Inspector General Report Finds No Scientific Misconduct at NOAA

Yet another investigation into the 'Climategate' non-scandal--this one by the Department of Commerce Inspector General--finds nothing of real scientific relevance. From NOAA's press release:

At the request of U.S. Sen. Inhofe, the Department of Commerce Inspector General conducted an independent review of the emails stolen in November 2009 from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, and found no evidence of impropriety or reason to doubt NOAA’s handling of its climate data. The Inspector General was asked to look into how NOAA reacted to the leak and to determine if there was evidence of improper manipulation of data, failure to adhere to appropriate peer review procedures, or failure to comply with Information Quality Act and Freedom of Information Act guidelines....

The Inspector General’s report states specifically:

* “We found no evidence in the CRU emails that NOAA inappropriately manipulated data comprising the [Global Historical Climatology Network – monthly] GHCN-M dataset.” (Page 11)

* “We found no evidence in the CRU emails to suggest that NOAA failed to adhere to its peer review procedures prior to its dissemination of information.” (Page 11)

* “We found no evidence in the CRU emails to suggest that NOAA violated its obligations under the IQA.” (Page 12)

* “We found no evidence in the CRU emails to suggest that NOAA violated its obligations under the Shelby Amendment.” (Page 16)

Full report here.

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Order from Chaos

The second law of thermodynamics states that the universe is increasing in entropy. This is often casually interpreted to mean that everything in the universe is tending toward decay and disorder. This may ultimately be true, but our intuition based on our experience with disorder in everyday life is not always a good guide on the matter.

You wouldn't think that a bunch of molecules shaking around could produce any order, but that's what constantly goes on inside every cell of your body. Animations of cellular processes usually depict molecules coming together in an ordered and purposeful fashion, but reality is not as neat. A good example is the assembly of viruses.

Viruses are parasites of living cells; they enter cells, commandeer the cellular machinery and use it to produce more viruses, then leave to find more cells in which to replicate. Many viruses assemble a protein shell that is formed from smaller subunits. This assembly is depicted in the following cartoon (from Alberts, Molecular Biology of the Cell).



The virus is built through self-assembly, a process that is foreign to our daily experience. With that in mind, have a look at these two videos, which model the self-assembly of viruses. (I found them in a post at BioLogos discussing God and randomness.)






Note that the second law of thermodynamics is never violated. The flow of entropy simply takes a route that is not immediately obvious.

Aside from being interesting in their own right, viruses, and these models, serve as a reminder that we should be cautious about using our intuition as a guide to what is or isn't plausible under the second law of thermodynamics. If you think of the Big Bang as a kind of explosion, you might mistakenly think that the immediate product was a disordered universe with very low entropy. Think instead of a universe filled with hydrogen which, under the attractive force of gravity, condenses to form stars, which ultimately produce the rest of the elements and the earth upon which we live.

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