By Dr. David Schnare
N.B., Dr. Schnare is the lead attorney in the UVA-Mann email case.
This week Nature Magazine published an editorial suggesting that “access to personal correspondence is a freedom too far” and that Michael Mann, whom they favorably compare to Galileo, should have his emails, written and received while he was a young professor at the University of Virginia, protected from public release on the core basis that to do otherwise would “chill” the work of scientists and academics. I note Galileo was forced to keep his work private. Had he the opportunity, he would have published it far and wide. Mann is quite the opposite. He wants to keep secrets and let no one know what he did and how he did it.
Nature, unfamiliar with the facts, law and both academic and university policy as applies in this case, conflates too many issues and misunderstands the transparency questions we raise.
The facts of the case include that these emails are more than five years old; that they contain none of the email attachments, no computer code, no data, no draft papers, no draft reports; that the university has already released over 2,000 of them, some academic and some not; that when they were written Mann knew there was no expectation of privacy; that all emails sent or received by a federal addressee are subject to the federal FOIA, and many have already been released; and that nearly 200 of the emails the University refuses to release were released by a whistleblower in England.
That latter group of emails, part of the “Climategate” release, do more than merely suggest Mann engaged in academic improprieties. They show he was a willing participant in efforts to “discriminate against or harass colleagues” and a failure to “respect and defend the free inquiry of associates, even when it leads to findings and conclusions that differ from their own.” Other emails document Mann’s communications were not “conducted professionally and with civility.”
Thus, emails already available to the public demonstrate that Michael Mann failed to comply with the University of Virginia Code of Ethics and the American Association of University Professors Statement on Professional Ethics.
A question, not mine, but asked by many who are interested in the history of this period, is not whether Mann failed to live up to the professional code expected of him. It is to what degree he failed to do so and to what lengths the university will go to hide this misbehavior. If we merely sought to expose Mann’s failure to display full academic professionalism, we would not need these emails. Those already in the public eye are more than sufficient for any such purposes.
I want those emails for a very different reason. Our law center seeks to defend good science and proper governmental behavior, and conversely to expose the converse. Without access to those kinds of emails, and, notably, research records themselves, it is not possible for anyone to adequately credit good behavior and expose bad behavior. This is one of two reasons we prosecute this case. It is the core purpose of a freedom of information act. Because the public paid for this work and owns this university, it has not merely a right to determine whether the faculty are doing their jobs properly; it has a duty to do so. This is not about peer review; it is about citizens’ acting as the sovereign and taking any appropriate step necessary to ensure those given stewardship over an arm of the Commonwealth are faithfully performing.
The second reason we bring this case is to defend science and the scientific process. Anyone who has taken a high school science laboratory course knows that the research or experimental process begins with recording what was done and what was observed. As UVA explains in its Research Policy RES-002, “The retention of accurately recorded and retrievable results is of the utmost importance in the conduct of research.” Why? “To enable an investigator to reproduce the steps taken.”
Currently public emails show Mann was unable to provide even his close colleagues data he used in some of his papers and could not remember which data sets he used. A query to UVA shows the university, who owns “the data and notebooks resulting from sponsored research,” had no copy of Mann’s logbooks and never gave him permission to take them with him when he left UVA. The university refused to inquire within Mann’s department as to whether anyone there knew whether he even kept a research logbook, so it’s impossible for me to know whether he stole the logbook or just never prepared one in the first place.
The emails ATI seeks are all that appears to be left of a history of what he did and how. Absent access to those emails, anyone seeking to duplicate his work, using the exact same data and methods, has no way to do so. That is in direct conflict with both good science and the UVA research policy.
Nor should access to these kind of emails “chill” the academic process.
As a former academic scientist, I understand the need and desire to keep close the research work while it is underway. Both I and the university have a proprietary interest in that work, while it is ongoing. Once completed, however, I have a duty to share not only the data and methods with the academic community, I also have a duty to share the mistakes, the blind alleys, the bad guesses and the work and theories abandoned.
Science advances knowledge by demonstrating that a theory is wrong. All the mistakes, blind alleys and bad guesses are valuable, not just to the scientist himself, but to his colleagues. By knowing what did not work, one does more than simply save time. One gains direction. One mistake revealed often opens a vista of other ideas and opportunities. The communications between scientists during a period of research are the grist for the next generation of work. Ask any doctoral candidate or post-doc how important being part of the process is on the direction of their future research. They will tell you that these unpublished communications are as much an important scientific contribution as the final papers themselves. Anyone who wishes to hide those thoughtful discussions hides knowledge.
If anything is “chilling” it is the thought that a neo-Galileo is hiding knowledge.
“so it’s impossible for me to know whether he stole the logbook or just never prepared one in the first place. ”
OUCH !!!
Either way, that’s real bad for Mr. Mann !!
Is Michael Mann honest? You decide.
Climate collaborators covering for the field marshal…
“I note Galileo was forced to keep his work private. Had he the opportunity, he would have published it far and wide. Mann is quite the opposite. He wants to keep secrets and let no one know what he did and how he did it.”
This is not really the way one should look at it… Galileo and Mann are almost exactly the same position.
Both have presented data that is explosive in nature and would rock the fundamental basics of the popular held religious belief at the time.
Both sets of data must be spun to the religious benefit of said popular religion as not to hurt said religion.
The religion must censor all the real data and prevent its release to the public as free thought could easily see through the “consensus”.
The only real difference is that Galileo didn’t believe in the “consensus” of the time and thus was censored to prevent his theory from gaining hold.
On the other hand Mann believes in the “consensus” of his time and supports the popular religion in its for censorship in order to protect the “consensus” knowing full well his data could well be its undoing.
Schnare,
I would be nice if you would provide links to back up your claims. If you can’t I don’t see how you can be considered anymore trustworthy than the character described in the UVa affidavit.
All of this is looking more and more like an institutional conspiracy and not just a “lone wolf” fraud. These people are spending way too much effort on something that should be a great to do about little. pg
I am simply amazed at the scale of corruption we see today in both academics and in government. What amazes me even more is a press sitting silent and enabling that corruption. They have the power to stop it, they choose to be a part of it.
Sickening, really.
The “log book” was probably on a university PC hard drive. That hard drive was probably cleaned and the computer replaced with a faster one. I seriously doubt that the university archieves everything on discarded PCs. Anything on their main computer is a different story. What copies of files Mann took with him would be revealing.
There should not even be a court fight/legal challenge to this. Prof Mann was working in the public sector, for the public. Under US law, unless a security issue is involved, all corespondence is a matter of public record.
Why he wants to hide his research is beyond me…..unless his research is tainted.
This is the impression he is giving by ignoring the law.
To me, the questions of importance are these:
a) why should any scientist expect that their research should be considered by anyone at anytime when their methods data are not completely transparent?
b) why should anyone who is employed by an organization who benefits from public funding consider themselves above the FOI legislation that public institutions are bound by law to comply with?
Hasn’t he already been cleared after thorough investigation by Penn State University?
Exactly which claims did Dr. Schnare make that would require links to back them up?
What an idiotic statement. I suppose if you actually had a legitimate argument you would have made it. I wonder how aware you are of the obvious transparency…
Mark
“log book”! Why should Mann keep research records? How arcane to imagine a that written record of research, as might be employed in the backward world of industrial research, would ever apply to such a Penn State superstar. Why on earth should Mann employ normal statistical methods? Academic and democratic freedom dictates that Mann simply radiates the only truth.
crosspatch says:
November 14, 2011 at 6:53 pm
“I am simply amazed at the scale of corruption we see today in both academics and in government. What amazes me even more is a press sitting silent and enabling that corruption. They have the power to stop it, they choose to be a part of it.”
The Left has declared that they hold the moral high ground and that anyone who criticizes them belongs to the Gigantic Redneck Conspiracy that threatens all that is Left and good. I am not kidding. This is the belief that animates the vast majority of professors and administrators who dominate America’s universities and colleges.
Your essay is eloquent, Dr. Schnare. Keep up the good fight.
To my knowledge, noone knows the identity or location of the whistleblower.
Dr. David Schnare,
Thank you on behalf of many around our nation who applaud your efforts and hope you stick to it tenaciously and succeed. You have a great deal of support even if it is not always as vocal as the opposition. The closer you get to the truth the harder they will fight.
For science, for public integrity and for the sake of history, this needs to happen!
GAWD and WOW! I support this statement from the bottom of my scientific heart!!!!! HOW MANY DEMONSTRATIONS WILL IT TAKE TO EXPOSE THE SCIENTIFIC FRAUD PERPETRATED BY THE AGW FREAKS???? I remain gobsmacked that we have a society that is sufficiently dumbed-down scientifically and so very blind as to not put this junk science in the garbage where it belongs!!
Maybe it is a sign that we are very, very, very weak as a society? Sad, indeed.
Camburn says:
November 14, 2011 at 7:05 pm
There should not even be a court fight/legal challenge to this. Prof Mann was working in the public sector, for the public. Under US law, unless a security issue is involved, all corespondence is a matter of public record.
Why he wants to hide his research is beyond me…..unless his research is tainted.
I agree – what makes this information so different that it is causing the University to spend money to keep it from being released?
This al makes “Diederik Stapel” looks like a amateur. But at least he has admitted that he was wrong and that he is very sorry for it.
As he said in response to the interim report from Tilburg University: “I did not withstand the pressure to score, to publish, the pressure to get better in time. I wanted too much, too fast. In a system where there are few checks and balances, where people work alone, I took the wrong turn. I want to emphasize that the mistakes that I made were not made were not born out of selfish ends.”
“I failed as a scientist. I adapted research data and fabricated research. Not once, but several times, not for a short period, but over a longer period of time. I realize that I shocked and angered my colleagues, because of my behavior. I put my field, social psychology in a bad light. I am ashamed of it and I deeply regret it. ”
So what is to fear mr. Mann?
Hasn’t he already been cleared after thorough investigation by Penn State University? Yup the same university that thoroughly investigated what goes on in locker rooms. Enuff said?
I dont know why anyone expects Mann and the Team to cooperate ? The only time frausters and con artists cooperate is when they are facing a conviction, and cooepration provides them a better sentancing deal. Just like all (alleged) criminals, Mann and Co. will only cooperate when that cooperation will save them jail time
Hi Jae
You might think differently about this issue if you looked behind the curtain…
Dr. David Schnare and the American Tradition Institute…
http://www.southernstudies.org/2011/10/special-investigation-whos-behind-the-information-attacks-on-climate-scientists.html
…
Thank you, Dr. David Schnare.
Rattus Norvegicus says:
Schnare,
I would be nice if you would provide links to back up your claims. If you can’t I don’t see how you can be considered anymore trustworthy than the character described in the UVa affidavit.
A nice ad hominen! Subtly administered to ensure that the topic is dragged off on a tangent.
Rattus, Dr (and I note how not calling Dr Mann “Dr” irritates so many of the trolls, but not in reverse) Schnare could be the world’s biggest a**hole, but that is entirely irrelevant to the nature of Dr Mann’s e-mails and the legality of the OIA.
So, don’t drag us off target. You can worry all you like about Dr Schnare’s reliablity, but he isn’t interested in reworking the economy based on his findings, so your worrying is worthless. Worry instead about Dr Mann’s reliability, because the consequences of his actions matter greatly.
“R. Shearer says:
November 14, 2011 at 7:12 pm
Hasn’t he already been cleared after thorough investigation by Penn State University?”
Yes, and that disciplined, moral, trustworthy group IMMEDIATELY went to work on allegations of a “pedophilia” ring at PENN STATE.
As in Mann’s case, they FOUND NOTHING. (But maybe they were looking at the “Wrong Man(n)”.)
At this point I think that being cleared by Penn State is about the same as being found guilty by normal people.
Anyone who has ever worked in a large corporation knows that their e-mails, computer files, etc. are totally subject to discovery in a variety of ways. Corporations have been the favorite target of lawyers for decades and have adapted to that by developing various training courses to teach employees about ethics, EEO, export laws, etc.
I really am tired of the “protected” class being shocked at such hum-drum requests.
Although I embedded the links into the essay, apparently they did not make it through. Here are the links to the Nature article and the policies to which I cited. While I’m at it, I respond to Martin by only saying that I was interviewed for the southernstudies piece and despite my best efforts, they refused to credit our statements, our purpose and the fact that we are not part of any right-wing conspiracy.
I’m just an old country lawyer from Virginia (and North Carolina). /sarc
Nature article: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v479/n7372/full/479149a.html?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20111110
UVA Code of Ethics:
http://www.virginia.edu/statementofpurpose/uethics.html
AAUP Statement on Professional Ethics:
http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/policydocs/contents/statementonprofessionalethics.htm
UVA Research Policy:
https://policy.itc.virginia.edu/policy/policydisplay?id='RES-002
Conspiracy to lie is not an academic privilege requiring protection. Michel Mann is no Galileo….though I’m sure he imagines that the myth of Galileo is a template for his own self-contructed myth.
1) Galileo did not invent the telescope, although he sure made an effort to assume that credential… Hans Lippershay invented it 12-18 months prior.
2) Lippershay also sketched the craters of the moon first. Not Galileo.
3) Galileo did not first describe a Sun-Centered “cosmos”…that was done by Copernicus or ?Samos? in ~300 BC??….A lot of people think it was Galileo. Now we know that the center of the observed universe is an infra red and microwave observing satellite hovering above the earth…..The center of the solar system is not the sun either… it is a point 1/4 of a solar diameter above the surface of the sun.
Maybe the comparison of Mann to Galileo is appropriate….Galileo was either most often wrong, using plagerized and uncredited work or scamming for more money from the Medici’s. Above all Galileo was a self promoter….at all cost.
Our law center seeks to defend good science
With all due respect, this goal is suspect from the outset. How do you know if something is ‘good science’ and how does one qualify to be defended by you? I would like to belong to the group whose science is considered ‘good’ by your law center, what do I do to join?
So Michael Mann wants to keep his “Nature trick” in secret. Funny. Odd that. Who could have imagined he’d do that!
Leif Svalgaard says:
November 14, 2011 at 8:05 pm
“With all due respect, this goal is suspect from the outset. How do you know if something is ‘good science’ and how does one qualify to be defended by you? I would like to belong to the group whose science is considered ‘good’ by your law center, what do I do to join?”
Pretty easy to tell the difference between good and bad science… good science is done out in the open following the scientific method…. bad science is everything else. This doubly applies when your talking publicly payed for science.
Martin says:
November 14, 2011 at 7:40 pm
Hi Jae
You might think differently about this issue if you looked behind the curtain…
Dr. David Schnare and the American Tradition Institute…
http://www.southernstudies.org/2011/10/special-investigation-whos-behind-the-information-attacks-on-climate-scientists.html
___________________________________
Who cares about the institutional alliance, real or imagined. The argument is what needs to be focussed upon. If 50% of what Schnare claims is correct, there is a serious issue to be unpicked, here.
But again, the Bear must raise this fundamental (to me) question: the scintific community, as a whole, is not stupid. Surely there has been enough said about these issues, and the potential damage to the reputation of science to prompt some sort of general movement, in the scientific community, calling for a proper review of what has been going on?
Where is the uprising? And, please, spare me the conspiracy theories about Mann/Jones/Trenberth manipulating the dabate. If they have been guilty of so doing, they may have fooled some of the scientists for some of the time, but surely not all of the scientists for all of this time?
temp says:
November 14, 2011 at 8:25 pm
Pretty easy to tell the difference between good and bad science… good science is done out in the open following the scientific method….
That may be a necessary condition [but I’m not sure that is always true], but it is certainly not a sufficient condition. So the problem persists.
R. Shearer says:
November 14, 2011 at 7:12 pm
Hasn’t he already been cleared after thorough investigation by Penn State University?
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Like Joe Paterno? University investigations don’t seem to be so thorough.
Fred H. Haynie says:
November 14, 2011 at 7:01 pm
The “log book” was probably on a university PC hard drive. That hard drive was probably cleaned and the computer replaced with a faster one. I seriously doubt that the university archieves everything on discarded PCs. Anything on their main computer is a different story. What copies of files Mann took with him would be revealing.>>>
Well…..
As a general rule of thumb, research institutions would strongly discourage (if they don’t have an actual overt policy on the matter) the keeping of any important files such as electronic “log books” on a desk top computer. The express reason being that such files are typically not part of the central backup system, meaning that accidental deletion, corruption, and so on, would render the data impossible to retrieve in most cases. Hence, any formal record keeping such as a “log book” would be kept on a network drive that was backed up by the central IT organization, not on a desk top hard drive. If UVa had no such system and/or policy in place….well they are out on a limb and some compliance auditor is going to have a hey day.
By extension, the backup system would not only have copies of the “log books” if they ever existed, but they would also have versions of those log book files as they existed at various points in time. So, if something was written in the log on Week 34, and then in Week 39 someone decided that the entry on Week 34 should not see the light of day, they could delete that section. BUT, the version that existed on Week 34 would STILL be in the backup system, and it could be restored to the exact same state as it was when it was backed up in Week 34. Now again, the university would have a data retention policy that sets out what they back up, and for how long they retain the backup. If they don’t have a data retention policy…. oooh they either have to keep everything forever, or else that compliance auditor is going to have still more fun. Now, if they DO have a data retention policy, the question is what is the policy, and would earlier versions of the document have been deleted at some point.
Bottom line is that if the logs did in fact exist, and were in fact electronic, then you would be gobsmacked at how hard it is to actually delete them from all the places that they existed at all the points in time that they existed. Shredding the hard drive on his desk top PC, provided anything approaching proper data management techniques were in place, wouldn’t even come close to eliminating those files.
Now, given that Mann claimed he couldn’t remember which data files he used for what, or where some of them were and so on, my guess is that he never had a log book of any sort as he could easily have looked that information up. That or he just lied.
For those who might be interested: David Schnare just retired from EPA, where he worked for over 30 years. He was once an idealist, as were many of us (maybe we are still idealistic, if cynicism reflects the desire for more honesty, mourning its loss). Ask him for his views on what happened over the years at EPA, and why.
If there is nothing to hide ? why not release the Emails the longer this goes on the more everybody thinks he is hiding
Michael Mann never intended to be open and honest about anything–that’s his modus operandi. He’s a crook; he’s been a tool of other crooks (UVa) and my prediction is he’s going down. (OK, further down, he’s already been discredited and everybody but a bunch of CAGW proponents knows it, but they’re so brain dead they don’t know what being “open and honest” is.)
Ok, now let’s see his hacks come to his defense on this site, which will only show how utterly indefensible their complicity is in this case.
Martin says:
November 14, 2011 at 7:40 pm
Aha! Another purveyor of the Myth of the Great Redneck Conspiracy. They are under every rug.
Leif Svalgaard says:
November 14, 2011 at 8:05 pm
Leif, you apparently didn’t read all of the post–one of the main objectives stated, because Mann refuses to share data and methodology, is to go back to basics and determine if Mann left or took his log book with him (any 11th-grade science student has one of those or he fails). The alternative to improper scientific method (regarding the log book, that is), is that Mann never kept one or destroyed it to cover his tracks. The first possibility gives credibility to the idea that Mann’s not much of a scientist; the second would indicate he’s a crook.
I suggest you read the post again and this time take off your blinders. If “this goal is suspect from the outset” as you say and yet that goal is to ascertain if the scientific method was followed in this particular case and you object to that, then your personal approach to the scientific method can only be described as Mannly. How sad!
Leif Svalgaard says:
November 14, 2011 at 8:31 pm
temp says:
November 14, 2011 at 8:25 pm
Pretty easy to tell the difference between good and bad science… good science is done out in the open following the scientific method….
“That may be a necessary condition [but I’m not sure that is always true], but it is certainly not a sufficient condition. So the problem persists.”
Failures in accordance with the scientific method can be just as valuable as successes. You haven’t arrived at a reasonably well confirmed physical hypothesis but you might show that a particular line of inquiry should be abandoned.
“Sufficient condition” allows no exceptions, so is a tad high as a standard.
Leif Svalgaard says: “I would like to belong to the group whose science is considered ‘good’ by your law center, what do I do to join?”
Don’t hide any declines, for starters.
Paul Westhaver says:
November 14, 2011 at 7:54 pm
You do not appreciate Galileo’s achievements. Read the book below and you will thank me always.
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican by Galileo Galilei, Stillman Drake, J. L. Heilbron and Albert Einstein (Oct 2, 2001) (from Amazon.com)
jorgekafkazar says:
November 14, 2011 at 9:00 pm
Leif Svalgaard says: “I would like to belong to the group whose science is considered ‘good’ by your law center, what do I do to join?”
“Don’t hide any declines, for starters.”
Bwaaa Ha Ha Ha… and double Bwaaa Ha Ha Ha…
Leif, you are totally lacking in guile. No one would ever file an FOIA for your work. 🙂
crosspatch says:
November 14, 2011 at 6:53 pm
I am simply amazed at the scale of corruption we see today in both academics and in government. What amazes me even more is a press sitting silent and enabling that corruption. They have the power to stop it, they choose to be a part of it.
Sickening, really.
——————————-
I agree with you. What is most sickening is with the academics.
Wow how far can this once proud journal fall under its present leadership. It is very clear the globe is now cooling and the “20-30 year pause” is just more proof. Once the best journal in the world now, second rate propaganda at best with this leadership.
Fred H. Haynie says:
November 14, 2011 at 7:01 pm
The “log book” was probably on a university PC hard drive. That hard drive was probably cleaned and the computer replaced with a faster one…..
____________________________________________
A darn good reason why lab books should be used. Lab books that are signed, dated and counter signed by a second each day.
Yeah, “Old Fashioned” but real good as evidence in a court trial.
I wonder how much science and other history will be lost from the last thirty years because everyone decided to use computers instead of hard copy???
Fred H. Haynie says:
November 14, 2011 at 7:01 pm
The “log book” was probably on a university PC hard drive. That hard drive was probably cleaned and the computer replaced with a faster one. I seriously doubt that the university archieves everything on discarded PCs. Anything on their main computer is a different story. What copies of files Mann took with him would be revealing.
———————————————————————————————————————–
I suspect that if that was the case the University would have ponied up what little it has and faced the music. No, there is something damning in that information that will never see the light of day. The conspirator’s strategy is to kick the can down the road as long as possible. Deny, deny deny. Then when backed into a corner it will turn out that the info was destroyed “years ago”, and those at fault are no longer available. So sorry…
Martin says:
November 14, 2011 at 7:40 pm
Hi Jae
You might think differently about this issue if you looked behind the curtain…
Dr. David Schnare and the American Tradition Institute…
http://www.southernstudies.org/2011/10/special-investigation-whos-behind-the-information-attacks-on-climate-scientists.html
*****************************************************
Of course, Martin, you should also look at the background of the people whose claims you are using to smear Dr. Scnare.
http://www.southernstudies.org/iss/board.html
Let’s see, on the board of directors – American Postal Workers Union, community organizer at Stanford, AFL-CIO, a gay & lesbian blogger. Advisors – NAACP, ACORN, Sierra Club, Praxis Project, Naomi Klein, Jim Hightower. Surely this is not a partisan group! /sarc
Martin says:
November 14, 2011 at 7:40 pm
Hi Jae
You might think differently about this issue if you looked behind the curtain…
Dr. David Schnare and the American Tradition Institute…
_____________________________
I do not care whether Dr. Schnare is a cannibal who ate his mother for lunch. All that matters is that we have a Scientific Method, a Freedom of Information Act and work MY TAX DOLLAR PAID FOR!
http://web.jjay.cuny.edu/~acarpi/NSC/1-scimethod.htm
In other words by defying the FOIA Mann is acknowledging the fact he is NOT DOING SCIENCE!
I wish you non-science types and Post-normal pseudo-science types would get that point through your heads.
If it is not reproduced it ain’t Science it is Snake Oil.
GALILEO? More like Piltdown Man’s creator!
RockyRoad says:
November 14, 2011 at 8:54 pm
go back to basics and determine if Mann left or took his log book with him
In 46 years of research I have never kept a ‘log book’ nor have I known anybody who has. If you are conducting an experiment or a workshop, then you will ordinarily have documentation related to that experiment and recently it is likely that the documentation would be a shared and joint document [e.g. a Wiki, like http://ssnworkshop.wikia.com/wiki/Home ], but that would not be a ‘log book’ in the usual sense. Whether a PC can be considered a log book is debatable as the PC is too dynamic.
Again…it is sad to say bet needs to be said…one of the great universities and institutions in the USA which whitewashed the Michael Mann BS with an “investigation” (at the taxpayer’s expense) is now having to explain itself on what will probably become the worst and most repugnant college sports scam in history.
So…if we can’t trust them on that horrible revolting mess…then why the hell should we even remotely trust them on something more minor, like a hockey-stick scientific FRAUDSTER who is sheltered among their ranks??
How much Mass Groupthink / Cognitive Dissonance Disorder should we be able to endure as a species…before we annihilate ourselves?
Geezus I mean REALLY.
The answer is…we shouldn’t have to endure any of it.
And we should not for one minute “trust” the “judgement” of Big Academia establishment at UVA either.
I certainly don’t agree with everything the Atty General in VA stands for, but I will cheer him on for being on the vanguard in attacking the constitutionality of Obamacare…as well as pushing FOIA to see what Mann has been up to on the taxpayer’s time….especially as when that “research” could cost trillions of dollars of extra burden on the mom and pops of the world.
Long live the truth. Keep chipping away, everyone,…and don’t stop.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Currently I am reading Montford’s book on the hockey stick. The crux of the argument is that Mann et al produced a paper that if true affected everyone. They with the help of others then published widely and consequently were believed without examination. When questioned and attempts were made to validate the finding an absolute refusal to help was the result. As yet there is no adequate explanation for this behaviour other than the suspicion that is total absolute fraud. If not why not reveal everything that is evidence for the conclusion and end it. Until this happens it will not end it is just too important.
re posts: Theo Goodwin says: November 14, 2011 at 7:16 pm
Many years ago as a teen I read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand… as I put the book down, I thought, good story overall, even with the silly immature relationship notions – but things could never get that corrupt, that bad, that fast. Maybe we could wind up somewhere in the middle of the book during my lifetime, but not the end.
Much to my dismay, for a number of years now it seems that every time I turn around, read or listen to the news, more and more frequently I find myself thinking “and Atlas Shrugs yet again.” That we’re far further into the latter pages of the book than I’d ever have imagined possible – especially here during the last couple of years. What I think concerns me the most is that it seems between education and parenting, kids are more and more willing and comfortable with cheating and morals, in terms of honesty, integrity, pride (JUSTIFIABLE pride, not false pride!), independence, capability, work ethics, etc., are disappearing. Not to mention apparently logic and rational critical thinking skills. All of which does not bode well for the future, to say the least.
But heck, the rate things are going, we won’t need to worry about the young folks screwing things up, we’re speeding down that path already.
That or I’m just getting cranky and cynical as I age. Heck, I’m only middle aged. At this rate, just think what I’ll be like when I’m really old! :0)
re post by: Martin says: November 14, 2011 at 7:40 pm
Martin, would you like a little cheese with that whine?
Hate to break it to you, but the factual, logical argument laid out by Dr. Schnare makes vastly more sense than the conspiracy theory emotional hyperbole in your link. Mann’s emails, data, codes, etc., created on University computers are all publicly owned, bought and paid for up front. There is no justification I can see for refusing to release everything.
I understand that the UVa stonewalling has been funded by another party to the tune of $1,000,000. I’m very, very curious as to who that would be. How would we go about finding that information?
R. Shearer says:
November 14, 2011 at 7:12 pm
Hasn’t he already been cleared after thorough investigation by Penn State University?
Yeah, the same folks who allowed a known child molester campus access right up until his arrest… They are REAL thorough investigators….
All the comments miss the simple reason for the FOIA. What is Mann fighting so hard to hide. The information does not belong to him, the rules state that.
What intrigues me more is the fact that UVA also seem have a reason for secrecy. To me, a good reason to have all this out is not only to protect the scientific method but to free all undergrads and fellow researchers to be able to stand up and say when something is going wrong. It seems obvious many in climate research are scared to stand up for reasons we are all aware off. Hell. this is a bunch of people that resort to editing comments on their own dictatorial website!
Far to simple for Climate Scientists, it’s not about facts, figures or advancing science it’s about grants, funding and belief that all humans are evil.
Cave men/women never heard of fuel poverty it’s a shame alot of the older generation now have over here in the UK. Advancement in science? you must be joking.
Mann dips deeply into the public purse for a living – costs millions. The result of Mann’s “science” helps to turn that public purse into a black hole – costs billions. Mann basks in praise of his contemporaries who are also funded by the public purse – costs God knows. Mann cries foul and issues writs right, left and centre when said public demand scrutiny in the name of transparency – priceless!
In paragraph four,where you pass judgement on Dr Mann’s activities,what is the source/are the sources of the the sections in quote marks?
Martin said
“You might think differently about this issue if you looked behind the curtain…”
which turns out to be
“But a Facing South investigation has found that the Colorado-based American Tradition Institute is part of a broader network of groups with close ties to energy interests that have long fought greenhouse gas regulation.”
Don’t you get bored with regurgitating unsubstantiated accusations. There was no proof associated with that statement. Yes of course anyone who questions those who have manufactured CAGW, must be a fossil fuel lackey – it is obvious they look evil. Therefore you do not need proof!
mpaul said:
November 14, 2011 at 7:16 pm
.”…released by a whistleblower in England”
To my knowledge, noone knows the identity or location of the whistleblower.
———————————————————
They should take algore’s Nobel prize away from him and give it to the Whistleblower.
Well Chris Horner reckons that UVA has spent half a million on legal fees. Which suggests ATI has also spent a similar amount.
Now David is telling us that ATI want those emails just for the completely innocent reason that they want to have a public record of Mann’s thought processes in arriving at his research conclusions. Even though these processes have been documented in their final form in the research literature. These results have not been falsified by subsequent researchers.
Here is what I think is more plausible. David is on a fishing expedition to find emails that can be presented in such a way as to discredit Michael Mann and by extension the entire field of paleotemperature research.
If the legal case was about some random guy studying grass hoppers ATI would not be bothering. The only plausible reason to bother is to interfere with political action on climate change.
This means that even if ATI can find nothing dubious in Mann’s emails they will still manage to “discover” something dubious by making stuff up.
Nick says:
November 14, 2011 at 11:48 pm
“In paragraph four,where you pass judgement on Dr Mann’s activities,what is the source/are the sources of the the sections in quote marks?”
Looks like someone didn’t bother to read the links at
“David Schnare says:
November 14, 2011 at 7:53 pm”
Commenters: Please review the basic facts of the Galileo case to avoid the egregious errors that have appeared here with distressing consistency.
Is there some way of practicing good science without having some acquaintance with what is and what is NOT the practice of good science?
As a person whose “science” education ended in high school, I think I can still define the scientific method and the difference between a good scientist and a bad scientist.
A good scientist will say… Here is my hypothesis, here are my data, here is my conclusion… I dare you to find something wrong.
A bad scientist will say… Why should I show you my data when all you want to do is to find something wrong.
Amino Acids in Meterorites (I need a new name soon) says:
November 14, 2011 at 8:22 pm
How about Soylent Grin?
I think Dr. David Schnare is being somewhat fractious. If the documents were truly subject to FOI they can be obtained through the normal channels. There are also several unsupported attacks on the character of Dr Mann (pardon me for not using latin to indicate that I am educated). These are personal communications, not inter-office memos, get real! However I do read this blog for amusement and Dr. Schnare has not disappointed.
If it’s not reproducible, it ain’t science. Sheesh, I know that and I ain’t even a sceintust, let alone a gummit-funded sceintust.
Well, to be honest I’d really hate for my email spool to be grabbed and pawed through by somebody hostile to me. After all, it contains all of the records of my hooker-and-cocaine binges, the love notes from undergraduates, evidence of my gambling problem and my collusion with the traffickers and child porn. Besides, there are nearly 20K messages spooled there — who has the TIME to go through it all? Not me. God knows what’s in there — perhaps I called a colleague a poo-poo head in an unguarded moment.
Then there is that damn logbook. Who knew? Here I’ve been doing research off and on for thirty years and I was supposed to keep a logbook? They should have told me during my original HR interview or something. Of course, I’m a theorist — all of my work is code and data and figures and papers and stuff like that, and anybody can get to it that wants to. Maybe experimentalists have to keep a logbook, dunno, but honestly I’ve never heard of any such thing.
So I find myself strangely split. No, not by a cocaine hangover, by the issue. On the one hand I think it is absolutely reasonable for 100% of Mann’s research “stuff” to be made public — his actual code and data in particular — although some chunk of that has already happened back in the days of the hounding of M&M. On the other, I have to seriously oppose the release of his email. It would really, really piss me off to have my email spool made public for anything less than a court order obtained under suspicion of serious criminal conduct, not just being a sloppy and incompetent and biased researcher.
The latter is many things, but not a crime. Criminalizing it would indeed have a “chilling effect” on academic research. I’d have to go through all of my own emails to make sure that I never made an unguarded remark, never called anyone a bad name, I’d have to hide the drugs, the sex, the arguments with my kids, all of the stuff I’ve ever said with the reasonable expectation of privacy. And I just don’t have time…
rgb
Looks like academic freedom can become the child’s hand in the cookie jar. In most of my career in exploration geochemistry, we were allowed to look at land by government permission (often withheld), at our cost. We were required as part of the conditions to lodge reports to the government at specified periods, at our cost, at the risk of losing access if we defaulted. We were even required to store rock samples, especially diamond drill core, marked, labelled, logged, for long after we had relinquished interest in the property. This is something like the latter part of the scientific method quoted above by Gail Combs, “In other words, if two different people in two different parts of the world perform the same experiment, they should both get the same results….. “. One way to do this is to retain original material for later workers.
Thank you, Keith W.!
Martin, you don’t have to do the kind of research that Keith did to know that SouthernStudies.org is biased. Their own “about us” page declares their purpose to be “an essential resource for grassroots activists, community leaders, scholars, policy makers and others working to bring lasting social and economic change to the region… [for] progressive change…”
Their commitment is not to good science, it is to progressive social change, and what they detest most are capitalists and Christians.
Their smear piece against Schnare at places didn’t even pass the laugh test, as when they referred to the “growing scientific consensus about climate change.”
“I note Galileo was forced to keep his work private. Had he the opportunity, he would have published it far and wide. Mann is quite the opposite. He wants to keep secrets and let no one know what he did and how he did it.”
Just to spell out an implication of that last sentence – in other words, like a magician or occultist.
The wider question that raises is how did we get here, when almost a century ago the Logical Positivist program was supposed to expunge the use of occult entities and processes from the domain of scientific explanation?
@Rattus, re: “Schnare,
“It would be nice if you would provide links to back up your claims. If you can’t I don’t see how you can be considered anymore trustworthy than the character described in the UVa affidavit.”
It is not for Dr Schnare to provide us with those links. Anthony Watts has merely replicated the good Dr’s basic and simple explanation as to why he wants access to these emails. I am sure that any court case would require the evidence you seek to justify such a request of the court to compel Dr Mann to provide the requested emails.
A lot of what Dr Schnare states is common sense and self-evident to any scientist or engineer. Are you opposed to the “scientific method”? IF Dr Mann has failed, as alleged, to uphold the proper and professional and rigorous standards required of a serious scientist, then all evidence supporting that allegation must be heard in court.
It is claimed that Dr Schnare is backed by mysterious ‘energy interests’. I don’t really care if he is or not, but I clicked on the link provided to see the details. The linked source gave no details, but contained another link purporting to back up the claim. So I clicked on that one – and there the trail ends, because the linked page merely asserts that Dr Schnare’s organisation is backed by coal/gas/shale businesses, with no evidence whatever for this.
Dr Schnare,
It is incumbent upon you to do all in your power to get to the truth.
All government paid research that is not state secret stuff, is by law open to the public for scrutiny. Those individuals or institutions that refuse public disclosure paid for by the public purse
should be bought to count and nailed.
The serious nature of this particular case that has caused the waste of billions of dollars around the world, and is ongoing in its stupidity, needs to come to a head soon, so that it can be lanced.
The world will thank you sir.
.
Smokey says:
November 14, 2011 at 6:32 pm
///////////////////////////////////////////////
Being wrong, or even being negligently wrong does not in itself make one dishonest, but it does call into question one’s competence and whether one should be taken seriously.
Does anyone know where we are with the court action? What happens next?
Mann is not worthy to mention in the same breath as Galileo.
Luther Bl’t says:
November 15, 2011 at 2:10 am
“…. Logical Positivis….”
Is there really something called “logical positivism”? And all this time I thought that Monty Python were taking the piss…
@ Robert Brown, re: “I have to seriously oppose the release of his email. It would really, really piss me off to have my email spool made public”
The simple answer to that is to NEVER use work email for personal use and NEVER use personal email for work use. If you use your work email for drug dealing, ordering prostitutes or whatever else you used as a hypothetical (I hope) example, then more fool you if and when it becomes public. Your personal feelings (being pissed off) are utterly irrelevant in law. I know of no clause in law which states that emails on a public system belong to the public which paid for them unless the release of such causes the author of the emails to be “pissed off”.
I vote “tough shit” on that one.
Does anyone know of any scientist who is pro AGW and is calling for data and methods to be released?
I think that Dr Fuller supports the idea but can,t think of any others.
Dear Dr. Schnare,
You forgot one very important link. I knew it would be there because I’ve been a unix systems administrator (in addition to doing physics research and teaching) for 25 years, personally wrote two of Duke’s computer security/privacy statements (and helped write or comment the rest, including the current one). You really should read:
http://its.virginia.edu/pubs/docs/RespComp/resp-comp-facstf.html
To quote:
“IV. Email: Rules, Responsibilities, and Privacy
You can expect that, except in specific circumstances, the content of the email files associated with your account will be treated as confidential by the University because it does not routinely examine or monitor such content, except when you have been notified in advance that such examination or monitoring is an expectation in your specific workplace. ”
The document does go on to specify the well-known exceptions, which sum up to: “If a court orders us to give over your email, we will, but unless and until this happens your email is private and confidential.” Indeed, a second document here:
http://www.virginia.edu/abuse/info.html
details the fact that unless the action is part of a faculty disciplinary proceeding, your email is held to be as private as possible internally as well. Similar policies exist here (at Duke) and pretty much every other research University — I know, because I personally helped to make sure that they were in our similar acceptable use/privacy documents. In them, not even my department chair or a Dean can “casually” enter my email spool and read through it, not without just cause, and I would absolutely expect University lawyers and officials to knee-jerk defend the privacy of my email against any outsider not backed up by a court order.
Given this, the University would open itself up to lawsuit, would it not, if it just handed over Mike Mann’s email spool to a perfect stranger without his permission. Not to mention the fact that any IT person and lover of personal freedom would consider any such action repugnant. Faculty, staff, and students do not use their email accounts “only” for professional activities. Staff generally have the lowest expectations of privacy (especially that associated with accounts that are indeed used primarily to help conduct and manage University business) and even there, one has a reasonable expectation of privacy and protection from one’s superiors simply grazing through your mail.
Email is often used by people to engage in truly private communications. A married homosexual person might use email to communicate with an illicit lover — seriously. Things that are personally or professionally embarrassing can easily be said. Email conversations are used to criticize superiors, bash colleagues with whom one disagrees, exchange ideas one wishes to keep close to one’s chest because they have research potential. In my opinion it is perfectly obvious that all of this communication MUST be protected, that researchers MUST be able to communicate with every expectation of privacy, or they will simply set up out-of-band secure communications channels that cannot be casually violated. This is entirely possible, and is a complete pain in the ass (e.g. encrypting every message in a public/private encryption scheme). It is “expensive” in time and storage resources. Far better to simply guarantee privacy within the limits prescribed by law.
Perhaps — perhaps, mind you — Mann violated some actual law conducting his research, although I doubt it. Confirmation bias is not a crime, it is just stupid. Being ambitious is not a crime. Failing to keep good records of one’s research is USUALLY not a crime, although it can be under very specific circumstances and in any event may well violate policies you agree to when you receive grant funding, policies that vary per agency. Similarly, different agencies have different rules for who “owns” what results of the grant supported work — most Universities have an entire office of research support part of whose purpose is to keep track of just what one’s obligations are in this regard.
In this sort of morass, it is by no means clear who “owns” Mann’s work. The obvious first answer is Mann. The possible second answer is the granting agency that supported the work. The latter can almost certainly make ex post facto requests for that work, even privy details of that work, to be made available to them, but PUBLICATION of that work IS generally considered to be fulfilment of a grant contract, and even that publication leaves e.g. the rights to the publications and often any patents etc in the hands of the researcher and/or University (all subject to negotiation per contract). Once again, the knee jerk reaction of any University administration will be to protect the privacy and academic freedom of its faculty, past or present, or else they won’t HAVE a future.
Who would work for a University that would at any time just hand over all of your private work resources to a third party? Who would work for a University that would just publish your email, with all of your dirty laundry and unguarded conversations, to the world?
So please do not blame the University for not simply acquiescing in your demands/requests. For it to do so would be to expose themselves to lawsuits and arouse the righteous indignation of its faculty. It would indeed deal a serious blow to academic freedom and personal freedom, to the reasonable expectation of privacy without which no serious business can be undertaken. The rules are simple. If you have a court order, they will comply. Otherwise, forget it.
Good for them.
And good luck getting the court order — seriously. Because Mann’s work has indeed become a major factor in public policy and may — I say may — have been crafted with malice aforethought and intent to “defraud” (personally I doubt it, at least not at first — never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by simple incompetence and stupidity) it has become fair game for the FOIA, Virginia or Federal, but is hardly unreasonable to require that you convince a judge of that and hence relieve the University of its responsibility to protect Mann’s information. I very much doubt that even a completely convinced judge will let you have access to ALL of Mann’s mail spool even then — you would do well to limit what you seek to his communications with a very select and finite list of individuals, and bear in mind that THEIR communications were made in expectation of privacy as well and you’ll have to convince the judge to override their implicit rights too.
Don’t forget, much as we might admire them in some ways, the people that “outed” Mann’s email in Climategate are >>criminals<< in the eyes of the law. And this is as it should be, or why bother having law.
You, as a lawyer, should appreciate that.
rgb
re post by: Leif Svalgaard says: November 14, 2011 at 8:05 pm
With all due respect, no one can tell if something is good science if key aspects of the data, methods, etc., can’t be seen and examined, and has to be taken on nothing more than an individual’s claims and sheer faith.
Their investigation only covered the time he was at Penn State, which followed his work on the hockey stick. and the investigation was far from thorough, as McIntyre and others have explained. E.g., it called no opposing witnesses regarding the first three charges and evaded certain critical questions.
Dearest Ken,
I just attempted to provide a pair of links to UVAs acceptable use documents but for some reason the reply failed to get posted; perhaps it was too long. In a nutshell, yes, sure, only an idiot assumes that their email can NEVER be made public, but in a University there are actually documents that form a part of the explicit “contract” between faculty, staff and student users of IT systems that guarantee privacy within some very specific bounds. Those guarantees are indeed necessary in order not to stifle academic freedom. Surely you aren’t suggesting that simply because “the government” paid for some part or all of the mail server that I’m using on a University campus that any butt-head can walk in off of the street and demand to read all of my communications made under the reasonable and carefully specified expectations of privacy?
In any event, UVA is legally bound NOT to surrender Mann’s email spool without a court order, and that IS a matter of “law”. The email servers of a University do not belong to “the public” in the sense you seem to be implying, any more than you can just walk in and demand access to people’s private offices and their desk drawers. Indeed, the protections are very similar. If you have reason to believe that a crime has been committed or that you have rights pursuant to the FOIA, by all means try to convince a judge of that. That’s what they are for, because we live in a society bounded by contract and law, and Mann’s contract with UVA includes a reasonable expectation of privacy >>explicitly written out<< here:
http://its.virginia.edu/pubs/docs/RespComp/resp-comp-facstf.html
You (and Dr. Schnare) really should read this, because "ownership" in a University isn't anywhere near as simple as you seem to think that it is.
Ultimately, you — or he — would very likely have to demonstrate that there is a reasonable chance that Mann committed some sort of crime in order to gain access to his email, and indeed NEITHER of you will probably be granted access to his email even then as private citizens, but you might compel a judge to go through it and decide if indeed a crime was likely to have been committed. There is a small chance of getting a small subset of his email spool — communications with a carefully delimited set of individuals, for example.
But I doubt it, because confirmation bias may be many things in research — stupid and counterproductive being at the top of the list — but it is not a crime. Being ambitious is not a crime. Defending your research is not a crime, even if it is being done in ways that are repugnant and counterproductive to the scientific process. A case can be made for the release of Mann's actual research — although that may well be up to the granting agency who supported it (again, a complicated issue of "ownership" that ultimately resides in the specific grant contracts with the specific agency(s) in question).
Actually, the only overt criminals involved so far are the ones that released the climategate emails. That was a crime. Civil disobedience, sure. Justified, perhaps. But without doubt a crime.
rgb
Dr. Schnare, this is an excellent article; thanks so much for it.
I wish to add that the scientific method applies to some extent to all research. When doing my dissertation on dissonance treatment in late 15th-century and early 16th-century choral polyphonic music, I began with a hypothesis: that composers would treat writing in many voices (6 or more) differently than they would treat “normal” 4-voice writing. In pursuit of that knowledge, I analyzed hundreds of works, in both categories, by dozens of composers. What did I find? Indeed, for some composers there were detectable differences in their writing that seemed to depend upon the number of voices; for others, no such difference appeared. I completed the dissertation and the degree, and I still have–35 years later–all my notes, graphs, charts, totals, percentages, tables, and versions of my writing. At the time, of course, very little could be done with such statistics on a computer; what I could do that way, I did on a CPU the size of a bank building, using cards and print-offs. I wrote my work on a Remington typewriter, making 6 carbon copies of 700+ pages. But the research method ensured that anyone else who wanted to check my work could do so. To date, no one has asked, and my work has cost no one besides myself a dime. On the other hand, my research affected no one else; it was pure research and changed no one’s life except mine. Dr. Mann, now–that “work” affects all of us, in needless and wasteful spending of our money on “green” fakery and false premises.
Confucius says:
“It is indisputable,
That in science, results
Must be reproducible.”
(Michael Mann take note.)
The judge will filter those out, or redact personal material. ATI is only asking for the rest.
Would you call the Climategate emails personal communications? (In one sense they were, but in another not. They certainly weren’t purely personal, which is what “personal communications” mis-implies.)
MikeA says:
November 15, 2011 at 1:10 am
I think Dr. David Schnare is being somewhat fractious. If the documents were truly subject to FOI they can be obtained through the normal channels. There are also several unsupported attacks on the character of Dr Mann (pardon me for not using latin to indicate that I am educated). These are personal communications, not inter-office memos, get real! However I do read this blog for amusement and Dr. Schnare has not disappointed.>>>
I think MikeA is being somewhat vacuous. If the documents had been released through the normal channels per the FOI request, there would be no need for court action asking to do so.
Which attacks on the character of Dr. Mann are unsupportable? Unless you make specific reference to these, for all we know you made the attacks up.
There’s no such thing as inter-office memos anymore BTW. Those were multipart notes with “press hard you are making x copies” written on them. One copy was kept “for the record” and the rest were sent to other offices via courier. Do you know why inter-office memos no longer exist?
BECAUSE THEY GOT REPLACED BY E-MAIL.
Smokey at 6.13pm says:
‘Is Michael Mann honest? You decide.’
Darn, Smokey…I thought it was a poll. I wanted to vote!
“I agree with you. What is most sickening is with the academics.”
As an academic, I do feel obligated to point out two very important things:
a) 99% of all academic research is conducted in a proper and above-board manner. For the most part, researchers “got no horse in any race” that anybody but other researchers care about, and the conflicts and debates that occur ARE the scientific process, working the way that it should. Sure, there is always some petty politics, sure, the process isn’t perfect because people do often referee inappropriately (either grants or publications), because the “nepotism” associated with a research community seeded with your “offspring” in the form of ex-students can generate minor inequities and many inefficiencies. It isn’t perfect, but it certainly isn’t “sickening”.
b) The SPECIFIC CASE of climate research is an exception, and even there I very much doubt that it is a universal exception. Indeed, I can read many papers published by people that doubt, or challenge, the “mainline” view of AGW. I’ve read enough, and communicated with enough, people working in this field at this point to have little doubt that a lot of what has happened in climate research IS somewhat sickening, but even so all or most of the work is still being done by idealists working in good faith. The “conspiracy” as it were is limited to a fairly small list of individuals (and we all know who they are) who were thrust, as it were, into a position of public notoriety and influence and who used this position to abuse the general process of moderately objective research.
This would not have been possible without the collusion, or at least acquiescence, of the editors of certain journals. In fact, I think that this is the sorriest aspect of the whole affair. Journal editors are not supposed to be participatory, especially not the editors of major journals such as Nature, yet there seems to be little doubt that they have in many instances failed to preserve the objectivity upon which the entire system of academic publication rests. This is one of the two great tragedies of the whole affair — it has recently made it even into the pages of Physics Today.
The other tragedy is the one implicit in your comment — that you are sickened with “academics”. How sad. It is almost enough to make me wish that AGW was a true hypothesis, although the evidence does not seem to support that conclusion, at least not the way that the IPCC and its paid cherrypickers have asserted from the beginning. As it is, when the AGW hypothesis comes crashing down in solar cycles 24 and 25, when better science fills in the gaps in the Earth’s energy budget and thermal cycle, when the IPCC is finally revealed as being the corrupt deal invented to loot a few trillion dollars and redistribute them in various ways that line the pockets and increase the political power of a bunch of unelected global politicians who have no actual mandate that it really is, ALL OF SCIENCE, all of academia, will suffer.
Science is not based on authority (that’s part of the problem, we’re being constantly told to “trust authority” where in science proper there is no such thing) but to MOST people who CAN’T actually go through all of the papers and read the research for themselves and form a judgement, the academy has been a kind of trustworthy authority. Evolution or creation? Heliocentric or Geocentry (or acentric)? 6000 years old or 13.73 billion years old? Are statins good or bad for you? At the very least one has to trust the process and rely on those that conduct it or we ultimately believe myths and lies to our collective detriment.
When AGW crashes down as I am very afraid that it will, that indeed it already is, with it goes the CREDIBILITY of scientists everywhere, which will allow the religious nuts, the mythicists, the luddites to damage something that for five hundred years has been the one thing that stands between the human race and the dark ages — the “enlightenment” and technology and wealth and knowledge produced by the scientific process, and the trust in those that engage in this process.
So very sad.
rgb
.
The normal channels were used. A Virginia state legislator with an obligation to exercise oversight for the funds used by the University of Virginia and Mann requested the e-mail and other documents required to assure his legislative committe that the state funds were not being used to defraud the state and taxpayers. The University of Virginia denied the official request by falsely claiming the e-mail and documents no longer existed. Now, you can argue whether this was an unintentional oversight or a deliberate lie and fraud, but the end result is that a relatively routine official oversight and inquiry was unlawfully obstructed by false statements.
At the request of state legislators, the Virginia Attorney-General undertook a followup inquiry to determine how and why the legislative inquiry was being obstructed, and whether or not the obstruction could be the result of a yet undiscovered defrauding of the state government. This official investigation was then obstructed by legal delaying tactics and appeals to sympathetic members of the public designed to derail and inquiries, investigations, or potential prosecutions in the event the inquiries found incriminating evidence. You saying “they can be obtained through the normal channels” is a comment seriously detached from reality.
The government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain announced the deliberate conspiracy to withhold and threat to destroy the e-mail correspondence which Mann participated in was a violation of law. Consequently it has already been established in a British court of law that some of the correspondence was not protected in Britian as private correspondence or private communications. Consequently, there is overwhelming evidence and cause to suspect that the finding of a violation of British law by Mann’s correspondents may be reasonable cause to inquire into whether or not Mann also engaged in any violations of U.S. law with respect to the obstruction of official Virginia legislative and executive obligations to exercise oversight of state funds.
Mann’s character is already exposed and evidenced by his own comments in his e-mails exchanged with the conspirators in the UK.
Wow that’s an amazingly poor grasp of history you’ve got there…
One of the first things I was taught about computers was this simple dictum: Never put anything in an e-mail that would make you uncomfortable seeing printed on the front page of the NYT. (Or the WSJ- your pick.) ‘Nuff said.
“Wow that’s an amazingly poor grasp of history you’ve got there…”
Well, as far as he goes he’s correct. Galileo didn’t invent the telescope, he invented a variation of the telescope that doesn’t invert the image. He wasn’t the first person to look at the moon with a telescope, but he was the first person to look at the moons of Jupiter. He absolutely didn’t invent heliocentrism — at least one was invented of by Aristarchus of Samos circa 270 BCE, who also measured the diameter of the earth and attempted to measure the distance to the sun and moon (we know of some of his work from commentary by Archimedes). He also followed Copernicus and was arguing for the general truth of the Copernican model (following the inquisition, both his works and Copernicus work was banned). He was indeed involved in “politics” — for a while the then-current pope had his back, but he made a political mistake in a dialogue he published that appeared to mock both the pope and geocentrism and lost his top cover. FWIW, the Brahe/Kepler team were far better observational astronomers — Galileo opposed e.g. Kepler’s first law because circles were “perfect” and ellipses weren’t, for example, because he lacked the data and means of analyzing it of convincing himself otherwise.
With all that said, his GREATER contribution to science was the invention of kinematics and observations on e.g. near-Earth gravity. Here he trumped Kepler, and with a bit more time or inclination might have trumped Newton; he had a weak grasp of the ideas that led to the calculus, but didn’t quite have the tools (Descartes’ Analytical Geometry, in particular) that Newton did when he managed to combine kinematics with a dynamical principle and invent proper “physics”.
Hardly plagiarism, even when he copied people or borrowed ideas. Early scientific synthesis, if anything. In the end, Galileo’s story has been more than a bit romanticized, but there is no doubt that he was a formidable figure in the Enlightenment and that he became something of an icon for freedom of thought, for the primacy of reason over religion.
rgb
See the impossible Schnare request here:
http://climateandstuff.blogspot.com/2011/06/schnare-vs-uva-impossible-request.html
It is not JUST a log book and a few relevant emails.
Schnare wants to trawl through everything Mann has touched. To quote the demand:
1. All documents that constitute or are in any way related to correspondence, messages or e-mails sent by Dr. Michael Mann to, or received from, any of the following persons:
(aa)…
.
.
(nn) All research assistants, secretaries or administrative staff with whom Dr. Mann worked while he was at the University of Virginia.
what are documents?:
2. As used herein, the words “record”, “records”, “document” or “documents” mean the original and any copies of any written, printed, typed, electronic, or graphic matter of any kind or nature, however produced or reproduced, any book, pamphlet, brochure, periodical, newspaper, letter, correspondence, memoranda, notice, facsimile, e-mail, manual, press release, telegram, report, study, handwritten note, working paper, chart, paper, graph, index, tape, data sheet, data processing card, or any other written, recorded, transcribed, punched, taped, filmed or graphic matter now in your possession, custody or control.
This is nothing more than an attempt to get a few more “Wow! Just Wow ” quotes from the anti AGW accolytes!
Nast! Just Nasty!
crosspatch says:
November 14, 2011 at 6:53 pm
I am simply amazed at the scale of corruption we see today in both academics and in government. What amazes me even more is a press sitting silent and enabling that corruption. They have the power to stop it, they choose to be a part of it.
Sickening, really.
____________________________________
Crosspatch, this only demonstrates the truth of how money and power corrupts. It is the reason I am pro-capitalism but anti-mega corporations and central banks. The more power and money is centralized the worse for the general population.
I can think of no horror for humanity worse than a world government controlled by the unelected and that is straight where we are headed within the next couple of decades.
Once they achieve their goals this worldwide totalitarian government will show its true colors to the watermelons and just like Russia’s intelligentsia, will find they were only tools to be discarded once they are no longer useful.
Would you be interested in the work of people who have demonstrated they have no honesty, honor or integrity, but do show an interest in disrupting the power structure???
>> Robert Brown says:
November 15, 2011 at 3:19 am <<
A lot of words that ignore the fact that UVa released Pat Michaels' E-mails without a whimper. Yet his works are not the basis for proposing massive new taxes and regulations.
Robert Brown: given your interpretation of the confidentiality of email correspondence at UVa, can you explain how the same administrators can decide to release all of Professor Patrick Michaels’ emails when served with an FOIA request from Greenpeace without any apparent qualms or legal attempts to protect.
I am curious about the relative tastes of sauces for goose and gander…
>>>Because the public paid for this work and owns this university, it has not merely a right to determine whether the faculty are doing their jobs properly; it has a duty to do so. This is not about peer review; it is about citizens’ acting as the sovereign and taking any appropriate step necessary to ensure those given stewardship over an arm of the Commonwealth are faithfully performing.<<<
Well said!
Billions have been squandered on the research world wide, and billions more are at stake. Obviously, the university has something to hide in those emails or they would have been released. I say the emails are public property because they were created on the public's dime.
Leif Svalgaard says:
November 14, 2011 at 9:56 pm
In 46 years of research I have never kept a ‘log book’ nor have I known anybody who has. If you are conducting an experiment or a workshop, then you will ordinarily have documentation related to that experiment and recently it is likely that the documentation would be a shared and joint document [e.g. a Wiki, like http://ssnworkshop.wikia.com/wiki/Home ], but that would not be a ‘log book’ in the usual sense. Whether a PC can be considered a log book is debatable as the PC is too dynamic.
_______________________________________
This absolutely floors me!
Is it only chemists working in industry who were taught to keep a daily lab notebook??? Heck I can not count the number of times I got buttonholed to sign off on the weight of ingredients by the guys in the pilot lab.
Post Normal Science in SPADES or should I say science fiction. I sure hope your computer documentation has an “audit trail”
I have to laugh at the ad-homs against Dr Schnare here. Aside from the diversionary tactic of playing the man rather than the ball is this: Does anybody in their right, unblinkered mind want to suggest that Dr Mann’s work was thought/known to be a good example of the scientific method and integrity until Cuccinelli’s and the ATI’s intervention?
The ATI haven’t suddenly thrown a dark accusation into a pool of light and goodness. It’s been known for about a decade that the hockey stick was poor science and, with the years of obfuscation, suspicion has lingered over the veracity of the data and methodology used to produce it. UVa and Mann have had ample opportunity to demonstrate the solidity of the findings of Mann, but their reluctance or inability to do so on such an important matter has brought the case to a head.
Pretending that all was well until the ATI lawsuit is ridiculous.
1. Galileo wasn’t operating on tax-payers dollars.
2. Galileo was ultimately wrong as he thought the sun was at the center of the universe and not the earth.
Perfectly stated! Succinct and Brilliant.
“In 46 years of research I have never kept a ‘log book’ nor have I known anybody who has. If you are conducting an experiment or a workshop, then you will ordinarily have documentation related to that experiment and recently it is likely that the documentation would be a shared and joint document [e.g. a Wiki, like http://ssnworkshop.wikia.com/wiki/Home ], but that would not be a ‘log book’ in the usual sense. Whether a PC can be considered a log book is debatable as the PC is too dynamic.”
Lief: Really? Interesting, as I just spent a week trying to find a reasonable “Electronic Labbook” for my work, rather than Excel and Word !!
But seriously then folks, despite my engineering degrees and jobs I’m just a Plugger when it comes to my research projects, yet..I feel constrained to try to keep track of my work.
At the same time, when (as I suppose Lief is) I’m PAID to do work, I usually keep maticulous and copious notes.
Should we try to get you an ELN Lief?
Max
Robert Brown says:
November 15, 2011 at 4:27 am
..99% of all academic research is conducted in a proper and above-board …
Respectfully, Robert, I disagree. I have also been involved in academic research (as a private sector partner) for over 25 years. While I have met many excellent researchers and find most of them not to be political, it does not reach anywhere near 99%.
I would hazard a guess of 1 in 5 people I have run across had a secret agenda. It is just the climate science industry has attracted a lot more attention than I think even they ever envisioned. And while the 1 in 5 is worrisome, it is the 2 others for every 5 who do the “me-too” research that really messes things up. Because now you have a consensus in a field (academic research) that is not well equipped to fight back.
I have no comment on the case, because I’m not familiar with the details. I am familiar with IT security and privacy policies because I’ve helped write them. I am also QUITE familiar with the fact that it is struggle to maintain those policies in place in the face of a legal staff and University administration with all sorts of internal politics — the very thing the policies are designed to withstand. Given a chance, administrators will often erode or ignore the rules, even though they are “their” rules.
It’s a perennial battle at Duke, and I’m sure it is at UVA as well. I know of a number of cases at Duke where there have been battles over privacy and who owns what; my own department has had a few spectacular lawsuits over who owns research results (Google John Madey lawsuit, for example). There are also cases where for example, somebody was out on leave, a department chair needed to find out if somebody was sending him email associated with a conference (sent to the secretary’s account as she was handling registration) so he went into the account, discovered that she was looking for a job, and the whole thing explodes into lawsuits and recrimination).
The point is, that if Patrick Michael’s emails were “outed” on an FOIA request without requiring a court order, this TOO is an injustice, not that outing Mann’s would not be. If I were Michaels I’d be suing and publicly criticizing the University for violating its own written policy. Court orders change everything, of course. When a judge orders it, UVA will comply. If evidence of real fraud, criminal fraud or conspiracy to commit fraud is found, heads will probably roll.
Note well, by the way, that I’m as skeptical as anybody on this list and have systematically worked through the literature. This isn’t about defending Mann; I was convinced that Mann was an idiot after reading the original M&M stuff many years ago — it was a portrait at that time less of conspiracy and more of chronic incompetence mixed with the kind of cherrypicking and model tampering that is all too easy to do when you have prior conclusions you want to support. Hardly “evil”, just wishful thinking projected out into a spaghetti bowl of crap homemade statistical code that bollixed up the PCA.
What turned Mann into Frankenstein’s Monster was becoming — literally — the poster child of the IPCC. They were desperate for a smoking gun, because yeah, the MWP and LIA were problems, yeah, they lacked any actual science and the evidence as everybody currently understood it at that time was not at all convincing. The IPCC latched onto it the way the Christian Right latches onto fossils of “human footprints” next to those of T Rex or a report that once, a long time ago, carbon dating dated something wrong.
I’d be perfectly happy, in the long run, to see Mann’s work utterly discredited for the LAY public, but at this point he is already an embarrassment to the IPCC and the AGW climate crowd. And quite aside from my possible future happiness associated with this eventual possible event, I would find it very disturbing if ANY University released ANYONE’S email to the public without due process and either that person’s permission or a court order overriding that permission. The FOIA provides one with the right to ask for certain things, but free access to my email spool file is not one of them.
rgb
R. Shearer wrote: “Hasn’t he already been cleared after thorough investigation by Penn State University?”
I think he should have his name changed to Michael Manndusky.
Leif Svalgaard says:
November 14, 2011 at 8:05 pm
“Our law center seeks to defend good science
With all due respect, this goal is suspect from the outset. How do you know if something is ‘good science’ and how does one qualify to be defended by you? I would like to belong to the group whose science is considered ‘good’ by your law center, what do I do to join?”
Lief, While I respect you greatly, this is a bit over the top. “Good Science” is judged along the same lines as good ethics. Was a reasonable process followed. Your standing as a good scientist will not be judged by history based on whether or not your latest model works. It will be based on how you have approached scientific inquiry. If my recall is correct, Galileo thought that the moon had nothing to do with tides. The fact that he was wrong does not make him a “bad” scientist. HIs criticism that the lunar model had no mechanism, just correlations, was a valid criticism. We’re in much the same situation with climate science. Time will develop the needed mechanisms and supporting work. In the meantime, process is what we can judge, and it is absolutely fair to do so.
I have no expectation of privacy or right to privacy when using my employer’s computers or email system. If I use my employer’s computers or email system for personal business or personal correspondence, then I still have no right to privacy (and may violate some workplace rules in doing so). Scientists and academics do not enjoy any special rights or privileges in this regard.
Robert Brown says:
November 15, 2011 at 3:19 am
Dear Dr. Schnare,
You forgot one very important link…..You really should read:
http://its.virginia.edu/pubs/docs/RespComp/resp-comp-facstf.html
…. I personally helped to make sure that they were in our similar acceptable use/privacy documents. In them, not even my department chair or a Dean can “casually” enter my email spool and read through it, not without just cause, and I would absolutely expect University lawyers and officials to knee-jerk defend the privacy of my email against any outsider not backed up by a court order.
….In my opinion it is perfectly obvious that all of this communication MUST be protected, that researchers MUST be able to communicate with every expectation of privacy….
Who would work for a University that would at any time just hand over all of your private work resources to a third party? Who would work for a University that would just publish your email, with all of your dirty laundry and unguarded conversations, to the world?….
_______________________
Prima Donnas aren’t you.
“Expectation of privacy” of course is the key phrase. Unfortunately it does not mean what we think it means. That is why Monsanto can have agents walk through PRIVATE PROPERTY and gather evidence to sue farmers whose crops are contaminated with their genetics…. So much for self-incrimination and privacy in US courts of law.
So do University profs have a magical “Expectation of Privacy” ???
Back to the document you so kindly provided. http://its.virginia.edu/pubs/docs/RespComp/resp-comp-facstf.html
Does not seem very “Private” to me.
Then there is e-mail in general.
Here is an example from a few years ago:
http://www.horsegazette.com/NAIS/NAIS_Supporters_Fighting_Dirty.html
This is just one example those who fought NAIS ran into. We learned anyone who considers e-mail “Private” is an absolute fool as is anyone who trust the US government.
Here is an article at “Findlaw.com” http://public.findlaw.com/internet/email-privacy.html
Sorry, US law trumps university policy.
re Robert Brown says: November 15, 2011 at 3:19 am
I knew it would be there because … personally wrote two of Duke’s computer security/privacy statements.
==============================================
Of note – Duke is a Private research university, and U Va is a Public research university.
Duke University http://www.duke.edu/
Official gateway to information and online resources of Duke University,
a private research university
located in Durham NC, USA.
UVa http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Virginia
The University of Virginia (also The University, Mr. Jefferson’s University, or Virginia; often abbreviated as U.Va. or UVA)
is a public research university located in …
Robert Brown says:
November 15, 2011 at 4:27 am
……When AGW crashes down as I am very afraid that it will, that indeed it already is, with it goes the CREDIBILITY of scientists everywhere, which will allow the religious nuts, the mythicists, the luddites to damage something that for five hundred years has been the one thing that stands between the human race and the dark ages — the “enlightenment” and technology and wealth and knowledge produced by the scientific process, and the trust in those that engage in this process.
________________________________
That is the real damage that has been done.
Since you are at Duke you should also be aware of another blow to science. The FDA stating Cetero has Fabricated Trial Data for pharmaceuticals. http://www.clinicalresearchsociety.org/2011/07/28/fda-says-cro-cetero-faked-trial-data-pharmas-may-need-to-redo-tests/
And the third: Psychology professor Diederik Stapel falsified research data in some 30 scientific articles published in peer reviewed journals. http://www.dutchnews.nl/news/archives/2011/10/tilburg_professor_faked_data_i.php
This has blow back here in the USA where University of Connecticut psychologist Hart Blanton, expects to have to retract two papers written with Stapel.
The fact that Penn State is now embroiled in the mother of all scandals is just the icing on the cake.
99% may be honest (a highly inflated number in my experience in industry) but it is the other 1% who will be remembered by the public. The Universities desire to continue to “Protect” scientists and the refusal by scientists to make data public after the papers are published will only feed suspicion that “Scientists are dishonest”.
Michael Mann and the ‘Team’ are present day medieval scientists, who haven’t understood the modern scientific world. They think we have a science which is authoritarian centric like medieval period science was.
Lost to Michael Mann and the associated ‘Team’, all of whom had been critically exposed on the blogosphere and other venues going back years before Climategate, was/is the modern concept of performing and documenting publically funded climate science in non-authoritarian manner.
The ‘Team’ presumes the mantle of moral authority in their science. Their science is posited (a piori) in a non-scientific ideological context as a vehicle to save the earth from the most freedom achieving civilizations of modern man. To the ‘Team’, whatever they do scientifically in that context must be correct because it supports their self-appointed moral authority. To the ‘Team’ any opponent must have morally deficient motivations and to the ‘Team’ any opponent’s science must simply be at the least wrong but also probably purposely deceiving or worse.
So, ATI’s fully legal process efforts to get the documentation from Mann for the period he was at UVa are opposed by Mann (and the ‘Team’) on basis of the presumption of their morally good science defending itself against morally bad science or the forces of anti-science.
Mann and the ‘Team’ need to leap forward many centuries from their medieval mindset. The many thoroughly modern scientists can help them make the change.
John
I’ts called “discovery” for a reason. Since the requested documents have not been produced, just what is he supposed to link to? Ample links are available to document the assertion that his behavior does not meet the University’s standards on scientific behavior. GIYF.
Defending Mann needs to be equated with defending Paterno and the Penn State administration (that also recently whitewashed an investigation in Mann to “protect the institution”.) See where that gets you? Open disclosure might hurt, but the cover-up hurts worse.
This scandal reminds me of a drunk driver refusing to blow into the breathalyzer. The driver is drunk but somehow believes that by refusing to blow, he will escape justice. It doesn’t in our system and it shouldn’t work for the conniving Mann. He was the Mann driving. GK
WTG Keith! Shove that “My partisans are OK but yours aren’t” hypocrisy right back down their throat!
John says:
November 14, 2011 at 8:41 pm
“For those who might be interested: David Schnare just retired from EPA, where he worked for over 30 years. ”
AGW’ers attacking David Scnare;
Did you read that? Did it sink in?
Dr Schnare
Thank you, thank you. I’ve appreciated everything you’ve done and said, and how you’ve said it.
Robert Brown
I hope that Dr Schnare succeed in his endeavour. If you are correct that Climate Science represents only a tiny part of Academia but threatens to cast its blight over the whole of Academia, then this blight needs to be exorcised as soon as possible, for the sake of the rest, and if the legal process can best do this, great.
To me, there is also the question of one’s implicit responsibility, as a member of any group, for the misdeeds of other members. Also one’s responsibility simply as a human being for truth, righteousness, and justice.
Yes, maybe there is only a small miscreant clique in Climate Science. But there are wider shortfalls of integrity with those who should be the gatekeepers: heads of universities, enquiry panels, scientific journals, the most supposedly prestigious scientific bodies, and above all the IPCC who is accountable to nobody. It is well-known that paper-writers in many scientific subjects today need to genuflect to the Global Warming idol, if they are to succeed in either grants or peer-review.
“It only takes the failure of good men to act, for evil to triumph”
G. Karst says:
November 15, 2011 at 8:57 am
“This scandal reminds me of a drunk driver refusing to blow into the breathalyzer. ”
Exactly. What is interesting to see is the reaction of part of the public who sides with the driver.
Similar FOIA have been already done several times for several other scientists why do some people want to make an exception now? Based on what reasons? see also: Christopher C. Horner: Confessions of a FOIA criminal
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=8614
Would be curious to hear from the protesters on this page how do they justify, is this ok to do FOIA for some and not ok for the other? Do we vote by popularity of the scientist? Are they aware of the situation? How does nature justify it? Ignoring the other cases? Will there be no FOIA request from now on on any? Is there no reason to have FOIA at all?
Gail Combs says: November 15, 2011 at 5:53 am
Leif Svalgaard says: November 14, 2011 at 9:56 pm
This absolutely floors me!
Looks like the difference between scientific work that can affect the life and health of others (engineering standards involved), and scientific work that is simply enjoying exploring.
Of course, Climate Science crossed over this line, without anyone paying due attention. Now we reap the consequences.
Galileo has an undeserved reputation as a persecuted scientist. I’ve said this before, but he was shot down (and not really persecuted at that), because he promoted a theory he had no way, at that time, of proving. His promotion of said theory was to the point of persecuting his opponents.
The fact that he was correct is beside the point. He was gigged for his methods more than anything else. I find it ironic that Galileo, who heaped more persecution and vilification on his opponents than he ever received, actually was treated quite fairly. In fact, for the times, the authorities bent over backwards to treat him with consideration. It was only when he broke the agreements that he agreed to that he was put under house arrest.
Gail Combs said
“Is it only chemists working in industry who were taught to keep a daily lab notebook???”
No in most areas of Science there is a culture of keeping day or log books (not sure about medical science). In my 4 decades of being a professional scientist I haven’t come across one who didn’t (unfortunately some are not well kept). Although in recent years keeping a soft copy in Word (or whatever word processor) is more prevalent.
I think this speaks volumes about Leif Svalgaard though !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! What a stunning statement.
JJThoms says: November 15, 2011 at 5:16 am
See the impossible Schnare request here:
http://climateandstuff.blogspot.com/2011/06/schnare-vs-uva-impossible-request.html….
Your ignorance is showing (a) re normal and necessary legal procedure (b) the provenance of your remarks (The Ford Prefect, complete with links to DeSmog etc)
I know almost nothing of the Dr. Michael’s UVA ordeal. Was a FOI request sent to the doctor who in turn failed to provide them or did Greenpeace call is admin buddies at the university and they just did a dump of the emails and forwarded them to Greenpeace? I don’t know.
“I think this speaks volumes about Leif Svalgaard though !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! What a stunning statement.”
Of all the comments on this thread, I must agree this identifies my ‘most shocking’.. Leif has done serious damage to his own reputation(!?) Why in the world would I believe a word he says now?? It is almost an in your face assertion that he operates like “hide the decline” M Mann. Why would he not correct this impression that he gave of himself? Please Leif, say it isn’t so.
Paul Westhaver says:
November 14, 2011 at 7:54 pm
“Conspiracy to lie is not an academic privilege requiring protection. Michel Mann is no Galileo….though I’m sure he imagines that the myth of Galileo is a template for his own self-contructed myth.
1) Galileo did not invent the telescope, although he sure made an effort to assume that credential… Hans Lippershay invented it 12-18 months prior.
2) Lippershay also sketched the craters of the moon first. Not Galileo.
3) Galileo did not first describe a Sun-Centered “cosmos”…that was done by Copernicus or ?Samos? in ~300 BC??….A lot of people think it was Galileo.”
Paul, that was Aristarchus of Samos. He had a relative simple way of measuring the size of the Earth and Moon by comparing the shadow the Earth was making on the Moon. His result was that the Moon is about 1/3 of the Earth’s diameter. Then he measured the angles of the triangle Moon, Earth, Sun when the Sun was illuminating half of the Moon making a 90° angle. The other 2 angles were then in his measurements 87° and 3°, so the Sun was about 18 to 20 times further then the Moon. From the apparent size of the Sun and the Moon (about the same) and the measured angle he concluded the Sun is about 7 times bigger in diameter then the Earth or about 18 to 20 times the Moon, so why would a bigger Sun (300 times the Earth volume) fly around a smaller Earth?
Pretty simple and nice piece of logic. Copernicus also cited Aristarchus in the manuscript then deleted the reference (hm, don’t remember where I read that…cannot find a link now)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristarchus_of_Samos
Robert Brown says:
November 15, 2011 at 3:45 am
———————————-
Whistle blowing is not a crime.
The crime is the powers that be failed to follow-up. Now look at where we are. Harry (of the read me file fame) knew the data they had and what they were trying to do was garbage and now even the original trash is gone. They can’t even provide the starting point or the original data or why they chose certain pieces to be included or ignored.
And that my friend is not science.
Mann was part of this and his involvement runs deep and continues to today. I’d like to see the emails. And because “WE” paid him for his time and for the resource to do the research I’d like to find out how he spent that time and disposed of our resources.
Emails will shed some light.
Wayne Delbeke says:
November 14, 2011 at 8:32 pm
R. Shearer says:
November 14, 2011 at 7:12 pm
Hasn’t he already been cleared after thorough investigation by Penn State University?
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Like Joe Paterno? University investigations don’t seem to be so thorough.
Sorry, my crude attempt at sarcasm. I think the main stream media is much like coach McQuery in the case of the Penn State scandal and climate alarmism.
What is obvious: Mann is either a fraud or a poor scientist. In either case he shouldn’t be getting government grants (or any grants) unless there is some agenda other than the science.
Can we agree that breaking the Law, refusing to comply with FOI can lead the culprit to doing Gaol time. Ergo, who is protecting Mann? as always follow the money.
“This is not about peer review; it is about citizens’ acting as the sovereign and taking any appropriate step necessary to ensure those given stewardship over an arm of the Commonwealth are faithfully performing.”
As a lifelong citizen of the great Commonwealth of Virginia, I whole-heartedly approve of this statement.
Lars P,
Yes.. I was writing the entry from memory and did not consult the volume of data easily at my disposal.
You are correct it was Aristarchus of Samos who first on paper described the Sun Centered Solar system and “Cosmos” and that description was read and understood and further documented by Copernicus. There may have been others but we don’t know that yet.
I am critical of Mann. Likewise I am critical of Galileo accidently today becaus he was referenced in the above in a populist attempt to make Mann a sympathetic figure….like Galileo.
I believe however that Galileo was just an opportunistic and flawed snot as Mann. History is on my side. Galileo has enjoyed an uncritical illumination from the brightness of other people for centuries. Common knowledge would have you believe that Galileo was responsible for a host of wonders. Common knowledge is, in the end, common and wrong. Galileo had employers and he also possessed an ego and a need to be grandiose and self promoting. In service to his ego he was prickly and attempted to exploit a small piece of knowledge for his own gain, relying heavily on the secret that his knowledge was not just his and the public were largely illiterate and that if he was in any way wrong, nobody would know. In this way Galileo was a deceptive and dishonest sack of shit.
Mann is just like him. Mann, tediously toiling away with a bit of theory, with an agenda…just like Galileo…relying on sophistry and phony privacy claims to conceal his deceit.
Too bad that nowadays we have tools to deal with the likes of him. The facts, in no small part thanks to A. Watts et al, will get out and his pathetic scheming self interest will be laid bare.
Too bad Galileo wasn’t pilloried for being a plagiarizer and fraud.His was pilloried for the wrong reason. Let be certain that Mann gets his comeuppance for the right reasons which are:
For conspiring to advance a popular theory (though flawed) at the request of his peers for money and fame and in service to his political goals. Like Galileo, Mann is a sack of shit.
Lars P,
Yes.. I was writing the entry from memory and did not consult the volume of data easily at my disposal.
You are correct it was Aristarchus of Samos who first on paper described the Sun Centered Solar system and “Cosmos” and that description was read and understood and further documented by Copernicus. There may have been others but we don’t know that yet.
I am critical of Mann. Likewise I am critical of Galileo accidentally today because he was referenced in the above in a populist attempt to make Mann a sympathetic figure….like Galileo.
I believe however that Galileo was just an opportunistic and flawed snot as Mann. History is on my side. Galileo has enjoyed an uncritical illumination from the brightness of other people for centuries. Common knowledge would have you believe that Galileo was responsible for a host of wonders. Common knowledge is, in the end, common and wrong. Galileo had employers and he also possessed an ego and a need to be grandiose and self promoting. In service to his ego he was prickly and attempted to exploit a small piece of knowledge for his own gain, relying heavily on the secret that his knowledge was not just his and the public were largely illiterate and that if he was in any way wrong, nobody would know.
Mann is just like him. Mann, tediously toiling away with a bit of theory, with an agenda…just like Galileo…relying on sophistry and phony privacy claims to conceal his deceit.
Too bad that nowadays we have tools to deal with the likes of him. The facts, in no small part thanks to A. Watts et al, will get out and his pathetic scheming self interest will be laid bare.
Too bad Galileo wasn’t pilloried for being a plagiarizer and fraud.His was pilloried for the wrong reason. Let be certain that Mann gets his comeuppance for the right reasons which are:
For conspiring to advance a popular theory (though flawed) at the request of his peers for money and fame and in service to his political goals.
So, what kind/s of documentation do you keep for the purpose of making it possible for another researcher to utilize your methods and data to confirm or deny your data inputs, process, and research results? What kind/s of documentation do you keep for the purpose of making it possible for administrators and auditors to confirm or deny your compliance with terms of grants, other funding, and tax reporting?
Lars P,
Thanks again and BTW I am a Mech Eng and very good at math and geometry. Your description of Aristarchus’ astronomical calculations was helpful….. I tried to get that from reproductions of his work but my eyes rolled back trying to figure out what he was doing…. (I am not as good at math as my 2400 year ago predecessors). Cheers Lars.
Gail Combs says: November 15, 2011 at 5:53 am
Leif Svalgaard says:
November 14, 2011 at 9:56 pm
In 46 years of research I have never kept a ‘log book’ nor have I known anybody who has.
_______________________________________
This absolutely floors me!
==============
What century are you living in !! Why write in a log book then copy to a computer Spreedsheets are wonderful calculators, doc editors are very good for documenting. No more unreadable log book entries, easy to share data.
Entering results straight onto a spreed sheet removes one source of error.
Gee!
Green peace and Patrick Michael’s emails were offered under the same terms as (initially) Mann’s. Give us the money we’ll see if we can give you the emails. Greenpeace backed off. Schnare had to reframe his request in order to get the cost down. Not sure how all this reached where we are but here is the university’s time-line to April
http://www.virginia.edu/foia/climatechange/timeline.html
Seems to me that both parties were treated the same initially.
The ludicrous request of Schnare:
http://www.virginia.edu/foia/climatechange/pdf/2011-01-06-Schnare%20et%20al-request-Mann%20records%20with%20attachment.pdf
How on earth can this be called a request to get to the research behind Mann’s science? This is real fishing for anything that can be mis-interpreted/taken-out-of-context/twisted and fed to the “skeptics” as “truth”
Come -on – it’s not long to Durban
Just in case people think that the likes of Mann are knowingly peddling a big fat lie, try listening to this interview with him (click the green triangle):
http://www.pointofinquiry.org/michael_mann_unprecedented_attacks_on_climate_research/
Like all fundamentalists, this bloke is a true believer.
interesting article but as Gail and others have highlighted, the scientific method requires appropriate records. whether those records are ‘public property’ is something for the lawyers to argue BUT in the context of the science and published material anything pertaining to that published material MUST be made available for scrutiny/replication. If not, the published and any subsequent use of the material must be withdrawn.
As a slight aside, I would like to recount a true story. a friend was stopped by the cops for a minor offence. the cop gave him a grilling and checked his motorcycle throughly for defects. after some time – he said he could go on his way. My friend looked at the cop, and asked what would happen if he called him a ‘XXXX’ (add any expletive you wish). the cop said he would have to arrest him for breach of the peace, etc. My friend asked, ‘but if I just thought you were a XXXX, that would be ok?’. yeah, said the cop – I can’t do you for that. – My friend then said ‘Well, ok, I’m just potentially thinking you are a XXXX’ – and rode off.
the point being that in law, as in science – a ‘thought’ is meaningless – unless its transferred into writing or other evidence, its still just a thought and has NO meaning or value to anyone else. This I fear, will be the legacy of Manns ‘work’. LOL
(apologies for bad grammar, etc – been a long day!)
BTW – to any warmista or tree hugging greenies who want to defend Mann in any way shape or form; I ask a simple question, involving quite simply, putting the ‘boot’ on the other foot:
imagine a prominent scientist, you could even say Mann himself, if you like ! – but let’s pretend they produced a work that said ‘We need more CO2, CO2 is good and is needed NOW’ and that work was disseminated all over the world and widely ACCEPTED as correct, governments reduced fuel tax, campaigns were on the TV saying to leave the lights ON and turn your heating up, burn bucket loads of coal etc, etc. How would you react if the workings of that work were hidden from view???
On a slightly less esoteric note – IF, and I use IF deliberately, IF any scientist showed a world/life changing result, he/she would and should shout it from the rooftops but he/she would also be the first and fiercest critic (if they are a true scientist!). If Manns work is soooo good and sooooo important and soooo valid – he would allow it to be severely disseccted and reworked to ensure validity. Where is this test of validity?
In the absence of this validity test, one can only assume that it would not pass such a test and Mann is likely a fraud.
Some people seem to be missing a key point here. UVA had already agreed to release some of Dr. Mann’s emails, per a court order, but are now stonewalling on others, because of a legal maneuver from Dr. Mann. It seems he interjected himself into an already settled legal matter and mucked it up.
@Gail Combs – You ask how much science will be lost because of the use of computers. I would hazard a guess that with an extreme solar event practically all of it.
Bound log books were used instead of looseleaf pages to avoid both the appearance of scientific and financial fraud and actual fraud. Would be fraudsters had to cope with the bound pages, rather than simply remove or substitute for the looseleaf pages. In this age of electronic computers, the equivalent safeguard against fraud is a computer system and storage systems maintained by independent administrators, and an audit trail independently verified by internal and external audits. Even then, undiscovered and unreported fraud is an ever present problem with electronic computer information systems. Experienced professionals in finance and accounting have a difficult time maintaining compliance with accounting and auditing standards. Scientists are all too often hopelessly incompetent at maintaining compliance with audit standards.
The open contempt some scientists have for compliance with the routine controls the rest of the world must live with every day only confirms the general public’s worst suspicions of scientific fraud and the need for draconian responses to such contempt for the public benefactors.
The impression upon the general public is seeing important areas of the scientific community behave like an undisciplined and rogue bunch of spoiled college fratternity/sorority juveniles intent upon their own selfish goals paid for out of the public’s own pockets contrary to any remote concepts of commonsense. It is only a matter of time before the pocketbooks will be closed to these people and institutions, and the entire scientific and academic community will suffer as a consequence of the unbridled lack of discipline and accountability of these contemptuous so-called scientists.
Just as there is no such thing as an unbreakable computer encryption code, there is no such thing as a computer information system which can be made as secure as a bound book. Consequently, there is still a role which can sometimes be played by a bound logbook even though informaton technology is used to secure the remaining aspects of a scientific research project.
RGB (Robert Brown)
I’m wondering how longer others are going to go on letting you bury yourself.,
Your belief that Universities will obey the law is interesting, but…
Do you really believe that UVA would have handed over the material if given a court order?
Really?
Really, absolutely, without question?
Because…
A court order was issued to UVA for this material in MAY.
Of course, UVA promptly turned over the required data. Right?
No, if they had done that, this whole thread wouldn’t exist.
Here’s a link to the history up to May. More has happened since then, of course.
http://www.atinstitute.org/court-orders-university-of-virginia-to/
What does this mean about the thousands of words you’ve written above?
It means:
1) You haven’t done your homework. You really don’t know what the current situation is, or how ridiculous this whole affair is. You’re defending the situation as it existed a year or two ago, and don’t know anything about the legal situation now.
You can find quite a bit of back information on this website, if you search. You REALLY need to do thatx before posting much more.
2) You are operating on assumptions about how Universities comply with the law, and the assumptions are wrong. UVA felt so unbound by law as to actually have lied about having the docs in the first place. A number of other Universities have complied immediately to FOIA requests when the target is a Skeptic. This whole situation is not about law or privacy; it is about politics.
The University is currently fighting both a Subpoena and a Court Order.
3) You don’t seem to know that the Court Order requires ATI to ignore, keep secret, not release, redact the kinds of personal emails you think should be protected. The only emails at issue for exposure are ones that might indicate legal malfeasance with regards to abuse of Federal grants.
I understand your impassioned feelings that your email should be kept private unless a court order is received. However, your emails are subject to law (as you seem to understand when you state that you expect that they will be turned over with a Court Order), including FOIA, which was where this all started. FOIA means that if you work at a gov’t job, your employer may SAY they’ll protect your emails, but they really can’t protect them from an FOIA. That’s the law.
RDCII
Mann’s Hockey Stick is a joke that would be laughed out of any Junior High School Science Lab.
The work of R. B. Alley (2000) on the 10,000 year GISP2 ice core record puts Mann’s Frankengraph to shame.
I think the average Joe is more than capable to spot emails with questionable science similar in context to some of the more egregious climategate emails.
I’m sure Dr. David Schnare is significantly more qualified than the average Joe.
Hasn’t he already been cleared after thorough investigation by Penn State University?
True and here is a transcript of that review:
PS review “Dr Mann your really, really nice and you bring in lots of money, did you do anything naughty? ”
Dr Mann ‘NO”
PS review “well, that’s good enough for us, no problem found here “
As to Mann’s personal content in his UVa emails, it can be redacted. I do not care to hear about his stockbroker communications or discussions with his family or medical communications with his health providers or dealings with his lawyers or reminisces with old acquaintances, et cetera . . .
But UVa, you shall give us all the UVa emails as is your duty to the citizens of Va and, if federal money is involved, then also to citizens of the USA.
Dr. Schnare . . . . persistence by you is appreciated. Good legal eagling to you sir!
John
List of organizations supporting Martin’s Southern Studies link include the Tides foundation and Soros’ Open Society Foundation. It’s many of the very same groups that support most of the environmental activists. Do you think they have no agenda? Think again.
Why I want Mike Mann’s Emails
Because I have successfully completed development of a computerized model of a puppy, and I am looking for material worthy of use for electronic paper training.
I want them because they are totally and completely paid for with MY tax dollars. Forget the fact that every time his mouth opens lies vomit forth. I, the tax payer of Pennsylvania, own everything Mikee is trying desperately to hide from public access.
Martin says:
November 14, 2011 at 7:40 pm
Hi Jae
You might think differently about this issue if you looked behind the curtain…
Dr. David Schnare and the American Tradition Institute…
http://www.southernstudies.org/2011/10/special-investigation-whos-behind-the-information-attacks-on-climate-scientists.html
…
Martin, science is science. You cannot dismiss something because the oil companies are behind it. Neither can I dismiss something because the Greens are behind it. I simply want the truth and if scientists produce results that their paymasters/beliefs want them to produce, then they are not scientists, they are intellectual prostitutes or lying bigots; take your pick. Mann has publicised his hockey stick graph and refuses to publicise the data behind it. Why? If his science is sound, then publicising the data shouldn’t be a problem, if the data is flawed, then maybe the whole AGW theory needs to be looked at more closely, and that is what Mann wants to avoid at all costs.
My guess is that the data is long gone, the HDD has been deleted, fomatted then destroyed, before an equally damaging charge of “Contempt of Court” could be brought.
I’m going to expand my earlier point. It was a real moment of clarity, to reflect why it’s Climate Science that has become so corrupted – and to see the key remedies needed.
Gail Combs comes from a scientific environment in which log books are de rigeur, and is gobsmacked that Leif casually says he has never kept a log book.
There’s a world of difference between scientific work that can affect the life and health of others, where engineering standards are the norm, and scientific work where engineering standards aren’t even considered because they don’t matter. Yet they have enough similarities that both are called Science.
Climate Science crossed over this [first] divide, from harmless exploration to predictions with huge financial consequences, without anyone noticing that the engineering standards that should have been instituted, were missing. This change happened with the creation of IPCC.
But IPCC also crossed a second divide, and a third divide, resulting in something that still looks enough like science to fool most of the gatekeepers of scientific integrity (science institutions, university departments, publications). But it is governed by entirely different principles.
The second divide: With IPCC, Climate Science was “promoted” to a global standards organization that, in clear break with scientific tradition, is accountable to nobody. So instead of the standards being upped, they were rendered vulnerable to lowering.
The third divide that IPCC crossed was politicization, in the form of the pre-production of a “Summary for Policymakers” with pre-determined goals to which the science had to be fitted, with the help of “data” from climate models, rather like the Ugly Sisters’ toes.
IPCC is Mann’s real employer and promoter, of course.
Martin says:
November 14, 2011 at 7:40 pm
Hi Jae
You might think differently about this issue if you looked behind the curtain…
Dr. David Schnare and the American Tradition Institute…
http://www.southernstudies.org/2011/10/special-investigation-whos-behind-the-information-attacks-on-climate-scientists.html
Yeah, but they forgot to mention the Standards of Real Science, the Constitution, the FOIA, People’s Lives, and me!
Andrew Harding says:
Really? Is that so?
http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/shared/research/old/mbh99.html
http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/supplements/MultiproxyMeans07/
Of course, this won’t stop many people from complaining…because it is really the results that they don’t like and then they come up with some “cover story” excuse. If they get access to the data, then they want the code; if they get access to the code, then they want every e-mail that he has written.
That is how you launch smear campaigns on someone who is telling you things that you don’t want to hear.
R. Shearer says:
November 14, 2011 at 7:12 pm
Hasn’t he already been cleared after thorough investigation by Penn State University?
Given that everyone surely must be aware of Football, I’m taking R.’s rejoinder as being right-on witty!
A poster is claiming that Dr. Mann’s data has been kept secret or is long gone. Actually, the Internet link to the data can be found in his published papers.
I don’t know exactly what data you are asking about, but here are many links to Mann’s data.
http://search.usa.gov/search/?affiliate=NCDC&query=mann
Joel Shore, surely you jest linking to the same university where everyone from the President to the Trustees to the coaching staff covered up multiple child rapes because football brought them lots of money.
Well, Mann brings in boatloads of money too, and we witnessed a complete whitewash that was risibly labeled an “investigation” in which Mann was “exonerated”. If raping boys as young as ten years old is A-OK by PSU’s standards, then excusing Mann’s climate fraud is a no-brainer. Mann even got to huddle with the so-called investigators, and was allowed to frame the questions!
I will accept that Mann has complied with the transparency required by the scientific method when Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick state that he has fully cooperated with their requests for his data, methodologies, metadata, code, and anything else necessary to replicate – or falsify – Mann’s results. Until then, you’re just being Mann’s water boy.
From Joel Shore on November 15, 2011 at 5:34 pm:
That may be how you launch a smear campaign. I’ve been here long enough to recognize the oft-debunked “Mann hasn’t hid anything!” non-defense on sight. Got any new material?
Joel Shore says:
November 15, 2011 at 5:34 pm
That is how you launch smear campaigns on someone who is telling you things that you don’t want to hear, [Mann and his Hockey Stick]
Say it ain’t so, Joel! Someone would really want to disparage The Religion of The Hockey Stick and its Holy “tenets”? The Prophet cries….
Apparently Mann was just involved in a little “horseplay” with the data.
Of interest:
http://www.nature.com/news/the-road-to-fraud-starts-with-a-single-step-1.9321
Smokey says:
So…Now you refuse to look at any links that go to data if it is kept at Penn State?!? Surely this is a new low even for you in making excuses to continue your deceptions in the face of contrary evidence.
Well, that is convenient, to listen only to people who will tell you exactly what you want to hear! Although that being said, I believe that even Steve has grudgingly admitted that Mann has given all the necessary information for his 2008 PNAS paper, apparently not even being able to find one molehill to make a mountain out of.
Nice cherry-pick: “…Mann has given all the necessary information for his 2008 PNAS paper…”
Now make the same claim about Mann08, MBH98 and MBH99.
Cathy Henry says:
November 15, 2011 at 5:54 pm
I don’t know exactly what data you are asking about, but here are many links to Mann’s data.
Now, yes, thank’s to Steve McIntyre. But no thanks to the ipcc and its “peer review” by billions and billions of scientists – that is, only by Steve, who even as an ipcc Reviewer was obstructed by the ipcc itself and actually even threatened to the effect that his attempts to get Mann’s data and methods constituted ~”professional misconduct”; no thanks to Nature or its peer reviewers which published Mann’s Hockey Sticks without Mann’s data and methods; no thanks to the “mainstream” Climate Scientists who did not seek to replicate Mann’s Hockey Sticks; not much thanks to Mann himself – except perhaps that he forgot to not release his “censored” file to McIntyre when McIntyre finally did get Mann’s stripbark bristlecone and foxtail data and his infamous methods.
JPeden says:
So, even assuming your version of the truth is correct, does that make it justifiable for people to continue to deny that the data is now freely available?
In actual fact, the level of data and code sharing for Mann’s 2008 PNAS paper goes well beyond the norms of what I am familiar with in the areas of physics and applied physics that I have worked in.
Joel Shore says:
November 15, 2011 at 6:20 pm
I believe that even Steve has grudgingly admitted that Mann has given all the necessary information for his 2008 PNAS paper, apparently not even being able to find one molehill to make a mountain out of.
You mean the paper where Mann used the Tiljander sediment proxies upside down so his algorithm could find a Hockey Stick blade pointing the “correct” direction, against Tiljander’s statement herself that the sediments should not be used at all for temp. reconstructions, especially because the last ~ 70-90 years of sediment was “contaminated” by civilization’s effect and could therefore not even be calibrated to temps to begin with?
Joel, your “I believe” appears to be the operative term here. But at least you made a real “leap of faith”!
Leif Svalgaard says:
November 14, 2011 at 9:56 pm
RockyRoad says:
November 14, 2011 at 8:54 pm
go back to basics and determine if Mann left or took his log book with him
In 46 years of research I have never kept a ‘log book’ nor have I known anybody who has.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Thank goodness engineers are not so sloppy. I can go back and get design notes from the 1960’s for projects my company did and see what the design basis was when doing updates and upgrades of structures and facilities, I guess the fact that engineers have a duty of care to the public makes a huge difference in their thinking and record keeping as compared to researchers. I can go back in my files and tell you what I did nearly every day for 40 years. It is what I was trained to do starting in University: “What isn’t written down hasn’t been said.”
oops – Should read ” … HAVE a duty of care …”
“not much thanks to Mann himself – except perhaps that he forgot to not release his “censored” file to McIntyre when McIntyre finally did get Mann’s stripbark bristlecone and foxtail data and his infamous methods.”
Mann’s “censored” file showed that the Hockey Stick was not “robust” to leaving out the independently discredited stripbark data. And counting. Sripbarks are trees which have only a striip of bark left going vertically up the tree. The cross cut section is radically inhomogeneous because the rest of the tree has progressively died, leaving absent rings indicating “temperatures” of, er, Absolute Zero on the same tree.
Sure, there are links to some of Mike’s data now. All it took was the involvement of Congress.
To understand people’s feelings about Mann’s willingness to release data, you have to have been following this for almost a decade…or, as a shortcut, you can read “The Hockey Stick Illusion”, by Andrew Montford, and then you’ll not only get the history, but explanations of Mann’s early abuse of statistics, and how all of this led to Congressional intervention. It’s a fun read.
“Since you are at Duke you should also be aware of another blow to science. The FDA stating Cetero has Fabricated Trial Data for pharmaceuticals. ”
Oh yes. If there is any field that comes close to climate science with a record of confirmation bias, it is medical research esp drug trials. There it can kill people and generate lawsuits, and there is at least some effort expended policing researchers on the part of the grant agencies and Universities as a few cases like this and granting agencies take a dim view of the entire ORS and audit process.
When Mann STARTED OUT, nobody cared about climate science but climate scientists. Climate was beyond our control and basically unpredictable, so funding was at a reasonable level for what is basically a sideline to meteorology, which is immediately useful. Climate is still beyond our control and basically unpredictable, but climate science has become a major business in and of itself. It’s a modern version of biblical prophecy, where many people made a living out of predicting tempest and earthquake and crying out that it is all caused by the sins of man. It is a perfect psychological vessel wherein people can atone for their wealth and curse the unrepentant sinner.
“Climate Science crossed over this [first] divide, from harmless exploration to predictions with huge financial consequences, without anyone noticing that the engineering standards that should have been instituted, were missing. This change happened with the creation of IPCC. ”
Well said. It’s been said before, but that doesn’t make it any less true. The whole concept of “carbon futures” and large groups on BOTH sides of the issue with profoundly vested interests and billions of dollars at stake took a group of mid-level, average researchers — some of them appallingly young (as was Mann when the whole thing started) — and catapulted them into a fast track world where they were being treated like rock stars, where their results were being seen on the nightly news and trumpeted by famous people, movers and shakers.
I could almost feel sorry for Mann. He may have even had his moments of clarity where he acknowledged, to himself, that his work was badly done and probably wrong, but he didn’t know HOW wrong or what the right answer really was (nobody did) and so he chose to hang on and ride the tiger. Or if you prefer another metaphor, to continue to try to teach the horse to sing. Sure, if he fails the king will sooner or later have his head, but in the meantime the king might die. He might die. The horse might die. Or, however unlikely people on this list think it, the horse could learn to sing.
AGW isn’t a DISPROVEN hypothesis — it is just far from being proven, so far that it is foolish to be bending world policy into strange shapes and creating whole artificial markets on the possibility that it might end up being true. In the end, it will probably take decades of work and observation to understand the climate, and it might even end up being worth it. One of these decades the Holocene will end and the glaciers will return. Since we don’t know why it started when it started, what has modulated temperatures across its ten thousand plus year course, or what will cause it to end when it ends and we return to glaciation, it could literally start tomorrow, it could already have started with the current solar cycle. Even the heating of the 20th century could act as a trigger to a cold state, if there are cold attractors out there in a chaotic system. It might take decades of a quiet sun to really get it going; it might require some sort of “event” to nucleate a shift to a different (but stable) system of oscillation that completely changes the way heat is carried around, but the Younger Dryas rather convincingly demonstrates that this kind of thing can happen, entirely without the help of humans.
Maybe we will learn enough DISproving AGW to be able to predict this sort of thing with some degree of confidence, and that would be totally worth it. I am enormously skeptical about global warming being a problem EVEN if it is as bad as the alarmists claim that it will be. Warm isn’t bad, and even peak CO_2 if we do “nothing” and just burn fossil fuels until they are gone — or more likely mostly replaced by solar and other technologies that are already borderline cheaper — it won’t ever get that much higher. I fear the cold. With 7 billion humans, one or two “years without a summer”, no matter how they are triggered, could kill a billion people in war and famine and plague, and the start of the next glaciation, no matter that it is spread out over a century, would kill half the world’s population. AGW at its worst would do nothing of the sort.
In the meantime, it’s a pretty problem, and it seems as though sanity is slowly starting to prevail in climate science, as the latest IPCC report sounds like it is already starting to hedge its bets to try to keep “believers” on board if in fact the climate continues to hold steady or cool for the next two or three solar cycles. This is good news! What it means is that they are facing the stark realization that nature doesn’t give a damn for theories, that the models they are using don’t even have the correct SIGN for the sensitivity, and that with the current solar cycle heading to one of the lowest peaks seen in a century or more (and IIRC, with the next one predicted by Lief and perhaps others to be even lower), well, we will soon enough find out if global temperature tracks solar state (lagging by years to decades).
rgb
From Joel Shore on November 15, 2011 at 6:20 pm:
Pardon me for ignoring the static-like noise of obfuscation. I just Googled the following recent Climate Audit piece about Mann et al 08:
http://climateaudit.org/2011/07/06/dirty-laundry-ii-contaminated-sediments/
There I find out that important data relevant to Mann et al 08 wasn’t revealed until it was included in the Supplementary Info (SI) of Mann et al 09, where it was quietly admitted the “skillful reconstruction” of the Hockey Stick in Mann et al 08 was, in simple words, crap.
Fascinating article, well worth reading, ends with Steve McIntyre rightfully concluding, by the relevant PNAS criteria, that Mann et al 08 should be retracted.
Looks like McIntyre not only found the mountain, he’s busy counting the molehills on the sides of it.
Joel Shore says:
November 15, 2011 at 6:49 pm
In actual fact, the level of data and code sharing for Mann’s 2008 PNAS paper goes well beyond the norms of what I am familiar with in the areas of physics and applied physics that I have worked in.
Is it supposed to be a surprise to me that you and Mann don’t know what the norms for the practice of real science are?
Steve Goddard has explained it pretty well, me thinks;
http://www.real-science.com/paper-trail-mikes-nature-trick
Dr Schnare
In the light of recent public domain information relating to Penn State’s maladministration of internal inquiries relating to inappropriate behaviour by employees and as a result of this Steve McIntyre concerning William Easterling might I be so bold as to suggest two lines of enquiry.
First, the impassioned and expensive Penn State legal defence opposing your FOI request makes much more sense should there turn out to be correspondence involving Easterling and/or Wendell Courtney pertaining to the subject of SM’s article linked above. Perhaps that possibility might strengthen the argument for disclosure?
Secondly, should there be such pertinent information, might the scope of the FOI request be extended to include relevant information from both Courtney & Easterling’s electronic records?
Apologies, I forgot to add the link in my previous post
http://climateaudit.org/2011/11/15/new-information-at-penn-state/
Joel Shore
RDCII says: November 15, 2011 at 7:20 pm
Sure, there are links to some of Mike’s data now. All it took was the involvement of Congress.
To understand people’s feelings about Mann’s willingness to release data, you have to have been following this for almost a decade…or, as a shortcut, you can read “The Hockey Stick Illusion”, by Andrew Montford, and then you’ll not only get the history, but explanations of Mann’s early abuse of statistics, and how all of this led to Congressional intervention. It’s a fun read.
Joel, thanks for getting us all out to turn the mirror round to you, to show you that, far from the commenter’s statement being wrong, as you said, it actually is true not only in spirit but also in significant details. Please read and enjoy Montford, as encouraged. And you can easily remind yourself of our answers by using the search / find facility for “Joel”.
I hope this will end all repetitions of such comments, in future. You’ve been raising straw men long enough IMO.”When the facts change, I change. What do you do Sir” was spoken by economist Maynard Keynes during the Depression, but it neatly describes the true scientific attitude.
I hope Smokey et al bookmark this to use on future occasions as REMEMBER THIS [click] or CHECK THIS [click]. It would be nice to think that true scientific attitude can actually be practised and recognized again by scientists such as yourself.
Gail Combs says: November 15, 2011 at 7:36 am
I am horrified, having followed your link re NAIS, that the same situation exists here in Oz.
But more horrified in regard to other situations I am aware of here in Australia, and those that involved families with young children.
A colleague posted this link some time ago, it may be of interest.
He posted also with the link:-
Remember: It’s not what backs the money, it’s who controls its quantity
Perhaps these days ‘money’ is ‘carbon dioxide’? And the geography, of where it may be most profitable with as least transparency as possible?
Additonally, this academic paper may be of interest
Rockoff Hugh (1990) The Wizard of Oz as a Monetary Allegory The Journal of Political Economy 98(4) Aug p739-60
I greatly admire your and Lucy Skywalker’s comments on this post. Thank you.
Steve from Rockwood says: November 15, 2011 at 6:30 am
…it is the 2 others for every 5 who do the “me-too” research that really messes things up. Because now you have a consensus in a field (academic research) that is not well equipped to fight back.
Let alone the effect on the ‘me-too’ informing policy……. effective for the 3-4 years of governance and influence on expenditure at all three levels: local- state and federal (here in Australia). And of course non-govt organisations (NGOs) /not-for-proft. And taxation exemptions.
+ another year or two to overturn the policies. If they are evaluated or audited rigorously and these results disseminated.
In the saga of northern Australia – thirty years ran on, three generations of children born to suffer the consequences of gross research, reporting of and 30 years of policy in health, education, infrastructure, employment/welfare schemes and civil & criminal justice and the need for policing. The hypothesis being ‘self-determination’!
There has only been one comment in this blog on the role which the media may have (or not) played, given that the academic journals (and associations) make use of the web in publishing to the public. And access to academic institutions and subsidised access to developing nations. see JSTOR for eg.
pesadia — “Does anyone know of any scientist who is pro AGW and is calling for data and methods to be released?”
Absolutely. Phil Jones. He’s been working hard persuading every NMS to release their proprietary data to the public, but Poland just won’t play ball. It’s a shame I’ve yet to see a single sceptic write a post thanking Prof. Jones for doing what they seemed unable to do (organise a canvassing of NMS’s to release their proprietary data). It’s a harsh world.
JPeden says:
It makes no sense to talk about the proxies being put in upside-down: The algorithm automatically decides which way the proxies go by how they correlate with the temperature record over a certain period.
Because of concern about the contamination issue and which direction the authors of the Tiljander sediment proxies thought the data ought to correlate with temperature, Mann et al repeated the analysis with these proxies removed in the Supplementary Materials part of the NAS paper.
So, in other words, Mann did what any good scientist does when there is certain disputed data: He showed the results both with and without this data included.
Lucy Skywalker says:
Do you really believe that Montford is an unbiased account of things?
JPeden says:
Mann’s 1999 GRL paper discusses how the tree ring data from the Southwest U.S. is vitally important for getting a skillful reconstruction for the past 1000 years. Publishing something in GRL is hardly the recommended way of “censoring” it. In discussions, even Steve M. has admitted that it is true that Mann discussed this there; the debate he has with Mann is whether or not this was already true for the time period going back only to 1400 (as in Mann 1998). But even if McIntyre’s argument were correct, it is largely irrelevant since the 1000-1400 period is the period of most interest (i.e., the broad time referred to as the “Medieval Warm Period”).
I see that Joel Shore is still Michael Mann’s water boy. He says: “Do you really believe that Montford is an unbiased account of things?” Unbelievable. Pure psychological projection. As if Joel Shore is not one of the most heavily biased commentators since Gutenberg started copying the Bible.
And of course Joel swallows gallons of Kool Aid when he excuses Mann’s deceptive use of the upside down Tiljander proxy, conveniently omitting the fact that Mann was told before he published that he was using a corrupted proxy; he went ahead and used it anyway, because it reinforced his coveted hockey stick shape. It also reinforced my observation that Mann is a fraud with no professional ethics.
Michael Mann is a conniving climate charlatan, and Joel Shore is his Mini-Me apologist. It’s plain to see that Joel Shore is part of the climate alarmist runaway global warming propaganda clique. But where is that runaway global warming? Where is that hidden heat lurking? Joel Shore is trying to convince everyone that down is up, war is peace, ignorance is strength, and Mann is honest. That won’t work here at the internet’s Best Science site. Joel needs to run along back to Pseudo-Skeptical Pseudo-Science, where the mouth breathers all nod their heads in unison, and no pushback is allowed.
From Joel Shore on November 16, 2011 at 7:59 am:
So if a proxy shows the temperatures going down, but the “temperature record”, whatever that is before thermometers came about, shows the temperatures going up, the algorithm will automatically flip the proxy to show temperatures going up. And no one is at fault, especially not the people who put forth the final results, because “It was the algorithm what done it!” Yeah, that sure makes sense…
Joel Shore –
I don’t think it’s possible to find an “unbiased’ report of things. It doesn’t sound to me like you’re unbiased, for instance, when you report things here.
The key to learning is to read both sides, looking for verifiable facts…and then verifying them for yourself, if you have doubts. There’s no excuse for having an interest in this issue, and not reading Montford’s book.
Montford gives a really good outlining of the timeline of the events, along with skeptical opinions you can ignore or investigate. His is the longest, most detailed explanation of the timeline I’ve seen, so if you want to know why people here get a little ill when anyone says Dr. Mann has released all the data, as if he did it promptly and willingly, that’s where you can go to get that understanding.
Further, I’ve never seen anyone being able to criticize his explanation of the statistics used by Mann and the problems with it (for instance, that the methodology leads to hockey sticks from input red noise).
You could do us a service by reading the book and independently verifying where he’s right or wrong. You’d be better at it than I would, because of confirmation bias.
If, instead of reading it, you want to come late to the party and not know what everyone else has already experienced as they lived through this stuff, well, don’t read the book. But don’t expect to get taken seriously.
“[…]these unpublished communications are as much an important scientific contribution as the final papers themselves. Anyone who wishes to hide those thoughtful discussions hides knowledge.”
If this were true then we wouldn’t be able to decide if Mann’s critics were true until they released the correspondence surrounding the publication of their paper. I eagerly await the release of McIntyre and McKitrick’s email. Until then I’ll just assume they are wrong 🙂
RDCII says:
November 16, 2011 at 10:07 am
…
Further, I’ve never seen anyone being able to criticize his explanation of the statistics used by Mann and the problems with it (for instance, that the methodology leads to hockey sticks from input red noise).
…
———————
Then you haven’t looked very hard…
http://deepclimate.org/tag/michael-mann/
Joel Shore says:
November 16, 2011 at 7:59 am
It makes no sense to talk about the proxies being put in upside-down:The algorithm automatically decides which way the proxies go by how they correlate with the temperature record over a certain period.
Right, Joel, it makes no sense at least not in your Apocalypic Religion’s already upside-down Fantasyworld, which willfully operates in direct opposition to reality, and according to the same sacred Mannian algorithm above which magically reverses sediment reality as needed!
And which explains, for example, why your Religion’s CO2 = CAGW “hypotheses” have a perfect record of prediction failure compared to objective reality.
But, hey, your method also predicts that if you just keep on repeating and generating more of your equally unhinged “perception is reality” verbiage, your own “perceptions” finally become reality, and then even the Communist Utopia therefore “exists”, right? But me, I don’t know if that actually works in North Korea, so maybe you should go there and find out how well it does before continuing on with your preferred “method”?
But I’m afraid you will instead find only Apocalypse Now!
1. Aristarchus. He came up with an incorrect solution because he did not compensate for the refraction of light by the atmosphere. When the Sun appears to be in contact with the horizon, she is actually below the horizon.
2. Galileo. He was arrogant, abrasive, and caustic.
He deliberately insulted the Pope by a) writing in Italian and b) putting the Pope’s observations into the mouth of Simplicio (the simple one) in his dialogue. And he had no proof of a moving Earth. He was 250 years early for the Focault pendulum.
Nevertheless, his discoveries (pendulum, projectile motion, phases of Venus, satellites of Jupiter, handles on Saturn, sunspots, mountains on the moon, and so on) sparked the Renaissance.
Galileo was NOT a poseur, an amateur, or a fraud. Read the story of his recording of his sighting of the planet Neptune. Yes, that’s right, Neptune. A couple of hundred years early, yet.
Read his dialogue on physics.
He overturned Aristotle with experiment, and gave a push to the Scientific Method.
Of course he was in disgrace from 1650 to 1715 because of the Maunder minimum, but we had to wait that one out for sunspots to return!
the beast of traal says:
November 15, 2011 at 1:20 pm
Gail Combs says: November 15, 2011 at 5:53 am
Leif Svalgaard says:
November 14, 2011 at 9:56 pm
In 46 years of research I have never kept a ‘log book’ nor have I known anybody who has.
_______________________________________
This absolutely floors me!
==============
What century are you living in !! Why write in a log book then copy to a computer….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I did it that way for a very good reason. It is called the Food and Drug Administration.
You make DARN sure everything is double signed and dated. Heck if you do drugs you even have to count and sign out the labels and then sign them back in, accounting for any that were destroyed.
That type of signed, double checked and signed by a second person requirement (among others) is why the Baxter flu vaccine scandal never made any sense to me.
Of course now most companies have gone over to electronic lab notebooks which meet the same FDA compliance requirements as the paper notebooks making life a bit easier since I left the Laboratory, but the concept is the same. SEE: http://www.labtrack.com/tab5.html
I still wonder how much information will be lost forever because of the reliance on computers that have gone obsolete. Old floppy disks from the 1980’s come to mind, not to mention the computer the chem Engineer managed to fry when the lab temp got to hot. (Melted the mother board)
Joel Shore and John B
Steve McIntyre has demolished with facts every single one of Mann’s Hockey Stick Papers and showed them to be false. Andrew Montford has shown in the HSI a very detailed fact based description of how the Hockey Stick was derived by Mann and what were the faults. If any of you have any knowledge, competence or capability, go ahead and prove factually where Andrew Montford was wrong and where McIntyre was wrong. Steve would even offer you gladly a chance to post at Climate Audit, defending the Hockey Stick, if you can. Anthony would do the same here. Go ahead and do so.
Venter says:
November 16, 2011 at 9:43 pm
Joel Shore and John B
Steve McIntyre has demolished with facts every single one of Mann’s Hockey Stick Papers and showed them to be false. Andrew Montford has shown in the HSI a very detailed fact based description of how the Hockey Stick was derived by Mann and what were the faults. If any of you have any knowledge, competence or capability, go ahead and prove factually where Andrew Montford was wrong and where McIntyre was wrong. Steve would even offer you gladly a chance to post at Climate Audit, defending the Hockey Stick, if you can. Anthony would do the same here. Go ahead and do so.
———————–
Here you go…
http://www.skepticalscience.com/broken-hockey-stick.htm
And if you don’t trust SkS, follow the links to the primary sources.
I’d like to add that “Good Science” doesn’t mean correct (as in the hypothesis is correct) science, it just means that the scientific method has been used to test the hypothesis. Failed hypotheses doesn’t mean bad science, it means faulty analysis.As long as the data, analysis tools and code is available, it’s good science, even if incorrect.
John B says:
Here you go…
http://www.skepticalscience.com/broken-hockey-stick.htm
And if you don’t trust SkS, follow the links to the primary sources.
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I thought McIntyre and Montford dealt with all the claims made on SkS?! Many of them are specious and weasel-worded anyway.
Exactly, when somebody uses Skeptical science as a source, you know that they are burnt and are of the same cloth as the deceivers out at SKS. The same website where the owner was caught cheating, amending comments years after to pretend he was right and then pretends innocence. Yeah, quote the as your source, very credible.
Every single claim of Mann hockey sticks have been blown apart at CA and by HSI. If John B and Joel Shore have the guts or capability, let them post here or at CA with facts stating why Mann’s hockey sticks are correct and defend them like capable men do.
John B.
This is a perfect example. After all the critiquing and handwaving, the blog auther NEVER SAYS that Mann’s methodolgy doesn’t turn red noise into hockey sticks. This is still unrefuted.
In fact, the blog author says several times things like ‘that correction of Mann et al’s “short-centered” PCA’, ‘In effect, “short-centered” PCA may have promoted “hockey stick” patterns in the proxy data to higher PCs’, etc., making it clear that the issue is well-understood. Furth, the author seems to have a good understanding of the issues with Steve’s code, so I feel confident that if the author could have fixed the code and rerun it and showed that the methodology no longer produces hockey sticks from red noise, he’d have done so.
Montford explains the issue, and the issue is still unchallenged, as far as I’ve seen. Do you have a ref to a Paper that proves that Mann’s original methodology doesn’t mine for Hockey Sticks?
RDCII: The National Academy of Sciences report on temperature reconstructions addresses this issue pretty directly http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=11676&page=113 :
So, in other words, this issue is not really important. It’s a good reason not to use the method in the future, which is why better methods are now used; but, no, the final result was not effected. They go on to say:
Of course, the eagle-eyed amongst you will know that what the NAS report is saying here is nothing that was not already basically said in slightly different words in the Mann et al. (1999) paper ( http://www.deas.harvard.edu/climate/pdf/Mann1999.pdf ):
Mann’s silly proxy reconstruction compared to Craig Loehle’s ‘anything but trees’ proxy. The latter looks like the reconstructions I have seen over the past 50 years. Mann’s HS is the purple line.
http://i39.tinypic.com/2q3arlw.jpg
Natural variation rules, but we were taught that ‘Mikey’ will eat anything, oh wait, that was ‘surreal’ not real ‘Life’. Sorry for the obscure, off- the-wall humor.
Joel Shore…
It is astonishing for something that “doesn’t matter” to be so vociferously defended.
It was like pulling teeth to get data from Mann. The Mann methodology was WRONG. It pulls Hockey Sticks out of Red Noise. Montford’s book explains the history and the statistics well and correctly. Nothing I have said is incorrect.
The fact that Mann’s methodology came to an almost-right answer isn’t a defense of the methodology. That’s like guessing the answer is 42, then working out mathematically that it’s 42, then saying that the methodology is ok or doesn’t matter because it got the right answer. This is why math teachers require that you show your work on tests!
It’s all this dancing around to try to avoid actually admitting that it was an error that leads me to recommend Montford’s Book. If you guys really, really cannot get yourselves to boldy say the simple truth thatt Mann’s methodology was WRONG and mines Hockey Sticks from Red Noise, you really ought to ask yourselves why.
Well,Watts
Watt about this:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-11/ps-mtr111611.php
[Already covered here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/16/mann-gets-medal/ ~jove, mod]
My most recent contribution to this thread, written last night has still not appeared and seems not to have been rescued from the SPAM filter.
Okay…I guess I have to repeat my post as I remember it. My basic point was, RDCII, that you adopt very much of a two-valued orientation: in your view, the methodology is either right or wrong. A better way to look at it is that the methodology had certain flaws and that is why scientists have now moved beyond this to better methodologies. Such is the natural progress of science. However, so far, the end result of these better methodologies has been to confirm the basic correctness of Mann’s conclusions.
But, do you really think that Montford wrote a whole book that claimed that Mann et al. got basically the right answer but with a problematic method? Why would one waste a whole book on that technical point, especially since scientists have moved beyond this method?
Finally, it is worth noting that it is not unusual at all that the pioneers of a new area of science use imperfect methods that are later improved upon by others in the field. Skeptics seem to understand this in the case of Spencer and Christy, whose pioneering work on using satellite data to deduce temperatures in the lower troposphere, was plagued by errors…and, in fact, errors that led to a completely erroneous conclusion regarding the temperature trend (that it was cooling when in fact it was warming). Skeptics seem very forgiving of the errors in this case, even though they had a significant effect on the results. Perhaps this is because the errors were in a direction that was useful for skeptics…and, in fact, allows people like Fred Singer to continue to this day to deceive about what the satellite temperature record shows.
Joel,
Why is that a “Better” way to look at it? Oddly, I was taught that when an experiment is a failure, you learn from it and try again. BUT…you don’t deny that the experiment was a failure. It’s this utter inablility of Mann and supporters to say that this first try was a failure that screams politics rather than science.
I certainly don’t think Montford’s book was about this narrow point. Here is the excerpt from my first posting about Montford’s book on this thread:
“To understand people’s feelings about Mann’s willingness to release data, you have to have been following this for almost a decade…or, as a shortcut, you can read “The Hockey Stick Illusion”, by Andrew Montford, and then you’ll not only get the history, but explanations of Mann’s early abuse of statistics, and how all of this led to Congressional intervention.”
See? I suggeset that there’s all KINDS of goodies in there worth reading. This narrow viewpoint you’re concerned about is your own contribution.
I’ve read the book…have you? If you haven’t, how can you even have an opinion about what it contains?
I wasn’t around for the pioneering work of Spencer and Christy, but…I’ve read Spencer since, and I’ve seen him publicly admit it when he’s WRONG. I think you’re mistaking a skeptical preference for honesty and openness with a political leaning…and a preference for honesty and openness is actually as opposite to politics as you can get. It’s more like…science.
I’m actually trying to help you out here…as long as what you’re saying smacks of political wordplay, as long as you truly can’t even bring yourself to say out loud that Mann’s first attempt was a Failure, you’re less likely to convince skeptics to save the world from C02. If saving the world is important to you, stop the political dancing, admit it was an experimental Failure, and then give skeptics the credit for the skill and determination to prove it in the face of rabidly politically-motivated resistance. Then we can all get back to some Science.
RDCII: I guess our discussion illustrates the difficulties of getting someone with a two-valued orientation to get beyond that. I tried to explain it; I’m not sure what else I can do.
So, now you are throwing out the additional goodies from Montford’s book, including the issues of Mann releasing everything that McIntyre’s heart desired from him. So, now I ask you: Where can I find as a full listing of data and code for Spencer and Christy’s algorithm? I have provided you with links to Mann; the least you can do is reciprocate…Or, maybe it is not possible for you to? What about Wegman’s willingness to answer some very basic questions about the report that he wrote?
Oh yes, I am quite sure this is all about honesty and openness and has nothing to do with the viewpoints of the people involved….Give me a freakin’ break!
I also find it interesting how so many skeptics think that Mann’s fighting e-mail disclosures means he is hiding something and yet no skeptics like Anthony Watts have stepped forward and offered to release all of their e-mails. Arguments that they are not required to because they don’t have government grants or don’t work at a public university aren’t relevant. If they had nothing to hide, don’t you think they’d welcome the opportunity to take the moral high ground?
As to Spencer and Christy’s admissions that they were wrong: Yes, they have to a certain degree admitted their mistakes but they have also tried to minimize them, sometimes with statements that are not completely enlightening. For example, they talk about how one particular correction was not larger than the errorbars on their estimate, but don’t talk about the collective effect of all of the corrections.
And, although it is exceedingly easy to do, the only attempt to study the extent to which the changes in the LT temperature trends over the years are due to the corrections of the algorithm and to what extent they are due to the longer temperature series (which is what S&C tend to emphasize) was my own! All one had to do is take the current version of their temperature series and compute the trend over the same time period that they reported back in the papers during the 1990s. It is quite a surprise that neither Spencer and Christy nor any of the people who seem so interested in “auditing” climate science results that they don’t like have showed any interest in performing this very simple audit, let alone demand the release of all of S&C’s code for a more detailed audit!
I too, have tried best to explain that throwing away the standard Scientific Success/Fail standard is a political, rather than scientific, idea, and I also don’t know what else I can do.
Let me try one last analogy…if you order a steak rare, and it is delivered burnt, do you pronounce the meal a success and congratulate the chef? Well, you might…IF it’s really important to you the restaurant stays open. The rest of us call a burnt steak a burnt steak.
It is apparently your philosophy that has allowed a bunch of people in this thread to continue to argue against me when I’ve said that Mann’s methodology pulls hockey sticks out of red noise. Perhaps the value of implementing my “two value” system is that it would finalize this little detail into peoples minds? Because your method hasn’t seemed to have accomplished that.
And please, if you’re going to discuss what I said with me, could you read what I wrote? You say “So, now you are throwing out the additional goodies from Montford’s book, including the issues of Mann releasing everything that McIntyre’s heart desired from him”. I am not “now” throwing it out; I said it in my very first posting on this thread that discussed Montford’s book. I only brought it up again because I was accused of NOT saying anything else about Montford’s book. Any subsequent narrowing of focus is due to what others, such as you, wanted to discuss. This feels to me like you came in the middle and never went back to see what I said.
You’ve dodged the question about whether you’ve read Montford’s book…from that, I’m assuming you haven’t, and are not therefore qualified to discuss the contents. I recommend the book to anyone who actually wants to know the early history and statistical errors of Mann.
I will not dodge your question about Spencer and Christy…I cannot provide a link. I actually don’t keep as set of links; this could be considered a flaw in my character. I admit it. (See? It’s not so hard to admit a failure 🙂 ) I don’t know anything about this Spencer and Christy refusing to release code issue, and I’m truly interested, if you could forward a link that describes this situation.
You don’t believe that Skeptics are about honesty and openness. You’re not a skeptic, though, so you’re not exactly a good resource. I would tell you my story, but it would take too long…the short version is I started full AGW, and ended Full Skeptic, unconvinced by the science and feeling betrayed, really, by the lack of openness and honesty and the bad behavior among a group of people that I had grown up to trust. AGW scientists worked very hard, step by step, to create my Skepticism.
The rest of what you wrote seems to expand what is already a dying thread, so I won’t be responding. It would be an interesting discussion in an appropriate thread.
RDCII: Here is the summary of the availability of the UAH and other data and codes to analyze satellite data: http://magicjava.blogspot.com/2010/02/summary-of-aqua-satellite-data-computer.html It seems strange to me that people who are so exercised about some claimed lack of availability of every last little minutia of Mann’s code do not even bother to see if the UAH code is at all publicly available!
By the way, what I heard (and admittedly I don’t remember the source for this) is that when the RSS folks were trying to figure out the discrepancies between their results and UAH’s, they asked not for every last piece of code but for one very specific piece of code and Spencer and Christy were not very forthcoming at first although they eventually did provide this one specific piece of code. The reason you likely haven’t heard vociferous complaints regarding the lack of code release is that scientists generally “replicate” each others work by writing code themselves rather than auditing the other person’s code. Only when there is some sort of issue that they can’t resolve will possibly ask for some specific piece of code.