Byung Kyu Park's Personal Website

I already know that Nature has thrown in its lot with the fraudsters. Fine. Nature isn’t Nature Physics, and given the culture of corruption among climatogists, it’s not too surprising that that culture seeps into the association of scientists.

But APS, the single organization that is supposed to be representing physicists in America and elsewhere? Have you sunk to these levels? This is the email I received today, and if you are a member of APS, you should have or will recieve one soon:

From: APS President <apsp...@aps.org>
Reply-to: APS President <apsp...@aps.org>
To: byun...@berkeley.edu
Subject: Unsolicited Climate Change Email
Date: Wed, 9 Dec 2009 20:26:05 -0500

Dear APS Member:

Recently, you may have received an unsolicited email from Hal Lewis,
Bob Austin, Will Happer, Larry Gould and Roger Cohen regarding the APS
and climate change.  Please be assured that this was not an official
APS message, nor was it sent with APS knowledge or approval.   A
number of members have complained to APS regarding this unsolicited
e-mail.  If the e-mail addresses used to send this message were
obtained from our membership directory, this was contrary to the
stated guidelines for members' use of the directory.   We are
continuing to investigate how the senders obtained APS member email
addresses.

As many APS members are already aware, the Council of the Society has
tasked the Panel on Public Affairs to examine the 2007 APS statement
on climate change for issues of tone and clarity.  Duncan Moore, the
current chair of POPA, is in the process of convening a subcommittee
to carry out the task.  The subcommittee, which he is also chairing,
will report its recommendations to POPA in early February, and shortly
thereafter POPA will post the text for a three-week APS member comment
period.  We will alert the APS membership by email when the posting
occurs.  Duncan Moore's subcommittee will use the comments it receives
to finalize the wording in time for the April Council meeting.

Some members of the APS have asked the Society to craft a statement
regarding the issues surrounding the release of climate files stolen
from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia.
The CRU maintains the repository for temperature measurements used by
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  The APS
leadership has concerns about both the improper release of private
e-mails and any premature rush to judgment regarding scientific
integrity at the CRU.   Both the CRU and the IPCC are in the process
of investigating the affair.  Once the full range of information is
made available, the APS Panel on Public Affairs will examine the case
and recommend how APS should act.

We will continue to keep the APS membership informed about climate
change issues through postings on the APS home page; articles in APS
News; commentaries on the APS blog, Physics Frontline; and direct
email alerts to the membership when necessary.

Best Regards,

Cherry Murray
APS President

From private communication (forwarded to me by someone else), I can attest that Prof. Happer did not access APS member directory in the manner APS president claims he did. In fact, I did not receive Prof. Happer’s email (if one was sent), and I know quite a few (including myself) who would have liked to receive that email and not the one from APS.

And she says: “The APS leadership has concerns about both the improper release of private e-mails and any premature rush to judgment regarding scientific integrity at the CRU. Both the CRU and the IPCC are in the process of investigating the affair. Once the full range of information is made available, the APS Panel on Public Affairs will examine the case and recommend how APS should act.” So in the case of serious scientific fraud by people APS has no duty to represent (climatologists are not physicists, at least not as a rule), she would like to wait until all the information is available before making any judgment. But in the case of a respected member of APS, whose crime, in the worst case scenario, would have been one of spamming, she jumps to conclusions without letting him defend or explain his actions. If this is not a double standard and intellectual dishonesty, well, I’ve been using the wrong definition of “dishonesty” my whole life.

Partisan politics, and the attendant politics of personal destruction that APS president is engaging in by defaming (since that’s what accusation sans evidence is) a well-known and respected physicist like Prof. Happer, has no place in a professional organization such as American Physical Society. And someone like a president of APS must remember that she works for us, not the other way around. Represent member interests—and as a corollary, stop attacking members personally without due cause—and not the leftist agenda, especially not against the accepted standards of proper scientific conduct.

I know climatoligists, as a group, have been corrupted by the allure of public funding and now cannot be trusted to conduct good science, not without supervision from adults. I was holding out some hope that physicists, guardians of the oldest modern scientific endeavors, would be somehow immune to the corrupting forces of the state. I guess it’s my fault for having that hope. I guess I should have known that liberals have no principles or concept of Truth, not even Scientific Truth, so such lofty ideals as Scientific Method means nothing to them, when that gets in their way.

But then, where do I go from here? I don’t want to go Galt.

Update: APS, with its action to demonize its own dissenting members, is only adding fuel to this fire. Please. Now isn’t too late to stop. Don’t get on the Titanic.

Update: This post has the full text of Prof. Happer’s email that was sent to a few physicists, but not all the members as they did not have access to the APS members mailing list, nor did they use the APS member directory in contradiction to the anti-spam rules (as for the blog itself, I don’t know who that is; I’m linking only because it has the full text of the email that is very relevant). How can any honest physicist find anything wrong with the content of that email? All that the petitioners are trying to do is get APS to withdraw its statement on a subject that it had no business commenting on anyway (we are physicists, not climatologists; many of us, including myself, have not examined climatologists’ work in detail and we have no business, as a collective, rubber stamping someone else’s work), and given the Climategate scandal, are we so sure of our climatologist “colleagues” that we are willing to go down with them? Climatologists have mixed public policy with science and may have destroyed science in the process. We physicists need to defend it.

Update: ‘Might as well post the full text here, since widest distribution is the intent of the petitioners:

Dear fellow member of the American Physical Society:

This is a matter of great importance to the integrity of the Society. It is being sent to a random fraction of the membership, so we hope you will pass it on.

By now everyone has heard of what has come to be known as ClimateGate, which was and is an international scientific fraud, the worst any of us have seen in our cumulative 223 years of APS membership. For those who have missed the news we recommend the excellent summary article by Richard Lindzen in the November 30 edition of the Wall Street journal, entitled “The Climate Science isn’t Settled,” for a balanced account of the situation. It was written by a scientist of unquestioned authority and integrity. A copy can be found among the items at http://tinyurl.com/lg266u, and a visit to http://www.ClimateDepot.com can fill in the details of the scandal, while adding spice.

What has this to do with APS? In 2007 the APS Council adopted a Statement on global warming (also reproduced at the tinyurl site mentioned above) that was based largely on the scientific work that is now revealed to have been corrupted. (The principals in this escapade have not denied what they did, but have sought to dismiss it by saying that it is normal practice among scientists. You know and we know that that is simply untrue. Physicists are not expected to cheat.)

We have asked the APS management to put the 2007 Statement on ice until the extent to which it is tainted can be determined, but that has not been done. We have also asked that the membership be consulted on this point, but that too has not been done.

None of us would use corrupted science in our own work, nor would we sign off on a thesis by a student who did so. This is not only a matter of science, it is a matter of integrity, and the integrity of the APS is now at stake. That is why we are taking the unusual step of communicating directly with at least a fraction of the membership.

If you believe that the APS should withdraw a Policy Statement that is based on admittedly corrupted science, and should then undertake to clarify the real state of the art in the best tradition of a learned society, please send a note to the incoming President of the APS ccal...@princeton.edu, with the single word YES in the subject line. That will make it easier for him to count.

Bob Austin, Professor of Physics, Princeton
Hal Lewis, emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara
Will Happer, Professor of Physics, Princeton
Larry Gould, Professor of Physics, Hartford
Roger Cohen, former Manager, Strategic Planning, ExxonMobil

Update: CBS article covering the debate and issues.

Because no good scientist or scientific institution should be able to defend scientific fraud on any grounds:

In the end, what the UEA e-mails really show is that scientists are human beings — and that unrelenting opposition to their work can goad them to the limits of tolerance, and tempt them to act in ways that undermine scientific values. Yet it is precisely in such circumstances that researchers should strive to act and communicate professionally, and make their data and methods available to others, lest they provide their worst critics with ammunition. After all, the pressures the UEA e-mailers experienced may be nothing compared with what will emerge as the United States debates a climate bill next year, and denialists use every means at their disposal to undermine trust in scientists and science.

Oh, really? I won’t go into details of unfairness of words such as “denialist”, “stolen emails”, etc. Those word choices only serve to reveal the author’s strong bias, which may be a valuable service to the astute reader.

But the author’s conclusion is disastrous from moral and scientific point of view. First, from the moral point of view, how can one argue that circumstances excuse anyone’s criminal actions? Scientific fraud is crime—against the society and against the nature—there is no excuse for that. Just as no murderer can be excused that he is “a victim of the society”, those who murdered the peer review process—one of the pillars of Western scientific institutions—cannot be excused based upon what their opponents did. If their opponents were fellow scientists then they should have listened to their peers. If their opponents were idiots undisciplined in the way of science, then climatologists should have been able to rise above the unscientific criticisms.

From scientific point of view, now we have an editor at Nature, formerly one of the most prestigious peer-review journals, writing an editorial defending those who conspired to destroy and re-define “peer review”. This is either a case of scientific Stockholm syndrome, or this is a glimpse at how deep the corruption goes. Science, as a fundamentally experimental academic endeavor (all theories are subject to experimental verification), relies on the integrity of data. These climatologists endangered that integrity and quashed those who question their actions—because when data has been fudged with, sooner or later that fact becomes evident to fellow scientists—by attempting to—and given what Nature publishes now, probably succeeding in—destroy the peer review process, one of the checks and balances in science and academia.

No scientist should be able to defend these actions upon any ground, including but not limited to insanity—after all, do we want the insane using public funds to conduct fraudulent research?

The fact that Nature defends these criminal climatologists suggests that Nature may not be a scientific publication any more. Am I right?

We already know peer review isn’t a panacea. For one, it is widely known that peer review simply cannot prevent scientific fraud, because as experimentalists, we tend to trust in the data—we may question the process of data gathering, but once the process itself seems free of error, we trust the data as presented, unless it claims something fantastically impossible, usually involving violation of energy conservation or something on that order.

But, recent global warming scandal, a.k.a. ClimateGate, has uncovered even more problems with peer review: it’s done by “peers”

In response to an article challenging global warming that was published in the journal Climate Research, CRU head Phil Jones complains that the journal needs to “rid themselves of this troublesome editor”-hopefully not through the same means used by Henry II’s knights. Michael Mann replies:

I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.

Note the circular logic employed here. Skepticism about global warming is wrong because it is not supported by scientific articles in “legitimate peer-reviewed journals.” But if a journal actually publishes such an article, then it is by definition not “legitimate.”

In short, if your peers are crackpots, would you want your work reviewed (and judged) by those peers? Peer reviews are used to keep crackpots out of legitimate science journals—but, if the crackpots have already taken root inside that fence, then, well, crackpots can use it to keep legitimate science out of journals.

I wouldn’t call these failures of peer review necessary … failure of science. It represents pitfalls and setbacks of frontiers of research. Eventually (on the time scale of decades or even centuries), scientific theories are judged by their ability to produce predictions that no other theories can. And short of time travel, there is no way to fake that.