Fascinating write-up on Mr. McIntyre, the soft-spoken Canadian who by the simple act of requesting the raw data behind the wildly alarmist predictions of the warmers, has helped to revitalize sound science within the realm of climate study...
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Excerpts:
...McIntyres machine-gun auditing of scientific results from outside the traditional structure of peer review creates practical problems for researchers, Zorita admits, but in the aftermath of the CRU email leak we now know that a team of gatekeepers have tried to scupper studies that contradict their own previous publications. McIntyre has brought up interesting points from time to time, but his most important contribution may be to the culture of climate science.
Years ago, very few people, me included, thought to make data available to other researchers for confirmation or refutation. Such inquiries were very rare in climate research. Now, Zorita says, reviewers are more aggressive about asking for raw data and confirming that statistical calculations can be replicated.
...The world of mining is one in which everyone is constantly aware of how engineering results can be tampered with or misrepresented to rip off investors. And in 2003, when McIntyre first saw the hockey stick graph, it reminded him uncomfortably of some stock promoters over-optimistic revenue projection. McIntyre asked lead hockey stick author Michael Mann for the underlying data and was startled when Mann had trouble remembering where he had posted the files to the Internet. That was when the penny dropped for me, McIntyre says. I had the sense that Mann was pulling together the data for the first timethat nobody had ever bothered to inquire independently into the hockey stick before.
To McIntyre, a scientists data and code stand in the same relationship to a finished paper that drilling cores do to a mining company press release. If youre offering securities to the public, McIntyre observed in a May 2008 talk at Ohio State University, there are complicated and expensive processes of due diligence, involving audits of financial statements, independent engineering reports, opinions from securities lawyers and so on. There are laws requiring the disclosure of adverse results. Peer review in scientific journals is good, he suggested, but it is limited and vulnerable to compromise. There is far more independent due diligence on the smallest prospectus offering securities to the public than on a Nature article that might end up having a tremendous impact on policy.
Full article here:
Centre of the storm - Canada - Macleans.ca
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Excerpts:
...McIntyres machine-gun auditing of scientific results from outside the traditional structure of peer review creates practical problems for researchers, Zorita admits, but in the aftermath of the CRU email leak we now know that a team of gatekeepers have tried to scupper studies that contradict their own previous publications. McIntyre has brought up interesting points from time to time, but his most important contribution may be to the culture of climate science.
Years ago, very few people, me included, thought to make data available to other researchers for confirmation or refutation. Such inquiries were very rare in climate research. Now, Zorita says, reviewers are more aggressive about asking for raw data and confirming that statistical calculations can be replicated.
...The world of mining is one in which everyone is constantly aware of how engineering results can be tampered with or misrepresented to rip off investors. And in 2003, when McIntyre first saw the hockey stick graph, it reminded him uncomfortably of some stock promoters over-optimistic revenue projection. McIntyre asked lead hockey stick author Michael Mann for the underlying data and was startled when Mann had trouble remembering where he had posted the files to the Internet. That was when the penny dropped for me, McIntyre says. I had the sense that Mann was pulling together the data for the first timethat nobody had ever bothered to inquire independently into the hockey stick before.
To McIntyre, a scientists data and code stand in the same relationship to a finished paper that drilling cores do to a mining company press release. If youre offering securities to the public, McIntyre observed in a May 2008 talk at Ohio State University, there are complicated and expensive processes of due diligence, involving audits of financial statements, independent engineering reports, opinions from securities lawyers and so on. There are laws requiring the disclosure of adverse results. Peer review in scientific journals is good, he suggested, but it is limited and vulnerable to compromise. There is far more independent due diligence on the smallest prospectus offering securities to the public than on a Nature article that might end up having a tremendous impact on policy.
Full article here:
Centre of the storm - Canada - Macleans.ca
