For the most part, I don’t think you’re quite answering my question.
You present two explanations for the lack of peer-reviewed articles that are sceptical of the scientific consensus on global warming. The first is that there is unjust suppression of such views. The second is that such scepticism is based on bad science. You say that you think the leaked emails support the first explanation, and that there is sufficient evidence of biased (I’m guessing “biased” means “unmerited by the quality of the science” here) selection by journals. What is that sufficient evidence? More specifically, how does the information conveyed by the leaked emails distinguish between the first and second scenarios?
Now I’m sure the AGW believers feel that they are rejecting bad science rather than rejecting conclusions they don’t like but emails like the above certainly make it appear that it is the conclusions as much as the methods that they are actually objecting to.
This addresses my questions, but I was asking for more specifics. Let A = “AGW sceptics are being suppressed from journals without proper evaluation of their science” and B = “AGW sceptics are being suppressed from journals because their science is unsound”. Let E be the information provided by the email leaks. How do you get to the conclusion that the likelihood ratio P(E|A)/P(E|B) is significantly above 1?
Personally I can’t see how the likelihood ratio would be anything but about 1, and it seems to me that those who act if the ratio is significantly greater than 1 are simply ignoring the estimation of P(E|B) because their prior for P(B) is small.
(EDIT: I originally wrote P(A|E) and P(B|E) instead P(E|A) and P(E|B). My text was still, apparently, clear enough that this wrong notation didn’t cause confusion. I’ve now fixed the notation.)
I do think the likelihood ratio is significantly above 1. This is based off reading some of the emails, documents and code comments in the leaks. Here’s a reasonable summary of the emails. It looks like dubious science to me. I find it hard to understand how anyone can claim otherwise unless they are ideologically motivated. If you genuinely can’t see it then I’m not really interested in arguing over minutiae so we’ll just have to leave it at that.
It seems to me that AGW skeptics made a variety of claims that AGW believers dismissed as paranoid: there was a conspiracy to keep skeptical papers out of the journals; there were efforts to damage the careers of climate scientists who didn’t ‘toe the party line’; there were dubious and possibly illegal efforts to keep the original data behind key papers out of the hands of skeptics despite FOI regulations. I did not see many AGW believers prior to the climategate emails saying “Yes, of course all of that happens, that’s just the way science operates in the real world”.
When the CRU leaks became public and substantiated all the ‘paranoid’ claims above, including proof of illegal destruction of emails and data to avoid FOI requests, I find it suspicious when people claim that it doesn’t change their opinions at all. The standard response seems to be “Oh yes, that’s just how science works in the real world. I already knew scientists routinely engage in this sort of behaviour and the degree of such behaviour revealed in the emails is exactly in line with my prior expectations so my probability estimates are unchanged”. That seems highly suspect to me and looks an awful lot like confirmation bias.
You’re still talking about how the e-mails fit into the scenario of fraudulent climate scientists, that is, P(E|A) by my notation. I specifically said that I feel P(E|B) is being ignored by those who claim the e-mails are evidence of misconduct. Your link, for example, mostly lists things like climatologists talking about discrediting journals that publish AGW-sceptical stuff, which is exactly what they would do if they, in good faith, thought that AGW-scepticism is based on quack science. Reading the e-mails and concluding that sceptical papers are being suppressed without merit seems like merely assuming the conclusion.
(Regarding the FOI requests, that might indeed be something that might reasonably set off alarms and significantly reduce P(E|B) - if you believe the sceptics’ commentaries accompanying the relevant quotes. But googling for “mcintyre foi harassment” and doing some reading gives a different story.)
My impression from reading the emails is that different standards are being applied to the AGW skeptics because of their conclusions rather than because of their methods. At the same time there is evidence of data massaging and dubious practices around their own methods in order to match their pre-conceived conclusions. The whole process does not look like the disinterested search for truth that is the scientific ideal.
My P(B|E) would be higher if I read emails that seemed to focus on methodological errors first rather than proceeding from the fact that a journal has published unwelcome conclusions to the proposal that the journal must be boycotted.
I think there’s too much attention paid to the emails, and not enough to all of the publicly available information about the exact same events. Maybe it’s because private communications seem like secret information that contain the hidden truth, or maybe it’s just a cascade effect where everyone focuses on the emails because everyone is focusing on the emails.
The second email that you quoted is in response to the publication of a skeptical article by Soon & Baliunas (2003) in the journal Climate Research which generated a big public controversy among climate scientists. Reactions to that publication include several editors of the journal resigning in protest (and releasing statements about why they resigned), the publisher of the journal writing a letter admitting that the article contained claims that weren’t supported by the evidence (pdf), and a scientific rebuttal to the article being published later that same year. I think that you get a better sense of what happened (and whether climate scientists were reacting to the methods or just the conclusions) by reading accounts written at the time than from the snippets of emails. And of course there’s Wikipedia.
FOI requests? Which ones? Those for proprietary data sets that they weren’t allowed at that time to release, or the FOI requests for information availalble from a public FTP site?
For the most part, I don’t think you’re quite answering my question.
You present two explanations for the lack of peer-reviewed articles that are sceptical of the scientific consensus on global warming. The first is that there is unjust suppression of such views. The second is that such scepticism is based on bad science. You say that you think the leaked emails support the first explanation, and that there is sufficient evidence of biased (I’m guessing “biased” means “unmerited by the quality of the science” here) selection by journals. What is that sufficient evidence? More specifically, how does the information conveyed by the leaked emails distinguish between the first and second scenarios?
This addresses my questions, but I was asking for more specifics. Let A = “AGW sceptics are being suppressed from journals without proper evaluation of their science” and B = “AGW sceptics are being suppressed from journals because their science is unsound”. Let E be the information provided by the email leaks. How do you get to the conclusion that the likelihood ratio P(E|A)/P(E|B) is significantly above 1?
Personally I can’t see how the likelihood ratio would be anything but about 1, and it seems to me that those who act if the ratio is significantly greater than 1 are simply ignoring the estimation of P(E|B) because their prior for P(B) is small.
(EDIT: I originally wrote P(A|E) and P(B|E) instead P(E|A) and P(E|B). My text was still, apparently, clear enough that this wrong notation didn’t cause confusion. I’ve now fixed the notation.)
I do think the likelihood ratio is significantly above 1. This is based off reading some of the emails, documents and code comments in the leaks. Here’s a reasonable summary of the emails. It looks like dubious science to me. I find it hard to understand how anyone can claim otherwise unless they are ideologically motivated. If you genuinely can’t see it then I’m not really interested in arguing over minutiae so we’ll just have to leave it at that.
It seems to me that AGW skeptics made a variety of claims that AGW believers dismissed as paranoid: there was a conspiracy to keep skeptical papers out of the journals; there were efforts to damage the careers of climate scientists who didn’t ‘toe the party line’; there were dubious and possibly illegal efforts to keep the original data behind key papers out of the hands of skeptics despite FOI regulations. I did not see many AGW believers prior to the climategate emails saying “Yes, of course all of that happens, that’s just the way science operates in the real world”.
When the CRU leaks became public and substantiated all the ‘paranoid’ claims above, including proof of illegal destruction of emails and data to avoid FOI requests, I find it suspicious when people claim that it doesn’t change their opinions at all. The standard response seems to be “Oh yes, that’s just how science works in the real world. I already knew scientists routinely engage in this sort of behaviour and the degree of such behaviour revealed in the emails is exactly in line with my prior expectations so my probability estimates are unchanged”. That seems highly suspect to me and looks an awful lot like confirmation bias.
You’re still talking about how the e-mails fit into the scenario of fraudulent climate scientists, that is, P(E|A) by my notation. I specifically said that I feel P(E|B) is being ignored by those who claim the e-mails are evidence of misconduct. Your link, for example, mostly lists things like climatologists talking about discrediting journals that publish AGW-sceptical stuff, which is exactly what they would do if they, in good faith, thought that AGW-scepticism is based on quack science. Reading the e-mails and concluding that sceptical papers are being suppressed without merit seems like merely assuming the conclusion.
(Regarding the FOI requests, that might indeed be something that might reasonably set off alarms and significantly reduce P(E|B) - if you believe the sceptics’ commentaries accompanying the relevant quotes. But googling for “mcintyre foi harassment” and doing some reading gives a different story.)
(EDIT: Fixed notation, as in the parent.)
My impression from reading the emails is that different standards are being applied to the AGW skeptics because of their conclusions rather than because of their methods. At the same time there is evidence of data massaging and dubious practices around their own methods in order to match their pre-conceived conclusions. The whole process does not look like the disinterested search for truth that is the scientific ideal.
My P(B|E) would be higher if I read emails that seemed to focus on methodological errors first rather than proceeding from the fact that a journal has published unwelcome conclusions to the proposal that the journal must be boycotted.
I think there’s too much attention paid to the emails, and not enough to all of the publicly available information about the exact same events. Maybe it’s because private communications seem like secret information that contain the hidden truth, or maybe it’s just a cascade effect where everyone focuses on the emails because everyone is focusing on the emails.
The second email that you quoted is in response to the publication of a skeptical article by Soon & Baliunas (2003) in the journal Climate Research which generated a big public controversy among climate scientists. Reactions to that publication include several editors of the journal resigning in protest (and releasing statements about why they resigned), the publisher of the journal writing a letter admitting that the article contained claims that weren’t supported by the evidence (pdf), and a scientific rebuttal to the article being published later that same year. I think that you get a better sense of what happened (and whether climate scientists were reacting to the methods or just the conclusions) by reading accounts written at the time than from the snippets of emails. And of course there’s Wikipedia.
Would you expect to see evolutionary biologists discuss the methodological errors of creationist arguments in private correspondence?
(I don’t think this is the place for this, since I don’t think we’re getting anywhere.)
Upvoted for the parenthetical.
FOI requests? Which ones? Those for proprietary data sets that they weren’t allowed at that time to release, or the FOI requests for information availalble from a public FTP site?
Voted you up not for your particular assessment of P(A|E)/P(B|E) but for using this pattern of assessing evidence to guide the conversation.