{"id":179,"date":"2009-11-24T07:32:30","date_gmt":"2009-11-24T12:32:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/2009\/11\/24\/climategate\/"},"modified":"2009-11-24T07:32:30","modified_gmt":"2009-11-24T12:32:30","slug":"climategate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/2009\/11\/24\/climategate\/","title":{"rendered":"Climategate"},"content":{"rendered":"

Apparently that’s what some people are calling the revelations found in a bunch of emails by climate scientists that were hacked into and made public by climate change deniers.\u00a0 Stephen “Freakonomics” Dubner gets the vapors<\/a>, talking about how this exposes the “very ugly side” of climate science.\u00a0 For a less heated discussion, check out Andrew Revkin’s summary<\/a> of the controversy, and for the mainstream climate science point of view, go to RealClimate<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I know nothing at all about climate science (although I share 1\/2 of my genes with someone who does<\/a>), so I won’t say anything about the scientific merits of the issues.\u00a0 But I have been a scientist for quite a while, so naturally I’ve spent a lot of time talking to and emailing other scientists.\u00a0 As far as I can tell, what’s in this trove of emails is exactly what you’d expect to find if you listened in on the private conversations of a bunch of scientists discussing any remotely controversial subject.\u00a0 Personally, I rarely call people who disagree with me “idiots,” for instance, but I’ve certainly heard that, and a lot worse, from colleagues.\u00a0 If this is as “ugly” as it gets, things are just fine.<\/p>\n

One supposed smoking gun in the emails is the scientist Phil Jones’s statement\u00a0 that he used a “trick” in a graph to “hide the decline” in temperature in a time series.\u00a0 From Revkin’s article,<\/p>\n

Dr. Mann, a professor at Pennsylvania State University<\/a>, confirmed in an interview that the e-mail message was real. He said the choice of words by his colleague was poor but noted that scientists often used the word "trick" to refer to a good way to solve a problem, "and not something secret."<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That’s exactly true. In my experience,\u00a0 scientists use “trick” very often to mean simply “good idea,” not anything underhanded. If you’re going to worry about anything in that quote, it should be the bit about “hiding”:\u00a0 science isn’t supposed to be about hiding things, right?\u00a0 So let’s look at that.\u00a0 Here’s the full quote from the email (via RealClimate<\/a>):<\/p>\n

\u00a0I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In other words, the “trick” in question consisted of plotting the supposedly problematic data in plain sight, while comparing it with another data set.\u00a0 No actual hiding was done — in fact, apparently the paper explicitly displays the supposedly “hidden”material. I don’t know which of his own papers Jones is referring to, but the original source of the “trick” is Figure 5b in this Nature paper<\/a>, in which the supposedly “hidden” data are right there in view.<\/p>\n

So here’s what Jones is guilty of: behaving in a completely scientifically appropriate manner, and then describing that he did somewhat inaccurately in a private email exchange later.<\/p>\n

Let me repeat that I’m not qualified to make judgments on the science: this just isn’t my field.\u00a0 But here’s what I can say.\u00a0 Some climate change deniers claim essentially that the mainstream community is engaged in a massive conspiracy to suppress the truth.\u00a0 If they were right, this trove of hacked emails would prove it.\u00a0 But from everything I’ve seen, what’s contained in them is pretty much exactly what you’d expect under the opposite hypothesis — that the climate science community is behaving like a normal, healthy scientific community.\u00a0 Rather than bolstering the conspiracy theorists’ claims, the new data provides strong evidence falsifying them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Apparently that’s what some people are calling the revelations found in a bunch of emails by climate scientists that were hacked into and made public by climate change deniers.\u00a0 Stephen “Freakonomics” Dubner gets the vapors, talking about how this exposes the “very ugly side” of climate science.\u00a0 For a less heated discussion, check out Andrew … Continue reading Climategate<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}