Re: Jul 26, 2012 at 10:23 PM | BBD

Pleeeease BBD not back to that red herring. Science simply isn't done by 'consensus' and I would have thought that by now you after all your input here you would have realised how the 'consensus' has been manufactured.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/18/about-that-overwhelming-98-number-of-scientists-consensus/

Barry Woods did an excellent post quite recently on the comments made by some of the contributors to that survey.

Perhaps you didn't see the link

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/18/what-else-did-the-97-of-scientists-say/

Besides which if you'd read the Climategate 2 emails you'd have realised the scientists themselves couldn't even agree as to where the heck is global warming (read from bottom up, same thread breaks into two)

http://foia2011.org/index.php?id=6356

http://foia2011.org/index.php?id=198

Not so much of a 'consensus' there then, so who do we believe -

The IPCC scientists and what they tell us in public and the IPCC reports, or

The IPCC scientists and what they tell each other in 'private'.

Gixxerboy and Martin A: thank you for the summar(ies). I realise there will be more than one point of view on what has gone on but I missed almost all of that. Such retrospectives can be particularly helpful for a very sporadic lurker, as I have become.

I can imagine receiving certain kinds of nasty emails in certain contexts and not wanting to make them public. I would want to give some latitude on that.

What this does for me is emphasize what a grave crime it is to claim that you or your associates have received death threats when they have experienced no such thing. This poisons the well in a particularly horrible way - because of the insinuation the next time you deign to talk to the group that disagrees with you that this is what you people are capable of.

There is so much poisoning of the well in the climate debate, with the introduction of 'deniers' as a direct allusion of holocaust deniers the canonical example. Someone doesn't care about reconciliation and the bright light of truth that always shines as a result of it. They want darkness - they want to rule in darkness. One ring to bind them all and all that.

There is something better. My bets are that someone in the UK is going to make - has already made - a significant difference to this. I'll let you have a guess at his name.

Thanks for publishing the mails, Richard, it has been very informative, a fascinating insight into how members of various organizations ie

Met Office - RIchard Betts, John Kennedy (Climate Monitoring and Research)

University of St. Andrews - Rob Wilson (Geography & Sustainable Devpt)

NCAS (NERC) - Ed Hawkins (Met Office, University of Reading)

network together and discuss the sceptic bloggers commenting on social media such as this to provide a united front on the climate science.

I was aware that it was Met Office policy so I suppose I should have guessed that it was also the policy of the universities to

Public outreach

"27/03/12 - The University published a YouTube video of me talking about 'not if, but when'

01/02/12 - Article in Significance magazine - 'Our evolving climate' (or PDF)

17/11/11 - Gave talk at Reading Skeptics in the Pub event

24/10/11 - Press release on when global temperatures might reach 2C. Followed up at The Independent.

19/08/09 - Press release on the potential to improve climate predictions. Followed up at Nature Reports Climate Change and realclimate.org.

09/05/08 - New Scientist article on the predictability of rapid changes in the overturning circulation"

http://www.met.rdg.ac.uk/~ed/home/public.html

And if the Climate Modellers can agree that

"All models are wrong"

and there are "Limitless possibilitiees"

yet still confuse 'projections' and 'predictions'

"Mark Maslin and Patrick Austin at University College London have just had a comment published in Nature called “Climate models at their limit?”. This builds on the emerging evidence that the latest, greatest climate predictions, which will be summarised in the next assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR5, 2013) are not going to tell us anything too different from the last report (AR4, 2007) and in fact may have larger uncertainty ranges."

ie "the latest, greatest climate predictions"

http://allmodelsarewrong.com/limitless-possibilities/

Then what hope for Govt ministers, MPs and the public in general?

Your Nature article on Communications was very interesting by the way.

http://blogs.nature.com/soapboxscience/2012/01/18/climate-science-%e2%80%93-moving-beyond-a-single-issue

So it's a great shame that you didn't incorporate Steve McIntyre's response on Climate Audit -

"When I see handwringing by climate scientists about “climate communications”, the commentary always overlooks one of the most obvious requisites for successful communications: honesty even to critics. Unfortunately, the proven untruthfulness of the Met Office and CRU in something as simple as FOI requests corrodes their credibility on other topics."

http://climateaudit.org/2012/01/31/geoffrey-boulton-and-ipcc-secrecy/

In your slides on the subject of Communications at the University of Exeter.

http://www.exeter.ac.uk/btg/newsandevents/archive/title_220045_en.html

And by the way, were the only attendees there the ones giving the slides or was there a target audience and if so is there a list of attendees, or was it simply for public perusal.

BBD

Honestly, how can you–hand on heart–state the following: "over the last few decades a scientific consensus on AGW has emerged without any nudging from anyone."

LMFAO

Martin A

Thank you for the clarification, and that's not some shitty aside. I appreciate it. As to the good Bishop's promise to tightly moderate this thread...I am still unsure exactly what the feck we are talking about: ∂T or Rob's accusations of asshole emails? I thought the latter, and that remains totally unresolved.

Jul 26, 2012 at 10:20 PM Pharos

"Thank you for your considered response in defence of temperature adjustments. I appreciate that a strong technical argument can be made for manipulations of the raw data to produce smoothed interpretations, although I strongly feel that these should not then be rebranded as 'corrected', and then subsequently become morphed as the truth."

Thanks. I also dislike the term "corrected". I prefer to use "adjusted" which emphasises the fact that the data are not in their raw form and that no absolute promises can be made for their correctness. It also points up the need to make reasonable estimates of the uncertainties involved.

Martin A

Foxgoose's yummie analogies and wild attempts at conspiracy theories aside, WTF is this all about? leave the whole bloody GAT debate aside. Where's the evidence of Rob's accusations?

Cross post Martin sorry

Richard Drake Jul 27, 2012 at 7:55 AM

"There is something better. My bets are that someone in the UK is going to make - has already made - a significant difference to this. I'll let you have a guess at his name."

==============

Would you be referring to "FOIA"?

hmm... thanks so far, anyway.

In the meantime for example some (loosely topic-connected but) specific questions and some broader questions:

1.a.: (It appears to me that most (of the often so-called poor) "peer reviewers" (confer below question number 6) absolutely neither need to ask nor need to check (*anything*) - in most of the diverse so-called peer review processes that are practised at different publishing organisations, but) Was anyone of you ever asked by your "peer reviewers" for un-adjusted data (not only while publishing for example on some adjustments in academic journals or the like)?

1.b.: Are - respectively in which form and to whom are - the un-adjusted data available for independent audits?

1.c.: Mostly, we (for example members of all kinds of the "public spheres") are, for instance, neither authorised to inspect all the reviews that were produced by the "peer review process" nor allowed to know the names of the reviewers, are we?

2.a.: While publishing (for example on tree rings, temperature trends, adjustments, and other things) were you asked for any raw data during the "peer review process"?

2.b.: Are - respectively in which form and to whom are - the raw data available for independent audits?

3.: While trying to assess the sciences (here outside of "peer review"), do you know any better way than to ask, for example, for the grade of transparency (here for instance: asking for transparency in un-adjusted, raw- and/or meta-data, source code, homogenisation-, parametrisation-processes and so on)?

4.: Comprehension question, because some technical reports were mentioned vaguely by John (see discussion above): Am I right that the technical reports didn't need to be and haven't been "peer reviewed"?

5.: An opinion survey: Is it, in general, v) the sciences, w) the scientists, x) the publishers, or y) the public [respectively, z) is it impossible to separate the foresaid in deciding] who profit the most from a so-called peer review that is practised down to the present-day predominantly (confer for instance above question number 1.a.)?

6.: There is no uniform definition of "peer review". How would you try to define an appropriate peer review process?
_____

(It's not exactly easy to avoid the feeling being trapped, is it?

BTW, while I've been constantly staying quiet in this *shocking* "Wilson-email-case", I see - w.r.t. older cases without Rob - some similarities to other infamous schemes; for example: While one e-mailing/communicating "side" is described, namely a "side" which seems to include overly often "threatening/nasty/corrupted/orchestrated/gang..." "members", the other "sides", or even, for instance, certain persons or "institutions/organisations" are mostly not mentioned and/or appear anyhow to be the "good/better" "sides".)

Martin and Richard Betts

I don't see how it's possible to maintain this nonsense without Rob Wilson just showing WTF he's on about.

Presumably because he would not wish to embarrass anyone.

"However, some of the personal e-mails sent to me today would be rather embarrassing to some of you if I posted them on BH. "