If anyone has been keeping up with current climate issues, then they should be well aware of the CSIRO and its claims of global climate induced drought. Also, you may have ran across the extreme amount of stonewalling they have been doing concerning the request for the data that is used as evidence to this. It has been a passing topic on McIntyre's (Climate Audit) site (as is a lot of the unscientific behavior of researchers concerning data release) of which David Stockwell (PHD in Ecosystem Dynamics for those who love to source attack) has been trying to obtain for quite a while now and to which there has been a lot of "false" claims being circulated through the media concerning this very topic.
Finally, he has gotten his hands on the data and has produced an analysis of the findings made by the CSIRO. It is quite the interesting read. For those of you who are familiar with the "business as usual" concerning current research facilities and their publicized claims, it will be the same old same old. For those of you who are not, it may open your eyes to which is a common problem in this field today. That is, politics taking the front stage over science and fact.
http://landshape.org/stats/wp-conten...08/article.pdf
Quote:
Originally Posted by Abstract
In a statistical re-analysis of the data from the Drought Exceptional Circumstances Report, all climate models failed standard internal validation tests for regional droughted area in Australia over the last century. The most worrying failure was that simulations showed increases in droughted area over the last century in all regions, while the observed trends in drought decreased in five of the seven regions identified in the CSIRO/Bureau of Meteorology report. Therefore there is no credible basis for the claims of increasing frequency of Exceptional Circumstances declarations made in the report. These results are consistent with other studies finding lack of adequate validation in global warming effects modeling, and lack of skill of climate models at the regional scale.
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The practice of refusing to release data to which publicized research is given is a very common tactic in this field. Some of it is "somewhat" and I stress "somewhat" understandable in terms of rights and recognition issues, but in most of the cases, this is not the issue as researchers have failed to release their data even after they have been published (Briffa, Hansen, Mann, Jones, etc...). Those who often refuse are those who also have their research in major question.
The sad thing is that many of these datasets which are refused to release are also being passed around like a paid date. That is, the data results are being used by other researchers to come to further conclusions. What happens if you start with garbage.... you end up with garbage no matter how hard your try to clean it up. In terms of much of the climate research (Tree chronologies, surface temps, etc..) much of the research is dependent on the other. So, what you end up with is a house of cards all built on one pivotal card to which if it fails, the entire house comes tumbling down. No wonder they don't want to release their data.
Anyway, this is just an example of the shoddy work being done by "organizations" and "Administrations" to which have a "consensus" on the this topic. It is only a small peek of the problems that exist in this field, but hopefully we can get more and more of the data released so we can actually see the wizard behind the curtain.