Mann oh Mann. Tom Nelson continues to wade through the 5000+ Climategate 2 emails. I’ve selected a few he’s highlighted in the vein of behind the scenes discussion of Dr. Michael Mann’s infamous “hockey stick” which claimed we were living in a period of unprecedented warmth.
It seems though, that the stick isn’t nearly as robust as we have been led to believe, such as it isn’t consistently replicable by the team itself and Briffa admits the trees are more precipitation sensitive (told ya so), and besides, Mann says it all big oil’s fault anyway.
The triggering issue was the “divergence” problem as raised by Rosanne D’Arrigo, that a spatially and temporally complex difference has arisen between many of the long tree-ring records and the instrumental record more recently than the calibration period in many cases. This has been in the literature for a while, as you know much better than I do, and was not highlighted by Rosanne in her talk, but some committee members jumped on it in questions, and she was not convincing that trees were thermometers when it was warm a millennium ago but are not thermometers when it is warm now.
…(I’m happy to go into details as to why the arguments were not convincing, insofar as I captured the arguments, but they were not convincing to me, and looking around the committee room, I don’t think they were convincing to important members of the committee.) …I don’t want to stir up trouble, I don’t want to piss off the tree-ring people yet again, but I do think that the tree-ring workers (and by association, all of us who do climate change) have a serious problem, and have not answered it very well yet. If better answers are out there, I hope that they come out soon.
Email 775, Feb 2006, Briffa to Henry Pollack
date: Wed Feb 15 15:49:58 2006 from: Keith Briffa subject: Re: Science paper to: Henry Pollack
thanks Henry – sorry also about the ridiculous way the Paleo chapter is being rushed. I have found loads of errors /typos that crept in
Email 4853, Keith Briffa, Nov 2006: “dropped the inference of direct, positive association with temperature, because we added in sites that Mike in particular had used because of their inverse sensitivity – ie they were really more precipitation sensitive”
cc: t.osborn@uea.ac.uk date: Mon, 06 Nov 2006 12:26:25 +0000 from: Keith Briffa subject: TSU Figure label to: Jonathan Overpeck , Eystein Jansen
..Tim has just pointed out to me that the caption to the current TS-20 contains the words “locations of temperature sensitive proxy records..”. In the revision of the Figure ( showing the 3 maps ) as presented in the Chapter , we refer to sites ” used to reconstruct temperature” and dropped the inference of direct, positive association with temperature, because we added in sites that Mike in particular had used because of their inverse sensitivity – ie they were really more precipitation sensitive . It would be better to amend the TSU caption to show the latter wording to account for this also. cheers Keith
Email 4854, Oct 2003, Phil Jones: “It is rather odd that the email said [M&M] had rerun his (Mann’s) exact analysis and got quite different results. I know I couldn’t do this, as when Keith, Tim and me wanted to do some comparisons with MBH98 a few years ago a few of the series could not be made available.”
subject: Re: CONFIDENTIAL
Thanks Phil, Got your email just as I sent off my latest. I agree fully with what you say–it is very difficult to repeat such an analysis exactly, and the real point here is, who knows what this guy (Steven McIntyre–I don’t know who the supposed 2nd author is) actually did. The Mann et al ’99 paper was clear that the results were sensitive to a small number of skillful predictors prior to AD 1400, and that non-climate biases had to be corrected for in some of the longer series to get a skillfully cross-validated reconstruction. Without knowing what the guy did, I’m guessing that he doesn’t even demonstrate that his alternative “reconstruction” passes cross-validation. If not, its all moot… But more fundamentally, this wasn’t submitted to a legitimate peer-reviewed scientific journal. Its a social science journal, and one that has shown a disdain for peer review (e.g. in publishing the Soon et al Climate Research paper essentially in its original unedited form–and see the recent documented comments of the editor). I agree this might blow over, but the folks in DC, such as McCain and Lieberman, who are fighting to represent what the legitimate scientific community has to say, need to be prepared in case the special interests try to use this. Hence, the short response I sent out. [Mike Mann]
[Phil Jones] Mike, Depending exactly on what it says I suggest we should do our best to ignore it. E&E is edited ( a very loose use of the word) by Sonia Boehmer-Christiansen, who’s generally involved, in some way, in all skeptic stuff here in Britain. It is rather odd that the email said the two had rerun his (Mann’s) exact analysis and got quite different results. I know I couldn’t do this, as when Keith, Tim and me wanted to do some comparisons with MBH98 a few years ago a few of the series could not be made available. I’m not trying to make any sort of point here, just to state that repeating an analysis with exactly the same data is normally very difficult.
Email 4758, UEA’s Tim Osborn, Oct 2000: “how can we be critical of Crowley for throwing out 40-years in the middle of his calibration, when we’re throwing out all post-1960 data ‘cos the MXD has a non-temperature signal in it, and also all pre-1881 or pre-1871 data ‘cos the temperature data may have a non-temperature signal in it! “
Because how can we be critical of Crowley for throwing out 40-years in the middle of his calibration, when we’re throwing out all post-1960 data ‘cos the MXD has a non-temperature signal in it, and also all pre-1881 or pre-1871 data ‘cos the
temperature data may have a non-temperature signal in it! If we write the Holocene forum article then we’ll have to be critical or our paper as well as Crowley’s!
But here’s the kicker, it’s all big oil and big coal’s fault:
Mann calls the hockey stick “an obscure graph”; other unnamed people have stripped the error bars away, “making it appear more definitive than it was ever intended”; “the entire apparatus for propelling this manufactured scandal on to the world stage was completely funded by the fossil-fuel front groups”
Mann believes the theft of the emails was not the work of a random hacker, but part of a sophisticated campaign. “It was a very successful, well-planned smear campaign intended … to go directly at the trust the public had in scientists,” he insists. “Even though they haven’t solved the crime of who actually broke in, the entire apparatus for propelling this manufactured scandal on to the world stage was completely funded by the fossil-fuel front groups.”…Climate contrarians argued that Mann and his colleagues were concealing their research methods because they had something to hide. In reply, Mann insists that he has been as open as he can about data and methodology, but the aim of these requests has more to do with intimidation than openness. “What they are trying to do is to blur the distinction between private correspondence and scientific data and methods, which of course should be out there for other scientists to attempt to reproduce.
“I think it’s intentional and malicious. It’s intended to chill scientific discourse, to intimidate scientists working in areas that threaten these special interests,” he says. “It’s the icing on the cake if they can also get hold of any more private correspondence that they can mine and cherry pick. It’s a win-win for them.” Why an obscure graph published in a scientific journal should enrage so many people has been the subject of much internet conspiracy (or genuine scientific debate, depending on your point of view).
The original 1998 hockey stick study by Mann and his colleagues did in fact emphasise the tentative nature of estimating past temperatures before the invention of accurate thermometers.
…”When we first published our Nature article in 1998, we went back six centuries,” Mann says. “A year later we published a follow-up going back 1,000 years with quite a few caveats. In fact, the caveats and uncertainties appeared in the title, and the abstract emphasised just how tentative this study was because of all the complicating issues.
“It’s frustrating that to some extent all of that context had been lost and the result has been caricatured. Often the errors bars are stripped away, making it appear more definitive than it was ever intended.”
So Michael Mann believes his entire career was manufactured by the Fossil Fuel Front groups?
Oh what a tangled web….
Good Mann. No HS, no crisis.
Wow. Not the content, but the horrible English prose. Bad writing is possible the single best marker of bad thinking.
What a natural wonder it is that an “obscure graph” can result in such a high profile career. Maybe he should recognize the graph’s obscurity by giving back all of the positions, perqs, and accolades?
Not gonna hold my breath on that one.
Email 4854 quoted above also contains this gem from Phil Jones:
“I’m not trying to make any sort of point here, just to state that repeating an analysis with exactly the same data is normally very difficult.”
Could one not paraphrase that as saying that “Our results are not reproducible.” and does that not have the knock on effect of putting them outside what ought to be acceptable as ‘scientific’ findings?
“all of us who do climate change”
Interesting phrase, quite revealing.
Off topic….David Shukman has been announced as the BBC’s new Science Editor, this is the man who seems to think that Wind Farms are the only way forward. I suppose the fact that he has a degree in Geography is a step up from his colleague Richard Blacks degree in Zoology.
P.s Shukman has also published a book on cooking, I wonder if the book carried any recipes for cooking polar bear?
Hmmmmm – – Back in the days of TAR when Mikey was just finishing his dissertation (but somehow happened to land the influential gig writing the paleo chapter), I don’t recall a whole lot of emphasis on the uncertainties of the HS reconstruction.
Why, it was simply “revealed truth” and thus it was displayed three times in TAR.
But now it’s just an “obscure graph”. Ministry of Truth time, again.
Mann/Open? Yea, and I have some “lake front” property in Florida to sell you.
[snip – funny, but over the top – Anthony]
“I’m not trying to make any sort of point here, just to state that repeating an analysis with exactly the same data is normally very difficult.”
I’m no scientist, or Sherlock Holmes, but isn’t that an enormous clue to it being wrong?
From the NYT on the HS
1998 – “Despite the caveats, Dr. Jones said he thought the study would turn out to be quite important.”
I just want to puke every time I think of Mann.
I love how people are going through these emails, it shows the real hard work the scientists are doing. It will make a great movie one day 🙂
These emails show less criminal intent than they do the application of very low scientific standards. PhD committees should take note as well as department heads. The proper schooling of PhD”s is job one, not their use as your grunts. The shame belongs to ivory tower research heads. And it is my opinion they should role. To produce such inept snivelling researchers is criminal.
“repeating an analysis with exactly the same data is normally very difficult.”
==========================================
No it isn’t……….and that’s the point
The Bish had Mann’s recent MSNBC appearance here: http://bit.ly/zur9ss
It’s not easy to play the victim while asserting world dominance, but if anyone is up to the role it’s this guy. Once again: Big Oil funds UEA and Stanford and much of big-time AGW science, but it does not fund this blog or mine or any of the others that fight to get the truth out.
1) Wasn’t one of their criticisms of the Soon-Baliunas paper that they included proxies for precipitation? Odd how they jumped over them publicly but not Mann for doing the same thing less openly.
2) Mann was recently on MSNBC, they showed the Hockey Stick without error bars, he did nothing to correct this on air.
3) “the results were sensitive to a small number of skillful predictors”
Translation: You used a very small sample size of your choosing which makes any statistically-derived wizardry from them inherently non-robust.
Are Dr. Mann’s grades in undergrad and grad school not aviable also.
FIO them compare and contrast.
At some point soon the people who write this guys pay checks are going to have to take a long look at what they are doing. He is dragging some others over the cliff with him.
Are they willing or is it some above them who are allowing them all to free fall on their own.
“when Keith, Tim and me wanted to do some comparisons….” Is that form of English the result of the UEA creative writing course? I know the three of them have no scientific qualifications, but surely Jones studied English Grammar at school.
On Guard!!
“Mann your thermometers”
In a similar vein;
“Cold Winters Caused by Warmer Summers, Research Suggests”
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/01/120112193430.htm
This extraordinarily poor analysis, filled with speculation, somehow conflates temperature with snow extent. As if snow caused cooling.
I think we have a clear gold medal prospect in the Olympic backpedaling race.
“…the entire apparatus for propelling this manufactured scandal on to the world stage was completely funded by the fossil-fuel front groups.”
This is classic Mann! Bwahahaha! I hope he stays front and center in the CAGW science cabal (along with his tinfoil hat colleague Jim Hansen).
BTW – are they using solar panels and windmills to keep NASA GISS and Penn State’s meteorology department warming this winter??
E-mail 4854:
“Who knows what this guy [McIntyre] did?…”
“Without knowing what he did…”
Wouldn’t it be better to understand what that guy did before preparing McCain and Lieberman (et. al) against whatever it was that the guy did? I know I would worry about that, even if “that guy” had declared neverending love for big oil, and hatred for kids, kittens, and life in general.
The existence of a pronounced Medieval Warm Period automatically casts some good measure of doubt upon the scientific validity of the climate models, regardless of any other supporting arguments for CO2-driven AGW which might be offered.
Proponents of the theory of CO2-driven AGW must defend the hockey stick — error bars or no error bars — until the last dog dies.
To do anything less is to risk losing the public relations battle with the AGW skeptics, and the alarmists all know it.
The alarmists know what the stakes are by not allowing any public discussion of the true uncertainties of performing a Mannian type of paleoclimate temperature reconstruction.
In public, they won’t go there, because they can’t publicly admit any uncertainty or doubt about the hockey stick and still defend the reliability of the climate models.
That their behavior behind the scenes would be very different from their behavior in front of the public should therefore be no real surprise.
Well, it is getting a bit warmer- at least in Europe and North America-, or is it not? (If it is not the case, then, prove it). Bristlecone pines from some remote place in the US might have a slightly different perception of overall changing conditions than -say- deciduous and non-deciduous trees in the remaining parts of the Northern hemisphere (we are comparing a square foot to a a square mile, to use your pre-industrial measurements), so what?
Francois says:
“…in Europe and North America…”
You do understand that the issue is global warming, don’t you? Furthermore, the issue is human-caused warming – for which there is not a shred of empirical evidence.
And using treemometers is anyway highly questionable. Had Briffa deleted only one tree, YAD061, there would have been no hockey stick shape in the chart. If that doesn’t convince you that these guys are climate charlatans, probably nothing will.
“I’m no scientist, or Sherlock Holmes, but isn’t that an enormous clue to it being wrong?”
“When I’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how mad it might seem, must be the truth.” -Sherlock Holmes.
I’m pretty sure Sherlock isn’t at all worried about “Mann-made” Global Warming.
“Are Dr. Mann’s grades in undergrad and grad school not avaiable also?”
They won’t even release our Dear Leader’s Kinderkarten transcripts. Good luck on Mr. Mann’s grades.
On what planet Phil? I’m embarrassed for you that you even put PhD after your name with comments like that. If you had trouble re-running Mann’s analysis with his exact data, shouldn’t that raise questions in your brain that you would then pose to your colleague? Phil seems to display zero curiosity even with regards to his own colleagues work. He is a fail professor in the extreme with an attitude like that.
I think Jones comment about replication with the same data needs to be read in conjunction with the preceeding paragraph.
I think he means it is very difficult to repeat an analysis WITH the same data
Francois says:
January 16, 2012 at 9:47 am
“Well, it is getting a bit warmer- at least in Europe and North America-, or is it not? (If it is not the case, then, prove it).”
HA HA HA HA!!!
I am a genius, and God’s gift to women! (If it is not the case, then prove it).
Posting on a phone is not the easiest way to do it. To conclude:
It’s not easy because you can’t be sure what data was used. Classic Mann.
That said, why does he think this is normal?
If there isn’t enough info on data or methods for replication, it’s not science. Back to failure by the journals again.
The thing I hate most about the Hockey Stick fiasco is how the MANN behind the myth can completely disregard 100’s of peer-reviewed scientific papers published over the past 40 yrs from many countries, with almost all papers showing the Medieval Warming Period was warmer than today AND a global phenomenon.
Its only proper for Dr. Mann to explain in detail how all these previous papers could all be wrong about the existence of the MWP. Without addressing the mistakes of previous MWP papers why his bogus paper negates all previous work.
“Mann insists that he has been as open as he can about data and methodology”
Of course he has been. He’s been just as open about his data and methodology as he has been about his UVA E-mails.
Thanks for the laugh!
@Francois who said “Well, it is getting a bit warmer- at least in Europe and North America-, or is it not? (If it is not the case, then, prove it).”
Nice straw man, Francois. But nobody denies that the climate is warming and has been doing so for thousands of years. But there is no correlation with atmospheric CO2 concentration, much less a cause and effect relationship as claimed by the CAGW crowd. If anything, the reverse is true; CO2 concentration lags warming which suggests that warming causes release of CO2 from the oceans.
I just pre-ordered Dr. Mann’s book. Unlike some deep thinkers we know and love, I have no intention of reviewing a book I have not read.
In my firtst post I should have emphasised SAME data. I’ll keep quiet now.
ew-3 says:
January 16, 2012 at 8:18 am
“all of us who do climate change”
Interesting phrase, quite revealing
——————
It gave me pause also.
Email 4854
“It is rather odd that the email said the two had rerun his (Mann’s) exact analysis and got quite different results. I know I couldn’t do this, as […] a few of the series could not be made available. I’m not trying to make any sort of point here, just to state that repeating an analysis with exactly the same data is normally very difficult.”
I don’t think that is very hard to understand.
SteveW on January 16, 2012 at 8:16 am: “Could one not paraphrase that as saying that “Our results are not reproducible.” ”
There is a place for the Hockey Stick and many other studies that have emerged from efforts of The Climate Team (Mann, Jones, et al). Trenberth’s “climate heat is hidden in the unmeasurable deep blue sea” is one of the recent knee-slappers.
http://www.jir.com/
The Journal of Irreproducible Results
Jeremy says:
“Phil (Jones) seems to display zero curiosity even with regards to his own colleagues work. He is a fail(ed) professor in the extreme with an attitude like that.”
Phil Jones and Mike E. Mann are twin sons of different mothers. While Mann uses the “If you can’t dazzle ’em with brilliance, baffle ’em with bullshit” approach, Jones apparently just makes his data up:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/16/jones-may-submit-a-correction-to-his-1990-paper-keenan-responds/
Ken Coffman says:
“…I have no intention of reviewing a book I have not read.”
Ken, for contrast, I suggest that you also order The Hockey Stick Illusion by A.W. Montford, available on the right sidebar. It was published at about the same time the first Climategate emails were released, so it only tells the sordid and damning tale of the Mann/Jones clique prior to the world seeing their emails. If you don’t come away realizing that Mann’s “Team” are terribly dishonest manipulators and self-serving scientific charlatans gaming the system for their own benefit, then your mind is as made up as those you implicitly criticize for their opinions.
I think what you mean to say is that Phil is saying it is difficult to get the same data set to start off a re-examination. Why would Phil have this problem?
Presuming you have the same data available to you, any trouble re-analyzing it should generate questions for you to ask until you either understand the process someone else used perfectly and can re-do it, or you find an alternate method and disagree with the original research.
Presuming you do not have the same data, and you are in a position of data-keeping and central the IPCC effort to determine climate, what good are you if you can’t manage to get the exact data that someone else used in an IPCC report?
The 1999 hockey stick graph is so old news, lets keep up to date http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/mann2008/mann2008.html
Steven Rosenberg says: “Wow. Not the content, but the horrible English prose. Bad writing is possible the single best marker of bad thinking.”
Good point. I recently came across this at my local library, was intrigued by the double entendre title, and then couldn’t put it down:
Communicating Rocks\
“Writing, Speaking, and Thinking about Geology”
149 pages
by Peter Copeland, U. Houston
http://www.pearsonhighered.com/educator/product/Communicating-Rocks-Writing-Speaking-and-Thinking-About-Geology/9780321689672.page
Or order through Amazon.
This book applies to most fields, not just Geology. I highly recommend it. One of the points he makes is that, as Steven indicates, clear writing is related to, and often forces the writer to produce, good science. This might warrant a full book review post here.
“inverse sensitivity”
Made up concept to say that the trees in question are not responding to temperature.
“But more fundamentally, this wasn’t submitted to a legitimate peer-reviewed scientific journal.”
Hahaha, I used to read non-“peer reviewed” articles all the time – I received about 10-15 lb./month free via the Post Office – and obviously still do, if you call publishing your work on the Internet to the whole freaking world not peer reviewed. Certain ones were always better than what the Journals put out, not to mention the Textbooks, and they always had to heel to what works where the rubber meets the road in the real world. I couldn’t just go around telling people to lower their carbon footprint and everything would be ok.
“I agree this might blow over, but the folks in DC, such as McCain and Lieberman, who are fighting to represent what the legitimate scientific community has to say, need to be prepared….”
I was on Sen. Bill Bradley’s site a while back when he declared the AGW debate over because Joe Lieberman had just said so. So as long as we were dealing with irrelevancies, I reminded him of the time I was guarding him when he was playing at Princeton, forced him into a wild hook shot, and they had to take him out of the game….well it wasn’t quite like that, it was near the end of the game and they were killing us, but Bradley and Lieberman have sure done got rightly “stuffed” concerning this AGW hoax.
“repeating an analysis with exactly the same data is normally very difficult.”
Only if it’s not science.
Gets better with every batch … How good will it go?
tangled web. Much easier to just tell the truth.
Now, I’d like to see where Mann, et al., complained in public about missing error bars.
This is getting to Mr Mann. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/8282028/Michael-Mann-vows-to-keep-up-the-street-fight-against-climate-change-deniers.html
major9985 says:
The hokey stick is old news, so let’s do a reconstruction. The link provided of course shows Mann’s Hokey Stick was the real deal, commenting that it used: “…complementary methods that have been thoroughly tested and validated with model simulation experiments.”
Oh, yeah, like that’s convincing [/sarc]. They come up with the same hokey stick as Mann’s original.
However, apparently major 9985 forgot that he posted this upthread:
That contradicts the link that claims it replicated Mann’s results.
No wonder journals have lost credibility with nonsense like that. Actually, when Mann’s numbers are used correctly, his hokey stick disappears.
“I think it’s intentional and malicious. It’s intended to chill scientific discourse, to intimidate scientists working in areas that threaten these special interests,” he says.
Reads a little differnt considering M Mann is the ‘Special Interest’.
Why an obscure graph published in a scientific journal should enrage so many people has been the subject of much internet conspiracy (or genuine scientific debate, depending on your point of view).
Then how did it get such a prominent place with the IPCC?
Phil Jones:
“I’m not trying to make any sort of point here, just to state that repeating an analysis with exactly the same data is normally very difficult.”
I had a quick skim though the article above and that comment jumped straight out at me like it was in 3D! I thought I can’t be reading that right, then noticed all the other comments here. This is really weird. Worthy of an article on its own.
I have just managed to download the CET daily data since 1878. Wow what a lot of information anomolies cover up. I was starting to beleive in climate change but I’m not now!
Smoky, I love The Hockey Stick Illusion so much that I bought a hundred copies and I’m reselling them. As far as I know, I am the only retailer in the world offering copies with a bookplate signed by the Bish. I’d be delighted to sell them all and order more.
Is that the guy who does not know how to use excel?
Since the first time I saw Mann interviewed for AlBeebs “Climate Wars” and in all subsequent interviews, I’ve considered him to be no more than a snivelling brat, not a scientist.
Sue me Mikey! You have my name, I live in Peterlee, Co. Durham, England!
DaveE.
Urederra: Is that the guy who does not know how to use excel?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!
[wipes eyes]
Thanks for that……………….
Anthony, I sure do wish you could change the comment format to allow direct response to others who post here. Possible?
Steven Rosenburg says, complains about the prose of others but, “Bad writing is possible the single best marker of bad thinking.”
I don’t usually make note of spelling or grammar unless a grammarnazi chimes in with his own mistakes. You’re not a grammarnazi are you Steven?
I was going to say something about this laughable quote, “repeating an analysis with exactly the same data is normally very difficult.” but, the crew already tore that one a new one!
Mikey really does have a thing for “skill” and “skillful predictors” doesn’t he? Would that he used a little more of his supposed skill to compose his graphs, which he now maintains are pure conjecture, despite being prominently featured in just about every discourse on AGW and many school texts. I’m guessin’ he’s sent e-mails to all those publishers and users suggesting they remove the offending pages, right?
I like this, “all of us who do climate change”. Really? So they are responsible? Couldn’t we just have them killed and the problem would go away?
This is good too, ““…the entire apparatus for propelling this manufactured scandal on to the world stage was completely funded by the fossil-fuel front groups.” if you know that the fossil fuel industry has pumped a lot of money into the warmista’s pockets and realize that the entire apparatus propelling this manufactured scandal (AGW) is Mann et al! So, is he telling the truth, or not? Yeah, I know, out of context. 😉
The Middlebury Community Network
——————————————————————————–
Editorial: The Great Global Warming Hoax?
JPeden says:
January 16, 2012 at 10:59 am
Sir are you the JPeden that wrote the above article? If so a very good article.
[From Mann’s creative whining exercise in The Independent:]
Hmmm … looks like we need to add two more words (“open” and “obscure”) to the ever-lengthening list of those that must be redefined in order to fully appreciate and understand the findings of these noble “climate scientists”.
Amazing. Simply amazing.
Mann believes the theft of the emails was not the work of a random hacker, but part of a sophisticated campaign…
Everybody has their own personalized intepretation–for Mann, he’s been at the center of a “sophisticated campaign” himself so he’d certainly view it that way.
But the “hacker” as Mann likes to call him, may have actually been angered enough by what he read to provide with world an unprecedented view of Mann’s inhumanity to man.
“and looking around the committee room, I don’t think they were convincing to important members of the committee.) …I don’t want to stir up trouble”
Remember, the camel is a horse designed by a committee.
What’s interesting is tying some phrases together for a whole picture:
“…Mann insists that he has been as open as he can about data and methodology, but the aim of these requests has more to do with intimidation than openness…”
“…as when Keith, Tim and me wanted to do some comparisons with MBH98 a few years ago a few of the series could not be made available…”
Couldn’t they have just asked Mann for the data? Would Mann feel “intimidated” if they asked? After all, these WERE fellow academics, and not wanting to find anything wrong with it.
ref Jones comment
“I’m not trying to make any sort of point here, just to state that repeating an analysis with exactly the same data is normally very difficult.”
I wonder if the model runs use a ‘counter factual concept of prediction’ idea which is basically a ‘what if’
if it does (IF) , then this might introduce a randomizer, which would make replication difficult or impossible.
Even Wikipedia cannot fail to notice some interesting _details_:
Eternal Optimist says:
January 16, 2012 at 3:09 pm
“ref Jones comment
“I’m not trying to make any sort of point here, just to state that repeating an analysis with exactly the same data is normally very difficult.”
I wonder if the model runs use a ‘counter factual concept of prediction’ idea which is basically a ‘what if’
if it does (IF) , then this might introduce a randomizer, which would make replication difficult or impossible.”
That would be a kind of Monte Carlo simulation; there are such papers; Rahmstorff has produced his last few papers with such simulations. But in such a case you re-run it many times to get a stable result. During a reproduction, you would again run it many times, and the averaged result should then be close to the original one, and if it’s not, that indicates that the original result was spurious – resulting in a rebuttal of the original result.
As far as I know, Michael Mann’s original Hockey Stick doesn’t use such techniques.
” In reply, Mann insists that he has been as open as he can about data and methodology, but the aim of these requests has more to do with intimidation than openness.”
His recent “science communication” course pays off; they taught him to shamelessly lie. It’s time that scientists openly distance themselves from him; otherwise science as a profession will lose the remaining reputation it has. Well, maybe it’s already too late for that.
Steven Rosenberg says:
January 16, 2012 at 8:07 am
Wow. Not the content, but the horrible English prose. Bad writing is possible the single best marker of bad thinking.
No, in my experience it sometimes those who use the best prose that do the worst thinking! Often, they use their mastery of prose to hide their sloppy thinking.
The now classic paper, “Corrections To The Mann et. al. (1998), Proxy Data Base And Northern Hemispheric Average Temperature Series,” by Stephen McIntyre & Ross McKitrick in Energy & Environemnt, Volume 14, Number 6, pp. 751-771, 2003, at http://www.multi-science.co.uk/mcintyre-mckitrick.pdf debunks the MBH98, due to its non-reproducible scientific data, i.e. Michael Mann´s et. al. infamous “hockey stick” graph. (My remark: MBH98 is “Global-Scale Temperature Patterns and Climate Forcing Over the Past Six Centuries,” Nature, No. 392, pp. 779-787, 1998, by M.E. Mann, R.S. Bradley, and M.K. Hughes.)
Stephen McIntyre´s & Ross McKitrick´s paper, “Corrections to the Mann et. al. (1998)” from 2003, states in its “Abstract,” page 751:
“The data set of proxies of past climate used in Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998, “MBH98” hereafter) for the estimation of temperatures from 1400 to 1980 contains collation errors, unjustifiable truncation or extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, geographical location errors, incorrect calculation of principal components and other quality control defects. We detail these errors and defects. We then apply MBH98 methodology to the construction of a Northern Hemisphere average temperature index for the 1400-1980 period, using corrected and updated source data. The major finding is that the values in the early 15th century exceed any values in the 20th century. The particular “hockey stick” shape derived in the MBH98 proxy construction – a temperature that decreases slightly between the early 15th century and early 20th century and then increases dramatically up to 1980 – is primarily an artefact of poor data handling, obsolete data and incorrect calculation of principal components.”
Global Warming Hoax is a Junk Science, as well as, Eugenics/Racial Hygiene, Malthusianism, and Lysenkoism.
Global Warming Hoax are destroying Rationality, the Scientific Method, and Science.
SAY NO TO GLOBAL WARMING HOAX
SAY NO TO JUNK SCIENCE
SAY NO TO GLOBAL GOVERNANCE
Steven Rosenberg says:
January 16, 2012 at 8:07 am
Wow. Not the content, but the horrible English prose. Bad writing is possible the single best marker of bad thinking.
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You mean “possibly”. I always laugh when people fail the tests they use on others.
Man, the stuff Tom’s putting out now is just not good for one’s blood pressure.
“It’s intended to chill scientific discourse …”
Ohboy! Did you and Steve McIntyre miss your target. You’ve helped stirred so much scientific discourse that there’s hardly a politically aware soul on earth who doesn’t know of the global warming controversy. I’d bet 99% of them are unaware of any other scientific controversy.
Keep up the good work,
Bill Drissel
Grand Prairie, TX
steven mosher says:
January 16, 2012 at 5:33 pm
Perfection must be quite a load to carry.
The man will be humbled enough once he recognizes his error.
Anthony tells me I’m wrong about you, but I’m having a hard time seeing it.
I’m irked, I tell you, irked. I go over and over lab reports with my students, stressing with emphatically emphatic emphasis that THE WHOLE POINT OF A LAB REPORT IS TO COMMUNICATE WHAT YOU DID AND WHY so you could give the report to someone else who could then repeat the experiment exactly the same way you did it and get similar results.
And now I find out that’s not true, that it’s very difficult to duplicate results? Really? This is science?!!!!
Irked.
The Medium is the Message: America can’t read you know. Without the graph Al Gore is a failed American presidential contender. With the graph he has amassed millions trashing America.
…the entire apparatus for propelling this manufactured scandal on to the world stage was completely funded by the fossil-fuel front groups.
How about the facts that
(1) the entire apparatus for promoting CAGW onto the word stage in the first place, was completely funded by government, the very organisation that stands to hugely benefit from public acceptance of CAGW (more taxes, bureaucracies, control over peoples’ lives).
(2) Government funding completely dwarfs all non-government spending, probably by three or four orders of magnitude.
Blurryell !
Is Jones saying he can’t reproduce the results because he can’t get the original data or because the original results are wrong?
This thing has become a parody of itself.
Harold Ambler says:
January 16, 2012 at 9:00 am
“… Once again: Big Oil funds UEA and Stanford and much of big-time AGW science, but it does not fund this blog or mine or any of the others that fight to get the truth out.”
Does Mann know that he himself funds “Big Oil” every time he 1) drives his car, 2) uses plastic products, 3) flys to a conference in a big jet plane, 4) heats his home, 5) buys products not made on his property 6) etc. 7) etc. 8) etc.
Bite the hand that feeds you.
“I think it’s intentional and malicious. It’s intended to chill scientific discourse, to intimidate scientists working in areas that threaten these special interests,” he [Mann] says.
Is this what psychologists call “projection”? Isn’t this the sort of thing that Mann and his ilk resorted to several times when journals published papers with which he did not agree? Get the editor fired, threaten legal actions, intimidate, encourage people to boycott? Now he’s the victim?
Once upon a life, I did “publicity work.” Sometimes for client folk I liked, sometimes less so.
Frankly, I was completely ineffectual if I didn’t “believe” in a client.
“Believing” in the rectitude of what we do is important, whatever the job. Gavin and MM can no more see the real world now than Mr. Magoo. They “believe.” Period. It’s a big bottle of pills and a quart of Jack Daniels, otherwise.
(Hell. It’s true if you’re going to kill a mussie for Jesus, or piss on the taliban dead. It’s true if you are a German Nazi. You gotta believe.)
In the great scheme, Michael Mann is chump change, a little demi-god of self-creation. The bigger story is the sad story of how a politicized world was dragged after him, for so very long.
….Lady in Red
Nah. But there’s a lovely dish called “Smurf ‘n’ Turf”, for baby harp seal & codfish!
Missing concluding clause: “… without exposing the whole fraudulent shambalooza.”
He was obviously unaware that he was missing Mann’s Secret Sauce in the algorithms. Which Mikey will never reveal!
I agree, but …
To be fair, we lack any and all edit functions on this bare-bones forum software.
Other than appealing to the kindness of mods. Which is highly variable, with a huge noise factor.
>:)
Since tree ring widths are directly affected by CO2 levels as well as being affected by temperature and rainfall, the whole thing is very questionable. If the IPCC needs to show a relationship between CO2 and temperature, the first requirement shoud be a proxy which is not itself affected by CO2.
> Anteaus January 17, 2012 at 11:50 pm
So is there also a *CO2* divergence problem ?
pat: ” As if snow caused cooling.”
Well, it does, you know.