by Judith Curry
“The fuss over climategate showed that the world is increasingly unwilling to accept the message that “we are scientists; trust us”. Other people want to join the scientific conversation. Good scientists, interested in finding truth, should want to encourage them, not put up the shutters. The wider world instinctively knows to distrust those in all walks of life who reject openness.”
Fred Pearce has published a very interesting article in Index on Censorship, entitled “Secrecy in science – an argument for open access.”
The article begins with Steve McIntyre:
He does not believe this conclusion is a big lie. But he does want to see for himself. And in particular to look at how the data had been “manipulated” — a perfectly honourable process in which, for instance, some weather stations are made to count for more than others because they represent large areas with few weather stations, while others are discounted because their rural locations have been invaded by growing cities.
It’s not what everybody wants to do on a Saturday night, but surely he is exactly the kind of citizen investigator the 2000 Freedom of Information Act was intended to help.
On CRU’s refusal to hand over the data:
If CRU had been more open with its data from the start, a great deal of time and angst on the part of its scientists — and a great deal of public uttering of paranoid nonsense from climate deniers — would have been avoided. And if, in the months before the hack, Jones and his colleagues had not spent ever more time bitching about McIntyre and scheming to keep their data and working methods secret, then the emails would have contained little of outside interest.
Graham’s decision unlocks some four million temperature readings taken at 4,000 weather stations over the past 160 years. But as the journalist Jonathan Jones put it, “the most significant features of this decision are the precedents that have been set”. It could open the door to thousands of other British researchers being required to share their data with the public. Good.
On data sharing:
It is also true that there is little consistency among scientists about what the rules on data sharing and confidentiality should be. Some peer-reviewed journals have tough rules requiring access to that data underpinning research papers, but others do not, including some academic institutions. But there is a growing move to more openness that should surely be welcomed. Cameron Neylon, a biophysicist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire, writing in New Scientist in September, said the aim should be for “anyone, anywhere to contribute to science”. You can hear the shudders in the labs across the land. But to those who fear an avalanche of ill-informed nonsense arising from data sharing, he said: “If you care about the place of science in society or are worried about the quality of information on the web, then openness offers massive potential to engage people more deeply, educate them about how science works and increase the store of quality information on the web.”
On the fine line between the crackpot and the sublime:
In any event, the whole point of research is that it should be open to maximum scrutiny. And the scientific priesthood can no longer claim that scrutiny should only be among their specialist fellows.
And there is sometimes a fine line between the crackpot and the sublime. Earth science guru Jim Lovelock — a doyen for many modern climate researchers — left institutional academia in frustration at his ideas being ostracised. The Independent began its report of the 2011 winner of the Nobel prize for chemistry, Daniel Shechtman, thus: “An Israeli scientist who was once asked to resign his research post because his discovery of a new class of solid material was too unbelievable has won this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry – for that same discovery.”
The charge of sloppiness in the way science often portrays its findings to the wider public is also a warning against allowing too much self-policing. In June, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued what it said was a summary of the findings of a detailed study of renewable energy. It headlined the claim that 77 per cent of the world’s energy needs could be met from green power by 2050. In fact, the “77 per cent” finding was the most optimistic of hundreds of academic studies reviewed in the report itself. Moreover, that particular study was conducted by one of the report’s own lead authors, who was also a Greenpeace campaigner. Curious. But most damagingly of all, this highly relevant information only emerged a month after the press release and subsequent media coverage, when IPCC got round to publishing the report itself. This was shameful spin.
The fuss over climategate showed that the world is increasingly unwilling to accept the message that “we are scientists; trust us”. Other people want to join the scientific conversation. Good scientists, interested in finding truth, should want to encourage them, not put up the shutters. The wider world instinctively knows to distrust those in all walks of life who reject openness. As McIntyre put it recently, “probably no single issue damages the reputation of the climate science community more than the refusal to show the data that supports their work”. There should, for the good of science as well as public discourse, be a presumption in favour of open access.
JC comment: Fred Pearce, thank you for this essay!