Govt policy "reprehensible" says Science and Technology committee

Oh, but they didn't say it in quite that way, instead preferring to portray it as a fault of the "climate science community":

"The parliamentary science and technology select committee was scathing about the 'standard practice' among the climate science community of not routinely releasing all its raw data and computer codes – something the committee's chair, Phil Willis MP, described as 'reprehensible'. He added: 'That practice needs to change and it needs to change quickly.'"

Let me introduce you to the NERC policy on Intellectual Property. Short version: "Who owns the intellectual property? We do." The UK Ministry of Defence (who run UK Met Office and therefore the Hadley Centre) is orders of magnitude worse in its defensive and bean-counting approach to the supply of, well, just about anything that they have and anyone else wants. The bottom line is (or certainly was, when I worked there) that NERC employees are under pressure to sell anything that can be sold. And if someone asks for something, that means it must surely be worth something, right? Of course this is an attitude that the scientists - who know that they can't really get any significant price for their work - have always implacably opposed, but we don't really count for much when the politicians are demanding budget cuts and percentage returns on investment.

[In fact when I was a NERC employee, they once tried to modify our contracts in order to claim IP rights over everything we ever did, even if entirely unrelated to our jobs, such as taking beautiful photographs as a hobby or composing pop songs in the bath. Many of us refused point-blank to sign up to such absurd terms, there was enough opposition that even the union was persuaded to oppose it, and the idea was eventually dropped.]

Occasionally, it works ok: a previous employer sells this software to mariners all over the place, and I believe that the commercial department actually brings in more money than it costs to employ them (at least that was the situation back then). The vast majority of our work has no meaningful commercial value, however, but the effort of demonstrating this may not always be trivial.

I don't defend any unnecessary secrecy: I was disappointed when a prominent climate scientist refused to allow me to have his widely-used code (a Windows executable was available, but that was no use to me) so I used another model and the developers have gained a handful of highly cited publications as a result. I am also one of the founding executive editors of Geoscientific Model Development, "an international scientific journal dedicated to the publication and public discussion of the description, development and evaluation of numerical models of the Earth System and its components. " We explicitly encourage and support the archiving of code to support the paper.

Returning to the politicians:

""It is important in terms of scientific endeavour that that material is made available," said Willis. He added that the committee accepted that Jones had released all the data that he was able to."

Well, quite. There's no point in MPs pointing fingers when they are the ones setting the policies that make it impossible (or at least difficult and deprecated as a general principle). Is it possible they don't even realise this?

[jules' pics] 3/30/2010 09:02:00 PM

magnolia, originally uploaded by julesberry2001.

Using the extendable bipod plus that lovely 70-300mm Nikkor zoom that the bipod made me buy, it is possible to photograph the neighbours' own magnolias almost slightly artistically.

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Posted By jules to jules' pics at 3/30/2010 09:02:00 PM

Phil Jones exonerated

This is a pleasingly firm and clear statement from the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee (as reported by the Times, I haven't read the report itself):

"The climate scientist at the centre of the row over stolen e-mails has no case to answer and should be reinstated, a crossparty group of MPs says"

Though come to think of it I suppose this just makes the great global conspiracy even larger than we thought :-)

[jules' pics] 3/29/2010 08:47:00 PM

small Magnolia flower bursting from its bud, originally uploaded by julesberry2001.

Magnolias rate highly on jules' flower list. Not white, but the colour of interior wall paint, the large flowers gleam spectacularly in the sun. This one is *our* dwarf pink magnolia, which has had a record breaking number of flowers this year (5).

Due to the warmth, magnolia flowers in Kamakura burst from their buds only for the petals to fall to the ground about 2 days later. But this year an unusual cold snap arrived, and even now (10 days later) there are still a few bedraggled flowers sticking to some of the branches.

The inlaws come from Scotland, where it is always cold and dark and wet, but it seems they have become soft in their centrally heated thick-walled stone castle. Consequently they have been complaining bitterly about this bitter weather. For some reason they keep talking about how it was cold during the war and stuff. Presumably that was the last time they felt as cold. Welcome to Japan: medieval to 22nd century lifestyle all at once!

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Posted By jules to jules' pics at 3/29/2010 08:47:00 PM

The peer reviewed literature has spoken

ABC appears to be lumbered with a denialist Chairman, so it's perhaps only to be expected that they have promoted the foil-hat conspiracy theories of McLean regarding the rejection of his nonsensical attempt at a reply.

Now Stephan Lewandowsky has a good article up on the ABC site on the topic, discussing how peer-reviewed literature is fallible but still paints an overwhelming picture on climate change:

"The article by McLean and colleagues is a perfect example of the fallible but self-correcting nature of peer reviewed science.

Although the authors loudly proclaimed to the media that their work shows that 'no scientific justification exists for emissions regulation' and that it 'leaves little room for any warming driven by human emissions', these claims have now been shown to be wishful thinking at best, and mendacious propaganda at worst.

The Journal of Geophysical Research is publishing a devastating rebuttal of Mr McLean's work, authored by a team of nine of the world's leading climate scientists from Japan, the UK, the US, and New Zealand.

This rebuttal uncovered numerous errors and, most crucially, it unambiguously showed that the paper by McLean and colleagues permitted no conclusions about global warming, let alone the lack thereof.

None.

Peer reviewed science is fallible but self-correcting."

Go and read the whole thing - and add a comment too.

[jules' pics] 3/28/2010 06:06:00 PM

Zen garden at Zuisenji, originally uploaded by julesberry2001.

Upping the Zennish ante, this weekend I loaded my camera with black and white pixels. Similar in colour taken 10 months ago can be found here.

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Posted By jules to jules' pics at 3/28/2010 06:06:00 PM

[jules' pics] 3/26/2010 08:45:00 PM

I can't decide which of these two pictures I prefer, so as a special treat there are two photos today.

Architechturally, peonies are all over the place. Furthermore, in colour they range from white to red, which means there is an awful lot of pink. But they do have some interesting shaded tones in their petals and Hachimangu has a special peony garden where they make hundreds of them bloom in early February. The garden is very well tended and all the blooms look fresh. I don't know what dark arts are employed to acheive this remarkable feat.

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Posted By jules to jules' pics at 3/26/2010 08:45:00 PM

McLean's whine part 2

OK, having talked about the (absence of) science in McLean's reply, on with dealing with the whine with which they try to smother it.

Well, the first point is that it may be unprecedented for the authors' reply to fail to pass peer review, although conversely it may very well have happened before without my hearing about it. (FWIW, many years ago I once found out quite by chance that someone had published a "comment on" one of my papers in a journal that I didn't regularly read, and neither the author nor the editor had bothered to contact me at any point in the process.) In the AGU journals there is no automatic right of reply, there is only the right to submit a reply for the consideration of the editor. In this case, it seems that after peer review McLean et al's reply was not found to meet the standards for publication. I don't make any claim to be disinterested but on reading it, I can only agree with this judgment, specifically on the following grounds.

(A) Their reply performs a dishonest bait-and-switch in initially claiming that their analysis was not based on the filtered data[1], but then conversely stating that their statistics only refer to the filtered data and were never even intended to refer to long-term variation[2]. Of course their acknowledgment of this second point means that there is not one scrap of support in the paper for their claim that the analysis "shows the potential of natural forcing mechanisms to account for most of the temperature variation" [over the last 50 years]. Their analysis simply has no bearing on any long-term trends, since they filtered them out of the data.

(B) They don't even try to address the fact that their original paper pretended that the differencing was done to reduce the noise, when in fact it amplifies noise and eliminates long-term variability[3]

(C) they present no defence of their claim of a "stepwise shift" in the mid-1970s, which (as we pointed out) their naive statistics do not support.

There is other stuff that I could criticise in their reply, but this is more than enough to justify a rejection. They simply aren't responsive to our criticisms.

As for the stuff they quote from the hacked emails...well that's all pretty small beer. First, the most (only? IIRC) critical comment that they have reprinted from one of our three reviewers was a very reasonable complaint and I think we were all happy to make some edits to the tone of the original. Since that is available on the web, you can look for yourself to see the minor differences. There were also some useful comments from all three reviewers about clarity and references, but nothing major. As you can see, the people that we discussed proposing for reviewers are all authoritative and respected figures in the field. The complaint that they were "reasonably well known" to one of the more prominent authors is particularly laughable - there could hardly be anyone of similar experience who isn't. However, the actual choice of reviewers is the responsibility of the editor and I don't know who was used. It would certainly be amusing to know who McLean et al proposed for both their original paper and the attempted reply, but somehow I doubt they'll be prepared to divulge either this information or the full reviews that they received. I can only assume that the editor made his own choice of reviewers, which is not only his right but duty if he thinks the suggested reviewers are inappropriate. The list of suggestions is not to enable the authors to choose their reviewers, but rather to provide the editor with some help.

The complaint about "prior publication" due to placing a copy of the submitted manuscript on a personal web-page is just a petty and pathetic attempt at armchair-lawyering. The AGU explicitly endorses publication of manuscripts on a personal web-page, the only minor error was in some carelessness over the formatting which was corrected within a couple of days. This could justify a minor slap on the wrist but it is not "prior publication" by any reasonable definition, including that of the AGU. For one thing, it wasn't even put on the web-site prior to submission!

I don't see on what grounds there could possibly be any criticism of the AGU for using a different editor and reviewers from those who dealt with the original paper. Obviously, the submission of a comment may be considered an implicit criticism of those responsible for the original publication, so it is reasonable to remove this possible source of bias. But anyway, neither of these matters has anything to do with us.

I thought it was supposed to be the Poms that whinged. On this evidence, some Aussies are pushing them pretty hard. If only they had devoted as much effort to science they might have learnt something.

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[1] "contrary to what Foster et al. (2010) imply, the data in question (Figure 7) were not subjected to contrived statistical analysis" and "we used the filtering technique solely to establish that a 7-month time lag existed between changes in the ENSO and changes in global average lower tropospheric temperature...Our substantive conclusions were then based on applying this time-lagged relationship to the raw data sets"

[2] "Our comments about the change in Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) accounting for 72% of the variance in satellite (MSU) GTAA, 68% of variance in the radiosonde (RATPAC-A) GTAA and 81% of variance in the tropospheric temperature in the tropics were made in the context of the discussion of our derivatives based on differentials between 12 month averages, and we stand by them. Contrary to Fea10 claims, those figures do not refer to long-term variations but only to the derivatives that were used."

[3] "To remove the noise, the absolute values were replaced with derivative values based on variations. Here the derivative is the 12-month running average subtracted from the same average for data 12 months later."

[jules' pics] 3/24/2010 05:56:00 PM

The new view of Hachimangu, originally uploaded by julesberry2001.

Today the in-laws arrive! Eleventy! The house is clean (ish*), the cherry blossom is obediently just starting to bloom. Only problem: it's cold and pissing with rain.

This view is the new view of Hachimangu because there used to be a big ginkgo tree next to the upper building [on the left as you look at the photo]. See here for the "before" picture.


*actually it isn't really clean - but we have thrown an awful lot of stuff out to make room for the extra biomass.

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Posted By jules to jules' pics at 3/24/2010 05:56:00 PM

OMG we're all going to drown!!!111!!11

A shame to see supposedly reputable sites like the BBC credulously swallowing this nonsense:

"Global warming claims a tiny island disputed by India and Bangladesh in the Bay of Bengal, scientists say."

(that line is actually the lead from the front page, it doesn't appear in the story, but the sense of it does)

The "island" in question is a sandbank in a river delta that only appeared in 1970 following a storm: it reached 2m above sea level at its zenith but has now pretty much vanished. Clearly, sea level has not risen anything like 2m in the last 40 years, so the whole story is complete nonsense from start to finish. Anyone who has lived near a shallow sandy coast or river delta will have seen how the topography shifts gradually or even rapidly, due primarily to storms and waves shifting around the sediments. The main scientist quoted appears to be a nobody making up stuff for the sake of some headlines.

Of course we've been here before with this nonsense Lean article from a few years ago. Oh, I see it's the same scientist behind that too. Ho hum.