Wednesday, March 03, 2010

Jones - "peer review means no one looks at it..."

Remember all of that science that Al Gore assures us correct? Because, after all, it's all "peer-reviewed?" Sounds pretty formidable, doesn't it? Herds of scientists diligently poring over ever piece of data, every piece of code in the model?

Yeah, apparently not...
[On-leave CRU head Phil] Jones's general defence was that anything people didn't like – the strong-arm tactics to silence critics, the cold-shouldering of freedom of information requests, the economy with data sharing – were all "standard practice" among climate scientists. "Maybe it should be, but it's not."

And he seemed to be right. The most startling observation came when he was asked how often scientists reviewing his papers for probity before publication asked to see details of his raw data, methodology and computer codes. "They've never asked," he said.
So the CRU has produced "data," which consists of manipulated raw climate station data, apparently no longer extant, run through models of poorly-written, poorly-maintained and never reviewed computer code, and the "science is settled."

I've written a lot of software over the years, and modeled a lot of different hardware behavior in a lot of different ways, so this is something I know something about. Let me tell you this - if no one's reviewed the model, nothing that the model produces can possibly qualify as peer-reviewed1. I don't care whether an editor did a grammar check or some other acolyte at the church of AGW agrees that it accurately represents his point-of-view. If no one has walked through the process, including careful examination of the tools that produced the output, then the data isn't peer-reviewed. Or, to put it a little bit differently, if that's what passes for peer-review in the climate apocalypse movement, then none of those peer-reviewed journals are worth the paper on which they're printed.



1 - And let me just say this again - if the models cannot explain a 15-year period of non heating, which they cannot, then the models don't work. There's something either wrong or missing, but either way, the output is not trustworthy. The amount of centralized control that the Al Gore's of the world are looking for, the amount of economic devestation, is unjustifiable without far, FAR better information than we have right now...

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