freedom of research

Showing posts with label freedom of research. Show all posts

Sunday, 3 May 2015

Gavin Schmidt, welcome to Hamburg

Neglecting to monitor the harm done to nature and the environmental impact of our decisions is only the most striking sign of a disregard for the message contained in the structures of nature itself.
Pope Francis

Bad Astronomer is mad:

A passel of anti-science global warming denying GOP [USA Republican party] representatives have put together a funding authorization bill for NASA that at best cuts more than $300 million from the agency’s current Earth science budget. At worst? More than $500 million. ... The authorization bill passed along party lines (19 Republicans to 15 Democrats).

Bad Astronomer also reported that last year the Republicans shifted the climate research funding for NOAA towards weather prediction.

John Timmer of Ars Technica adds:

The bill comes a week after the same committee reauthorized the America COMPETES act, which includes funding for the National Science Foundation and Department of Energy. As at NASA, geoscience funding takes a hit, down 12 percent at the NSF, with environmental research from the DOE taking a 10 percent hit.

There seems to be a pattern.

One wonders if they know what they are doing.

I would personally interpret a reduction in the budget for climate research as claiming: the science is settled. If these Republicans were sceptical about climate science, they would want to fund research to find the reason for the misunderstanding. The consensus of 97% of climate scientists, myself included, that global warming is happening, is caused by us and will continue if we do not do something, will not go away by itself. That will require research, arguments, evidence. In this light it would make sense when Democrats would shift science funding from climate research to climate solution, but they may realise that there are more considerations.

It also goes against the motto of the mitigation sceptics that we should help ourselves and adapt to climate change, rather than to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Because then we should know what to adapt to.

When it comes to the relationship between greenhouse gasses and global mean temperature, our understanding of climate change is pretty solid. Not perfect, science never is, but pretty solid. For adaptation, however, you need local information; global means are not enough. That is a lot harder, that requires that all the changes in the circulation of the oceans and the atmosphere are rightly predicted. It likely depends on aerosol concentrations (small atmospheric particles), on changes in the vegetation, water tables, sea ice.

Many impacts of climate change will be due to severe and extreme weather. Sea level rise, for example, endangers low lying regions, but the sea dikes will breach on a stormy day, thus you also need to know how storms change. Thus for adaptation you do not only need to know the annual or decadal average temperature, you need to know the changes in atmospheric events that happen on short time scales. From minutes to days for severe weather, from weeks to months for heat waves and droughts. This is hard for the same reasons why predicting local changes is hard.

It is not enough to know what happens to temperature, while especially precipitation and storms are very hard to predict accurately. They are, however, very important for agriculture, infrastructure, flood prevention, dikes, and landslides. When it comes to infrastructure or long term private investments, we would need to know such changes decades in advance. Alternatively, you could "adapt" to any possible change, but that is very expensive.

This is the kind of detail we need to prepare our communities to adapt to climate change. This is hard and very much ongoing research. If you are taking the bet that adaptation is enough, it does not seem wise to leave the American public unprepared.

Earth observation is also much more than climate. The same satellites, the same understanding of these measurements and deriving information products from them are used in meteorology. One of the main reason why casualties due to severe weather are decreasing is because of good weather predictions, we see the bad weather coming and can respond in time. Good weather predictions start with a good description of the state of the atmosphere at the start of the weather prediction (called [[data assimilation]]). More computer power, better models, better assimilation methods and detailed global Earth observations are responsible for the improved modern weather predictions. My guess would be that the better observations are easily responsible for half of the improvements. While I work on ground-based measurements, I must admit that for accurate weather predictions beyond one or two days the global overview of satellites is essential.

Other applications of Earth observations:

- assisting wildfire managers in wildfire recovery
- supplying farmers with knowledge about when to grow which crops and where
- drought/famine prediction
- the effects of deforestation and natural disasters (such as landslides, earthquakes, hurricanes, etc.) on local communities and surrounding ecosystems

Earth observation is also important to organize the rescue work after catastrophes. Think Hurricane Katrina.

The funding reductions also give the impression that climatologists are punished for their politically inconvenient message. Maybe these Republicans think that they can influence the state of the science by beating scientists in submission. This will not work. Science is not organised like a think tank, which are there to write any bunk that the big boss wants written.

Science is a free market of ideas. Like the free market uses distributed information on how to efficiently organize an economy, science is highly distributed and cannot be controlled from the top. Every researcher is a small entrepreneur, trying to search for problems that are interesting and solvable. Science is organised in small groups. If your group does not function, you'd better get out before your reputation and publication record suffer. Multiple such groups are at one university or research institute. In one country you will find many universities and institutes. All these groups in many countries are all competing and collaborating with each other. Competing for the best ideas, because it is fun and get more possibilities to do research. The currency is reputation.

Your articles are peer reviewed by several anonymous colleagues selected by a journal editor, research proposals are reviewed by several senior anonymous colleagues selected by the funding agency, the university groups and institutes are regularly reviewed by groups of senior scientists. You are competing to be able to collaborate with better groups. This web of competitive and collaborative relations is designed to get the best ideas to float up and to make it hard to apply pressure top down. Add to this researchers who are fiercely independent, intrinsically motivated and do science because they want to challenge themselves, understand the world and measure themselves with the best. At least the majority of people starting with research is intrinsically motivated. The climate "debate" gives the impression that for some the joy of science fades with age.

Even if it would be better for American scientists to shut up and spread Republican propaganda, no one could enforce that, while there are strong enforcement mechanisms for the quality of science. I am sure that most American scientists that would be pressured by the Republicans would still stick to the truth. You get into science because you want to understand reality. Scientists accept low pay and bad labour conditions to do so. If they are no longer allowed to tell the truth, I would expect most scientists to move to another group, to another country or simply to stop.

Punishing scientists for their inconvenient message also send a bad signal to the world. A country with a government meddling in the results of scientific research is not attractive. A large part of the scientists in America come from abroad. New high potentials may now think twice before they go to America.

Researchers may go to my birth country (The Netherlands) or home country (Germany)instead. They have freedom of science and research in their constitutions. In both countries you only need English to do your work and nowadays you can also get by in daily life with English (although I would still advice to learn the local language for better social integration). For Germany I know that we are always looking for good scientists. Too little students start studying meteorology to fill the vacancies. They even took me as a physicist because they could not get any better.

In the 17th century, when in most of Europe's rulers did not tolerate deviating thoughts, The Netherlands was a haven of tolerance and experienced a golden century. This little country attracted an enormous influx of the best scholars, scientists and artists from all over Europe, introduced many free market innovations, became a world power. Before and during the Second World War many Jewish and German scientists migrated to America because of the repression in Europe. This has kick started American science. The repression of scientific freedom has real economic and cultural consequences.

One wonders if they know what they are doing. The GOP representative, that is. They almost unanimously have trouble accepting that we are responsible to (almost) all the warming seen in the last century. The normal Republicans (except for the Tea Party) fit into the American mainstream when it comes to accepting that climate change is real. The very vocal mitigation sceptics on the net that give America a bad name abroad only represent a few percent of the population. One wonders when these normal people tell their politicians to get their act together.

In the realm of climate research, my guess would be that Europe is already a little stronger than the USA. The aggressive mitigation sceptics to do not make America more attractive. The FOIA harassment in response to inconvenient science does not make America more attractive. When the political radicals are determined to hurt American interests and pass this bill, I would like to invite Gavin Schmidt to Germany. In am sure the Max Planck Institute in Hamburg would be interested. The Max Planck Foundation was specially founded to attract the best researchers from all over the world by providing them with a lot of freedom of research. After all, top researchers know best what is important for science. Gavin welcome to Hamburg, your [[ICE]] is waiting.

Friday, 27 February 2015

Stop all harassment of all scientists now

This week Greenpeace revealed that aerospace engineer Willie Soon got funding of over one million dollars from the fossil fuel industry and related organizations. However, Soon did not declare these conflicts of interest, while many scientific journals he wrote for do require this. His home institution is now investigating these irregularities.

Possibly inspired by this event, Member of the U.S. House of Representatives for Arizona Raúl M. Grijalva (Dem) has requested information on funding of seven mitigation sceptical scientists that have testified before the US congress. Next to funding also the drafts of the testimonies and any correspondence about them are requested. The seven letters went to the employers of: David Legates, John Christy, Judith Curry, Richard Lindzen, Robert Balling, Roger Pielke and Steven Hayward.

This is harassment of scientists for their politically inconvenient positions. That is wrong and should not happen. This is a violation of the freedom of research.

Judith Curry and Roger Pielke Jr. are on twitter and I was happy to see that basically everyone agreed that targeting scientists for political aims is wrong. There was a lot of support for them from all sides of this weird US climate "debate".

Looks like I am up next in this 'witch hunt' http://t.co/nBrw3T7DXy
— Judith Curry (@curryja) February 24, 2015

@RogerPielkeJr Welcome to the new McCarthyism. Congress should not be able to investigate on a whim. You have my *unequivocal* support.
— Eric Steig (@ericsteig) February 24, 2015

[UPDATE. The American Meteorological Society also sees these letters as wrong: "Publicly singling out specific researchers based on perspectives they have expressed and implying a failure to appropriately disclose funding sources — and thereby questioning their scientific integrity — sends a chilling message to all academic researchers... We encourage the Committee to rely on the full corpus of peer-reviewed literature on climate science as the most reliable source for knowledge and understanding that can be applied to the policy options before you."]

After these signs of solidarity, maybe this is the right moment to agree that all harassment of all scientists is wrong and change the rules. I would personally prefer that the Freedom of Science gets constitutional rank everywhere, like it already has in Germany having learned from the meddling in science during the Third Reich. At least we should change the law and stop the harassment, especially by the governments and politicians.

Next to the affair around Willie Soon, the open record requests by Democrat Rep. Grijalva may also have been inspired by the plans of Oklahoma Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe and California Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher. They announced this week their plans to investigate the politically inconvenient temperature record of NASA-GISS. This not too long after a congressional audit which kept the scientists of the National Climate Data Centre (NOAA-NCDN) from their important work.

@caerbannog666 expect there to be congressional hearings into NASA altering weather station data to falsely indicate warming & sea rise
— Dana Rohrabacher (@DanaRohrabacher) February 20, 2015

The new investigation of GISS is all the more ironic as the GISS dataset is nowadays basically the NCDC dataset, but with a reduced trend due to an additional attempt to reduce the effect of urbanization. Probably these two mitigation sceptical politician do not even know that they will investigate an institution that makes the trend smaller. Just like most mitigation sceptics do not seem to know that the net effect of all adjustments for non-climatic changes is a reduction in global warming.

It is not as if this was the first harassment of inconvenient climate scientists. As the Union of Concerned Scientists writes:

Notably, the requests from Rep. Grijalva are considerably less invasive than a request made in 2005 by Rep. Joe Barton for materials from Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann. Rep. Barton’s request sought not only funding information but also data, computer code, research methods, information related to his participation in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (including report reviewers), and detailed justifications of several of his scientific calculations. The Barton requests were roundly condemned by scientists, and were part of a long history of harassment of Dr. Mann and his colleagues.

Seeing @repraulgrijalva request for @rogerpielkejr finances, would he be okay with @jiminhofe doing same for others http://t.co/6DhAlsTobN
— Andy Revkin (@Revkin) February 24, 2015

Then we did not yet mention the report in which Republican Senator James Inhofe called for the persecution of 17 named inconvenient climate scientists and more not named scientists. We did not yet mention the political attack of the Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli on Michael Mann, which the Virginia Supreme Court halted after costing the university nearly $600,000 for legal fees.

The harassment is not limited to the USA. There was an action of the mitigation sceptics to ask Phil Jones of the UK Climate Research Unit (CRU) for the data and contracts with the weather services for five random countries. The same Phil Jones of the politically inconvenient CRUT global temperature curve whose emails were stolen and widely distributed by the mitigation sceptics. Emails which did not contain any evidence of wrongdoings, but spreading them is an efficient way to punish Jones for his inconvenient work by hurting his professional network.

In New Zealand, the Member of Parliament Mr. Hide filed 80 parliamentary questions to the the maintainers of the temperature record of New Zealand. As a result the minister requested an audit by the Australian Weather Service, which costed the researchers several months of work. The mitigation sceptics in New Zealand have on started a foundation for juridical attacks. When the judge ordered these mitigation sceptics to pay the costs of the trail, NZ$89,000, the foundation filed for bankruptcy, leaving the tax payers with the costs.

Open records laws

Open records does not help to check a scientific consensus. Scientists judge the evidence collectively, as historian of science Naomi Orekes states. Chris Mooney writes, in a beautiful piece on motivated reasoning, explains that this means that individual scientists are not important:

We should trust the scientific community as a whole but not necessarily any individual scientist. Individual scientists will have many biases, to be sure. But the community of scientists contains many voices, many different agendas, many different skill sets. The more diverse, the better.

This may come as a surprise to people who get their science from blogs or mass media. Mitigation sceptical blogs like to single out a small number of public scientists. Possibly not to make it visible how many scientists stand behind our understanding of climate change, possibly to dissuade other scientists from speaking in public.

Journalists like to focus on people and tell stories about how single persons revolutionised entire scientific fields. Even in the most medially hyped examples of clearly brilliant scientists such as Einstein and Feynman this is not true. If other scientists had not checked the consequences of their claims, these claims would have been a cry in deep vacuum. Journalists also tend to exaggerate the importance of single (new) scientific articles with spectacular and thus make the huge number of less sexy articles invisible.

These journalists would like to be allowed to do almost anything for a juicy story. In the Columbia Journalism Review, a journalist complained that exemptions for science “made it difficult for journalists to look into (Penn State’s) football sex abuse scandal.” I fail to see why journalists should have extra rights to investigate sex scandals, when they happen at public institutions. If they want more rights, then everyone should be affected, also private universities, companies and journalists. Personally I am not sure if I want to live in such a post-privacy world.

This kind of invasion of privacy has real consequences. I notice that colleagues in countries with Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) harassment write short and formal mails, whereas they are just as talkative at conferences or on the telephone. That is only natural, when you write for the front page of the New York Times you put in more effort to make sure that every detail is right and clear. If you have to put in that amount of effort for every mail to a colleague, you naturally write less. This hinders scholarly communication.

Mitigation sceptics that are convinced that top scientists control science and determine what is acceptable for publication should welcome strong confidentiality even more. That allows the honest scientists to build a coalition and get rid of these supposedly dishonest scientists. More realistically, scientists need to be able to warn their colleagues about errors in the work or character of other people.

Finally, scientists are also humans and write about private things. That is important to keep networks strong. The more so because for many science is not just a profession, but a vocation. Thus boundaries between private and work can be vague.

Thus I would argue that scientific findings should be checked by scientists. That includes everyone who invested the time to make himself an expert, not just the professionals. However, that is not the role of journalists and certainly not of politicians.

In my view, scientists should stand together against political intimidation from any side. We'll sort out scientific disagreements ourselves
— Richard Betts (@richardabetts) February 25, 2015

Openness

There are naturally cases where the public may want to know more about what is happening at academic institutions. The funding of science is a good example. It has been shown that the funding source influences the results of medical research. This should thus be disclosed.

Industry funding of science is welcome, but it should happen openly. Representatives of industry have complained that that would make it impossible for them to collaborate with universities, because that would give competing firms strategic information and would allow them to copy the ideas. I would argue that when the research is that straightforward, it is not something for a university.

At some universities in Switzerland and at the University of Cologne there have recently been protests against companies funding large amounts of research and about contractual conditions that limit scientists in their work. This can also limit the freedom of science and we need rules for this. It should not lead to a situation where industry research is sold as independent academic research.

It should never be possible to firms to stop the publication of results. A contract with Willie Soon stated that he was not allowed to disclose his funding. I feel such conditions should not be allowed. Some people complained about contractual obligations or scientists to inform the firms of their work. I would feel that that is still okay, it is natural that the firms are interested in a transfer the knowledge. Also in case of larger joint projects, scientists are expected to show up at general meetings of the project.

Sometimes replication of scientific work is hard, for example in case of large dietary studies or clinical trails. This makes it hard for scientists to check such research without access to the original data. Also in climatology it would be very beneficial if the governments around the world would allow a free transfer of observational data. Climate data is often withheld for commercial and military reasons. While climate data is valuable, the number of people willing to pay for them is small and the fees minimal. The military value of climate data is disappearing due to the accuracy of modern global weather predictions.

In all the above cases and maybe more, we should not work with open record laws, but make the information open for everyone for every case. In this way these laws cannot be abused for attacks on scientists doing politically inconvenient work. Criminal investigations should naturally be possible, scientists are humans, but should never, ever be ordered by politicians, such as in the case of Senator Inhofe. We should protect the separation of powers, such political orders should be illegal.

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Sunday, 3 May 2015

Gavin Schmidt, welcome to Hamburg

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Friday, 27 February 2015

Stop all harassment of all scientists now

Open records laws

Openness

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Sunday, 3 May 2015

Gavin Schmidt, welcome to Hamburg

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Friday, 27 February 2015

Stop all harassment of all scientists now

Open records laws

Openness

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