Something interesting comes this way

by Eli Rabett, Rabett Run blog, November 22, 2009

Ed Darrell has found something interesting in the CRU e-mails (Ed has a nice bathtub to wash in after wading in so you don't have to).

Sure enough, with just a few minutes of searching the e-mails, I found references to ethical breaches in cooking of data, and a discussion about how to talk about the data and the issue in public.

The paper involved is this one:

David H. Douglass, John R. Christy, Benjamin D. Pearsona and S. Fred Singer, “A comparison of tropical temperature trends with model predictions,” INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CLIMATOLOGY, Int. J. Climatol. (2007). Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/joc.1651

and the discussion of what to do about it

One of the e-mails is quite explicit:

I think the scientific fraud committed by Douglass needs to be exposed. His co-authors may be innocent bystanders, but I doubt it.

Fraud? Right there in front of everyone? In the climate debate?

In the end, the scientists in the discussion determined not to hold a press conference to announce a finding of fraud, but instead to hunker down and work on publishing datasets that would contradict the alleged fraudulent paper, and establish their case with data instead of invective and press conferences.

They even declined to rush to inform the public of the fraud after a lengthy series of attempts to duplicate the results with well-known, accurate methods on accepted data:

More at the link with links to the correspondence. Eli eagerly awaits comments from Douglass, Christy, Pearsona and Singer. Eli is a foolish, but ever hopeful bunny. You can pull the angora over his eyes.

Link to Rabett Run blog post:  http://rabett.blogspot.com/2009/11/something-interesting-comes-this-way-ed.html