Re: OT: interesting global warming quote found elsewhwere

On Aug 7, 2:17 am, James Arthur <bogusabd...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
bill.slo...@xxxxxxxx wrote:
On Aug 6, 7:10 am, Jim Thompson <To-Email-Use-The-Envelope-I...@My-Web-
Site.com> wrote:
On Tue, 05 Aug 2008 17:03:17 GMT, James Arthur wrote:
Joerg wrote:
http://www.climateaudit.org/?page_id=354
This shows how much political hardball seems to be played in that
"scientific" world. Pretty sad, actually:
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=224

This URL doesn't work. Changing it to end ?page_id=224 ended up
getting me to a blog posting by Steve McIntyre on Friday, June 17th,
2005 at 6:49 am, basically bitching that the rest of the world doesn't
share his particular obsession.

The last paragraph is shocking:
"One of the first places that we would recommend such procedures is the
temperature data set used by the IPCC. Other researchers have tried
without success to get access to the supporting data. One of them shared
with us the response he received from the principal author of the
dataset: “We have 25 years invested in this work. Why should we let you
look at it, when your only objective is to find fault with it?”"
The 2nd-to-last paragraph is stunning as well.  Such sloth.  The work
shows it.

Sloth? Referees aren't paid.

That doesn't excuse not doing their job.  Their job is to
double-check the work to help avoid errors.  We all make
mistakes; this process is supposed to catch them and prevent
outright fraud.

To do that you have to check the data.

In an ideal world, this might be true. As I've pointed out earlier in
this thread, this involves a lot more work than referees are normally
willing to take on. In the limited refereeing that I have done, I've
never asked for access to raw data, and the referees who have
commented on my published work have never asked me for my raw data.

By "sloth" I also meant the authors--not deigning to share their
data or methods for critical review?  Do they think they own this
publicly-funded data, or that their work is beyond review?

The authors do think that they own their data - some of their work may
have been funded by tax-payers money, but such funding doesn't come
with any explicit requirement for total exposure. If they open up all
their data to everybody - including their academic competitors, they
make it easier for their competitors to write follow-up papers which
the authors would otherwise be able to get into the literature first,
under their own names, improving thier own academic standing.

There's also the minor - but non-trivial - point, that raw data is
often poorly organised and expressed in non-standard units. Getting it
reorgansied into an easily accessible form takes work which won't do
anything significant to advance the authors' academic standing and
promotion prospects.

If the data is genuinely controversial - which is to say that it would
have contradicted or been contradicted by independently collected data
- there can well be case for making both sets of raw data accessible
so that everybody can pitch in on working out what went wrong. My wife
recently swapped experimental materials with a colleague in the UK
who'd got - and published - different results in comparable
experiments, and there is now a third - joint - poaper in the
literature which explains and reconciles the differences. This sort of
thing doesn't happen often, and most academics are delighted to
exploit the chance to publish another paper.

These data aren't trade secrets, they aren't proprietary; these
guys didn't pay for the satellites or weather stations, and they
/are/ responsible for some extraordinary policy recommendations; we
have a right and they have an obligation to provide all information
essential to scientific review.

"Essential"? In whose opinion? It generally involves a lot of work,
and nobody is going to take it on if they can avoid it.

IOW they're intellectually sloppy; they're not willing to defend
their work.  Or even disclose it, here.

People only have a finite amount of time - they aren't going to waste
it on satisfying frivolous requests. That's practical time management,
not intellectual sloppiness.

"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.  The Great Oz
has spoken." -- The Wizards [sic] of Oz

When I was a child, I thought like a child ...

  I haven't noticed Steve McIntyre, or
anybody else with concerns about the quality of refereeing in
scientific journals, ever coming up with scheme for paying referees
for the time they put in on reading and trying to understand other
people's papers. At the moment the people who put in the time get very
little back for their work, and this time could more productively be
invested in work that will get them publications, grant money and
promotion.

That's the most damning description of peer-review I've heard.
If the reviewers aren't interested and don't have the time, maybe
they shouldn't do it.

Many people don't. Finding appropriate people willing to review
academic articles is the major part of the job of editing an academic
journal. The work is usually spread over an editorial board, and my
wife does quite a bit of it; she's never been the editor of a serious
journal in her field (not for want of offers) but she's an action
editor (in her specialisied area) for several journals that are edited
by colleagues.

The fact that I get to referee stuff for the British Institute of
Physics from time to time illustrates that editors sometimes do have
to scrape the bottom of the barrel.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

.

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