Sean King

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San Juan, Puerto Rico, United States

Monday, March 1, 2010

Pseudo Science

DailyMail:
Prof Jones today said it was not 'standard practice' in climate science to release data and methodology for scientific findings so that other scientists could check and challenge the research.
He also said the scientific journals which had published his papers had never asked to see it.

Well then, Mr. Jones, call it what you will, but your work was not "science." The word science is not a loose term of art but rather has a specific meaning. In short, it describes the body of knowledge gained by application of the scientific method. And, the final step in the scientific method is confirmation:

Science is a social enterprise, and scientific work tends to be accepted by the community when it has been confirmed. Crucially, experimental and theoretical results must be reproduced by others within the science community. Researchers have given their lives for this vision; Georg Wilhelm Richmann was killed by ball lightning (1753) when attempting to replicate the 1752 kite-flying experiment of Benjamin Franklin.

To protect against bad science and fraudulent data, government research granting agencies like NSF and science journals like Nature and Science have a policy that researchers must archive their data and methods so other researchers can access it, test the data and methods and build on the research that has gone before. Scientific data archiving can be done at a number of national archives in the U.S. or in the World Data Center.


But, apparently not at the CRU.

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