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posted by mrpg on Saturday February 11 2017, @05:28PM   Printer-friendly
from the the-truth-shall-prevail dept.

A follow-up to this story: NOAA Whistleblower: Climate Data Was Manipulated, the Computers Used "Suffered a Complete Failure"

Top Republicans on the House science committee claim a former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist “confirmed” that his NOAA colleagues “manipulated” climate data for a 2015 study. But that scientist denies that he accused NOAA of manipulating data.

Rep. Lamar Smith, the chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, and two subcommittee chairmen issued a Feb. 5 press release — “Former NOAA Scientist Confirms Colleagues Manipulated Climate Records” — as part of an ongoing dispute over the validity of a paper published in the journal Science in June 2015 by NOAA scientists.

[...] But in interviews with the Associated Press and E&E, an online energy and environmental news outlet, Bates said he had not accused his colleagues of data manipulation.

Bates told the AP on Feb. 6 that there was “no data tampering, no data changing, nothing malicious” involved with his colleagues’ study. “It’s not trumped up data in any way shape or form,” he said.

Rather, Bates claimed Karl and his group hadn’t followed NOAA protocol in “the way data was handled, documented and stored, raising issues of transparency and availability,” the AP reported.

No Data Manipulation at NOAA


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 11 2017, @06:15PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 11 2017, @06:15PM (#465839)

    “no data tampering, no data changing, nothing malicious”

    What he originally described was p-hacking*, which is incorrectly considered to be a legitimate activity in many fields (for example, I was trained to do it in biomed where it is SOP to p-hack). It isn't clear whether he is standing by these p-hacking accusations or not, since nothing is really "made-up" per se:

    Tom Karl constantly had his ‘thumb on the scale’—in the documentation, scientific choices, and release of datasets

    Weakening the significance threshold:

    "I questioned another co-author about why they choose to use a 90% confidence threshold for evaluating the statistical significance of surface temperature trends, instead of the standard for significance of 95% — he also expressed reluctance and did not defend the decision.

    Weakening data quality standards:

    Tom Karl liked the maturity matrix so much, he modified the matrix categories so that he could claim a number of NCEI products were “Examples of “Gold” standard NCEI Products (Data Set Maturity Matrix Model Level 6).”

    Picking which data to include

    The withholding of the operational version of this important update came in the middle of a major ENSO event, thereby depriving the public of an important source of updated information, apparently for the sole purpose of Mr. Karl using the data in his paper before making the data available to the public."

    https://judithcurry.com/2017/02/04/climate-scientists-versus-climate-data/ [judithcurry.com]

    *For a good description of p-hacking, see:

    In this article, we show that despite the nominal endorsement of a maximum false-positive rate of 5% (i.e., p ≤ .05), current standards for disclosing details of data collection and analyses make false positives vastly more likely. In fact, it is unacceptably easy to publish “statistically significant” evidence consistent with any hypothesis.

    The culprit is a construct we refer to as researcher degrees of freedom. In the course of collecting and analyzing data, researchers have many decisions to make: Should more data be collected? Should some observations be excluded? Which conditions should be combined and which ones compared? Which control variables should be considered? Should specific measures be combined or transformed or both?

    http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797611417632 [sagepub.com]

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 11 2017, @06:20PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 11 2017, @06:20PM (#465842)

    I forgot to mention that, from what I read of the rebuttals in this case, P-hacking seems to be an accepted activity in climate research. I am not sure if Bates was "baiting" them to reveal this, but it was very clever if so.

  • (Score: 2, Redundant) by jmorris on Saturday February 11 2017, @07:18PM

    by jmorris (4844) on Saturday February 11 2017, @07:18PM (#465855)

    Yup, the warmers are experts at igniting strawmen, not so good at dealing with their actual opponents. Bates never accused them of outright cheating. So they then get him to "admit" there was no accusation of cheating and the "Denier's charges vanish" announcement press release / legacy media article pops out the other end of the media digestive tract. And seriously, linking to factcheck.org is just about as bad as World Socialist these days when it comes to blatant propaganda.

    You can't accuse them of cheating because they destroyed all of the work product that could be examined for evidence of cheating. They get all indignant and butthurt when anyone calls them on it and correctly observes that work that isn't capable of duplication, isn't making a falsifiable claim and generally fails to meet the accepted standards of science should be ignored because it isn't science regardless how many pretty color graphs you put in the popular media.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 11 2017, @07:31PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 11 2017, @07:31PM (#465857)

      generally fails to meet the accepted standards of science

      It looks to me like the problem is the "standards" of what has been passing for science (not just climate research, but all around). It seems a software guy recognized something was wrong with how the data was being dealt with, but then got told by the researchers "no, this is normal behavior, this is how science works in practice". He then became unsure of his own sanity.

      It is unsurprising that an intelligent person untrained in modern research "methods" would think this way. The mind does naturally reject the NHST + p-hacking "analysis" as irrational, which is why it can only persist as a mindless ritual.[1]
      [1] http://library.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/ft/gg/GG_Mindless_2004.pdf [mpib-berlin.mpg.de]