Or as an alternate title: “Why we find it difficult to trust certain climate scientists.”
This posting by Bishop Hill, telling the tale of the nefarious temperature reconstruction known as the Michael Mann hockey stick, from start to present, is an excellent summation for the layman reader struggling to understand the entire affair and why it is such an amazing pox on the conduct of science and practice of peer review. This sums it up quite well:
That the statistical foundations on which they had built this paleoclimate castle were a swamp of misrepresentation, deceit and malfeasance was, to Wahl and Amman, an irrelevance.
I highly recommend reading it, and Bishop Hill deserves thanks for condensing this affair into a readable story.
There was a great commentary with a link on Climate Audit yesterday and it is a great read. It plainly gives a blow by blow of the corruption present today in the climate science world today. This is particularly true at the IPCC with regards to the political agenda they support. The involvement of the peer review process is equally co opted in the process. It seems that Wegman hit the proverbial nail on the head.
Great thanks is due to those that are willing to put their time and wealth into the process of saving science. People like Steve McIntyre, Anthony Watts, Spencer, Ball. and all the skeptics that are willing to stand up and say lets look at this again your method is flawed. I am a skeptic but what I like is the way the good sites question the methods and the data collection before they fault the findings. This is science at its best.
Thank you Bishop Hill for bringing this to light in a manner that I can understand.
Bill Derryberry
EXCELLENT!! I’ve been looking for something like this for ages!!!
How about something similar about James Hansen and his GISS???
Bill in Vego:
In which tread can I find the commentary you refered to??
Maybe these guys are where the CCSP folks learned to use fake photos
We need to go back further in time. The question that always stood out in my mind was, what prompted Mann to manufacture the Hockey Stick in the first place? Someone came up with the idea to create a temperature reconstruction that eliminated the MWP and LIA. Someone at the IPCC would be a reasonable assumption. It appears that Mann was just the tool who agreed to implement it. Who wanted it? Houghton maybe?
How about something similar about James Hansen and his GISS???
Why do we automatically assume that Hansen has engaged in dishonest or unethical practices? I agree that this unfortunate saga illustrates potentially significant ethical breaches and extremely shoddy science, but why must we automatically cross everything with other arguments? Steve McIntyre has been commenting double-time on his own posts over at CA strongly discouraging anyone from making over-arching generalizations about this episode; namely, it does nothing to “refute” AGW – it only applies to a single argument, which is the statistical significance of the “Hockey Stick” paleo-climate reconstruction. You can argue that the “Hockey Stick” is an extremely important part of the public’s perception of AGW, and at one point it definitely was one of the most important selling point’s of the theory. But things have progressed very much since those days, and even if in the coming months the “Hockey Stick” is shown to be definitively incorrect, there are many, many other convincing lines of evidence which strongly support modern AGW.
That’s all there is. That’s the sum of this entire debacle. It’s unfortunate that it took so much obfuscation and dishonesty by big name players to reach this point, but one can’t possibly claim anything more from it. This doesn’t debunk Al Gore; this doesn’t prove that there is a conspiracy to prop up AGW. All this shows is that there could be serious issues with the “Hockey Stick,” and those issues should most definitely be re-investigated to settle the matter once and for all.
It’s bad enough that some people (as evidenced by some comments at CA) are trying to turn this into another death-blow to AGW, but to use this to suggest in some way that Hansen is also dishonest is completely ridiculous. I get it; some skeptics don’t like Hansen because he uses extremely strong and harsh rhetoric in some speeches. I’m one your all’s antagonizing “alarmists/eco-nazi/climate-conspiratorist”, and even i’m embarrassed by the tone of Hansen on many occasions. But disagreeing with his political stances is a far cry from alleging that he conducts fraud in his scientific work.
It’s important to be clear and concise and not over-reach what your evidence implies. The “Hockey Stick” paleo-climate reconstruction may not have any statistical significance, and certain researchers may be going to absurd lengths to defend it and absolve it from error. That’s all that comes out of this episode.
#2 Bill Need to check out the new post on Climate Audit about the temperature record splices. Of course, Anthony may crosslink here.
“In an age of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.”
– George Orwell
I hope some major publications, like the WSJ write up about this one. This should be used as a case study for all those majoring in statistics and what happens when politics manipulate scientists.
An excellent article. This needs to be spread far and wide. Perhaps one of the professional bloggers/journalists at the Telegraph will help out? They seem to me to err on the side of the sceptics.
Bravo! When I first met up with the Mann Hockey stick I had my doubts because it was pieced together with dendrochronology, directly observed temperatures, and the most extreme of the modeled predictions. Good science doesn’t mix and match so selectively like that. Why could he not have used dendrochronology all the way through the 19th and early 20th centuries? I recall they still had trees then. I have always liked the sea level data because there are good insights that go well back in time and all the way up to the present. But Mann, et al, chose to completely disregard the sea level data that said the Medieval Climate Optimum was warmer than present and the worst case scenario from him and the IPCC would get the world only to the average condition for the period of human civilization (roughly the past 6500 years).
There are lots of nails for the Mann Hockeystick coffin.
Usually innocent corruption spreads like cancer through the entire group of “we-thinkers”, which is another term for the herd mentality, and then spreads as it picks up new converts wanting the ride on the bandwagon. Going to war in Iraq is a classic example of better-knowing people being swept up into the “we-think” camp instead of thinking for themselves. Innocent people even spread lies under “we-think” agendas. Logic becomes twisted. New statistical inventions to verify data becomes acceptable. Backdoor agreements that justify the end become common place. And the public is swept into the bin without knowledge of this downward turn of a once pristine scientific endeavor to hypothesize, test, and then explain an observation.
Been there. Seen it happen.
But of course, Pamela, climate-change skeptics are immune from that “we-thinker” mentality.
Anyways, I want to clarify my point from my above comment: this episode merely demonstrates that very specifically, the Mann “Hockey Stick” should be re-evaluated and analyzed. This says nothing on other temperature reconstructions (bear in mind that the Mann one is what, a decade old now, and more modern ones have been constructed since its publication). Finding some evidence of some vast political conspiracy in this story is nothing more than confirmation bias by those who have already determined that such is the nature of AGW – a hoax perpetrated upon them by politicians for some reason or another.
Counters writes: “There are many, many other convincing lines of evidence which strongly support modern AGW.”
Presumably, these do not include the fact that polar bears have lived through episodes of warming far more intense than that of the past century, or that the Northwest Passage has been traversed repeatedly throughout history during cyclical melt-offs, or that Greenland was colonized in the tenth century by the Vikings, or that Alpine passes that were frozen until recently have melted and refrozen cyclically since before Roman times, or that C02 has spiked after every past significant warming (not before), or that C02 has spiked in the past with no evident effect on temperature (once the 800-year lapse was accounted for), or that commentators in the 1930s were talking about the end of Arctic ice and the catastrophic effects thereof, or that since 1998 there has been no warming, or that quite a lot of warming evidence is contaminated by the urban heat island effect, or that Antarctic sea ice grew to historic maximum in the past 12 months, or that the Southern Hemisphere winter was the most intense in decades last year, or that it has been more intense than that in the past two months, or that it snowed in Baghdad last winter, or that snow and cold in China last winter were both dangerously extreme, or that it was colder and snowier in the American mountain West last winter than in some time, or that Alaska has seen record cold and historic minimums of warm days this summer.
Al Gore almost certainly had learned that the Mann hockey stick was fallacious prior to making “An Inconvenient Truth.” So far as I know, he hasn’t stopped alluding to its central deceit: that our current warming is without precedent and “caused” by humanity. The planet has warmed many times more than this episode, and not one of the instances from the past was caused by man-made carbon dioxide.
We are headed into at least three decades of possibly dangerous global cooling. The IPCC is a fully politicized, at least manipulative, and most likely out-and-out deceitful entity, whose ranks were determined by Gore and other warmists. They are playing dangerous games with human history, and they will eventually be held responsible for their folly.
Counters,
What is at stake is the credibility of the scientists in the alarmist community. Obfuscation, manipulation, dishonesty and silencing of dissent are not elements of legitimate science.
I posted this at the CA post regarding the GISS estimations:
“The key point in this is the quality of the science.
The estimations done by GISS are sloppy. The peer review process is incredibly sloppy. The failure of anyone in the alarmist community to check the quality of the surface temp station siting is really sloppy. The adoption of the hockey stick without anyone making an effort to check Mann’s work was beyond sloppy. The wild guess assumptions uncovered in the sea surface temp records was sloppy. The failure to archive samples and data sets is sloppy. The unwillingness of IPCC scientists to comply with its record requirements is sloppy. [The calls to stifle dissent is way beyond sloppy.]
There seems to be a pattern developing here regarding the quality of the science.”
And I added this “The refusal to employ the services of the best experts in statistics, forecasting and computer modelling is sloppy.”
For this post, let me add — if the climate science community accepts the behavior as described by Bishop Hill in his post, the science is worse than sloppy.
With the exception of the “once pristine scientific endeavor” myth, I agree with Pamela. Science has always been subject to the shortcomings of all-too-human researchers, but in the last few decades I think the scale (and the potential for harm) of pseudo-science has increased substantially.
Why do we automatically assume that Hansen has engaged in dishonest or unethical practices?
Uh, gee, I don’t know — maybe because he’s been caught making adjustments that make no sense; because he’s refused to divulge methods and algorithms used for making adjustments; because, IMHO, first and foremost he’s almost singlehandedly done more to politicize the debate than any other individual.
Counters, why do you assume that the duplicity and outright fraud highlighted in Bishop Hill’s piece is an isolated incidence related only to the hockey stick temperature reconstruction? How is it even remotely possible or plausible that fraud and dishonesty have been implicated in just that one single aspect of the AGW issue?
You are, without a doubt, the most articulate and civil spokesperson for the “alrmists/eco-nazi/climate-conspiratorist” (great description, BTW) side that I’ve run across in a while. You say: “even if in the coming months the “Hockey Stick” is shown to be definitively incorrect, there are many, many other convincing lines of evidence which strongly support modern AGW. One by one those “many other convincing lines of evidence” are being debunked, but it leaves me curious as to what it would take for you to join the ranks of the skeptics. Will you hang on until there is NO credible evidence left of AGW, or will you, at some point, decide that it really was all just one of the worst hoaxes every perpetrated on mankind.
counters, you’re making some pretty odd suggestions. From your comments, it seems you would suggest that the Hockey Stick was a single, isolated incident and not representative of the rest of the AGW science.
There’s several problems with that. While the Hockey Stick Incident (HSI) is a single “thing”, it’s a really big thing that includes a lot of different actors, motivations, and power plays.
You make it sound like a single bad paper got slipped through. Hardly. This was a years-long process that involved dozens of people all working to a common goal to pass off a horrible piece of mistakes and lies as “science”. It involved multiple papers. Many, many people used the Hockey Stick (and still do) as support for AGW. There was obviously a great deal of behind-the-scenes chicanery and power-pressure by various political and pseudo-scientific groups to get those papers made “official” and “true”.
You can’t possibly say that all that influence, falsification, and really horrible ‘science’ is contained just within the couple of papers involved in the HSI, but don’t affect the rest of the science going on about AGW. If they were pushing that hard to get the Hockey Stick papers passed of as good science, you can be guaranteed that there are dozens or hundreds of other situations where the same sort of influence has been wielded to push an AGW POV into a position of respectability when it doesn’t in fact deserve to be based on scientific credentials.
Hansen has made more than enough statements to show that he is in complete agreement with the style of influence and manipulation that was exercised in the HSI. That makes him very suspect and worthy of great suspicion when it comes to his promotion of his scientific claims about AGW.
If the HSI parties behaved in such a way to promote the pro-AGW Hockey Stick and silence any dissent, it is highly probable that Hansen (who sounds like he would fit right in with the HSI crowd) would, and perhaps has already, behave in a similar horribly un-scientific way. That’s why Hansen is a prime suspect, at least to me.
The evidence is circumstantial so far, but he sounds just like the groups who were behind the HSI debacle. If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and swims like a duck, I don’t need to do a full dissection to be pretty sure that it is indeed a duck. If Hansen is indeed like the HSI crowd, then I will put very little trust into his statements about AGW.
Others (Anthony among them) are doing some of the dissection of Hansen based on the very reasonable suspicion that he has engendered about his science. The dissection is ongoing, but so far it looks like, Yup – Hansen is a Duck.
‘ “I think if we don’t overthrow capitalism, we don’t have a chance of saving the world ecologically,” said Judi Bari, principal organizer of Earth First!’ from:
http://www.libertyunbound.com/archive/2008_09/contoski
warming.html
The above article is a pretty good debunk of AGW. I got to it from a Lew Rockwell link.
This doesn’t debunk Al Gore; this doesn’t prove that there is a conspiracy to prop up AGW. All this shows is that there could be serious issues with the “Hockey Stick,” and those issues should most definitely be re-investigated to settle the matter once and for all.
Al Gore has been debunked, thoroughly, and the hockey stock is just one aspect of the debunking. Funny, how you AGW alarmists like that word, “conspiracy”. Just another in your huge arsenal of straw men arguments, since you don’t actually have any science.
For [snip], the ends justify the means, and the hockey stick is proof positive of that.
Reply: I know this is another outrage thread, but where I have time and notice, I will continue to enforce the prohibition on name-calling~charles the moderator
Counters-
“…even i’m embarrassed by the tone of Hansen on many occasions. But disagreeing with his political stances is a far cry from alleging that he conducts fraud in his scientific work.”
It should, if you’re interested in the science, make you extremely skeptical of his science and his ability to keep his obvious bias from affecting his results.
Counters,
The question is this:
How come it is always “outsiders” that perform the due diligence? How come it was left to a retired mining engineer and an economist to uncover these obvious statistical flaws?
And Hansen has already crossed the Rubicon by signing up to be ALGORE’s climate guru. He has taken sides, and it is normal to now question the motives if his almost daily adjustments.
Re: Counters
I agree with you that this clearly underhanded and deceitful act shouldn’t necessarily be related to GISS. (Though IMO their work is contaminated by bias.)
About your comment that the hockey stick is just one piece of the AGW puzzle though – are you sure? You probably have a better history than me, but wasn’t the hockey stick created in large part from Briffa’s studies of dendrochronology, strip bark trees etc? Aren’t all the IPCC supported paleo reconstructions intertwined with the hockey stick and Briffa? Was that historical data not used to create the models??
To put it another way, what historical records or studies did the IPCC reference in AR4 that aren’t based, or can’t be traced back to, Mann’s work or Briffa’s? I get the impression that it’s a chain of paper after paper, that eventually lead back to these two (only with regards to historical temp data).
Isn’t this paper another nail in the coffins of Mann, Hansen, et al?
http://www.co2science.org/articles/V11/N33/C3.php
From the more anecdotal evidence…
Tom Skilling reports in his blog that Chicago’s Midway reporting station has recorded the fewest 90 degree days for the start of any decade since 1930.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-tom-skilling-explainer-13aug13,0,918946.story