Citizen Science in the Digital Age by Wynn James

Author:Wynn, James
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780817390860
Publisher: University of Alabama Press

I want to extend my heartfelt thanks to . . . the entire CRN science team . . . for answering all my questions and taking such careful time with me. Additionally, I wish to thank Dr. [Thomas] Karl [Director of the NCDC] and Assistant Director Sharon LeDuc for hearing my concerns and offering ideas.

Everyone there at NCDC made me feel welcome and appreciated. (“Day 2”)

Watts’s visit to the National Climatic Data Center headquarters marked a rare if not unprecedented show of acceptance by a large and important scientific governmental organization of a citizen-led citizen-science project. It might also be considered the high point in the relationship between Watts and the NCDC. With the publication of Watts’s report, relations between the citizen scientist and the NCDC lapsed into confrontation once again. Less than three months after the release of Is the U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable? representatives of the NCDC Matthew Menne, Claude Williams, and Michael Palecki submitted for review the paper “On the Reliability of the U.S. Surface Temperature Record.”20 In the paper, the authors challenge Watts’s scientific conclusions about the relationship between the quality of site conditions and the quality of temperature measurements. At the center of this challenge are the scientific questions, What degree and type of bias is introduced by site conditions into temperature measurements? and To what extent is qualitative data about site characteristics helpful in understanding these biases? An examination of the technical sphere arguments launched by representatives of the NCDC suggest that though they advanced legitimate technical critiques of Watts’s work, they also extended their criticism of the Surface Stations project into the realm of value argument. The question the analysis in the next section endeavors to answer is, Why? Why would the NCDC stretch beyond a scientific critique of Watts’s work to challenge it at the stasis of value?

NCDC and the Value of Statistics

Perhaps the most suitable explanation for why Menne, Williams, and Palecki were compelled to stretch their argument is because they could not easily dismiss the value or legitimacy of the Surface Stations project’s site assessment by dismissing its conclusions about measurement biases. In their paper the authors reveal their awareness of the social and technical legitimacy of the project by the way they strike a balance between praising the project’s efforts to document site conditions and challenging Watts’s conclusion about the relationship between site quality and data quality. Evidence of the authors’ support for the project’s methods for documenting site conditions and ranking site quality appears in the methods section of the paper. Here the authors affirm their acceptance not only of the project’s method for rating sites but also its general conclusions about the quality of sites by using them as the basis of their own investigation: “The exposure characteristics of a subset of USHCN stations have been classified and posted to the web by the organization surfacestations.org. . . . To evaluate the potential impact of exposure on station siting, we formed two subsets from the five possible USCRN exposure types assigned to the USHCN stations by surfacestations.

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