Bishop Hill FOI and scientists
Nov 25, 2010 Climate: CRU FOI 
Alice Bell and Adam Corner have an article in the Times Higher Educational Supplement, which is by turns rather strange and complete nonsense, but nevertheless contains one or two interesting snippets.
The general thrust of the piece seems to be encapsulated in this quote:
"Expecting FoI requests to be able to arbitrate between competing knowledge claims is no more plausible than asking the social services to use FoI to uncover instances of "bad parenting" - it's the wrong tool for the job."
This is truly strange, because I can't think of anyone thinks that you can resolve scientific debates with an FOI request. I'm not therefore sure why an article that shows that the possibility of doing so is implausible should be anything other than deeply trivial. The two authors seem to be conflating two separate issues - whether publicly funded data should be freely available and how scientific debates can be resolved.
The article goes on to repeat endless nonsense about the application of FOI to scientific work. First we have Martin Griffiths, national coordinator for science journalism training at the Royal Statistical Society:
"FoI goes beyond just the data and allows the release of correspondence between scientists. These may not make much sense to outsiders and lead to the kind of language problems we saw in Climategate - with (the word) 'tricks' (being used) and so on - that are everyday parts of science being blown out of proportion."
Mr Griffiths seems to have missed the bit about "hiding the decline", and he clearly hasn't heard that even the whitewashing Russell panel had to rule that this episode was "misleading." It has been said before, but let's just repeat it once more for the benefit of Griffiths, Corner and Bell: if a commercial company, in a listing prospectus, had done what Jones et al did in the Nature trick, the directors would have been jailed. It's very disappointing to see the Royal Statistical Society apparently condoning this sort of behaviour, and serious academics giving it the nod. You would have thought they placed a higher value on their reputations.
Next we have Gabrielle Bourke, a researcher at University College London's Constitution Unit (which presumably studies the FOI laws):
"The ways in which scientists go about their work, such as peer review, don't necessarily sit very well with the FoI policy," she says. "The usual way is not to hand over your data before you have done work on it."
I don't know what sort of research Ms Bourke does, but she clearly hasn't done enough to know that there is no duty under FOI for scientists to release their data until they have published their findings.
Then there is the repetition of the old canard about CRU researchers being swamped by FOI requests.
A great deal has already been written about the motivations of the army of bloggers who bombarded the University of East Anglia with FoI requests.
Clearly not enough has been written though - otherwise Bell and Corner might have noticed the observation from the former Information Commissioner that the level of FOI requests to UEA was nothing out of the ordinary. Just in case we hadn't got their point, Bell and Corner then repeat it, adding their own apparently completely non-expert opinion on the matter:
And at the University of East Anglia, it certainly seemed as if some of the FoI requests satisfied the Information Commissioner's definition of "vexatious", although other (apparently legitimate) requests do also appear to have been ignored by the scientists.
Of course, UEA didn't try to claim the requests as vexatious since publishing four agreements (of a couple of pages each) on their website was not exactly going to be a lot of work was it? To hear publicly funded academics spouting this sort of nonsense is very frustrating. We are paying for this stuff.
It is left to Mike Hulme - perhaps an unlikely source - to actually say something sensible:
"With complex issues like climate change, sophisticated forms of expert knowledge assessment are necessary to weigh conflicting, incomplete or ambiguous evidence. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a good example of this. Of necessity, such assessment is discursive and deliberative, and cannot be captured in data, theory or even in formalised recorded words. Here, FoI - if it is being used to reveal the foundations and construction of knowledge - reaches its limits. If scientific knowledge is to continue to warrant public trust, then expert deliberations, eg, the IPCC, should be made public events."
THere's not much chance of that happening, of course, but the sentiment is a fine one.
Reader Comments (26)
What a dismal article. You must occasionally wonder why you bother.
As you said yourself (possibly somewhere other than this blog) Mike Hulme has upped his game remarkably over the last 12 months or so.
Bell, Corner and Griffiths have some catching up to do.
Actually that quote from Martin Griffiths slightly misses the point IMHO. Scientists weren't called that until about 1830-something, when natural philosophers were renamed "scientists", and other kinds of philosophers remained philosophers.
Plenty of natural philosophers believed some remarkably wacky things - Newton and various forms of magic, John Dee and various forms of ESP. They could not have done had they applied the same rigour to those as they did in studying physics and maths, respectively.
In that respect, people like Phil Jones sit very well in the historical tradition of iffy scientific practice. You apply the scientific method selectively, and never too vigorously in areas where you figure you already know the answer.
Newton and Dee have an excuse, in that the modern scientific method was not formalised at the time, so arguably they discovered stuff despite the way they worked. It's less clear what the Hockey Team's excuse is.
@Justice4Rinka
Early modern science: "We don't know what caused it- it must have been magic, there is no other explanation we can think of."
Post-normal science: "We don't know what is causing it- it must be CO2, there is no other explanation we can think of. "
Sorry, hit send too early. Martin Griffiths seems to be saying that the arguments around some aspects of science are hard for us proles to follow, because answers are arrived at through conversations rather than evidence and data, and we don't understand the conversations.
My point is that if you look at the history, it isn't an aberration at all for scientific views to be formed in this way - i.e. without data, or by torturing the data till it confessed. If Newton and Dee can fall into this trap, so too for sure can Phil Jones.
And that's the problem - Climategate wasn't a scandal because we don't understand what we read, but because we do, and because the climate alarmists don't think it's a problem.
It is getting harder and harder for me to sustain my belief that most respectable scientists and academics trust climate science (and the way it informs legislative policy) only because they assume it is done to the same high standards they are used to in their own fields. It is becoming obvious that most academics are quite misguided about the standards they should be expected to meet. My naivety is unforgivable really, as I worked for 10 years in clinical research and have seen the sort of trash that gets published and how it is finessed into a publishable state.
Scientific freedom and scientific openess are not mutually exclusive. If the scientist is not pursuing both then he is not conducting science.
Having read the article, I must agree with the other comments and can only add that should either Alice Bell and Adam Corner need the services of an otolaryngologist, they might be better served by a proctologist.
If UEA were forensic scientists preparing evidence for a murder trial, a defence Barrister would have no difficulty establishing that:
the provenance of their evidence could not be relied upon,
the evidence had been tampered with, there was no audit trail to establish who had access to the evidence,or why or when
conflicting evidence had been ignored/deleted
Therefore all the evidence should be thrown out, and the company disbarred from further work because the management seemed incapable of understanding that their scientists had ever done anything wrong.
Meanwhile the mainstream media would be saying "but we think the suspect is guilty, so it does not matter whether the forensics was all fabricated"
“Why should I make my data available to you when your only objective is to find something wrong with it?”
That statement, alone, betrays an attitude that is so anti-scientific that it casts doubt on the entire output and certainly the motives of its author.
As an aside, I just finished reading "The Hockey Stick Illusion" and found it immensely illuminating, impeccably thorough, intricately documented and impressive. Thank you for your information-rich and important contribution to the increase and diffusion of knowledge.
No wonder they are not up to date and well informed. Most "consensus" believers do not care to read any dissenting opinion. Most just declare they do not follow blogs like this one or Climate Audit, airily confess they have not read The Hockey Stick Illusion and do not intend to, and then they contentedly continue their life course, completely unaware of what is going on.
There are historical exemplars of this kind of folly. Imagine one of the many Ptolemaic astronomers still thriving, say, in 1640 Italy, content with their commonsense conviction that the Earth evidently does not move whilst the Sun does, and the accordance of these beliefs with Scripture, and not minding or caring to read crazy earth-movers like the thoroughly discredited Copernicus or Kepler, and the utterly heretic Galilei (surely funded by Dutch telescope makers). Or many eminent biologists in 1880, like Louis Agassiz, firmly convinced that evolution was nonsense, not worth reading or discussing.
Hulme deserves zero credit for any distance he tries to put between himself and the CAGW train wreck.
Rather like the director of a Railway company who advocates ignoring safety procedures and proper maintenance so that the train gets to its destination faster he has helped create the toxic "post modern science" atmosphere in which the ends justify the means in climate science. Not unlike such a manager, when it all goes horribly wrong he is happy to slime away leaving the people who get their hands dirty to take the blame.
(Not that I'm suggesting that the average climate scientist is as useful or honorable as the average train driver or mechanic)
If those guilty of the CAGW scandal get anywhere near a dock Hulme, more than most, deserves to be firmly in there.
A vivid attack on Hulme's views:
http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/03/mike-hulme-and-post-normal-science.html
And so we are to take Jones's word that 2010 is the joint warmist ever year, nice how they never wait until the year is over. And if its taken since 1998 to get another warmist year doesn't that tell you tempetures are flatlining not increasing but as I am not intelligent enough I cannot complain.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/nov/25/2010-joint-hottest-year-global-warming
JohnH
According to UAH, RSS and even HADCRUT 1998 is still the warmist year on record.
Currently UAH are recording temps that are BELOW average, and the rate-of-fall suggests we could be witnessing the lowest recorded temps in the satellite data.
I know Mac, but the cheek of putting out a press release from an organisation that shelters behind FOI, then gets caught misusing FOI and then continues ignoring FOI's got my goat.
Plus I am freezing my bollocks off today.
"nice how they never wait until the year is over"
When the last few weeks might skew the data.. :-)
Bishop, I understand your pov, but is there any truth/validity in the idea that FoI (which we all, Monbiot included, regard as long fought for and a valuable tool for (often) mavericks and obsessives to dig and dig and dig when they smell something wrong - by the way I applaud this, from the late Paul Foot to Monbiot to Holland to McIntyre to Michael Mansfield to Shami Chakrabarti to Amnesty to WWF to you, I applaud them all as they all in their way keep us free) wasn't supposed to do what it is doing, or is it in fact, near enogh, doing exactly what it was supposed to?
I suppose I'm asking whether if it was redesigned it would be different?
@Roddy 5:35 - you are Jim Naughtie and I claim my £5! ;-)
Blair (in his memoirs) didn't like FOI. Acton (in his opinion piece) moaned about it. Both suffered because of it. Bell & Corner criticise: why, we don't know - yet.
No-one expects the inquisition:-)
Hector M.
I can't criticize the CAGWers for not reading our stuff. Their stuff makes me sick.
Tom Nelson runs a blog which displays all the latest emanations from the CAGW community. I don't know how he can stand it. It would drive me mad.
So reading the other guys' stuff can be challenging and read it we must.
A slight modification of an earlier comment above:
Classic Religion: "We don't know what caused it- it must have been God, there is no other explanation we can think of."
Post-normal science: "We don't know what is causing it- it must be CO2, there is no other explanation we can think of. "
th best part is those pointing out the bits the author just 'forgot'
It seems as though politically motivated 'science' is becoming the norm these days....
This is not about AGW, but the parallel is interesting. More here
Justice4Rinka said
You'd better tell that to Sir Muir Russell.
To quote his wikipedia page
JohnH (4:57 PM) and Mac (5:05 PM)
"warmEst year" is the hottest year ever
"warmIst year" is always the current year, according to AGW supporters
Do not be fooled by Mike Hulme. He is one of the architects of the whole thing with the development of the Tyndall Centre. He is still pushing his post normal science and is in step with Pielke Jnr, Tol and Prins, who all agree that AGW is happening and we need carbon taxation.
Every time anyone thinks Hulme is OK they should go and re-read this essay at buy the truth:
http://buythetruth.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/climate-change-and-the-death-of-science/
The most depressing aspect of keeping up with the claims and arguments relating to 'climate science' is not the rampant ignorance and stultifying feats of illogic demonstrated by the climate scientists. It's the realization that 'scientists' in other fields are just as bad. I'd hoped that the politics of global warming had created an aberation.