What Happens When Everyone Has Access

I love the internet; there is just so much information available at one’s fingertips.

But there is a price: if the data is available for the intellectually competent, it is also available for the dummies, woos, crack pots and morons who haven’t a clue as to how to properly use or interpret it:

Many scientific organizations, such as the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, now put data (some near real-time) on their Web sites. The information ranges from raw numbers from weather stations to computed values of, for instance, monthly global temperature anomalies, which represent temperature deviations from a historical average. Typically researchers make corrections and adjustments as they check equipment and replicate experiments.

In today’s politically charged environment, though, these routine corrections have become ammunition in the warming war. For example, last November Internet users found that raw data erroneously replicated from Russian weather stations contributed to a suspiciously high temperature anomaly that Goddard published. Two years ago the blog Climate Audit, run by amateur scientists and self-described “science auditor” Steve McIntyre, found that an error in a computer algorithm had ranked 1998 as the warmest U.S. year, instead of the correct 1934. (The change did not significantly affect global values: 1998 was still the earth’s warmest year as ranked by satellites, although Goddard has 2005 as slightly warmer.)

But perhaps the mistake that got the most publicity for skeptics happened in February as an automated system of the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) published information on the extent of Arctic sea ice. It contained a small but strange hitch indicating that enough ice to cover California was suddenly gone. Internet readers pounced, sending e-mails to the center and also to skeptical bloggers such as meteorologist Anthony Watts. His blog, Watt’s Up with That?, is read daily by about 21,000 people around the world (according to Quantcast, which compiles Web site statistics), and Watts’s post about the error mushroomed across the Web. Within hours the NSIDC withdrew the data, ultimately finding that the glitch resulted from a faulty sensor on a satellite. The NSIDC scientists admitted the mistake, corrected the problem using a different sensor and audited all past data.

But the public-relations damage was done. Skeptical bloggers and their readers called the NSIDC’s competence into question and accused it of tweaking data. The NSIDC sent out a press release pointing out that real-time data are always less reliable than thoroughly reviewed archived data.

Word of the otherwise prosaic issue spread via news reports, and the NSIDC took its lumps. “We were too naive,” admits Walt Meier, a researcher at the center. “We weren’t prepared for how closely people were watching.” The science community knows that such adjustments happen all the time, he says, but “the undermining of public confidence in our data comes from ignorance of use.” But he still believes that open-source data are “ultimately a great thing.”

If there were any justice, these crackpots, imbeciles and woos would be denied all benefits that derive from properly done science (e. g., computers, medicines, vaccines, etc.) but that isn’t going to happen.

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