Bishop Hill Blog writes, concerning the truncation of recently divergent data by Keith Briffa and others:

The point at issue is Mike’s Nature Trick and the question of whether it amounts to scientific fraud. Der Spiegel describe the trick as follows:

But what appeared at first glance to be fraud [“hide the decline”] was actually merely a face-saving fudge: Tree-ring data indicates no global warming since the mid-20th century, and therefore contradicts the temperature measurements. The clearly erroneous tree data was thus corrected by the so-called “trick” with the temperature graphs.

Many of Roger’s readers take issue with the description of the divergent data as “erroneous” and I tend to agree with them here. The data has been processed in the same way in the twentieth century as in earlier periods, so it is not erroneous, but anomalous. The reason for the divergence is unknown and the divergence therefore needs to be disclosed and discussed since it potentially undermines all tree-ring based temperature reconstructions.

Here is an example of data you might reasonably throw out as erroneous:   Drop a ball a thousand times from a building and measure its acceleration.  We know its going to be something like 9.8 m/sec/sec.  If four or five times we measure it as 5 m/sec/sec, we will likely treat those measurements as erroneous, since we have hundreds of years of historical measurements to confirm the acceleration near the Earth’s surface due to gravity.

Here is another example:   You have ten identical compasses.  Nine of them say north is in the direction of the tree in your backyard.  The tenth say it is behind you.  We might reasonably throw out the tenth observation as erroneous.

Here is a different kind of example.  From 1936 to 2000, the winner of the last Washington Redskins home game accurately predicted the winner of that year’s presidential election.  Then, in 2004 the relationship between Redskin’s performance and the presidential election did not hold.   So, should we throw out the data point as anomalous, or should we use this data point to force ourselves to reconsider whether the relationship was ever really a valid causality?

The Mann/Briffa/etc. tree ring analyses assume the following:  That tree ring growth varies linearly with average temperatures; that the temperature-growth relationship is far stronger and more dominant than relations between soil conditions, rain, sunlight, or any other environmental factor and tree growth; and that this relationship remains fairly constant over the life of a tree.

The question is, do we believe these assumptions in the same way that we believe that the acceleration of gravity is 9.8 m/sec/sec?  By throwing out the data after a certain date, which by the way was gathered from the exact same trees by the exact same methodology as the earlier data, Briffa and others are in effect saying that their assumptions about the relationship between tree ring growth and temperature are unassailable, despite the fact that these analyses have only really been done for a few years.

Reasonable people instead will tend to conclude that it is instead very possible that the divergence problem the author’s sought to hide is in fact evidence that tree rings make poor thermometers – than one or all of the assumptions about tree rings and their relationship with temperature are flawed.

From Virginia:

No one can accuse Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli of shying from controversy. In his first four months in office, Cuccinelli  directed public universities to remove sexual orientation from their anti-discrimination policies, attacked the Environmental Protection Agency, and filed a lawsuit challenging federal health care reform. Now, it appears, he may be preparing a legal assault on an embattled proponent of global warming theory who used to teach at the University of Virginia, Michael Mann.

In papers sent to UVA April 23, Cuccinelli’s office commands the university to produce a sweeping swath of documents relating to Mann’s receipt of nearly half a million dollars in state grant-funded climate research conducted while Mann— now director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State— was at UVA between 1999 and 2005.

If Cuccinelli succeeds in finding a smoking gun like the purloined emails that led to the international scandal dubbed Climategate, Cuccinelli could seek the return of all the research money, legal fees, and trebled damages.

Yeah, I get it that this was public money, so one can claim this is an accountability exercise, but in practice this is pure intimidation and harassment of an academic whose work one disagrees with.  Errors in Mann’s work should be dealt with through criticism and replication, not through legal actions by grandstanding politicians.

I am the last one to defend the dumb ass academic projects that government money often goes towards funding, but once granted, scientists and academics need some room to pursue truth (even incorrectly) without being harassed by elected officials.  I would have no problem with the entire state grant program being evaluated for effectiveness, or some investigation into UVA’s financial or academic controls it exercises over its research.

For skeptics cheering this on, would you be OK with Eric Holder going after, say, Roy Spencer in the same way?  Do you really think that if the guys in Virginia establish the precedent, the Chicago-trained folks in the White House aren’t willing and able to go one better?

Update: This seems a more productive approach.  Why not go after the University for its data sharing practices on publicly funded studies, rather than try to go after a scientist one disagrees with on criminal charges.  If we tried every academic for not fully disclosing data potentially contradictory to their pet theory, we would empty out the universities.  We handle these issues by replication and challenge by other academics.  Therefore, the better approach is to focus on release of data required to do the replication and verification.

Tycho Brahe was perhaps one of the greatest observational astronomers in history.  He amassed a tremendous amount of absolutely critical data on the motion of bodies within our solar system.  Interestingly, Brahe never accepted the Copernican heliocentric view of the solar system.  For years, he was incredibly protective of the data, refusing to share it with anyone.  Given that he (with historical hindsight) was wedded to a dead-end view of the solar system, his data was not initially valuable.

It was not until Keppler, and later Newton and others, were able to get access to his data that the data was truly useful, and it became the foundation of one of the greatest revolutions in thinking and understanding in human history.  Had Brahe insisted on the confidentiality of his data to his death, developed as it were with significant financial contributions from the state and various universities, his work would have been irrelevant, applied narrowly to support a failed theory.

I am reminded of this story when I read this:

In a landmark ruling, the UK Information Commissioner’s Office has ruled that Queen’s University Belfast must hand over data obtained during 40 years of research into 7,000 years of Irish tree rings to a City banker and part-time climate analyst, Doug Keenan.

This week, the Belfast ecologist who collected most of the data, Professor Mike Baillie, described the ruling as “a staggering injustice … We are the ones who trudged miles over bogs and fields carrying chain saws. We prepared the samples and – using quite a lot of expertise and judgment – we measured the ring patterns. Each ring pattern therefore has strong claims to be our copyright. Now, for the price of a stamp, Keenan feels he is entitled to be given all this data.”

I guess I am confused as to what the point of a public university is, if its not to contribute knowledge to the public domain.  Had Mike Baillie formed his own company with private investors to gather and monetize tree ring data, he would be absolutely correct, and I would be the first to defend him.   I would love to see the grant application or funding proposal he submitted for this work.  “We would like public funds in the amount of X to gather tree ring data and keep this data absolutely secret so that no one can check or replicate our results.”   Actively fighting replication is not a very positive indicator of confidence in one’s scientific results.