How a word sparked a four-year saga of climate fact-checking • Hacker News Board

Re: How a word sparked a four-year saga of climate fact-checking

#51

Post by frankmcsherry » Fri, Jul 15, 2016, 2:59 PM UTC

jasonellis wrote: post #38

frankmcsherry wrote: post #28

I'm personally inclined to support the climate change folks, being a scientist and stuff, but it's a bit crap to claim that it was a one word typo when the original text apparently read: > For predictor selection, both proxy climate and instrumental data were linearly detrended over the 1921–1990 period to avoid inflating the correlation coefficient due to the presence of the global warming signal present in the obse…

The one word typo was in the code, not the paper. It was setting DETREND to FALSE instead of TRUE. Their assertions were based on thinking they were working with detrended data instead of the raw data that they actually used.

In which case, one shouldn't write

> Instead of taking the easy way out and just correcting the single word in the page proof, we asked the publisher to put our paper on hold

Re: How a word sparked a four-year saga of climate fact-checking

#52

Post by socialist_coder » Fri, Jul 15, 2016, 3:00 PM UTC

dzdt wrote: post #15

Global warming denialists are attempting a denial-of-service attack against global warming science. The goal is to keep the science unsettled so no major policy changes are made while those making the most profits from climate-changing activities continue to do so.

See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchants_of_Doubt for mor on that, if you are interested. Very good book.

Re: How a word sparked a four-year saga of climate fact-checking

#53

Post by bertil » Fri, Jul 15, 2016, 3:10 PM UTC

jkot wrote: post #9

bertil wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that for climate science, a lot of effort is spent to debunk claims, by well-financed groups who will publish without independent peer-review but with a clear goal in mind. Allowing those groups to access the same data means that the researchers will have to spend a lot more effort explaining why those claims are unfounded. That means the researchers are not really encouraged into sharing the data…

Paranoid talks about "well financed groups" have no place in science. Climate science is way more important than astronomy. It should have much higher standards for transparency, not other way around.

There is absolutely nothing paranoid about systematic and well documented efforts from the oil industry to discredit scientists.

> It should have much higher standards

Yes, but for the quality of the result, not intuitions set-up as principles to replace the real pillars of science: experimentation and peer-review. Transparency is only useful if it helps getting peers; in this case, there are well documented reasons to doubt it, and that the people benefiting from that transparency are not just enemies of science, but of humanity.

Re: How a word sparked a four-year saga of climate fact-checking

#54

Post by dalke » Fri, Jul 15, 2016, 3:16 PM UTC

jkot wrote: post #8

lostlogin wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If its coming with hate mail and or has a generally offensive tone, I don't think it unreasonable to be unhappy. The author doesn't appear to have blocked access. One can cross examine without being a dick.

Read linked article, offensive language was used AFTER they refused to provide raw data. It took lawsuit to get them.

I read the article. I saw nothing about a lawsuit.

I also read that the final paper wasn't published until very recently. Why should a research group be forced to distribute raw data years before the paper is finished?

In the US, for example, http://biotech.law.lsu.edu/IEEE/ieee36.htm says "The term, Research Data, is defined as the recorded factual material commonly accepted in the scientific community as necessary to validate research findings. It does not include: preliminary analyses, drafts of scientific papers, ... "

I know nothing about the Australian equivalent.

Re: How a word sparked a four-year saga of climate fact-checking

#55

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jul 15, 2016, 3:16 PM UTC

jkot wrote: post #8

lostlogin wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If its coming with hate mail and or has a generally offensive tone, I don't think it unreasonable to be unhappy. The author doesn't appear to have blocked access. One can cross examine without being a dick.

Read linked article, offensive language was used AFTER they refused to provide raw data. It took lawsuit to get them.

[deleted]

Re: How a word sparked a four-year saga of climate fact-checking

#56

Post by dozzie » Fri, Jul 15, 2016, 3:21 PM UTC

jackmott wrote: post #32

dozzie wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, what you expect from people who happen to turn around in their (unverifiable) models 180 degrees (Amazon jungle net produces oxygen! No, it's a net consumer!) and who routinely produce models that use some physical value (heat capacity in greenhosue effect), but fail to account for major substances influencing the value (water concentration in atmosphere)?

I'm not an expert on the history of opinions on amazon oxygen, but >but fail to account for major substances influencing the value (water concentration in atmosphere)? is absolutely false.

OK. Now show me any study that accounts that the water in the atmosphere (0.4% on global level, after Wikipedia, not 1% on the sea level) has ten times higher concentration than methane (0.00018%) and CO2 (0.039%) combined, and almost twice as big heat capacity (75 J/(mol * K)) as each of those (36 J/(mol * K) for methane, 37 J/(mol * K) for CO2). To sum up, heat capacity of atmospheric water being twenty times bigger than CO2 and CH4.

Re: How a word sparked a four-year saga of climate fact-checking

#57

Post by dalke » Fri, Jul 15, 2016, 3:51 PM UTC

wolfgke wrote: post #48

dalke wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lack of source code does not make everything produced by software "a marketing statement." There's more than one way to verify a conclusion. For example, if I say that RSA-130 = 39685999459597454290161126162883786067576449112810064832555157243 × 45534498646735972188403686897274408864356301263205069600999044599 then you can easily verify it by multiplication - you don't need access to the factorization software I…

> For example, if I say that RSA-130 = ... × ... then you can easily verify it by multiplication - you don't need access to the factorization software I used to determine that result. I didn't write about independent computation , but about independent verification . In your case you need access to a software for multiplying numbers for an independent check. OK, this is rather trivial code to write. But if it weren't…

I gave the RSA example because it's better known and easier to understand than a molecular modeling example.

But I question the meaning of your phrase "independent verification".

If the author has to provide the program used for verification, how is that "independent"? At the very least, isn't there a range of dependencies, from "running the same code in an identical environment produced the same answer" to "running a different code in a different environment produced the same answer"?

Which verification do you trust more? What level of independence do you need before you can trust the results?

Let me give you a few other examples. "We docked 500,000 small molecule structures from CHEMBL against the target using 6,000 GPU days. We took the 1,000 best fits and measured binding affinity. The top 10 structures are shown in table 1. The third is our lead candidate, which reduces the chance of infection in rats from 80% to 10%."

Do you need to be able to validate the docking results in order to accept this paper as science?

"We used ProteinFitter 4.5 in simulated annealing mode to generate the best protein fold to the given constraints. The resulting structure has a R-factor of 2.3Å against the Hodgkin electron density, which is better than any other published model."

Do you need access to ProteinFitter 4.5 to verify this paper? Since all crystallography tools will generate an R-factor for you, why is it critical for the model provider to also supply an environment which contains a tool which does that?

Both are examples where it doesn't matter what's in the magic box, or if the magic box is buggy. It could as well be "I had a dream about a snake tying itself into a knot and eating its own tail. I woke up and realized the structure might be a trefoil. It fits all of the known data and makes intuitive sense and hasn't been considered before, so I'm publishing in the hopes that others can explore it more rigorously."

Is that science? I say "yes".

Now, replace "dream" with "computer program" - is it still science? I still say "yes".

Re: How a word sparked a four-year saga of climate fact-checking

#58

Post by dalke » Fri, Jul 15, 2016, 4:18 PM UTC

wolfgke wrote: post #45

dalke wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you understand what elcapitan means by numerically stable. Numeric stability is a function of the environment. If I take an algorithm designed for 128 bit IEEE binary floats and implement it on a system with 64 bit floats, then it may be unstable. That doesn't say anything about the correctness of the original method for the original environment. It only means the method wasn't designed for the new envi…

First: IEEE 754 defines exactly (bit per bit) what the result of any floating point operation in each of the five rounding modes as long as no NaN is produced (but in this case only not all bits are defined exactly, but it will still be a NaN). Unluckily C allows some optimizations to be done to code containing floating point code that violates this principle of bit-for-bit reproducability of floating point code. If…

I don't follow the point of your first four paragraphs. I specifically said the code was numerically stable on 128 bits - why are you introducing those irrelevant facts, like how C compiler details can make some algorithms unstable?

Really it comes down to what you mean by "another environment" and what your case is for access to the source code.

Let me give a simpler example. I wrote code which expects ILP32. It's stable under ILP32. However, it produces different and non-deterministic answers under LP64. That is "another environment."

Does the numerical instability under a different environment cast doubt on its validity in the original environment? Why is it a strong sign that there may be subtle errors?

Re: How a word sparked a four-year saga of climate fact-checking

#59

Post by jkot » Fri, Jul 15, 2016, 7:34 PM UTC

dalke wrote: post #54

jkot wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read linked article, offensive language was used AFTER they refused to provide raw data. It took lawsuit to get them.

I read the article. I saw nothing about a lawsuit. I also read that the final paper wasn't published until very recently. Why should a research group be forced to distribute raw data years before the paper is finished? In the US, for example, http://biotech.law.lsu.edu/IEEE/ieee36.htm says "The term, Research Data, is defined as the recorded factual material commonly accepted in the scientific community as necessary…

Paper was published first time several years ago. Lawsuit is mentioned in other article.

Re: How a word sparked a four-year saga of climate fact-checking

#60

Post by socialist_coder » Fri, Jul 15, 2016, 11:28 PM UTC

SeanDav wrote: post #40

a2l wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also from the same site: > "Since the industrial revolution in the 18th century, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (an important greenhouse gas) has risen significantly above the level it would be naturally. It now stands at over 400 parts per million (ppm) in the atmosphere. Evidence from ice cores (see Lesson four) tells us that the normal level for CO2 in the atmosphere during ‘interglacial’ ti…

You misunderstand me - I am not talking about man made climate change. I am saying that having data that shows current temperatures are highest ever in 1000 years is not surprising, given that temperatures have been rising for last several thousand years. If one had a time machine and went back 1000 years, took temperatures and compared them to those from previous thousand years, one would not be surprised to see tha…

No one is misunderstanding you, you are just wrong.

Even if you were right and we were in a "warming" phase, the velocity of the change should be on a geological scale; that is, very very very tiny. We are seeing rates of warming orders of magnitudes higher, which cannot possibly be anything but man made.