We Are Open and Honest With Everyone Who Agrees With Us

Phil Jones is now on the record saying that he doesn’t consider it normal scientific practice to share data and results with other scientists who wish to replicate his findings.  And, it is pretty clear that Hughs tended to get a big fat pass from all his reviewers of published works, stating that no reviewer ever asked for his data, methodoloby, or computer code.

Warwick Hughes makes a pretty good case that in fact Jones was quite open with his data and working papers, as long as he thought the requestor was on his side.  Once he found out certain people were working to replicated and find errors in his work, those people were locked out.   The impressin one gets from his article is that there is now a pretty easy answer to “how can all these climate scientists be so wrong?”  The answer is that they have never had any scrutiny whatsoever on their results, and anyone who attempted such scrutiny were marginalized and vilified by the inner core community.

Stephen Mosher writes:

When it comes to deciding whether to share data or not, standards have nothing to do with the decisions Jones made and he knows that. He knows he shared confidential data with Rutherford while he denied it to McIntyre and Hughes. He knows he regarded the confidentiality of those agreements quixotically. Violating them or hiding behind them on a whim. This was scientific malpractice. Lying about that now is beyond excuse.

11 thoughts on “We Are Open and Honest With Everyone Who Agrees With Us”

  1. You mean Jones got a big fat pass from his reviewers, not “Hughs” I think. Also “impressin” should be “impression”.

  2. The point you should be making is that Jones and his co-workers (including many at the IPCC) do not qualify for the designation “Scientists”. People who do science do not conceal data. Period. Any worker who does so, as Jones has admitted doing, forfeits the right to be considered a scientist.

    Jones et. al. have done lasting harm to science as a field of human inquiry, but they have performed one useful service in that they have settled the issue about “settled science”.

  3. Phil Jones has repeatedly claimed that the data that he used for his computer models is freely available from the original sources and I believe that Micheal Mann has used the same argument. Are they hoping that the person that they are addressing will be unaware that another scientist would require to know precisely which sets of data had been used and the precise methodology they had used in order to check their work?

    It would also appear to me that Phil Jones must have known only too well how shaky his data and methods were. If his science had been robust he would have had no problem at all with sceptics trying to pick fault with it because he would have known that it would stand up to their best efforts.

  4. The best cons are the ones that operate in the open with the support of the victims.
    Jones, Mann, Hansen, Gore, etc. etc. are very open, and very well loved:
    They are open about doctoring data, making stuff up, hiding processes, avoiding real peer review, etc.
    But the science is correct, so they are just being boys.

  5. I get the ‘impressin’ that his ‘methodoloby’ may not have been perfect.
    If Jones had not shared his data and code with anyone then he could have been partly right.
    If he had chosen to not publish his work at all he would have been fully correct.

  6. and yet your post doesn’t distinguish with those that disagree with him scientifically or politically. It makes sense not to share hard-earned data with people are more concerned with discrediting you than in advancing scientific understanding.

  7. Phil Jones now admits that there has been no global warming since 1995. But the warmists will reply that this proves nothing, as neither was there a warming from 1940 till 1970, though afterwards the warming came again “with a revenge”. So there we are.

  8. Dan,

    Your distinction makes a mockery of the self-correcting character of science. It amounts to saying that agreeing with me is “advancing scientific understanding” while disagreeing is simply “discrediting”. The whole point of science is that it’s subject to “discrediting”. One makes one’s data available to everyone, for the purpose of their trying to find fault. That’s the way science works. If it doesn’t work that way it’s not science, and it doesn’t work. If one is involved in scientific work and won’t make one’s data and methodology freely available, then what one’s doing, scientific or not, isn’t ‘science’, it’s private commercial or political development. Disputants should be judged on the value of their disputes, not a subjective estimate of their ‘expected’ worth in advance. Jones, et al. very clearly wandered off the tracks and ended up engaged in some activity distinctly NOT science, but more like political or ideological advocacy.

  9. This sort of thing is more common than one might think.

    Scientists have put out the myth that they are not subject to normal human failings, and that myth is wrong. The warmists have also tried to convince people that “peer reviewed” means correct and not “peer reviewed” means pseudo-science, when in fact peer review is primarily a way of ensuring the quality of papers, and does not guarantee the quality of the science.

    Too many scientists, in other words, are trying to convince others that they are right, just because they are scientists, when it is the method, often only over a long period of meandering and false directions, that converges on truth.

  10. Dan,
    Please show me the history of your interesting idea about scientists choosing who to share data with.
    It is fascinating to consider the idea that science is not to be tested rigorously, but rather is to be shared only with those who support your work.

Comments are closed.