Beware of Double Downers

Make Sure

I. Aware vs Beware

The airwaves are full of those who make patently false statements about most anything, then when called out on it they "double down."

And that degenerate practice of "doubling down" makes it seem like intellectual honesty is a relic of the past.

The "doubling down" I am talking about is:

"The term is increasingly used as a media euphemism when political figures tell bald-faced lies and when confronted with contradictory statements, the politician not only fails to retract their claims but instead expresses an increased certainty in their truth."

(Urban Dictionary). The ConWay and The Don are currently very usable sources for observing episodes of the misadventure of doubling down.

They are constantly using "alt-facts" and truthiness for deluding themselves and others.

Especially when it comes to global warming induced climate change, they are aficionados of doubts and lies on steroids.

II. A Recent Episode of Aware vs. Beware

A recent scientific paper hypothesized that scientists had missed the mark when it came to estimating the quantity of heat-content increase in the world oceans.

According to one person who read their paper, they had miscalculated some critical factors involved in the issues they had analyzed.

That is not a biggie in and of itself, because it is a good thing when other scientists, who were not involved in the relevant research, analyze a hypothesis.

The catch on this one paper is that the criticism that those scientists had issued in the paper was where there was a large error.

Their paper estimated that world scientists had missed the actual amount of ocean heat intake by about sixty percent (60%).

An observant and aware scientist or observer found a considerable error in the research team's math and its application.

Did the research team double down?

No.

Being intellectually honest professionals they acknowledged their error and thanked the scientist or observer who had caught their mistake and who had contacted them about it:

"I, with the other co-authors of Resplandy et al (2018), want to address two problems that came to our attention since publication of our paper in Nature last week. These problems do not invalidate the methodology or the new insights into ocean biogeochemistry on which it is based, but they do influence the mean rate of warming we infer, and more importantly, the uncertainties of that calculation.

We would like to thank Nicholas Lewis for first bringing an apparent anomaly in the trend calculation to our attention. We quickly realized that our calculations incorrectly treated systematic errors in the O2 measurements as if they were random errors in the error propagation."

(RealClimate, Resplandy et al. correction and response). Since scientific research reporting is not so anal retentive that it does not allow any mistakes, this behavior by Resplandy et al. via Ralph Keeling is a useful example for all of us to follow.

III. Another Episode

Another practice for journals and other scientific literature outlets to emulate is source-data transparency:

"Data underpinning any research finding should be findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) – not only for humans, but also for machines. Therefore, Copernicus Publications requests that such data are available upon publication of an article, with only a few standard and widely adopted exceptions, such as those concerning the privacy of human subjects or data that may place vulnerable species or sites at risk.

Research data should, to the greatest extent possible, be shared: at the very least, data should have unique and persistent identifiers and appropriate metadata to assist discovery and be cited in a form equivalent to other scholarly outputs. These data should be openly accessible and stored in community-approved FAIR-aligned repositories. Leading repositories provide additional quality checks regarding domain data and data services, and they facilitate discovery and reuse of data and other research outputs. Suitable data repositories can be found in the Registry of Research Data Repositories. In order to elaborate on our commitment, we have updated our data policy and author guidelines."

(Copernicus Org, emphasis added). Of course, other journal publishers hold to that same standard, which is quite reasonable.

Their mention of  "the Registry of Research Data Repositories" caught my eye, so I checked it out.

Some of the main sources of oceanographic data Dredd Blog uses are listed in that repository:

World Ocean Database (WOD)
Permanent Service For Mean Sea Level (PSMSL)
GISTEMP
NSIDC

(Registry of Research Data Repositories).  The official software for ocean thermodynamic computations that Dredd Blog uses (TEOS-10) is also of good repute:

"Having considered the presentation of the Chairperson of the SCOR/IAPSO WG-127 to the 25 th Session of the Assembly,

Decides to adopt the International Thermodynamic Equation of Seawater (TEOS-10) formulation that has been developed and recommended by the SCOR/IAPSO WG-127 to replace the existing EOS-80, as presented in the TEOS-10 Manual (IOC/INF- tbd );

Requests the IOC Executive Secretary to:

(i)     publish a suitably shortened and simplified version of the TEOS-10 manual in the IOC Manuals and Guides series

(ii)     continue to work closely with the SCOR/IAPSO WG-127 to ensure wide dissemination of TEOS-10 to government agencies, the scientific community, and industry

(iii)     ensure that the shortened and simplified manual contains a detailed, scheduled implementation plan allowing a traceable, stepwise implementation of the new standard;

Urges Member States to use and disseminate TEOS-10."

(Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, Twenty-fifth Session of the Assembly, p. 99 PDF); cf. Ocean Best Practices TEOS-10, UNESCO TEOS-10).

IV. Your Part

Like Nicholas Lewis, who brought the mistake of Resplandy et al. (2018) into focus, when any regular readers or irregular readers see a mistake in Dredd Blog posts, it will be appreciated if you share your observations (in comments or emails).

I take on some very big issues (e.g On Thermal Expansion & Thermal Contraction, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38) and there are bound to be some mistakes in my work.

If we become scientific sycophants we are not using intellectual honesty.

Instead, we are making a false religion or false philosophy out of our efforts.

We would also be deluding ourselves by thinking that we can use doubling down and other alt-truthiness behaviors to produce "knowledge" (The Pillars of Knowledge: Faith and Trust?).

V. Conclusion

This will help all of us become more knowledgeable:

"Research data are valuable and ubiquitous. The permanent access to research data is a challenge for all stakeholders in the scientific community. The long-term preservation and the principle of open access to research data offer broad opportunities for the scientific community. More and more universities and research centres are starting to build research data repositories allowing permanent access to data sets in a trustworthy environment. Due to disciplinary requirements, the landscape of data repositories is very heterogeneous. Thus it is difficult for researchers, funding bodies, publishers and scholarly institutions to select appropriate repositories for storage and search of research data.

re3data.org is a global registry of research data repositories that covers research data repositories from different academic disciplines. It presents repositories for the permanent storage and access of data sets to researchers, funding bodies, publishers and scholarly institutions. re3data.org promotes a culture of sharing, increased access and better visibility of research data. The registry went live in autumn 2012 and is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG)."

(Re3data Org).

It is difficult enough to practice the science of knowledge production while being intellectually honest.

The use of doubling down and other degenerate practices in a vacuum of dishonor is to be avoided, because it makes the research efforts orders of magnitude more difficult.