The FOI Myth #2

Dec 29, 2009 – 8:36 PM

As noted in yesterday’s post, Nature recently editorialized:

If there are benefits to the e-mail theft, one is to highlight yet again the harassment that denialists inflict on some climate-change researchers, often in the form of endless, time-consuming demands for information under the US and UK Freedom of Information Acts. Governments and institutions need to provide tangible assistance for researchers facing such a burden…

Similar sentiments have been expressed elsewhere e.g. New Scientist here.

In today’s post, I’ll review FOI requests to UK institutions for data other than CRU station data and unarchived IPCC review comments, showing that these requests were reasonable, that the use of FOI was entirely appropriate and that complying with FOI requests enabled the matters to be dealt with efficiently and expeditiously. I’ve reserved FOI requests for CRU station data and for unarchived IPCC review comments to separate posts, because they are longer topics and raise different issues. Contemporary CA posts on FOI requests are here. Continue reading →

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in climategate, FOIA | Tagged , | Comments (242)

Climategate on Finnish TV

Dec 29, 2009 – 2:27 PM

As a couple of Finnish readers have reported, there is an excellent Finnish Climategate documentary with English subtitles available on Youtube. (I have a couple of cameos from my pre-Climategate interview). Continue reading →

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in climategate, News and Commentary | Comments (68)

FOI Myth #1: USA

Dec 28, 2009 – 10:30 PM

Climate scientists have recently been promoting the myth that providing data in response to FOI requests was interfering with their work. Nature uncritically accepted this myth in a recent editorial calling for action to protect climate-change researchers from “endless time-consuming demands for information under the US and UK Freedom of Information Acts.”:

If there are benefits to the e-mail theft, one is to highlight yet again the harassment that denialists inflict on some climate-change researchers, often in the form of endless, time-consuming demands for information under the US and UK Freedom of Information Acts. Governments and institutions need to provide tangible assistance for researchers facing such a burden…

While the scientific method is supposed to require fact checking, in this case, the mantra had merely been repeated over and over by climate scientists like a sort of tribal chant and, without carrying out even a modicum of due diligence to determine the veracity of the claims, Nature joined into the chant.

Today I’m going to review the allegation that U.S. scientists have been unduly burdened by FOI requests, showing that they haven’t. I’ll discuss the UK situation in a follow-up post (and would appreciate that commenters defer discussion of the UK situation until then.) Continue reading →

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in climategate, FOIA, Santer | Tagged | Comments (270)

The UK Met Office “Subset”

Dec 27, 2009 – 11:19 AM

Around Dec 8, 2009, the UK Met Office released “value added” data for a “subset” of 1741 stations – see here, describing the release as follows:

The data downloadable from this page are a subset of the full HadCRUT3 record of global temperatures, which is one of the global temperature records that have underpinned IPCC assessment reports and numerous scientific studies.

The data subset consists of a network of individual land stations that has been designated by the World Meteorological Organization for use in climate monitoring. The data show monthly average temperature values for over 1,500 land stations

In question 7 of the webpage, they asked and answered rhetorically:

7. Why are you releasing a subset of the data now?

We can only release data from NMSs when we have permission from them to do so. In the meantime we are releasing data from a network of stations designated by the World Meteorological Organisation for climate monitoring together with any additional data for which we have permission to release.

Today, I’m going to do a quick analysis of the Hadley subset, which has some interesting attributes. Continue reading →

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in CRU, FOIA | Comments (246)

Christmas 2009

Dec 25, 2009 – 9:17 AM

Merry Christmas to all of you.

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (138)

Von Storch WSJ Editorial

Dec 23, 2009 – 10:54 AM

Online here.

One of the remarkable aspects of Climategate is that the only climate scientists presently speaking out against the Team are people who had previously been at least somewhat visible.

Curry, Von Storch, Zorita, the Pielkes. All had taken their own line vis-a-vis the Team prior to Climategate and have spoken out since Climategate.

My impression (and it’s an impression rather than a survey) is that it’s hard to think of previously silent climate scientists or sympathizers in the “community” who have publicly expressed any disapproval of Climategate conduct (George Monbiot a visible exception) and that the predominant public reaction of the “community” is nothing-to-see-here-move-along (e.g. Gerry North).

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (296)

Climategatekeeping: Jones reviews Mann

Dec 23, 2009 – 10:29 AM

As noted previously, the Climategate letters and documents show Jones and the Team using the peer review process to prevent publication of adverse papers, while giving softball reviews to friends and associates in situations fraught with conflict of interest. Today I’ll report on the spectacle of Jones reviewing a submission by Mann et al. Continue reading →

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in climategate, Uncategorized | Tagged | Comments (152)

Met Office Archives Data and Code

Dec 22, 2009 – 11:20 PM

The UK Met Office has released a large tranche of station data, together with code.

Only last summer, the Met Office had turned down my FOI request for station data, saying that the provision of station data to me would threaten the course of UK international relations. Apparently, these excuses have somehow ceased to apply.

Last summer the Met Office stated:

The Met Office received the data information from Professor Jones at the University of East Anglia on the strict understanding by the data providers that this station data must not be publicly released. If any of this information were released, scientists could be reluctant to share information and participate in scientific projects with the public sector organisations based in the UK in future. It would also damage the trust that scientists have in those scientists who happen to be employed in the public sector and could show the Met Office ignored the confidentiality in which the data information was provided.
However, the effective conduct of international relations depends upon maintaining trust and confidence between states and international organisations. This relationship of trust allows for the free and frank exchange of information on the understanding that it will be treated in confidence. If the United Kingdom does not respect such confidences, its ability to protect and promote United Kingdom interests through international relations may be hampered…

The Met Office are not party to information which would allow us to determine which countries and stations data can or cannot be released as records were not kept, or given to the Met Office, therefore we cannot release data where we have no authority to do so…

Some of the information was provided to Professor Jones on the strict understanding by the data providers that this station data must not be publicly released and it cannot be determined which countries or stations data were given in confidence as records were not kept. The Met Office received the data from Professor Jones on the proviso that it would not be released to any other source and to release it without authority would seriously affect the relationship between the United Kingdom and other Countries and Institutions.

The Met Office announced the release of “station records were produced by the Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, in collaboration with the Met Office Hadley Centre.”

The station data zipfile here is described as a “subset of the full HadCRUT3 record of global temperatures” consisting of:

a network of individual land stations that has been designated by the World Meteorological Organization for use in climate monitoring. The data show monthly average temperature values for over 1,500 land stations…
The stations that we have released are those in the CRUTEM3 database that are also either in the WMO Regional Basic Climatological Network (RBCN) and so freely available without restrictions on re-use; or those for which we have received permission from the national met. service which owns the underlying station data.

I haven’t parsed the data set yet to see what countries are not included in the subset and/or what stations are not included in the subset.

The release was previously reported by Bishop Hill and John Graham-Cumming, who’s already done a preliminary run of the source code made available at the new webpage.

We’ve reported on a previous incident where the Met Office had made untrue statements in order to thwart an FOI request. Is this change of heart an admission of error in at their FOI refusal last summer or has there been a relevant change in their legal situation (as distinct from bad publicity)?

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (177)

Climategatekeeping: Schmidt 2009

Dec 22, 2009 – 1:31 PM

We’ve seen that Climategate emails provide evidence that Jones, Briffa and Cook took steps to block publication of articles that were perceived as potentially damaging.

The Climategate documents also provide a glimpse of another aspect of Team gatekeeping – acting as peer reviewers of submissions by associates and friends. Phil Jones was a peer reviewer for Schmidt (IJC 2009), which criticized Michaels and McKitrick (2007) and de Laat and Maurelis (2006). Whereas Jones “went to town” as a reviewer of articles criticizing CRU Siberian temperatures, his review of Schmidt 2009 was perfunctory and trifling – a bias that is just as corrosive to the literature.

Jones’ peer review dated June 22, 2008 stated:

This paper is timely as it clearly shows that the results claimed in dML06 and MM07 are almost certainly spurious. It is important that such papers get written and the obvious statistical errors highlighted. Here the problem relates to the original belief that there were many more spatial degrees of freedom. This is a common mistake and it will be good to have another paper to refer to when reviewing any more papers like dML06 and MM07. There is really no excuse for these sorts of mistakes to be made, that lead to erroneous claims about problems with the surface temperature record.

My recommendation is that the paper be accepted subject to minor revisions.

The review continue with a series of minor points and observations. Schmidt submitted his article on 16 May 2008, revised on 2 September 2008 and was accepted on 8 November 2008.

The original McKitrick and Michaels (2007) is here. Schmidt 2009 is online here. A reply to Schmidt 2009 online here was submitted by McKitrick and Nierenberg on April 15, 2009 and does not appear to have been processed as expeditiously as the Schmidt submission.

Online discussion of Schmidt 2009 have taken place at RC here here, at CA here here and by Nicolas Nierenberg here.

The analysis in these papers is statistical. Phil Jones is not a statistician and was either unable or unwilling to review the statistical analysis (see Nicolas Nierenberg’s blog linked above for an earnest effort to review the statistical analysis. All we see in Jones’ review is that he liked the answer and viewed the Schmidt paper as another tool to assist future gatekeeping.

The “peer review” in evidence here is compromised first by the association between Jones and Schmidt (combined with Jones’ prior animosity to the articles being criticized), by the trifling quality of the peer review itself and the overt objective of using the article as a tool for future gatekeeping.

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in climategate | Tagged , , | Comments (144)

Terence Corcoran on Climategate

Dec 21, 2009 – 5:31 PM

A very interesting two-part article on Climategate by someone who’s followed the story for years:

Part 1

Now that the Copenhagen political games are out of the way, marked as a failure by any realistic standard, it may be time to move on to the science games. To get the post-Copenhagen science review underway, the world has a fine document at hand: The Climategate Papers.

On Nov. 17, three weeks before the Copenhagen talks began, a massive cache of climate science emails landed on a Russian server, reportedly after having been laundered through Saudi Arabia. Where they came from, nobody yet knows. Described as having been hacked or leaked from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, the emails have been the focus of thousands of media and blog reports. Since their release, all the attention has been dedicated to a few choice bits of what seem like incriminating evidence of trickery and scientific repression. Some call it fraud.

Email fragments instantly began flying through the blogosphere. Perhaps the most sensational came from a Nov. 16, 1999, email from Phil Jones, head of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), in which he referred to having “completed Mike’s Nature trick” to “hide the decline” in temperature.

These words, now famous around the world as the core of Climategate, are in fact the grossest possible oversimplification of what the emails contain. The Phil Jones email and other choice email fragments are really just microscopic particles taken from a massive collection of material that will, in time, come to be seen as the greatest and most dramatic science policy epic in history…

Part 2

In the thousands of emails released last month in what is now known as Climategate, the greatest battles took place over scientists’ attempts to reconstruct a credible temperature record for the last couple of thousand years. Have they failed? What the Climategate emails provide is at least one incontrovertible answer: They certainly have not succeeded.

In a post-Copenhagen world, climate history is not merely a matter of getting the record straight, or a trivial part of the global warming science. In a Climategate email in April of this year, Steve Colman, professor of Geological Science at the University of Minnesota Duluth, told scores of climate scientists “most people seem to accept that past history is the only way to assess what the climate can actually do (e.g., how fast it can change). However, I think that the fact that reconstructed history provides the only calibration or test of models (beyond verification of modern simulations) is under-appreciated.”

If temperature history is the “only” way to test climate models, the tests we have on hand — mainly the shaky temperature history of the last 1,000 or 2,000 years — suggest current climate models are not getting a proper scientific workout…

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in climategate, Uncategorized | Tagged , | Comments (136)