November 29, 2009

University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit admits slipshod research practices
by Bill Levinson

We reported previously that the Environmental Protection Agency allegedly committed scientific misconduct and academic dishonesty by ordering a researcher to suppress information that did not support the Obama Administration’s agenda of implementing carbon emission caps. As reported by the Wall Street Journal’s Kimberly Strassel,

Dr. Alan Carlin, a 37-year agency veteran, was muzzled earlier this spring. Dr. Carlin offered a report poking holes in the science underlying the theory of manmade global warming. His superior … complained the paper did “not help the legal or policy case” for Team Obama’s decision to regulate carbon, told him to “move on to other issues,” and forbade him from discussing it outside the office.

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) meanwhile wrote openly in her letter to the Wall Street Journal that the real purpose of cap and trade is to enrich companies like Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan Chase, along with the Green Exchange and New York Stock Exchange. Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan Chase each bundled more than half a million dollars in campaign contributions to help elect Obama, and they also contributed to Gillibrand. Now the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit has admitted to destruction of original data--a practice that anybody who has ever taken a high school science class knows to be slipshod, incompetent, or even worse.

As reported by the United Kingdom’s Sunday Times,

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”

The CRU is the world’s leading centre for reconstructing past climate and temperatures. Climate change sceptics have long been keen to examine exactly how its data were compiled. That is now impossible.

The first thing that any teenager who takes a high school, or even a junior high school, science class learns is that a laboratory notebook is a permanent record. It is NEVER acceptable to cover an entry with whiteout, tear out a page, or otherwise obliterate an entry. In our experience with industrial statistics, it is never acceptable to delete raw data while keeping only the summary statistics (such as population mean and standard deviation). An outlier, or a measurement that is far out of line with the rest of the population, can be excluded from calculations but never deleted from the set of raw data; the correct practice is to leave it in place while indicating that it is believed to be an outlier. The reason is that objective theoretical or applied research, or control of manufacturing processes, requires that all raw data, observations, and so on be available for inspection and testing by other scientists, engineers, and so on.

We must state up front that we are not familiar with the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit’s publications on global warming trends, but a “trend” suggests a time series model such as autoregressive, moving average, or a combination. The first thing you do with your time series model is to determine whether its residuals follow a bell curve. If the Climatic Research Unit did not do this, and threw away the raw data so nobody else can do it, whatever model it put together might as well not exist. We must emphasize “if,” because we do not know how the CRU handled its time series data; the key point is that throwing the data away makes it impossible for other people to verify the results independently.

The bottom line is that the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit has just admitted openly that it did not adhere to perhaps the most basic practice of scientific research, which makes the entire proposition of “global warming” and the need to counteract it with carbon taxes and so on a multitrillion dollar Piltdown Man. The only difference between the original Piltdown Man and global warming hysteria consists of intent; the former was a deliberate hoax or practical joke while the latter was the result of honest but slipshod (specifically, throwing away data and thus making independent verification or replication of the research impossible) practices.

Compare this to Emory University’s “Guidelines for the Responsible Conduct of Scholarship and Research:”

Each faculty member/preceptor is ultimately responsible for the maintenance and proper retention of research records. These records should include sufficient detail to permit examination for the purposes of replicating the research, responding to questions that may result from unintentional error or misinterpretation, establishing their authenticity, and confirming the validity of the conclusions.

In the case of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, however, “other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.”

The University of Pittsburgh says,

The retention of accurately recorded and retrievable research data is of utmost importance for the progress of scientific integrity. The investigator must have clearly defined responsibility for recording, retaining, and storing research data. These records should include sufficient detail to permit examination for the purpose of replicating the research, responding to questions that may result from unintentional error or misinterpretation, establishing authenticity of the records, and confirming the validity of the conclusions.

The University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit’s admitted practices fell far short of what most people in the scientific community know to be common sense standards for scientific research, and its alarmist findings about “global warming” can therefore be dismissed accordingly. The time has come to finally consign cap and trade to the trash heap along with Albert Gore’s self-serving and self-enriching hype, and the self-serving and self-enriching agenda of Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase, the Green Exchange, and the U.S. Climate Action Partnership.