Gavin Schmidt, Michael Mann, and Scott Rutherford have written a comment letter to the Annals of Applied Statistics to the Hockey Stick busting McShane and Wyner paper covered on WUWT in August.
It’s quite something. Here’s the M&W graph:
It only took reading the first paragraph of the Team paper for me to get cheesed off. Emphasis mine:
McShane and Wyner (2010) (henceforth “MW”) analyze a dataset of “proxy”climate records previously used by Mann et al (2008) (henceforth “M08”) to attempt to assess their utility in reconstructing past temperatures. MW introduce new methods in their analysis, which is welcome. However, the absence of both proper data quality control and appropriate “pseudoproxy” tests to assess the performance of their methods invalidate their main conclusions.
Why am I cheesed off?
The sheer arrogance of claiming improper “data quality control” when Mann himself has issues with his own papers such as incorrect lat/lon values of proxy samples, upside down Tiljander sediment proxies, and truncated/switched data, is mind boggling. It’s doubly mind boggling when these errors are well known to thousands of people, and Mann has done nothing to correct them but then speaks of data quality control issues in rebuttal. And yet Schmidt defends these sort of things on RC. It’s like the Team never read the McShane Wyner paper, because they clearly said this about data issues:
We are not interested at this stage in engaging the issues of data quality. To wit, henceforth and for the remainder of the paper, we work entirely with the data from Mann et al. (2008)
So MW used Mann’s own data, made it clear that their paper was about methodology with data, and not the data itself, and now the Team is complaining about data quality control?
The Team egos involved must be so large that the highway department has to put out orange road cones ahead of these guys when they travel. And they wonder why people make cartoons about them:
They go on to whine about the MWP being “inflated”.
MW’s inclusion of the additional poor quality proxies has a material affect on the reconstructions, inflating the level of peak apparent Medieval warmth, particularly in their featured “OLS PC10”
Well, here’s the thing gents; you don’t KNOW what the temperature was during the MWP. There are no absolute measurements of it, only reconstructions from proxy, and the Team opinion on what the temperature may have been is based on assumptions, not actual measurement. You can’t set yourself up as an authority on knowing whether it was inflated or not without knowing what the temperature actually was. They also rail about “poor quality proxies” (their own) used in MW. Like these?
Half the Hockey Stick graphs depend on bristlecone pine temperature proxies, whose worthlessness has already been exposed. They were kept because the other HS graphs, which depend on Briffa’s Yamal larch treering series, could not be disproved. We now find that Briffa calibrated centuries of temperature records on the strength of 12 trees and one rogue outlier in particular. Such a small sample is scandalous; the non-release of this information for 9 years is scandalous; the use of this undisclosed data as crucial evidence for several more official HS graphs is scandalous. And not properly comparing treering evidence with local thermometers is the mother of all scandals.
Read the entire Team response here, comments welcome.
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/notyet/inpress_Schmidt_etal_2.pdf
Backup location in case it falls down a rabbit hole: inpress_Schmidt_etal_2
For balance, the McShane and Wyner paper is available here: http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/mcshane-and-wyner-2010.pdf ======================
h/t to poptech
======================
UPDATE: Here are some other views:
Jeff Id, The Air Vent:
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/09/23/ostriches/
Luboš Motl, The Reference Frame:
http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/09/schmidt-mann-rutherford-just-clueless.html
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They (the alarmists) are worse than we thought…
This is bizarre. Mann is so desperate to prove any critics wrong that he will even piss in his own pocket in the attempt.
This is so ridiculous, they complain about their own data!
Are you surprised? This isn’t the first example of their double standards and it won’t be the last.
“scandalous”
Something is only a scandal if the rest of the neighborhood cares enough to be offended. We exist in a world where any imagined end justify any applied means. Nothing is scandalous anymore.
In Britain we would use the phrase ‘bare faced cheek’.
Not only is the original study referencing Manns own work but in this rebuttal paper there are no less than 6 references to papers written by Mann and 4 by Gavin.
Sorry, no time to commemt further-just off to write a paper confirming unprecedented warmth in the MWP using as a reference another paper written by myself…
tonyb
Only comment i can think of is ‘desperate’.
The earth is at the centre of the Universe and anyone who says different is clearly very mistaken.
The hallmark of a real scientist is that they do not have a preconceived idea of what the data should show. People like Mann are now just a huge embarrassment to real science. They were trusted to assess the evidence scientifically, and they abused that trust and now they are being subject to “professional” outside scrutiny there only defence is to say they must be wrong because it doesn’t show what they know to be right.
Real scientific professionals do not run publicity campaigns like Mann, nor do they run political propaganda websites, but they do care about science. So, what do they do when they find a rogue subject like climate “science” which refuses to follow the scientific method and which is tarnishing every other real science?
Hmm, lots to comment on. I’ll only mention the Schmidt, Mann et al obsession with phrases like “unprecedented in the last 1000 years”. I think those are traffic cones directing the reader to a detour around discussion of “…but not unprecedented in the Holocene scale”. Indeed, what MW are showing is that the Schmidt, Mann et al’s own data provide pretty good evidence that 1000 years ago was a warm period comparable to or warmer than the present. This is the conclusion they’d dearly love to negate but they realise that calling too much attention to it. They crow about how MW’s “own results” show current temperatures higher than the last 1000 years — as if this somehow invalidated MW’s results. But the point of contention is not “the last 1000 years”, but what happened right at the beginning of that period. Sheesh.
As for me, I’m driving right through those cones!
Mike, Gavin, and friends: Diversion tactics have lost their potency from overuse, fellas.
“MW’s inclusion of the additional poor quality proxies has a material affect on the reconstructions, inflating the level of peak apparent Medieval warmth…”
…way beyond what we’d like to believe it was.
Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Wishing
Let me get this straight. Is Mann ACTUALLY rubbishing his own data quality control in order to criticise the work of McShane and Wyner? By so doing, is he not also publicly invalidating the hockey stick itself?
If so, when is he going to hold a press conference and publicly apologise for his own hockey stick?
Checkmate to McShane and Wyner?
from the little i’ve read – it must wait til tomorrow – it strikes me these guys make creationism seem like harmless child play compared to the harm they have done and continue to do in the name of science.
I think Mann, Schmidt and Rutherford have lost so much from this they would have been better served to stay silent.
Alan Sutherland
Now let me get this straight. The Team are complaining that M&W’s use of the Teams own proxies constitutes absence of proper data quality control, and thus invalidates M&W’s conclusions.
Is it stating the obvious to enquire as to whether any other conclusions are invalidated by use of the same data?
Next they will start crowing that not only were they fully exonerated by the various “inquiries”, but they have since fully responded to the rebuttal. – Silly **$$!!s (fill in to taste).
For anyone writing comedy, the antics of the Hockey Team would be a goldmine. This group of misanthropic fiddlers with truth and scientific method are beyond parody and I am amazed that any reputable university or research establishment can justify keeping any of them on their payroll, let alone allowing them to make public statements under the banner of their employers.
But I suppose when Joe Public is paying the bill, anything goes…hey, wait a minute, there’s a title, readymade…oh darn, someone else thought of it already.
Attempting to discredit his own data …
This is not arrogant, or desperate – it is just utterly shameless
The point is reached now where a majority of the populace (~70% in Aus opinion polls) want “AGW” fixed, as they are scared witless by 20 years of relentless MSM propaganda … but equally a large majority (~65%) want someone else’s money to pay for it
This absolute contradiction is destroying politicians right,left and centre
This response could have been issued by the Pope. It seems so religious.
Ecotretas
Sounds like a politician or a good ad man – talk about how great you are on what is really your weakest point, Palin does it religiously. Unfortunately, that is god politics, but ver poor science…
The rule of holes.
#1 Stop digging.
R. Craigen-
It is really like the Star Wars part where Obi One says “nothing to see here, move along…”
When there is ALOT to see…
Certainly Mann made warming. How blinkered can you get? Well RC seem to have tunnel vision and their light at the end of this tunnel is an oncoming train of reality.
Now we know the origin of all those “You couldn’t make it up” stories. Penn state, The University of You Couldn’t Make it Up”
This sort of gives the word hypocrisy a new level of understanding.
Hi there,
just to clarify what has happened here:
M08 pusblished some reconstruction based on data
MW10 used the same data and shpwed a different result
Schmitt10 used a different method and a subset of data and got more or less the
M08 result.
Isn’t all MW10 will have to do, is answering the question which result Schmitt’s method produces using the full original dataset? (My guess is, it will be different than M08, due to the “quality issues” leaving MW10s conclusion about flaws in the original method intact . .)
However, the absence of both proper data
quality controlselection …There; that’s better.