Dave’s Archives

I have regrettably discovered that my old faithful source of technology news (which I haven't paid much attention to in recent years) is engaging in one of those enlightening let's-all-laugh-at-the-scientists climate change denialism campaigns.

This article in The Register caught my attention today, and made me despair a little. Andrew Orlowski reports light-heartedly on a freedom of information (FoI) crusade by Steve McIntyre, who runs the Climate Audit website and who is frequently cited, quite falsely, as having discredited the hockey stick graph (the one showing global temperatures over the last 1000 years with a dramatic spike at the end). McIntyre is actually an academic, which at least sets him aside from the likes of Viscount Monckton and other more political protagonists, but he certainly isn't a climate scientist.

The issue at stake is the availability of raw temperature data, as opposed to the aggregated, processed datasets put together by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), of which Phil Jones is the director. This Nature blog post sheds more light on the nature of the dispute between McIntyre and Jones; more than you will be exposed to by reading The Register's article at any rate.

McIntyre, unlike his hangers-on, seems to define his objective very precisely: the free availability of the raw temperature data. To this end, McIntyre appears to have encouraged (or possibly orchestrated) a barrage of FoI requests to Jones, who Orlowski describes as an "activist-scientist" (a term I would consider quite an insult).

Orlowski's article appears to have been informed by little more than a perusal of McIntyre's blog. He must have left his journalistic scepticism in his other trousers.

First, Orlowski claims that the CRU has "lost or destroyed all the original data". This is both factually incorrect and highly misleading, even if you accept McIntyre's version of events. The CRU says it faced storage constraints in the 1980s, meaning that some of the older original data could not be preserved. This is hardly implausible - scientists still face storage issues today, and will still face them decades from now, McIntyre's personal incredulity notwithstanding. Furthermore, the CRU doesn't own the original data, and says that due to agreements with those who do, it cannot release what raw data it does have.

Besides - and this is what I find most astonishing - Orlowski himself notes two things:

1. McIntyre already has the raw data. This apparently occurred through some sort of FTP security lapse at the CRU, which was then fixed in what McIntyre describes - in excruciating detail, as if the tanks were rolling into Washington DC - as an "unprecedented data purge".
2. McIntyre "doesn't expect any significant surprises after analysing" it.

That would seem to indicate that, through all the bluster, there is actually not even the pretence here that anything is wrong with the IPCC's climate projections. It's presented (by both Orlowski and McIntyre) in a fashion that suggests some sort of cover-up or conspiracy, and so that's what some readers will doubtless believe. In fact, such an allegation has been downplayed by the one person apparently best placed to make it.

The free availability of data is, I believe, a worthy cause - let's not make light of that. According to the Nature blog post, Jones wants this as well. However, McIntyre's own blog makes his FoI campaign look more like a vindictive assault than a fight for principles. Orlowski's article looks more like an Andrew Bolt post than an attempt at journalism.

The Linux boot up message of the moment:

/ has gone 49710 days without being checked, check forced.

This would place the manufacturing date of the computer in question at around 1872 or earlier; a century before the UNIX epoch (the official Dawn of Time for UNIX-based computers) and at least 86 years prior to the invention of the microchip.

One of Amnesty International's media releases reports on a survey of Australians' knowledge and opinions on asylum seekers. However, the point of the media release is clearly to highlight some of the facts themselves, not just the extent to which people are aware of them. This seems reasonable, given that:

The opinion poll also showed that a large majority of Australians have major misconceptions regarding the percentage of asylum seekers who arrive in Australia by boat. On average, Australians believe that about 60 per cent of asylum seekers come to Australia by boat. More than a third of Australians believe that over 80 per cent of asylum seekers arrive by boat. In fact, only 3.4 per cent of people who sought asylum in Australia in 2008 arrived by boat - the other 96.6 per cent arrived by plane.

This is a fairly important statistic. However, this article is utterly devoid of citations, and as a researcher this annoys the hell out of me. Amnesty is a kind of lobbying organisation. As such it has an interest in altering opinions, and so it shouldn't always expect people to take it at face value.

The other thing that troubles me is the discussion of processing costs (it costs more to process asylum seekers on Christmas Island than on the mainland). Why would Amnesty even care about asylum seeker processing costs? It's hardly an issue on which human rights hinge. I'd venture that it cares only because it's another means of altering opinions. It certainly wouldn't be reporting processing costs if they were less on Christmas Island.

(This reminded me of the nuclear power debate. Greenpeace has argued that the nuclear power is unwise because the economics don't stack up. This is actually quite dishonest, in my opinion, even if it's entirely accurate. It's hard to imagine that Greenpeace cares about the economics argument against nuclear power for its own sake. Coming from an authority on economics, such an argument may be taken seriously. The same argument coming from Greenpeace just looks like someone trying to push our buttons.)

In general I don't wish to denigrate Amnesty. The lobbying it does is directed at a genuinely worthy cause, unlike that conducted by a large number of other lobbyists. However, worthy causes are almost always served by open discussion, and this includes the ability to verify the facts and statistics for oneself.

There is of course much discussion of the statistics in the media. For instance, Crikey has a list of statistics on asylum seekers with numerous but not terribly good references. I eventually managed to (more-or-less) confirm that only 179 out of 4750 asylum seekers arrived by boat in 2008. This report gives the 179 figure on page 4, while a media release on the Immigation Minister's website mentions the 4750 figure. That comes out at roughly the same percentage (3.8%) as quoted by Amnesty.

The processing costs, I'm guessing, came from a 2007 report for Oxfam. The report states:

The latest figures given to a budget estimates hearing on 22 May 2006 suggest that it cost $1,830 per detainee per day to keep someone on Christmas Island compared to $238 per detainee per day at Villawood in Sydney.

So why am I interested in asylum seeker processing costs? I'm not; not directly, anyway. I consider it to be an argument that largely misses the point -  mechanisms intended to discourage unauthorised boat arrivals incur a human cost, not just a financial one. However, from the financial cost I note that not even selfish motives would justify a hardline position on unauthorised boat arrivals. What, then, are the hardliners actually arguing about? If both altruism and self-interest suggest the same course of action, what kind of corrupt mode of thinking can possibly raise an objection?

It's inexcusable that we should make asylum seekers the object of such irrational concern. By definition, these are people who possess the least political power of anyone in the world. However, as a direct result, their suffering also carries the least political risk; not that you'd know it from listening to some of the myopic reactionary logic floating around over the last few years.

It seems that ideology can thrive where beliefs are not merely simplistic or unsupported, but where they are demonstrably false.