A little bit more on BEST and Watts

I wrote a short post recently about the hot air surrounding the new surface temperature record being compiled at Berkeley.

One of the issues was the data sample that was used in preliminary BEST analysis that was being discussed.

UPDATE (31/3/2011 11:58am): Carbon Brief have some graphs to show how similar the 2% sample is to NOAA, GISS and HadCRU.

It seems that Watts was mistaken about the 2% sample of BEST data being from Japan. He updated his post in the last few days:

“ERRATA: I made a mistake regarding the 2% figure, I misheard what was being presented during my visit with the BEST team at Berkeley. As many of you may know I’m about 80% hearing impaired and the presentation made to me was entirely verbal with some printed graphs. Based on the confidentiality I agreed to, I did not get to come back with any of those graphs, notes, or data so I had to rely on what I heard. I simply misheard and thought the 2% were the Japan station analysis graphs that they showed me.

I was in touch with Dr. Richard Muller on 3/28/2011 who graciously pointed out my misinterpretation. I regret the error, and thus issue this correction about the 2% figure being truly a random sample, and not just stations in the Japan test presentation shown to me.”

It’s just a shame that he didn’t notice the contradiction between the BEST statement (“random”) and his own understanding (“Japan”) before writing his post and shouting down commenters asking for clarification (i.e. “Ah I see you are immediately back to wasting everyone’s time…“).

RealClimate libel threat

The publishers of the journal Energy & Environment have threatened libel action against the RealClimate blog because of remarks they made about the peer review process in E&E.

The key quote that upset them, from this post, was:

“The evidence for this is in precisely what happens in venues like E&E that have effectively dispensed with substantive peer review for any papers that follow the editor’s political line.”

I think it is somewhat cowardly of E&E to threaten this libel action as it is often used to silence critics when their arguments can’t be refuted with evidence (see the RealClimate post for examples and then go and sign the petition to reform English libel laws).

If E&E can defend their peer review system, then I think should do so. What would be even better is if E&E took the plunge and opened up their peer review process and became a model for other journals. After all, many of the “skeptics” who have published in or are on the editorial board of E&E have called for the peer review process to open up. Here’s a great opportunity to make some progress on that front!

I wrote their publishers a letter explaining my view:

Dear Bill Hughes,

I have just read the letter that you sent to RealClimate regarding their criticism of the peer review process in E&E. I am disappointed that you consider a libel threat a valid response to their post.

Indeed, if E&E has a robust peer review process then this opportunity could be taken to open that process up. In doing so, you could not only refute the claims made by RealClimate but also become a trailblazer for a system to replace the current model of anonymous/closed peer review, which is often criticised for favouring the consensus view on subjects like climate change.

I look forward to an imaginative and constructive response from E&E.

Yours sincerely,

Andrew Russell

WUWT alarmism?

Watts Up With That? recently published a post about an improvement to a method developed by Steig et al. (2009). This paper aimed to identify temperature trends over the data sparse Antarctic. The improved method has been accepted for publication in Journal of Climate, which is a decent achievement.

Firstly, I think its great that this exchange of ideas is happening in the peer-reviewed literature and not only on blogs.

I say this because, as Watts demonstrates, blogs can be used to insinuate things that are not the case.

For example, there is a quote from one of the paper authors in the post:

“I would hope that our paper is not seen as a repudiation of Steig’s results, but rather as an improvement.”

Yet Watts decided to title his post “Skeptic paper on Antarctica accepted – rebuts Steig et al”. Whilst I realise the difference between “rebut” and “repudiate”, it strikes me as poor form.

There also seems to be a tone of indignation in Watts’ part of the post about how long it took to get the paper through peer review and that one of the “difficult” reviewers had probably been involved with the initial paper:

“Anyone want to bet that reviewer was a “[hockey] team” member?”

I don’t understand why Watts is surprised about this: if you contribute something novel to the literature then the peer review process assesses that work against itself; if, on the other hand, you criticise and amend other people’s work then it would be irresponsible of the journal editor not to send the paper to one of the people being questioned.

Anyway, so what is the difference between the two analyses? Here are the plots that are provided before the paper is published properly:

The striking differences in the update are the increased positive trend on the peninsula and a “new” negative trend from the South Pole to the eastern Weddell Sea. The positive trend over most of Western Antarctica has also largely gone.

I expect Real Climate will post a response once the full paper is published so I don’t want to try to pick the methods apart here.

However, it struck me as a little odd that Watts was almost celebrating the re-affirmation of a massive warming on the Antarctic Peninsula!

Sure, the atmospheric dynamics of this region are very complicated and it’s not clear exactly what the distribution of temperature changes mean. But this “victory” seemed to focus more on getting one over the “hockey team” (ugh) rather than achieving something potentially useful.

Ryan O’Donnell, Nicholas Lewis, Steve McIntyre, Jeff Condon (2011). Improved methods for PCA-based reconstructions: case study using the Steig et al. (2009) Antarctic temperature reconstruction Journal of Climate, in press

Social media and academia

Social media applications – like blogs, twitter, wikis and other “web 2.0” applications – are becoming very popular. But what sort of impact have they had in the academic context?

My university is keen to get postdocs using these tools to improve collaboration and their skills base. It has recently run a couple of courses to help people on this journey.

I went along as I’m a relative newcomer to these things and thought I’d blog the useful points in case anyone else could benefit from what I thought was interesting.

Both courses were run by Cristina Costa from the University of Salford, who really knew her stuff.

1. Developing a Researcher Profile through Social Media

This idea of an online researcher profile is becoming important.

For example, I recently had an interview for a lectureship and some of the feedback was specifically about my blog. The university was really keen to get their staff active online in the hope that potential students, particularly overseas students, will find the university via their staff’s web presence.

So, the first session looked at how you can develop a profile and how to keep on top of it. Cristina had prepared a useful image showing the tools that she had found most useful in developing her online profile.

This course was aimed at people with any level of experience. As I’d been a bit more active than most people there, I was asked to share the sort of things I’d been up to. So it seems worth quickly recounting this here as well…

I got into blogging via Twitter – seeing what other people were saying made me think that I could have something to contribute. This is especially so as blogging on climate is largely dominated by those from the “skeptic” side of things.

I had previously blogged on-and-off for NOISEmakers (a campaign trying to get people more interested in science and engineering) and when I started writing this post I remembered that I had a another blog where I used to reflect on training courses I’d attended. I suppose this post really belongs on that blog but it seems relevant here as well.  But neither of those have had the impact of this blog.

The high point of my blogging career to date came when The Guardian linked to a post of mine in an article relating to the Institute of Physics and an evidence submission that they made to a Science and Technology Committee investigation.

So Twitter was my inspiration and I really like it – I feel like I’m part of a community on there. However, I do have one problem with it: I don’t feel like I’m free to be me on Twitter. Now that I know it represents a part of my “researcher profile” I feel the need to be relatively professional on there. This is a bit of a shame as I’ve “met” some really interesting people on Twitter and I sometimes think that I come across as quite boring! I suppose I could go down the route of having a second, personal account but, as yet, I’ve not done that.

This session was most useful for me as time to reflect on what I’ve been doing but I also found out about a nice tool called Slideshare, which I might start using.

2. Social Media for Research: Collaboration, Resources & Dissemination

This session was really useful.

For example, the project I’ve been associated with for the last couple years have tried to use wikis to coordinate the research and keep everyone up to date. However, they’ve failed to achieve much, largely because no-one really knew what to do with them or even how to edit them. So now that I have a few ideas of how to get a wiki working, I’ll set one up for my new project, which starts soon.

I think the best way to summarise this session is with a list of the sort of tools we looked at, with an example of each type. I’ve also included my experience of each one following the link:

Co-writing: google docs [Ok for getting a document going but forget about formatting. Good for web surveys too.]

Collecting resources: diigo.com [I’ve never really got into web bookmarking although I do like igoogle for keeping track of blogs.]

Taking notes: evernote.com [Got this on my phone but not really started using it yet.]

Sharing files: dropbox.com [Love this! Great for backing up key documents, making shared folders for teams and getting a URL for a document to make it public.]

Organising references: mendeley.com [I have high hopes for Mendeley – here’s my profile. I always struggled with the discipline needed to keep EndNote up to date but having access on various platforms to a single database version like this makes a lot of sense.]

Collective intelligence: ning.com [I actually had no idea that I was already a member a ning network – ClimateSciNet – until I went to the page and looked at the URL. I guess they are professional networking sites but rely on gaining critical mass and having members that are willing to communicate and collaborate with new people.]

Joint projects: pbworks.com [I’m setting up new project wiki to keep remote partners up to date with developments and it seems quite user-friendly. I expect I’ll need to push people to keep it up to date and delegate specific elements to individuals.]

Its going to take me a while to get to grips with all these tools and I expect some of them will be a waste of time. I can, though, see that some of them will make processes more effective and make my work more visible to more people.