed the statements in the Hansen 88 paper which explicitly laid out the answers to all his questions (#22): “Why do you say that I missed these statements? I saw those statements.”
So from that the inescapable conclusion is that Steve had read the paper which contained the answers to his original questions, had he just followed the paper rather than making assumptions it would have all been straightforward. As it was he became confused and made a mistake, unfortunately he’d already committed his findings to the blog and had to backtrack. Steve has left it at that, why do you feel it’s necessary to jump up in his defence and suggest that I’m unfairly maligning him when apparently he doesn’t feel that it’s necessary?

Ah, well, to each his (or her) own.

http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/aggi

Ah, well, to each his (or her) own.