American Meteorological Society disappears withdraws Gergis et al paper on proxy temperature reconstruction after post peer review finds fatal flaws

http://climateaudit.org/2012/06/08/gergis-et-al-put-on-hold/

“Put on hold”
climateaudit.org/2012/06/08/gergis-et-al-put-on-hold/

Contrast this episode and its media coverage with the neutrino mistake and appreciate how today’s climate science has become anything but science.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/reuvencohen/2012/06/08/cerns-mea-culpa-einstein-was-right-neutrinos-do-obey-the-speed-light/
Steig, Gavin and the usual suspects at Real Climate get another egg on their face!

LOL! The paper’s figure 1: no coral from the great barrier reef used. I think if I was trying to determine past temps down under I wouldn’t leave out such a vast and long lived proxy source.

When the hypothesis is presented with the complete data it can then be peer reviewed and either given a proof or rejected – When they give the base data the hypothesis always fails. PAID FOR SERVICE GRANT SCIENCE. This is just QUID PRO QUO like Public service UNIONS these Government agency or University GRANTS are given to those that produce the desired results.
What happened to the scientific ethics?

Steve McIntyre may not be part of the orthodoxy, but he is a true scientist. Karoly has communicated with him
and a potentially flawed paper has been taken down for further checking
I take great heart from this. Maybe science isn’t broken after all

Arse, plate, etc… Steve The Terminator McIntyre takes another scalp!

Hehe. First a snarky “It’s called research”. Then it’s “We would like to thank you and the participants at the ClimateAudit blog for your scrutiny of our study”.
Reminds me of a spokesman for Arthur Anderson during Enron, Worldcom, etc on the radio ten years ago: “It isn’t our job to check the figures.”
Thanks Steve, Anthony and the REAL peer reviewers. Makes you wonder what complete rubbish would be accepted without your keen senses. I mean, RealClimate might start cheerleading for this sort of cr*p!

Steve McIntyre (along with help from Jean S) is to be congratulated on a thorough examination of the paper. For the lay-person, the correlation tests are complex. There are two, simpler, problems with the reconstruction which give are sufficient to reject it as quality science.
1. Geography
The study is a

temperature reconstruction for the combined land and oceanic region of Australasia (0°S-50°S, 110°E-180°E)

So why are Palmyra Atoll coral proxy (>1300 miles km NE), 2 Rarotonga coral proxies (1250 miles east) or 2 Vostok Ice Station proxies (>1900 miles S) included?. 5/27 are well outside the area.
http://manicbeancounter.com/2012/06/06/mid-pacific-coral-temperature-proxies-from-gergis-et-al-2012/
2. Proxy Correspondence
Fiji (<150km across) and Rarotonga (<10km across) both have two coral proxies. The temperature proxies, if any good, should give similar results. They are massively different.
http://manicbeancounter.com/2012/06/05/palmyra-atoll-coral-proxy-in-gergis-et-al-2012/
3. Unrepresentative proxies
By far the biggest land mass in Australasia and Oceania is the sub-continent of Australia covering 2,900,000 sq miles. There were a couple of coral proxies off the coast of Western Australia, but nothing on the mainland. The only proxies more than 250 miles from the coast are at Vostok, Antarctica, holder of the the world record for lowest temperature ever recorded. It is hardly representative if the Outback.

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b331/kevster1346/accepted.jpg

I put it to you (the WUWT “crowd) that this is by far the biggest documented defeat for the AGW team. It surpasses climategate because it is now likely to be certain that Mann et al will be seen as attempted misrepresentation/fraud as well. I would say that the whole hardcore team will go down with this. I am prone to think that ceratin members wi;; not be affected too much Schmidt, Karoli etc.who are actually able to admit mistakes or at least admit that there hiding them LOL!

absolutely fabulous

Hey this isn’t supposed to be how peer reviewed scientific method works. A paper is supposed to be sitting around in some dusty journal for 3 to 5 years before anyone reads it or decides to try to duplicate the results. How are these beginning scientists supposed to meet tenure publishing criteria if their efforts keep getting skewered by amateurs before the ink is dry or before the ‘way back’ machine manages to catelog the online article?
I’m overwhelmed by the number of potential serious catastrophies that could happen because of such things! If, as published in peer reviewed literature, it is true that over 40% of peer reviewed literature is found to be seriously flawed within 5 years of publication, what is going to happen to all the junior tenure track faculty publishing this erroneous claptrap if it starts being proven false immediately after publication? Universities may no longer be able to replace retiring and dying faculty with permanent new faculty, creating gypsies out of younger wannabes. unfortunately, I have mixed feelings on the peer reviewed paper mentioned above. I feel it is probably correct, but if so, there’s about a 40% chance that it too is in serious error, leaving a barely 60% liklihood that it is in fact correct and that’s hardly a 1-sigma (standard deviation) confidence – and here it was only a few months ago that a few particle researchers found out their higg’s boson discovered with better than a two-sigma s.d. turns out to be an unlikely fluke rather than a big cash prize at the next nobel algore-a-thon.
/sarc-off
A big tip of the hat to Steve M. for his timely efforts.
if western civilization survives, the debt owed to Steve for exposing this clap-trap is going to rival the size of the current US national debt.

That a 3 year study of 950.000 australian dollars got peer reviewed (!), published in AMS and was allready used in the FOD for AR5 makes one think. Doesn’t it.

clipe says:
June 8, 2012 at 2:17 pm
Preliminary Advanced Version
Grrr…Preliminary “Accepted” Version

When Steve McIntyre talks, people listen.

Congratulations Steve McIntyre/Jean S, well caught.
Sean says:
June 8, 2012 at 2:50 pm
Steve McIntyre, Michael Mann is bad mouthing you again and claiming that all is good with his “independently verified” hockey stick:
http://www.montrealgazette.com/technology/Climate+change+deniers+blinded+political+ideology/6748053/story.html
==========
From which: “Hilliard compounds the problem by citing attacks against our work by two Canadian climate change deniers (Fraser Institute-funded economist Ross McKitrick and energy industry consultant Stephen McIntyre) without noting that several independent studies have established fatal flaws in their claims.”
Perhaps a formal complaint to NASA in an open letter?
http://www.globalwarmingclassroom.info/Lesson1_graphs.htm
“Finally, two Canadian scientists found out the data set used by Mann, and analyzed Mann’s statistical approach. They determined that Mann and his team used incorrect statistics to come up with the curve. In fact, it was so bad that the same curve was created even if they inputted a completely random data set. The curve was a function of the statistics used, and had nothing to do with reality. When the Canadian scientists applied the correct statistics, out popped the Little Ice Age and Medieval Climate Optimum (see above). Worse, a scandal at Great Britain’s Climate Research Unit in the late fall of 2009 revealed that the data used in the graph after 1960 was from a totally different and completely corrupted data set. Even if the second data set was not corrupted, combining two radically different data sets (apples and oranges) into one graph negates its scientific validity. Although the Hockey Stick Curve was thoroughly discredited, it continued to be used in publications and media reports for years, and was a main component of Al Gore’s video The Inconvenient Truth. Perhaps the most alarming aspect of this episode is that even after having his error exposed, Dr. Michael Mann is still a principal scientist in the IPCC and receives millions of dollars from the US government. Tragically, this kind of slipshod research has also been discovered coming out of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Since the finding that NASA’s temperature data was in error in 2007, other errors are being reported.”
Would have been better had the two Canadian scientists been named..
By the way, typo alert: (*Added: apparently Gergis refused some additional data Steve McIntyre requested, he [has] documentation of this on his website)

I guess that’s called “re-research”.

Russ R. says (June 8, 2012 at 4:35 pm)
—
The Team are probably trying to Mannhandle the data as we speak.

Another egregious travesty bites the dust.
The half-life of a hockey stick in the open literature is decreasing…
…this is what happens when people check what you do.

Ya know, if these type of paper writers would read WUWT they wouldn’t be constantly making the same mistakes over and over…
Oh, and thank goodness for Steve McIntyre.

Gergis will fall on her sword and announce that the MWP was regional and apologize for implying it occurred in the Southern Hemisphere too.
The AGW cult members I regularly argue with INSIST the MWP and LIA were regional and could therefore be dismissed. They were freaking out over the exstence of an MWP in this paper and graph showing up on “mainstream ” science sites.
They didn’t retract the paper because it was wrong, they retracted it because it demolished the narrative of the MWP being irrelevant and regional.

Funny thing about the data fudging crowd – they hate eating crow!

Help me out understanding this; my doctorate is in the law, not physics or math. The quoted part of the summary says, “The average reconstructed temperature anomaly in Australasia during A.D. 1238–1267, the warmest 30-year pre-instrumental period, is 0.09°C (±0.19°C) below 1961–1990 levels.” Now, when I went to school and studied math and that stuff, when the margin for error is larger than your result, that equals a meaningless result; has that changed?? Nine-hundredths of a degree Celsius, plus or minus nineteen-hundredths of a degree Celsius means (to my feeble understanding) that the average reconstructed temperature anomaly in Australasia … blah, blah … is between minus one tenth of a degree Celsius and plus twenty-eight-hundredths of a degree Celsius and we don’t know where the real average is, between those two numbers? Either the average temp was .28 degrees C below or was .10 degrees C above the 1961-1990 levels; or some number inbetween those two. Is that right? Then the temperature anomaly is useless to establish that average temps were above or below the 1961 – 1990 averages, because the range of possible anomaly results ranges from above to below. What am I missing here??

Ike;
What am I missing here??>>>
Nothing!
BTW, if you apply that same logic to pretty much ANY of the climate reconstructions out there, you wind up with that exact same conclusion. The error range DWARFS the very things they are supposedly measuring. In no other field of science is such a ridiculous practice ever considered, let alone used to justify major changes to the world economy. Would be a good thing if more lawyers such as yourself would ask the same questions and then apply your skills (as lawyers) to dealing with the matter. What you have discovered through your own reasoning and questioning is only scratching the surface of what the “team” has passed off as science.

A new defense for Gergis and friends:
Claim that Peter Gleick went “rogue” against the climate science community and forged the paper to embarrass them, because Gleick is now secretly in the pay of major fossil fuel interests.
Hey, if they have to sacrifice someone from the hockey team why not sacrifice a marginal third stringer already known to do that sort of thing??

When the standard deviation exceeds the anomaly there is no statistically significant difference from the baseline. There is still a level of confidence that can be provided given that there is a calculated difference. The level of confidence that the difference is real is low, very, very low.
That’s all. It is not complicated.

I would regard David Karoly’s letter to Steve McIntyre a step forward, and similar steps overdue from Mann, Rahmstorf and many others.
Climate literature is littered with bad science and the poor quality of IPCC reports is just one consequence. More than a decade old bad science is still circulated just because the persons responsible or in charge at the journals do not retract.
I also hope, the paper will be republished, even if the Hockey Stick disappears (what I expect to happen, as this happened with all other former Hockey Sticks after a Climate Audit.).

Manfred, that last point you make is a good one, and it _should_ be published regardless as it is still, having been done correctly, the reconstruction of the southern hemisphere temperature record. This is not something that should only be published if it suggests unprecedented warming. From a climate change perspective we want to know where current temperatures stand historically regardless of the conclusion.

Now this begins to look as science. A fair exchange over open data and method. More of that kind, please!

Karoly & co should all be sacked. What bludgers off my taxes they are.

So there is no date correlation between between the finding of data processing errors in this paper by Climate Audit and by the authors themselves on June 5th.
I wonder if Gergis et al get the irony of that.

Anthony
It was Jean S, a regular contributor both here and at Steve’s who discovered the detrending problem and , i think, Steve found the usual proxy selection fiddle.

John Bills says:
June 8, 2012 at 3:56 pm
///////////////////////////////////////////
As you rightly infer, it is a damning indictment of both the quality of the science and of the quality of peer review. If it was not for pal review, the errors ought to have beem picked up prioer to publication and the paper either corrected or rejected.
This affiar is an endorsement of the need to provide all code and data sets whenever a paper is published, it is also an endorsement of the effectiveness of independent review by ‘amateur’ scientists and demonstrates the value of their independent input and review.
Well done Steve.

Sorry Ignore above link, I’ll just repost GrantB comment:-
‘We would like to put the record staight on some recent misrepresentations in the climate denial community regarding our research (yes research!) and our recent paper in the Journal of Climate.
* Our paper has received wide acclamation in the Australian and world media. The Guardian reports that our study “of tree rings, corals and ice cores finds unnatural spike in temperatures that lines up with manmade climate change” as conclusive scientific evidence that “Australasia has hottest 60 years in a millennium”.
* Radio Australia reports our research concludes that the “Last five decades warmest in Australia’s history”. This was very much against our expectations, but as scientists we were obliged to report it.
* One of us has backed up this research with a video clip and further details on a blog. The link to the blog is currently broken and we will restore it as soon as possible.
* Our paper has five authors. Each one of us has extensively reviewed the data and methodology used in the paper. The paper has passed peer review by three referees in the Journal of Climate and peer review in Climate Science has long been recognised as the the gold standard in scientific publications.
* Our paper will be cited in the upcoming AR5 and is already being seen as seminal. However in a final check we discovered a minor error in our methodology which although it doesn’t matter will be corrected before inclusion in AR5. We understand that a denial blog also picked up this error some time after we did. Small potatoes and no big deal.
* Although we are based in Melbourne we do as a group own property in Sydney. If any of your readers are interested in purchasing a large spanning-arch bridge we will be happy to consider offers.
Thankyou
The Climate Science Team
The University of Melbourne’

Congratulations, Steve McIntyre. Climate well and truly Audited.

Jean S,
Thank you for your comment at CA which initially made public the error in Gergis et al 2012. And I thank Steve McIntyre for having his wonderfully open venue where such critical analysis as yours can be looked at by anyone interested in a more balanced scientific view than the problematic so-called ‘consensus’ climate science of RC.
John

A search of “Gergis” in Twitter has this near the top,

伊藤公紀 ‏@Itoh_Kiminori
Watt氏ブログより。最近また、20世紀の気温を過大評価する「ホッケースティック(HS)曲線」の論文が発表されたが、「データを逆さまに使用」などの欠陥を指摘され、米国気象学会が論文撤回。HS曲線が好きな環境事務次官はぜひ再考を。http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/08/american-meteorological-society-disappears-gergis-et-al-paper-on-proxy-temperature-reconstruction-after-post-peer-review-finds-fatal-flaws/#more-65267

My Japanese is a little rusty but Google translates it as,

@ Itoh_Kiminori Osamu Ito Blog from Mr. Watt. Also recently been published papers of the 20th century to overestimate the temperature curve “(HS) hockey stick”, is pointed out the defects, such as “upside down use the data”, American Meteorological Society withdrawal papers. What is your favorite environment vice minister to reconsider the curve means HS.

A big hello to our Japanese readers 😉

“My initial impression is that Gergis et al.s’ results will not wind up changing much, if at all.–eric”
There’s quite an advantage when one works in a field where “the right answer” is known before the work is done.

Skeptics shine – Warmist propagandists slime SSDD GK

What happended… did someone accidently burn the log containing the tree rings that spelled death to humanity?

Usually, so long as the conclusion is politically correct the numeracy of science isn’t that important. Has that changed? Are we now insisting on the Inconvenient Whole Truth?

With so many hockey-stick-looking graphy things coming out, sooner or later we’ll assume there must be some truth to them (somewhere). They can’t ALL be wrong. Or so they hope?
Yeah, that’s the ticket!

I just love it when someone trots out the “seminal” word as being descriptive of their research. These days, it means that we, the consuming public, have just been ____ed.

Not THAT kind of seminal, me thinks. ; )

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=seminal
Yes, and Seminary, too. My dad must be so proud.

Although there is an attempt to refer to the article as “on hold”, Anthony correctly refers to it as “withdrawn”.
Paul Mathews points this out over at Climate Audit.
http://climateaudit.org/2012/06/08/gergis-et-al-put-on-hold/#comment-337172
I posted this response, but it immediately went into moderation, which in my experience, means “bye-bye, so long”. So here’s my comment:
Paul, now that you mention it, I’ve never heard of an “on hold” category for the scientific publishing process. I was inclined to let them have their “on hold”, but your comment prompted me to do some googling. AMS does not seem to have any published guidelines with regard to “in press” withdrawals/holds, bue Elsevier has an extensive set of policies:

•Article Withdrawal: Only used for Articles in Press which represent early versions of articles and sometimes contain errors, or may have been accidentally submitted twice. Occasionally, but less frequently, the articles may represent infringements of professional ethical codes, such as multiple submission, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data or the like.
•Article Retraction: Infringements of professional ethical codes, such as multiple submission, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data or the like.
•Article Removal: Legal limitations upon the publisher, copyright holder or author(s).
•Article Replacement: Identification of false or inaccurate data that, if acted upon, would pose a serious health risk.

http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/intro.cws_home/article_withdrawal
Which of those would apply I guess would depend on the ultimate outcome of this thing.
AGU has a retraction/withdrawal policy, but nothing about “on hold”.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/authors/policies/retraction_policy.shtml
Maybe “on hold” will have to be created as a special category exclusive to climate papers. I wonder if the IPCC can alter their policy in time…

Here let’s give the Leftists a new meme to work with–e.g., the devastation from CO2 is heading to hearth like a comet on a collision course and there’s nothing that will save us except Schwarzenegger and schoolteachers. God save us from businessmen and capitalism.

But who were the reviewers who slipped up in their basic professional duties of care.
Unless and until they are identified, one will be alway suspicious of whether it not it was the Mates Review system at work . ie MR not PR…..and no more so than In Australia
There would have been a lot hanging on the printing and releasing of this paper…and they have produced a consumate stuff up. Not a good look

profitup10 says:
June 8, 2012 at 2:31 pm
…
What happened to the scientific ethics?

Scientific ethics lives and survives only where the funding sources are ‘blinded’ or disinterested. But since infinite money isn’t available, choices get made, and inevitably favorites are picked.
I’m beginning to think that the only way to prevent this kind of consensual lock-up is to explicitly establish funding, as a significant % of the total, for ‘dissident’ or ‘rogue’ science in any field where controversy exists. That would heighten the chances of catching groupthink disasters like Climate Science at an early stage, before they ran roughshod over public policy and academia — to the great detriment of society.

Ike says:
…
June 9, 2012 at 7:28 pm The answer – whether the result of calculation or of measurement – is both unknown and unknowable from the data or calculated results provided. Therefore, there is no probability that the difference is real, when as in this case, the range of possible answers extends from above to below the claimed answer.
…
THere may be a probability the difference is real, but it is unknowable from the methodology, both physical and analytic. As many have mentioned, this issue constantly dogs climate science, and most life sciences in general. Inability to measure to the necessary resolution, inability to account for and identify confounding variables, lack of understanding of the totality of variability inherent in the subject, renders most of this “science” worthless. This is a common issue with the study of chaotic and complex systems, many of which are also self-determinant, by physicists, mathematicians and chemists. They simply don’t have the knowledge base necessary to ask the right questions about the hypotheses they’re trying to resolve. In no way will a graduate astrophysicist, organic chemist, fluid engineer or any other traditional discipline produce scientists capable of addressing “climate change” or any number of broadly described “environmental” disciplines with the science that they graduated with. Understanding climate will have to be multi-disciplinary, with the most rigorous application of scientific methodology and principle that we can muster.
We are limited in so many ways as to our ability to conduct any kind of multi-variate analysis on the scale necessary to deduce climate, that we are decades away, if not generations, from any form of conclusions about the operation of the earth’s dynamic systems, much less policy decisions.
The current approaches produce nothing but “anthropogenic global warming” (ie, “hot air”), and contribute almost nothing to the science, only confusion. Presently active scientists need to understand that their individual contribution will, inevitably, be miniscule to the bigger questions, but also understand that their work must also be of the very highest quality, if it is to have any contribution at all. To do otherwise, for systems of the scale of climate, is to simply waste the money and lives of their contemporaries.

Thank you, markx; I re-read what I had written and what Crispin in Waterloo wrote and I see that you’re correct. He’s just more polite than I. *smile* Thank to all who wrote in reply to my comments; you’ve helped my understanding of the material considerably. Lawyers who are neither members of a government nor attorneys for a government agency have little or no chance of altering the apparently poisonous relationship between climate research funding by governments and the resulting papers and claims. Politics, in its modern form of unlimited scope untrammelled by reason or conscience or constitutional law, is the eight-hundred-pound guerrila with a machinegun of modern life: nothing can happen without the approval of those who control the governments. Of course, due to institutionalized ignorance and other unavoidable characteristics of political institutions, nothing that is effective or productive can happen with the approval of those who control the governments. *sigh* The answer ought to be less government intrusion and more freedom, but that seems a pipe dream at best, as I look around the world and consider what I see, based on 50 years of adult education, training and experience. Our fathers defeated the Nazis and Imperial Japan, the Soviet collapsed of its own incompetence and now it seems in America that we are dominated by people who seek the destruction of Western culture, replacing it with … nothing. Nihilism made flesh, as it were.

Gavin at RealClimate says that when all is cleared up, he believes the Southern Hockey Stick will prevail. It sounds like a faith-based assessment, or is it a triumph of hope?