This is a long one, but it’s because it’s filled with gems that are so valuable, they can’t be cut.

As the Climategate story was breaking, I wrote a couple of pieces entitled “Climate – the prequel“, and “Climaegate the pre-prequel“. The first was about Melanie Phillips sounding the alarm bell in 2007 about chicanery at the CRU. The second was about the 1961 speech by Dwight Eisenhower, in which he warned us about the dangers of a government-science complex. This fits between those, dating from 1974.

On Dec 24, I wrote up a piece on an abysmally poor science experiment that the BBC showed, and related it to what Richard Feynman referred to as “Cargo Cult Science”. Having re-read the 1974 speech that I had linked in that article, I was struck by how many things that he said in that speech that were directly relevant and directly in contradiction to the conduct of the CRU scientists, and their apologists. Here, again, is the speech (sorry; it’s in PDF format). I will excerpt the relevant paragraph in which he defines Cargo Cult Science:

In the South Seas there is a Cargo Cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas – he’s the controller – and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things Cargo Cult Science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.

That’s the description of “Cargo Cult Science”. He goes on to say:

Now it behooves me, of course, to tell you what they’re missing. But it would be just about as difficult to explain to the South Sea Islanders how they have to arrange things so that they get some wealth in their system. It is not something simple like telling them how to improve the shapes of the earphones. But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in Cargo Cult Science. That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school – we never explicitly say what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation . It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty – a kind of leaning over backwards.

Keep that in mind as you read the CRUtape letters™.

For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid – not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked—to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.

Well, well. It’s almost as if Dr. Feynman read the CRUtape letters in 1974. Here’s CRUtape letter 942777075.txt:

From: Phil Jones <p.jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
To: ray bradley <rbradley@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>,mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx, mhughes@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@xxxxxxxxx.xxx,t.osborn@xxxxxxxxx.xxx

Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm, Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow. I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd  from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got  April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for  1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C  wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.
Thanks for the comments, Ray.

Cheers
Phil

Apologists (we all know who they are) are claiming that the “trick”, and “hiding the decline” are no big deal in the big picture, since they don’t impact the ultimate IPCC findings. That’s largely true, but misses the key point that Feynman was making – that it’s the scientist’s responsibility to be scrupulous in making sure that his personal biases don’t affect the work. In this case, it’s even worse than that – there’s an open conspiracy – yes that’s a correct usage of the word – to mislead. What this exposes about the mindset and the group dynamic flies completely in the face of the scrupulous, as Feynman puts it “leaning over backward”, openness and honesty.

Feynman continues:

Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can – if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong – to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the Finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.

This brings up a broader issue not really related to the work that CRU does, but the work that the modelers do – can they predict anything, including the behavior of the earth in the 20th century, with their models? To make a long story short, not without embedding prior knowledge into them. In other words, they fail this test.

Feynman continues:

In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.

The Climategate affair was entirely about people wanting to repeat the science, and having to use FOIA requests to demand the data (which wouldn’t have been necessary if they had been behaving like good scientists as Feynman describes), and Jones et al still refusing. It’s again as if Feynman was talking about Jones, et all in 1974.

Feynman goes on:

We’ve leaned from experience that the truth will out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and Find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature’s phenomena will agree or they’ll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven’t tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it’s this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in Cargo Cult Science.

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