Thursday, November 24, 2011

It's A Turkey Day Climate "Scientist" Shoot

Click through and RTWT. It's great fun -- unless you're one of the Borg:

Quark Soup by David Appell: Sorting Through the Stolen UEA Emails: "Troublesome:

<5131> Shukla/IGES:
["Future of the IPCC", 2008] It is inconceivable that policymakers will be
willing to make billion-and trillion-dollar decisions for adaptation to the
projected regional climate change based on models that do not even describe and
simulate the processes that are the building blocks of climate variability.

<1939> Thorne/MetO:
Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical
troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a
wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the
uncertainty and be honest. Phil, hopefully we can find time to discuss these
further if necessary [...]"

<3066> Thorne:
I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it
which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.

<1611> Carter:
It seems that a few people have a very strong say, and no matter how much
talking goes on beforehand, the big decisions are made at the eleventh hour by a select core group.
And this post has the COTD also:
Peter, while I am absolutely sympathetic to the way some of these remarks are being taken out of context, as a fluid dynamicist, you have unfortunately ensured that you are going to lose this war by representing results produced by immature models as inerrant, demanding trillion-dollar action by governments, and requiring near-complete destruction of the productive apparatus of society as we have known in in order to avoid armageddon.

Never do you or your colleagues present results with the necessary margins of error, caveats, or uncertainties. Rarely do you even wait for your modeling results to be vetted and run straight to the press. And frequently, you have hidden them from those who would like to examine them for flaws, on the grounds that trying to find something wrong with the models and reconstructions is somehow untoward, despite those of us in every other scientific field having to deal with this all the time.

So yes, there are some remarks taken out of their immediate context. However, the rather larger context of your unscientific behavior is not going away. You have lost the PR battle with the public, and you have no one to blame but yourselves. Here is some advice, although I am but a junior scientist--until your code is directly solving all the governing PDEs for your system with sufficient resolution to capture all the nonlinear dynamics and chemical kinetics, lay off the press releases. I know it's not as sexy, and it won't make you as famous, but you won't get egg on your face, either.
Heh.