14 replies to this topic

[Rogerdodger]

Everything you have posted on this site is related to political policies

Science, medicine, and religion all play harlot to, and victims of, politics.

[stocks]

The original blog source.
The back and forth in the comments section are interesting.


Allegations of fraud at Albany - the Wang case


Professor Wei-Chyung Wang is a star scientist in the Atmospheric Sciences Research Center at the University at Albany, New York. He is a key player in the climate change debate (see his self-description here). Wang has been accused of scientific fraud.

I have no inclination to "weigh in" on the topic of climate change. However the case involves issues of integrity that are at the very core of proper science. These issues are the same whether they are raised in a pharmaceutical clinical trial, in a basic science laboratory, by a climate change "denialist" or a "warmist". The case involves the hiding of data, access to data, and the proper description of "method" in science.

The case is also of interest because it provides yet another example of how *not* to create trust in a scientific misconduct investigation. It adds to the litany of cases suggesting that Universities cannot be allowed to investigate misconduct of their own star academics. The University response has so far been incoherent on its face.

Comments


In the absence of any explanation to the contrary, it seems that the methodology for station selection as described in these two publications was false or at best grossly misleading.
Wang maintains that hard copy records do exist detailing the location of stations selected by himself outwith the published methodology. However the refusal to clarify "method" is inappropriate and a form of misconduct in and of itself. It does not lend credence to Wang's assertion that fraud did not take place. It would also be necessary to see records of stations that were not selected, in order to confirm that selection was indeed random, and only "on the basis of station history".

The University at Albany is in a difficult position.
If the University received such records as part of the supposed misconduct investigation, then they could easily resolve the problem by making them available to the scientific community and to readers.
If the University does not have such records then they have been complicit in misconduct and in coverup of misconduct.
If the University at Albany does have such records, but such records are not in accordance with the stated methodology of the publications, then the University has more serious difficulties.
"Investigations" of scientific misconduct should themselves align with the usual principles of scientific discourse (open discussion, honesty, transparency of method, public disclosure of evidence, open public analysis and public discussion and reasoning underlying any conclusion). This was not the case at the University at Albany. When you see universities reluctant to investigate things properly, it provides reasonable evidence that they really don't want to investigate things properly.


http://scientific-mi...lbany-wang.html

Edited by stocks, 10 May 2009 - 09:00 AM.

[stocks]

FRAUD IN CLIMATE CHANGE RESEARCH

An email from James H. Rust [jrust@bellsouth.net] to Benny Peiser

As a retired professor I was alarmed by your CCNET email exposing fraud in climate change research by Prof. Wang at the University of Albany. Anyone's misconduct on a campus reflects on all who teach and do research. No matter what one has for beliefs, truth can not be compromised.

Your article did not contain sufficient detail to understand the nature of the suspected fraud. By doing a Goggle search, I think the nature of the fraud was understating the Urban Heat Island effect in China from 1953-1994. This may have been used to imply that carbon dioxide was the main culprit for global warming during that period.

Fraud, mistruths are common practice by those promoting AGW. Two notable examples are doctoring global temperature data to arrive at the "Hockey Stick" that was used to claim recent atmospheric carbon dioxide increases caused global temperatures to rise and the recent attempt by NASA to prove October's global temperature rose by using September data from Russia.

It may behoove those who are trying to educate the public about AGW to publicize errors by all who speak or write about climate change. This letter was sent to the MIT Technology Review to ask them to correct a recent error.

I may add that those of us who are trying to promote sanity to the AGW controversy must never lie or exaggerate facts because our credibility will always be under the most stringent scrutiny.
From: James H. Rust
To: letters@technologyreview.com
Sent: Tuesday, May 05, 2009 5:35 PM
Subject: Energy Research at MIT

Dear Editor:

As an advocate for a sound energy policy for the United States, I enjoy reading Technology Review because it contains so many great articles on promising energy research conducted at MIT. Many articles imply a need for this research is to develop energy resources that do not use fossil fuels that produce carbon dioxide that contributes to global warming(AGW). I realize a perceived threat from AGW has caused the annual release of billions of research dollars to find energy sources that do not produce carbon dioxide. Therefore, it is necessary to bow down to AGW in order to obtain research dollars.

However, I do take issue with telling untruths about global warming in order to get public support to reduce fossil fuel use. Examples of untruths are doctoring global temperature data in order to produce the "hockey stick" that suggested the past century rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide was responsible for a one degree Fahrenheit rise in global temperature and the October 2008 increase in global temperature by using September data from Russia. A more recent example of doctoring temperature data is underestimating the urban heat island effect in China from poor research at the University of Albany.

I am sure it was unintentional, but MIT is contributing to the untruths by a statement in its publicized "The MIT Energy Index". One of the statements is as follows: "Of the 12 years from 1995 to 2006, number that are among the warmest years on record: 11." This is clearly wrong. 1934 was probably the hottest year and the hottest 15 years since 1880 have been spaced over seven decades. So it would be prudent to simply drop this statement from The MIT Energy Index.

Regards,
James H. Rust, SM60
Professor of Nuclear Engineering(ret)


http://foxhunt.blogs...981981994167056

[stocks]

The sordid saga of the alleged fraud by Prof Wang at the University of Albanay in USA begins with Phil Jones (East Anglia UK), the lead author of a paper published in Nature 1990, which the authors ( Phil Jones, Wong et al) have used to the hilt to keep insisting that the "urban bias" ( the urban heat island effect on city centre) magnitude is NO MORE than just 0.05C over 100 years! The Nature 1990 paper is now running a strong second to Mann et al paper of 1998, as one of the "most poorly reviewed papers by Nature"

Phil Jones and co-authors have totally ignored so many excellent studies on urban heat island reported in peer-reviewed literature by (late) Prof Helmut Landsberg (USA) and Prof Tim Oke ( Canada). Landsberg and Oke have amply demonstrated (in the 1970s and 1980s) how urban heat island can produce a temperature difference of up to 5C or more between a city centre and its surroundings. By completely ignoring previous work and pushing only their 1990 paper (with flawed data, as it appears now), Phil Jones and co-authors while preparing the IPCC 2007 Climate Change Documents have refused to accept a higher value for urban bias than the value of 0.05C, which most meteorologists now agree is too small. Several recent papers have shown this urban bias to be about 0.18C for the recent 30 years to about 0.35C over a one-hundred year database. A paper by McKitrick and Michaels (2007 J of Geophysical Research) shows clearly that for a gridded temperature data (commonly used in climate models) the urban bias can account for up to half the recent warming of the earth's surface.

If the urban bias is carefully removed from the temperature data, the "left-over" warming ( about 0.4C over 100 years or even less) is hardly something to be overly concerned about!

Madhav Khandekar
[mkhandekar@rogers.com]





Madhav Khandekar holds a B.Sc. in Mathematics and Physics, an M.Sc. in Statistics from Pune University, India, and both M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Meteorology from Florida State University. Dr. Khandekar has worked in the fields of climatology, meteorology, and oceanography for more than 51 years and has published well over 125 papers, reports, book reviews, and scientific commentaries as well as a book on Ocean Surface Wave Analysis and Modeling, published in 1989. Dr. Khandekar spent about 20 years as a Research Scientist with Environment Canada (now retired) and has previously taught meteorology and related subjects at the University of Alberta in Edmonton (1971–74) and for two United Nations training programs: Barbados, West Indies (1975–77, World Meteorological Organization lecturer in meteorology) and Qatar, Arabian Gulf (1980–82, ICAO expert in aeronautical meteorology). He has published research on surface waves, Arctic sea ice, ENSO/monsoon and global weather, numerical weather prediction, boundary-layer meteorology, and tropical cyclones. He presently serves on the editorial board of the international journal Natural Hazards (Kluwer, Netherlands) and was an editor of Climate Research (Germany) from 2003–05. Dr. Khandekar acted as a guest editor for a special issue of the journal Natural Hazards on global warming and extreme weather, published in June 2003. He has been a member of the American Meteorological Society since 1966, the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society since 1970, and the American Geophysical Union since 1986.

[OEXCHAOS]

0.4C over 100 years is a rounding error, essentially. Easily explained by solar activity. Recent cooling puts us well below that trend too, if I'm not mistaken. Mark