Mistrusting Public Urge Climate Scientists to Show All Their Data
Repeated adjustments to historical temperature records raise questions about transparency, independent verification, and public trust. Let’s apply the lessons of other fields to climate science:
Everything secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity.
— Lord Acton
I would have little confidence in a public company whose accounts are not audited. I would not invest in such a company.[some emphasis, links added]
Of course, I could not invest in such a company listed on the Australian Stock Exchange, because it is a condition of listing that a company has its accounts audited by an outside auditor every six months.
Thirty years ago, I would have had little confidence in the benefits claimed for a drug in a medical journal. The pressure on researchers and companies to exaggerate was tremendous. Auditing of the processing of results from drug trials was not possible because that information was not disclosed. Since then, the medical industry has reformed. It is now standard practice to make publicly available the raw data from the drug trials, the methods used to process that data, and the software used to process that data. Interested parties can now replicate the results from the raw data. Government approval for a drug now requires this. Confidence was mostly restored.
I have little confidence in some climate datasets because:
- There are many after-the-fact adjustments, often multiple times, often decades later.
- The reasons for the adjustments are effectively secret, described only in vague terms.
- The datasets are not audited.
- The raw data and the pathways to the final datasets are not made public with complete documentation and software.
- There is a consistent tendency for revised datasets to better fit the carbon dioxide theory of global warming.
By sheer coincidence, the previous version of the data was nearly always wrong, and after each revision it agrees more with the theory. What are the odds? Genuine technical errors would move the data away from the theory as often as they moved towards it.
Replicability is at the heart of science. The final dataset must be replicable from the raw data. This means someone else can start with a copy of the raw data, run the processing software (from source code), and produce the same final dataset. If human judgment enters the process, then it too needs to be documented sufficiently so that it can be replicated.
To further improve credibility, the raw data should be posted on a publicly accessible website immediately it is collected from the field.
Climate data is like drug-trial data back in the bad old days. The current “trust me” approach is not good enough. Too often the trend in the final version of a dataset differs substantially from the trend in the raw data. There might be good reasons for this, or there might not, but no one, apart from a few insiders, knows because the data processing is kept secret.
The process of science is simple: do not trust anything unless it can be replicated. The motto of the Royal Society is relevant: “nullius in verba” or “take nobody’s word for it”.
Reputations, motives, money, popularity, political status — they are all irrelevant. What distinguishes science from other fields of knowledge acquisition is that observations and replication are the ultimate authorities on what is accepted as true.
Secret climate business is no longer adequate on a matter as important as temperature trends, yet this has been the norm. Examples in the financial and medical arenas should be followed, and a regime of full disclosure implemented. Without full disclosure, confidence in climate matters will remain low and dissatisfaction — disbelief even — will remain widespread.
The solution is audits that can replicate the final climate datasets from the raw data. This is a narrow technical exercise. Climate scientists should welcome it, just as a responsible public company welcomes an audit of its finances, or an honest medical researcher welcomes making his processing methods and software public. If the climate scientists’ methods and conclusions are basically sound, this will be revealed by the audits.
This is not a reflection on either the character or expertise of climate scientists, but I am not going to just take their word for it.
Dr David Evans built Australia’s carbon accounting software in the land use sector, FullCAM, for the Australian government, while consulting to the Australian Greenhouse Office from 1999 to 2005.
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