[escepticos] Re: 2-0

[Carlos Ungil]

Hola, hola.

On 01/12/2009, at 22:37, Pedro J. Hdez wrote:
> Hasta cierto punto era lo lógico. El IPCC tiene obviamente una
> componente política y debería irse no tanto porque haya nada desde el
> punto científico, pero de cara al público trascenderá como un
> escándalo que podría afectar a la credibilidad del IPCC. Qué le vamos
> a hacer. Las apariencias a veces lo son todo.

Estoy de acuerdo en que cosas como "I can't see either of these papers
being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow
-- even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"
afectan a la credibilidad del IPCC. 

Zorita (uno de los cientificos que han participado en el ultimo informe del 
IPCC) explica como se forma el "consenso":

Why I think that Michael Mann, Phil Jones and Stefan Rahmstorf should
be barred from the IPCC process

Short answer: because the scientific assessments in which they may
take part are not credible anymore. 

A longer answer: [...] research in some areas of climate science has
been and is full of machination, conspiracies, and collusion, as any
reader can interpret from the CRU-files. [...] The scientific debate
has been in many instances hijacked to advance other agendas. [...]
editors, reviewers and authors of alternative studies, analysis,
interpretations, even based on the same data we have at our disposal,
have been bullied and subtly blackmailed. In this atmosphere, Ph D
students are often tempted to tweak their data so as to fit the
'politically correct picture'. Some, or many issues, about climate
change are still not well known. Policy makers should be aware of the
attempts to hide these uncertainties under a unified picture. I had
the 'pleasure' to experience all this in my area of research. [...]

> En cuanto a los datos, también ahí los negacionista han hecho
> muchísimo ruido, pero hay pocas nueces. Básicamente el 95% de los
> datos ha estado ahí a tiro de google. En Realclimate lo están
> coleccionando con la ayuda de los comentaristas
> http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/
> El 5% que no ha sido liberado estaban sometidos a acuerdos propietarios.

Buena excusa, ¿eh? En palabras de Jones: "Data is covered by all the
agreements we sign with people, so I will be hiding behind them."

Pero no se trata solo de que los datos esten disponible en alguna
parte (si es que lo estan). Se trata de saber exactamente cuales se
han usado (y cuales se han dejado fuera), y como se han (pre)procesado. 
No entiendo por que les disgusta tanto la idea de tener que proporcionar
los datos o los programas que permitirian verificar los resultados de
sus publicaciones:

[Santer] If the RMS is going to require authors to make ALL data
available - raw data PLUS results from all intermediate calculations -
I will not submit any further papers to RMS journals.
[Jones] I'm having a dispute with the new editor of Weather. I've
complained about him to the RMS Chief Exec. If I don't get him to back
down, I won't be sending any more papers to any RMS journals and I'll
be resigning from the RMS.

Bueno, en realidad si lo entiendo porque Jones lo explicaba muy
claramente en 2005 en su respuesta a otro cientifico que le pedia
acceso a unos datos: "We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why
should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and
find something wrong with it."

Espero que aqui estemos de acuerdo en que el metodo cientifico se
basa entre otras cosas en la reproducibilidad de los resultados y la
discusion y el debate. Como escribia hace unos dias Curry (catedratica
experta en huracanes):

In my opinion, there are two broader issues raised by these emails
that are impeding the public credibility of climate research: lack of
transparency in climate data, and “tribalism” in some segments of the
climate research community that is impeding peer review and the
assessment process.

1. Transparency. Climate data needs to be publicly available and well
documented. This includes metadata that explains how the data were
treated and manipulated, what assumptions were made in assembling the
data sets, and what data was omitted and why. This would seem to be an
obvious and simple requirement, but the need for such transparency has
only been voiced recently as the policy relevance of climate data has
increased. The HADCRU surface climate dataset and the paleoclimate
dataset that has gone into the various “hockeystick” analyses stand
out as lacking such transparency. [...]

Chau,

Carlitos