Climategate

Royal Statistical Society join Chemist and Physicists lecturing the University of East Anglia on non-disclosure

I’m not convinced that the inquiry into the University of East Anglia will result in anything but a whitewash, but it’s nice to see academics being forced to sit and have simple scientific principles dictated to them as if they’re simple-minded students.

The Royal Statistical Society (RSS) recently made some statements about data needing to be available to the public to have its validity proven, because we can’t just trust data from “peer reviewed journals.” If you’re not familiar with the RSS, a memorandum they submitted (CRU 47) provides a little background on themselves before diving into the nitty-gritty:

The Royal Statistical Society (RSS) is the UK’s only professional and learned society devoted to the interests of statistics and statisticians. Founded in 1834 it is also one of the most influential and prestigious statistical societies in the world. The Society has members in over 50 countries worldwide and is active in a wide range of areas both directly and indirectly pertaining to the study and application of statistics. It aims to promote public understanding of statistics and provide professional support to users of statistics and to statisticians.

Knowing how different scientific organisations operate in competing hierarchies must be causing a lot of teeth grinding at the University. It’s like being taught how to count all over again.

The RSS believes that the debate on global warming is best served by having the models used and the data on which they are based in the public domain. Where such information is publicly available it is possible independently to verify results. The ability to verify models using publicly available data is regarded as being of much greater importance than the specific content of email exchanges between researchers.

The submission does include some conditional and limited exceptions but further adds:

More widely, the basic case for publication of data includes that science progresses as an ongoing debate and not by a series of authoritative and oracular pronouncements and that the quality of that debate is best served by ensuring that all parties have access to the facts. It is well understood, for example, that peer review cannot guarantee that what is published is ‘correct’. The best guarantor of scientific quality is that others are able to examine in detail the arguments that have been used and not just their published conclusions. It is important that experiments and calculations can be repeated to verify their conclusions. If data, or the methods used, are withheld, it is impossible to do this.

The RSS believes that a crucial step in improving the quality of the debate on global warming will be to place the data, the analysis methods and the models in the public domain.

This leads to the conclusion that the University should have published their data as a priority, and for anything they couldn’t publish for whatever reason, then it should have been excluded, otherwise it formed the foundation of unsubstantiated and untestable theories.

Source: Parliament UK

Possibly related posts:

1. Royal Society of Chemistry backs 36,000 physicists in condemning Climategate
2. Royal Society capitulates on climate debate in worst week for global warmers since Climategate
3. The University of East Anglia CRU comes clean: there WAS a medieval warm period
4. Two U.S. Congressmen go after EPA on reliance on UN’s climate panel
5. And they’re still lying at East Anglia

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