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Climate Scientists refuse subpoena from Congress

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Climate Scientists refuse subpoena from Congress

#31

Post by leothekim »

SilasX wrote: post #17
lemevi wrote: post #6

Why would emails be more important than the data? The data should speak for itself, only a politician is looking for "gotcha" phrases they can print in huge letters for a poster board that they put up while making speeches denying global warming. It's not that these politicians don't understand how science works, they understand how to manipulate people to favor legislation that is actually against their interests. E…

In theory, yes. Among ideal rational agents, yes. But in practice, science depends on the trust that scientists aren't actively subverting the process: failing to consider alternate hypothesis, fabricating data, ignoring data, deliberately filtering for confirmatory data, groupthink, etc. So an import safeguard is the ability to detect when someone is doing the above, even if the detector doesn't know the literature…

It's called "peer review," and it doesn't require a subpoena.

Re: Climate Scientists refuse subpoena from Congress

#32

Post by fineman »

moonchrome wrote: post #22
lemevi wrote: post #6

Why would emails be more important than the data? The data should speak for itself, only a politician is looking for "gotcha" phrases they can print in huge letters for a poster board that they put up while making speeches denying global warming. It's not that these politicians don't understand how science works, they understand how to manipulate people to favor legislation that is actually against their interests. E…

>The data should speak for itself Are you serious ? Not only is there multiple way to interpret same data (after all there are so many competing models to explain it) and at best you can debate confidence intervals and models - it's far beyond non-experts expecting them to review the data directly is ridiculous - the only way they can work with experts is based on trust and credibility.

"Work with experts" the way you already work with accountants, lawyers, etc. Hire two and have one check the other.

And no, it's not unreasonable to expect a non-technical person to review the data or the methods either. Many people don't want to put the time in to try but it's well within the reach of any high-school grad.

Re: Climate Scientists refuse subpoena from Congress

#33

Post by jobu »

leothekim wrote: post #5

"Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) wants thousands of e-mails among scientists and NOAA’s staff of political appointees that he thinks will show that the researchers had something to hide when they refuted claims that global warming had “paused” or slowed over the past decade." Apparently climate change science is not in the published research itself, but can only be found by going through someone's email. What bald-face…

This is really dirty politics. Even if Lamar can't find anything that actually supports his argument he can drop embarrassing or out-of-context emails to the press in an attempt to discredit scientists.

Re: Climate Scientists refuse subpoena from Congress

#35

Post by leothekim »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #20
leothekim wrote: post #5

"Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) wants thousands of e-mails among scientists and NOAA’s staff of political appointees that he thinks will show that the researchers had something to hide when they refuted claims that global warming had “paused” or slowed over the past decade." Apparently climate change science is not in the published research itself, but can only be found by going through someone's email. What bald-face…

It's indeed an exercise in douchebaggery, but the fact is, Smith has the right to subpoena the emails. They're public property. If you saw The Martian, you might remember the arguments among NASA managers about how much information on Watney's predicament should be revealed to the public. It was pointed out that their only legal option was to lay it all out there. That's pretty much how government agencies actually w…

Agreed. But Smith is using a legal process in an attempt to subvert a scientific one. In my humble opinion, that's the crux of the douchebaggery.

Re: Climate Scientists refuse subpoena from Congress

#36

Post by fineman »

hyperbovine wrote: post #29
CamperBob2 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's indeed an exercise in douchebaggery, but the fact is, Smith has the right to subpoena the emails. They're public property. If you saw The Martian, you might remember the arguments among NASA managers about how much information on Watney's predicament should be revealed to the public. It was pointed out that their only legal option was to lay it all out there. That's pretty much how government agencies actually w…

> Smith has the right to subpoena the emails. They're public property. Not necessarily -- they might be, ianal, but it's not the case that all government e-mails are automatically part of the public record. I recall from back in my journalism days that government workers have some assurance of confidentiality w/r/t e-mail communications if that assurance is needed to effectively carry out their job.

I dislike the idea of government secrecy at all, but the scientists have a better case for keeping their emails secret than negotiators did to keep the TPP treaty details secret.

Re: Climate Scientists refuse subpoena from Congress

#37

Post by clumsysmurf »

Lamar Smith is going after others too.

"Representative Lamar Smith (R–TX), the chairman of the science panel of the House of Representatives, announced plans to investigate a nonprofit research group led by climate scientist Jagadish Shukla of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. He is the lead signer of a letter to White House officials that urges the use of an antiracketeering law to crack down on energy firms that have funded efforts to raise doubts about climate science."

http://news.sciencemag.org/policy/2015/10/turnabout-house-re...

Re: Climate Scientists refuse subpoena from Congress

#38

Post by acqq »

moonchrome wrote: post #26
acqq wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrong. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to repeat most of the basic calculations which give similar results.

Who cares if I can run a formula/program that tells me Y from X if I can't understand/trust the program/formula ? If you think that stuff like economics/climatology/etc. has the same level of rigor and validation applied to it as established and verified theories from hard science then boy do I have some bad news for you (struggling for SD 2 as ideal vs SD 5 for eg.).

I see you don't want to trust even yourself in actually learning the formulas and the basic principles of physics behind them, but that's how it is. Physics works. Humans produce immense amounts of CO2, CO2 in the atmosphere increases the temperature of the planet. It's as simple as that.

Reading other people's mails won't refute the physics.

And no, other factors aren't the answer:

http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-whats-warming-the-wor...

Re: Climate Scientists refuse subpoena from Congress

#39

Post by jerf »

I will avoid the cliche about how sites like HN have one opinion.

But I do find myself wondering how many people here frothing at the mouth have, in other contexts, sung the praise of heavy government funding of science research. Or how many sing praises of government oversight.

This is it. This is government funding in science research, and government oversight. The oversight committee has the right to perform oversight. In any healthy country, eventually, politicians you don't like will be in charge of the oversight levers, as naturally as day follows night. (Unless you live under eternal single-party control, in which case you've got bigger problems than science oversight committees.)

There's no world where the government funds science research but just ships out the dollars with no regard for what happens afterwards.

Re: Climate Scientists refuse subpoena from Congress

#40

Post by mrow84 »

gaius wrote: post #23
oberstein wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The data should speak for themselves. Unfortunately people who don't know statistics think they can't, because as we found out from emails, the data were "manipulated" via statistical methods: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_c... Honestly I'd rather we press scientists of all sorts for all their source code and modeling tool configurations including the raw data that hasn't been post-proces…

Any science based on simulation, any member of the public should be able to download, compile and run on their PC and get exactly the same results. It's the only way to be completely transparent. C and FORTRAN compilers are free.

It's important to recognise that a lot of the model runs are done on super-computers, and the runs themselves aren't always easy to replicate from a practical point of view, because of things like resource limitations and configuration issues.

I certainly agree that things should be open sourced, probably allowing for some kind of embargo system for publication, but we shouldn't allow a rhetoric to develop suggesting that people should be making things easily replicable, because that essentially means making very portable and resource-flexible code, which is not trivial, even in less complex domains, as I'm sure many people on this forum recognise.

As an example, many models make use hundreds of cores via MPI (along with preposterous amounts of RAM), and whilst I am no expert, I get the impression that porting such things to more commodity hardware is essentially impossible.

As an aside, I have seen more bad-faith practice (i.e. manipulation of results) in industry than in science, and have spent approximately equal periods of time in both.

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