Comments on: Relying on your coauthors

By: sg

sg — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 11:21:09 +0000

chrisl, the article doesn’t make it clear whether he knew when he published the paper that the data was wrong, or subsequently. There are sentences in the article which suggest that he didn’t know initially that the chinese data was wrong.

By: Anon

Anon — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 09:42:48 +0000

The Nature paper was used as evidence in the most recent report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Yeah, at least that is better than using the WWF, Greenpeace and phone calls as evidence

By: chrisl

chrisl — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 09:35:34 +0000

sg “I’m a bit confused actually by the Guardian’s piece as to what Phil Jones did and didn’t do”
Professor Jones and a colleague, Professor Wei-Chyung Wang of the State University of New York at Albany suggested in an influential 1990 paper in the journal Nature that the urban heat island effect was minimal – and cited as supporting evidence a long series of temperature measurements from Chinese weather stations, half in the countryside and half in cities, supplied by Professor Wei-Chyung. The Nature paper was used as evidence in the most recent report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

However, it has been reported that when climate sceptics asked for the precise locations of the 84 stations, Professor Jones at first declined to release the details. And when eventually he did release them, it was found that for the ones supposed to be in the countryside, there was no location given.

By: tigtog

tigtog — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 08:59:17 +0000

If the evidence is so compelling why the need to sex it up?

Some subset of individuals, for personal motives, sex up their work history all the time in all professions, trades and industries. The mere fact of misrepresenting one’s work as more important than it actually was doesn’t tell us very much about whether the pretender is a victim of their own confabulation or a deliberate fraudster or somewhere in the spectrum in between.

Sometimes people get something wrong and are then too embarrassed to admit to it, because they feel it makes them look bad, so they try to pretend that the error didn’t happen.

It also says very little about the larger enterprises of which they are a part that some subset of practitioners are pretenders. What’s more important is that the profession/trade/industry had rigorously scrupulous protocols for audits/reviews (and grievances). The scientific method is a model of scrupulous review by one’s peers – the first filter before publication, then subsequent analysis and attempts to replicate results in order to generate more detailed observations. Claims based on studies that cannot be replicated rapidly fall into well-deserved oblivion, and unless the original results can be traced to inadvertent error, the reputations of the scientists involved in non-replicable studies take a blow (Pons & Fleischmann, anyone?).

Leaping to the conclusion that it’s all part of a huge fraudulent conspiracy seems very much to be counting one’s chickens before they are hatched.

By: sg

sg — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 08:51:54 +0000

I’m a bit confused actually by the Guardian’s piece as to what Phil Jones did and didn’t do, and what the consequences were. It seems like he published a paper in good faith, and then discovered some data was missing… or the opposite? The guardian seemed a bit sloppy with the supposed facts of the case.

This endless smearing and nitpicking is really depressing. Watching these gloating pigs on the right dragging peoples’ careers through the mud over small infractions years ago is really dispiriting.

By: Anon

Anon — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 07:40:28 +0000

If the evidence is so compelling why the need to sex it up?

By: David Irving (no relation)

David Irving (no relation) — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 06:17:07 +0000

chrisl, I'm sure the good folk here would be fascinated with your well-reasoned objections to the IPCC reports. (Play your cards well, and you could be in line for a Nobel Prize!) There's nothing they like better than grinding, interminable stoushes with idiots.

By: chrisl

chrisl — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 06:08:18 +0000

The only real things that’s changed now is the media’s willingness to see the fraud and fiddling that was always part of the great global warming scam. To finally see the fraud and fiddling that bloggers have written about for years.
But now there’s a great change. There is now a race on to uncover the next big IPCC scandal, and I doubt the great climate change scare can survive.