Phil Jones exonerated part 2

I've been remiss in my blogging duties due to a lengthy invasion of Annans, which was due to be over today, though one straggler is still awaiting the reopening of European air space...

Anyway, here's an straightforward opener to ease myself back into the swing of things.

Phil Jones has been exonerated again, this time by Lord Oxburgh's enquiry:

The inquiry, the second of three set up in the wake of the controversy, found "absolutely no evidence of any impropriety whatsoever", according to Lord Oxburgh, who led the investigation.

That follows hard on the heels of the previous exoneration. I suppose this must prove the great climate science conspiracy is still growing! But though I am sure there are some ongoing sighs of relief that the charade is at least coming to a sane conclusion, there actually isn't anything of interest that the climate science community hasn't been saying for months if not years. See mt, Stoat and RC for more on the story. Or perhaps I should say, more on the nothing that has been turned into a story.

One minor point to highlight is that I was pleased to see Lord O explicitly draw attention to the part the Govt has played in the "culture of secrecy" though restrictive IP agreements and policies. I don't think this is necessarily a free pass for scientists, who have sometimes been a bit too possessive for my liking, but it is certainly a factor which should be recognised and taken into consideration (unlike the previous HoC investigation which didn't seem to be aware of it, or perhaps preferred to gloss over their contribution to it).

[jules' pics] 4/15/2010 07:21:00 PM

cherry tree avenue, Wakamiyaooji, Kamakura, originally uploaded by julesberry2001.

What with all the tour guiding, we saw a lot of cherry blossom this year. Unfortunately for the inlaws, it was not such a good season as last year. Not only were the skies rather grey, but the unreasonably cold weather prevented the flowers from blossoming simultaneously. Nevertheless, many people enjoyed cherry blossom viewing.

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Posted By jules to jules' pics at 4/15/2010 07:21:00 PM

[jules' pics] 4/14/2010 07:48:00 PM

Mystery Bird in Kanagawa, Japan, originally uploaded by julesberry2001.

Helen, my tall sister in law, is very good at spotting birds. Here is one she found yesterday on the Hakone side of Myojin ga take. Japanese white-eyes are fairly common here, but this was bigger, browner, with a bright yellow beak and different shaped spectacles.

Does any one have any idea what it is?

Update 16/04/2010: It's a Hwamei or Melodious Laughingthrush. Thanks to andrewt.

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Posted By jules to jules' pics at 4/14/2010 07:48:00 PM

[jules' pics] 4/13/2010 03:52:00 AM

Motorbike in Matsumoto, originally uploaded by julesberry2001.

vroooom...

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Posted By jules to jules' pics at 4/13/2010 03:52:00 AM

[jules' pics] 4/11/2010 10:54:00 PM

chihuahuas, originally uploaded by julesberry2001.

wuf!

[Yamashita Park, Yokohama]

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Posted By jules to jules' pics at 4/11/2010 10:54:00 PM

[jules' pics] 4/06/2010 03:24:00 PM

Matsumoto Castle, originally uploaded by julesberry2001.

In daylight this time.

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Posted By jules to jules' pics at 4/06/2010 03:24:00 PM

[jules' pics] 4/05/2010 02:18:00 AM

Matsumoto Castle, originally uploaded by julesberry2001.

Experimenting with life as tour guides. Perhaps we won't give up the day jobs quite yet. Here is Matsumoto castle, which is very nice. The only other place in Japan that I've seen such a high proportion of white people as in Matsumoto, is on Mount Fuji. We have travelled through Matsumoto railway station many times on mountain climbing trips, but have never before passed beyond the ticket barrier. Tomorrow another first - we hire a car - thanks to James' recent acquisition of a license.

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Posted By jules to jules' pics at 4/05/2010 02:18:00 AM

[jules' pics] 4/03/2010 04:24:00 AM

Mini Magnolia, originally uploaded by julesberry2001.

After a few days of in-law visitation one may start to feel a little frazzled.

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Posted By jules to jules' pics at 4/03/2010 04:24:00 AM

April Fool

Several people have pointed me to this article by John McLean. I don't really object in principle to ABC giving him the space to reply to Stephan Lewandowsky's previous article on peer review and the McLean paper. It's a commentary site, not held to the same standards as peer review journals.

And it shows.

There's plenty of fluff but the central lie remains: McLean claims that they data were not tortured and that anyway the thumbscrews were only used to drag out information about the lag from the evil liberal numbers, but in fact the correlations prominently displayed in the abstract and discussed in the text are actually calculated from the data after strapping them down to a flat board, gagging and almost drowning them. [They also admitted shooting JFK and being the mastermind of Al Quaeda.]

I'm delighted to see that so many of the commenters are by now well aware of this basic point, probably due largely to Lewandowsky's previous article, and are taking great pleasure in pointing it out to McLean in the comment thread. Better still, McLean is busy down there tying himself in knots trying to defend the indefensible. It's good stuff, you can find gems like

"If the SOI accounts for short-term variation then logically it also accounts for long-term variation."

Yes, really, he wrote that. I thought it was worth preserving for posterity, hence the webcite link. He's promising more, to be "published" by SPPI later this week. I can't wait.

At least ABC chose the date well for his article.

Self-serving crap from Nature

Ok, this is a bit of a dog bites man story, but IMO it's pretty poor behaviour, one might even say "reprehensible", for Nature to use its editorials to attack rivals. In particular, their repeated attempts to denigrate the EGU journals is nothing more than naked self-interest masquerading as commentary. It also seems pretty short-sighted, since these journals are actually run by and for members of the scientific community that that Nature claims to serve.

Their most recent attempt particularly criticises the on-line publication of submitted articles:

"But the downside of early online publishing is a confusing array of publicly available article types, awaiting print publication in various stages of editorial preparation. Adding to the confusion, interactive journals such as Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics place papers online first for peer review, and then in their final form."

ACP is the most well-established of the EGU journals, increasingly preferred by high-profile (indeed all) scientists over more traditional routes to publication. Could it be that Nature feels a a little threatened by their huge success? One can only hope so. Of course putting the submitted manuscripts online is a bit of a pre-requisite for any open review system, so their unsupported claim that this is "adding to the confusion" is just a handy way of predetermining their preferred conclusion - that open peer review is a bad thing. Perhaps a watermark on the pdfs - "DRAFT" or similar - would be a sensible step, but surely this is a minor point hardly worthy of editorialising.

What's worse, Nature then states that "uncertainity arises regarding the canonical publication date". Oh no, the horror....although they immediately admit: "Given the way the publishing industry is moving, it seems unlikely that print publication dates will play a role in the long run". So that's all right then. Phew.

The article ends with a real WTF moment:

What needs to be decided is how much a preliminary paper published online should be allowed to change before it constitutes a new paper.

Huh? What actually is the problem here that needs solving?

No, really, who gives a shit about this? I'm wondering how such a bizarre non sequitur passed Nature's own editorial review, as it bears no relationship to the rest of the content, and I've never heard anyone suggest that such a thing "needs to be decided" by anyone other than the editor handling the manuscript in question. But of course we'll never know, due to Nature's secretive publishing process :-) What I'm left with is the impression that Nature is desperately and irrationally lashing out at anything that it perceives as threatening its unhealthy stranglehold on scientific progress.