The Policy Lass

BBC has an article up titled “Climate data “not well organized”.

Here’s an excerpt:

Phil Jones, the professor behind the “Climategate” affair, has admitted some of his decades-old weather data was not well enough organised.

He said this contributed to his refusal to share raw data with critics – a decision he says he regretted. Continue reading →…

Here’s a bit of a news roundup concerning the Independent Review.

According to an article in The Guardian, the ICCER will not “audit” the scienific conclusions of the CRU scientists and their work. It will instead focus on issues relating to the alleged abuses of power made against them based on the CRU emails.

Here’s an excerpt:

The inquiry set up by the University of East Anglia into thousands of emails from its climate scientists published online will ignore the question of whether or not global warming is caused by human activity, the chair of the inquiry team said today. Continue reading →…

Note: This post is a work in progress. Expect some revision as the time goes by.

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Some interesting discussions around the climate blogosphere re: post-normal science.

Horror Fish

Watts Up With That has a guest post by Jerome Ravetz himself titled: “Climategate: Plausibility and the blogosphere in the post-normal age”.

Here is an excerpt:

Climategate is particularly significant because it cannot be blamed on the well-known malign influences from outside science, be they greedy corporations or an unscrupulous State.  This scandal, and the resulting crisis, was created by people within science who can be presumed to have been acting with the best of intentions.  In the event of a serious discrediting of the global-warming claims, public outrage would therefore be directed at the community of science itself, and (from within that community) at its leaders who were either ignorant or complicit until the scandal was blown open.  If we are to understand Climategate, and move towards a restoration of trust, we should consider the structural features of the situation that fostered and nurtured the damaging practices.  I believe that the ideas of Post-Normal Science (as developed by Silvio Funtowicz and myself) can help our understanding. [my emphasis]

How convenient… Continue reading →…

The Guardian is creating a public document letting anyone who wants, anonymously or not, edit it.

In a unique experiment, The Guardian has published online the full manuscript of its major investigation into the climate science emails stolen from the University of East Anglia, which revealed apparent attempts to cover up flawed data; moves to prevent access to climate data; and to keep research from climate sceptics out of the scientific literature.

As well as including new information about the emails, we will allow web users to annotate the manuscript to help us in our aim of creating the definitive account of the controversy. This is an attempt at a collaborative route to getting at the truth.

Continue reading →…