Over on Climate Audit, there’s an interesting thread going on about Lonnie Thompson and his wife Ellen, who Steve McIntyre describes as “serial non-archivers” due to their overt refusal to put their ice-core data online is spite of grant rules that require them to do so.
Steve begins with:
Recently, Geoffrey Boulton’s report and Nature editorial provided more pious language urging data archiving by hoarding scientists. As I mentioned in my initial comments on Boulton’s editorial, there have been many such pious pronouncements over the years without the slightest impact on, for example, the serial non-archiving couple of Lonnie Thompson and Ellen Mosley-Thompson, who, as it turns out, is an even worse offender than husband Lonnie, if such can be imagined. Their long career of non-archiving has flourished despite clear U.S. federal government policies dating back to 1991 which, on paper, require thorough data archiving by the climate community as a condition of receiving grants. Unfortunately, the U.S. climate funding bureaucracy has been thoroughly co-opted by the climate industry and has failed to enforce regulations that, on paper, would require the Thompsons and others to archive data. Unfortunately, Boulton failed to do any assessment of why even apparently mandatory government policies have been insufficient to deter to serial non-archivers.
There’s an interesting discussion around that, but what really caught my eye was this thread revealed in the Climategate emails where McIntyre becomes the target of defamation by Michael Mann, simply for trying to get data. The mendacity is truly disturbing.
Here’s the comment thread, bold mine:
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Steve McIntyre On October 19, 2003, I wrote to her, cc Lonnie Thompson:
Dear Dr. Moseley-Thompson,
I noticed that you have not contributed data from Dunde, Guliya or Dasuopo ice cores to the World Data Center for Paleoclimatology or your 10-year series on Huascaran and Sajama. I presume that this is an oversight. If so, I think that these would be worthwhile contributions and that it is important to support the digital archiving program of WDCP.
Yours truly,
Stephen McIntyre
Toronto, CanadaShe responded:
Stephen,
I have forwarded your comment to Lonnie Thompson as these are his data sets.
Indeed our philosophy in the past few years has been to release all the data that are published in a peer-reviewed journal. Witness that all the data from the Kilimanjaro cores that were presented in Science are in the data center. Some of the older cores do need to have the data deposited and we appreciate you bringing that to our attention. As time and resources allow us to pull those together, we will deposit them.
Thank you,
Ellen Mosley-Thompson
cc: Lonnie ThompsonI replied:
Thanks for your reply. I realize that time and resources are always limited. However some of these older datasets are being currently used in multi-proxy compilations such as Bradley, Hughes and Diaz and it would be worthwhile to ensure that the information already being digitally distributed is also at WDCP.
Pending the eventual archiving at WDCP, I would appreciate a digital version of the Guliya, Dasuopu and Dunde O18 datasets and of the 10-year versions for Huascaran and Sajama. Thanks for your attention. Steve McIntyre
She replied on Oct 20:
Stephen – two things
1) I see that you have copied Lonnie Thompson and that is good as these are his data sets.
2) I see not affiliation for you – where are you located? You did not provide a signature and yahoo of course gives no information about the sender.
Ellen Mosley-ThompsonThis inquiry to Mosley-Thompson was a result of a comment that I had posted on a Yahoo blog about non-archiving of data used in Mann and Jones 2003:
> “…2) the use of digitally unpublished data is highly frustrating. Of
> the 23 datsets referred to here, I can only locate 7 at the World Data
> Center for Paleoclimatology. http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/paleo/ . Some of the
> worst offenders in this respect include Mosley-Thompson, Cook, Hughes
> and Briffa….Timo Hameranta circulated this comment to a lengthy email list. I responded to him that I would ask the authors criticized to archive their data and did so, sending the above email to Mosley-Thompson among others. This got notice in the Climategate emails and is the second time that I’m mentioned. ( CG2 1566. 2003-10-20). Mann wrote Jones and Briffa, cc Bradley, Hughes, Diaz, Rutherford (this is 2 weeks before publication of MM2003):
At 11:14 19/10/2003 -0400, Michael E. Mann wrote:
FYI–thought you guys should have this (below). This guy “McIntyre” appears to be yet another shill for industry–he appears to be the one who forwarded the the scurrilous “climateskeptic” criticisms of the recent Bradley et al Science paper.
Here is an email I sent him a few weeks ago in response to an inquiry. It appears, by the way, that he has been trying to break into our machine (“multiproxy”). Obviously, this character is looking for any little thing he can get ahold of. The irony here, of course, is that simple composites of proxy records (e.g. Bradley and Jones; Mann and Jones, etc) give very similar results to the pattern reconstruction approaches (Mann et al EOF approach, Rutherford et al RegEM approach), so anyone looking to criticize the basic NH temperature history based on details of e.g. the Mann et al ’98 methodology are misguided in their efforts…
The best that can be done is to ignore their desperate emails and, if they manage to slip something into the peer-reviewed literature, as in the case of Soon & Baliunas, deal w/ it as we did in that case–i.e., the Eos response to Soon et al—they were stung badly by that, and the bad press that followed.For those of you who haven’t seen it, I’m forwarding an interesting email exchange from John Holdren of Harvard that I got the other day. He summarized the whole thing very nicely, form an independent perspective…
Cheers,
mike
p.s. I’m setting up my email server so that it automatically rejects emails from the “usual suspects”. You might want to do the same. As they increasingly get automatic reject messages from the scientists, they’ll start to get the picture…Jones replied:
Dear All,
I’ve had several emails from Steve McIntyre. He comes across in these as friendly, but then asks for more and more. I have sent him some station temperature data in the past, but eventually had to stop replying to me. Last time he emailed me directly was in relation to the Mann/Jones GRL paper. That time he wanted the series he used. I suspect that he is the person who sent the email around about only 7 of the 23 series used by Ray et al. being in WDC-Paleo. I told him then that he needs to get in contact with the relevant paleo people. It seems only Mike, Ray and me got this email from Timo, so I’ll forward it.He names the worst offenders (ie those not putting data on WDC-Paleo) as being Cook, Mosley-Thompson, Hughes and Briffa !! He clearly should go to a few paleo meetings to find out what is really out there. Last week I saw the Patzold Bermuda coral record again. It is now 1000 years long and all there is
an unwritten paper !
…
Cheers, Phil
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Steve McIntyrePosted Jul 3, 2012 at 3:50 PM
Another point in this respect is that authors have complained about being “pestered” for data. Or that one request simply leads to another. The climate community has by and large closed ranks in solidarity with the idea that requests for data were “distracting” scientists from their “real” work. I asked authors to archive their data as a solution to this supposed imposition,
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Mann libeled McIntyre by making an unsupported claim that he was trying to “break into our machine (“multiproxy”). “
The claim is laughable. Here’s why.
First, some background about what I know about Steve McIntyre, and this should not be taken as a criticism, but as a statement of fact. Everyone has their areas of expertise, Steve’s happens to be mathematics and statistical analysis, mine happens to be weather and PC technology. Steve needed help to run Climate Audit. That help was provided by many people, John A, Mr. Pete, myself and others. When CA was running on a single box, I’d routinely get emails from Steve with questions about how to do certain things, concerns about what appeared to be glitches, and other related day to day computing questions.
From those experiences I can conclude that Steve McIntyre is no more capable of breaking into a computer system than I am of running a PCA analysis on Mann’s data. That’s not a slam, just a recognition of expertise (and also of Steve’s ethics).
He is however quite capable of writing R scripts to scrape available data off of web and FTP sites, which can cause the jittery folks like Mann who see “big oil funded skeptics” under every rock and behind every tree to erroneously conclude that such wholesale data downloading is an “attack”. This has happened before, when GISS shut off McIntyre’s access for downloading large reams of data in 24 hours. See GISS Interruptus. McIntyre wrote then:
I have been attempting to collate station data for scientific purposes. I have not been running a robot but have been running a program in R that collects station data.
The idea that Mann would demonize McIntyre, simply for trying to get data for replication, reveals the black soul of Mann’s scientific mendacity towards making data available for replication.
UPDATE: Steve McIntyre weighs in via the comments –
Anthony, the highlighted Mann email (new in CG2) refers back to a pre-MM2003 incident and a very strange incident. In my first entry to paleoclimate analysis, I had asked Mann by email for the FTP location of the data for MBH98. Mann said that he had “forgotten” the location but that Rutherford would get it for me. Rutherford said that the data wasn’t in one location, but that he would get it together for me. This was my very first contact with the Team and I was amazed. Rutherford then gave me a link to a dataset at Mann’s FTP site. I downloaded this data and analyzed it.
Some months later, after noticing problems with the principal component series, I sent Mann the data set that I had downloaded and asked him to confirm that this was the actual data used in MBH98. Mann said that he was too busy to answer and that no one else had any problems. At the same time, I renewed my efforts to examine his FTP site for data related to MBH. His site was blocked to google search and the directories were not searchable.
When we published MM2003, Mann accused us of using the “wrong” dataset. Two days later, at David Appell’s site, a link was given to the “right” data set. Mann said that the “wrong” dataset had been prepared by Rutherford because we had supposedly asked for data in an Excel spreadsheet – an untrue smear that caused many smirks and sneers within the community. In fact, I hadn’t asked for an excel spreadsheet. The data set that we had loaded was also date stamped long prior to my request. Mann then deleted this version without any annotation or apology. Even though I published the correspondence, Mann’s smear was accepted by the “community” – Jones sneered at me about this in an email over a year later.
Mann also (falsely) asserted that the “right” dataset had been available all along and that we should have used it (though the URL now given had never been previously referred to in a webpage or anywhere else). I had diligently parsed his website and was convinced that Mann had simply moved data from a private protected area to a public area in response to our article but this could not be demonstrated unless the university investigated. The CG2 email that you refer to shows quite clearly that the “right” data set was not publicly accessible in September 2003.
The issue of the “wrong” data set ultimately proved to be moot as the problems with MBH98 did not turn on the differences between these two versions. However, the incident did make me that much more careful in asking members of the Team for the precise version of a data set used in article.
Most of all, I was amazed at Mann’s baldfaced untruthfulness in claiming that we had asked for an excel spreadsheet and that the version that we had been given access to had been prepared especially for us. Both because of the untruthfulness itself and because of the ease with which the untruthfulness could be demonstrated (merely by producing my original email request which made no reference to an excel spreadsheet and asked directly for an FTP location). The credulous acceptance of this untruthfulness by the community was amazing and perhaps Mann was counting on this. Remarkably, seven years later, Mann re-iterated this untruthful story to the Penn State Investigation Committee rather than just letting sleeping dogs lie. The Penn State committee accepted the false story at face value without doing any investigation.
A strange incident indeed.
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NOTE: I’ll give Dr. Mann equal space here on WUWT should he wish to respond – Anthony
All the more reason to have M Manns e-mails released. There is the over arching question to be answered, is climate science a science or is it politics?
God forbid that publicly funded scientists make their data available so that people can double check their results. That used to be called science.
Running a program in R that downloads station data IS running a robot.
I noticed that lately Obama seems to purposefully avoid the ‘ing’ at the end of words so now he’s ‘speakin’ and ‘grillin’ in the back yard. You know this has to be based on a lot of research, focus groups and advice from experts on more effective ‘communicatin’ in America.
So, we should perhaps try this approach when ‘communicatin’ to others about Mann–e.g., he is still ‘preachin’ ‘global warmin’ and ‘stickin’ it to those who are skeptical of the ‘fear mongerin’ so whether it be ‘rainin’ or ‘shinin’ don’t expect any ‘chillin’…
It is the repeated failure of climate scientists to make their data and methods available to the public for independent confirmation that provides the strongest evidence that climate scientists are knowingly participating in scientific malpractice.
Peer review is not independent review. Without independent replication a peer reviewed paper means very little.
MikeN says:
July 6, 2012 at 8:14 am
Running a program in R that downloads station data IS running a robot.
Not really. Running Wget and pulling every piece of data on the webserver with multiple iterations and directory traversals with ever expanding depth… all automated, would be more akin to running a robot.
Anthony, the highlighted Mann email (new in CG2) refers back to a pre-MM2003 incident and a very strange incident. In my first entry to paleoclimate analysis, I had asked Mann by email for the FTP location of the data for MBH98. Mann said that he had “forgotten” the location but that Rutherford would get it for me. Rutherford said that the data wasn’t in one location, but that he would get it together for me. This was my very first contact with the Team and I was amazed. Rutherford then gave me a link to a dataset at Mann’s FTP site. I downloaded this data and analyzed it.
Some months later, after noticing problems with the principal component series, I sent Mann the data set that I had downloaded and asked him to confirm that this was the actual data used in MBH98. Mann said that he was too busy to answer and that no one else had any problems. At the same time, I renewed my efforts to examine his FTP site for data related to MBH. His site was blocked to google search and the directories were not searchable.
When we published MM2003, Mann accused us of using the “wrong” dataset. Two days later, at David Appell’s site, a link was given to the “right” data set. Mann said that the “wrong” dataset had been prepared by Rutherford because we had supposedly asked for data in an Excel spreadsheet – an untrue smear that caused many smirks and sneers within the community. In fact, I hadn’t asked for an excel spreadsheet. The data set that we had loaded was also date stamped long prior to my request. Mann then deleted this version without any annotation or apology. Even though I published the correspondence, Mann’s smear was accepted by the “community” – Jones sneered at me about this in an email over a year later.
Mann also (falsely) asserted that the “right” dataset had been available all along and that we should have used it (though the URL now given had never been previously referred to in a webpage or anywhere else). I had diligently parsed his website and was convinced that Mann had simply moved data from a private protected area to a public area in response to our article but this could not be demonstrated unless the university investigated. The CG2 email that you refer to shows quite clearly that the “right” data set was not publicly accessible in September 2003.
The issue of the “wrong” data set ultimately proved to be moot as the problems with MBH98 did not turn on the differences between these two versions. However, the incident did make me that much more careful in asking members of the Team for the precise version of a data set used in article.
Most of all, I was amazed at Mann’s baldfaced untruthfulness in claiming that we had asked for an excel spreadsheet and that the version that we had been given access to had been prepared especially for us. Both because of the untruthfulness itself and because of the ease with which the untruthfulness could be demonstrated (merely by producing my original email request which made no reference to an excel spreadsheet and asked directly for an FTP location). The credulous acceptance of this untruthfulness by the community was amazing and perhaps Mann was counting on this. Remarkably, seven years later, Mann re-iterated this untruthful story to the Penn State Investigation Committee rather than just letting sleeping dogs lie. The Penn State committee accepted the false story at face value without doing any investigation.
A strange incident indeed.
On the theme of demonization, deception, defamation and Mannian mendacity, there was also the 2005 email from Mann to Revkin (3045.txt)
“Hi Andy,
The McIntyre and McKitrick paper is pure scientific fraud. I think you’ll find this
reinforced by just about any legitimate scientist in our field you discuss this with.”
This guy “McIntyre” appears to be yet another shill for industry
========
It could be said that climate science is a shill for the oil and gas industry. The policies being promoted by climate science are working to shut down the use of coal in the US for power generation, and coal is the one energy resource the US has in large reserves. This will most certainly drive up the price of oil and gas in the US long term, increasing US dependence on the middle east for its energy supplies, which underpins much of the US need to maintain a war footing at home and abroad.
Raise your hand if this suprises you…
When a scientist no longer believes in the Scientific Method, he’s no longer a scientist. At the core of Scientific method, we have empirical data, full disclosure, and repeatability.
The whole point about science is that scientists should be eager for their worst enemies and skeptics to take their data and repeat their experiments and come to the same undeniable truth that they have found. Indeed, the data, methods and results should speak for themselves and be undeniable.
When this is no longer followed, all we have is wizardry of Oz.
We now have a DC appeals court that has made findings that C02 is a Global warming gas and has found that the proof is that the SCIENCE IS SETTLE so now C02 caused global warming is a settled Science and a Settled LAW. This must get defeated in the Supreme court or congress must revoke the EPA and Species acts so the law has no enforcement ability of all is lost again?
mann , jones , briffa , thompson , etc. all third rate hacks who are intimidated by the intelligent questions from their betters. [SNIP: Policy. Please check site policy. -REP]
The Penn State committee accepted the false story at face value without doing any investigation.
Ouch.
This is what we can expect from the government science authoritarians until a Coke is $22 (like it now is in Paris).
Steve McIntyre has accused Michael Mann of being a liar. Mann should protect his reputation by suing McIntyre, otherwise we will all believe that he is, indeed, a liar.
Ironic, that they worry about Steve McIntrye doing underhanded computer activities, when a public institutution such as the University of Arizona blocked his IP address. He had to go to a public computer at the local university to access archived data. I contacted the U of A, and received a reply denying the block of access fron the VP of research, who was of course, a climate scientist.
If there are real “climate” scientists out there, why haven’t they criticized Mann and company on their suspect methodology and refusal to release data? To me, the answer is there is no such thing as a real climate scientist, and climate science is a political movement, not a science!
Jay Davis
When Mann falls I think we will surprised to see who lines up to kick him on the way down .
Its not his approach to AGW skeptics, childish as is it , but the way he treat his fellow team members . His got all the social graces of rapid Rottweiler on a bad acid trip and that is on top of being rubbish at science while at the same time total convinced of his own ‘wonderfulness’
Keep him in the public spot light , keep him under pressure and watch him blow .
Gee, Dr. Mann, I can hardly wait for your considered response…..I’d love to have a go at it!
I was once in need of weather readings for Fort Nelson, BC; hourly temperature and relative humidity for as many years as I could get. The Environment Canada website provides monthly (maybe even daily) averages over long periods as a download, but not hourly; the hourly data was only available by refreshing a web page for a particular day. I wrote a VBA script that would request a given day’s information and then read it off the web page and into an excel file, then request a page refresh for the next day, read the data, etc… 365 iterations later, I had an annual file.
It worked, but it was SLOW, so I usually set it to run overnight, but I started getting errors: the script either failed, or ran, but didn’t return any data. I also found that I was blocked when I tried to log in to the web page through a browser. I called Environment Canada, and it turns out that a series of 365 page refresh requests 10 or 15 seconds apart was interpreted as some form of attack on their website, and their software had blacklisted our IP address (a little embarassing to block the provincial electric utility from access to the Environment Canada website!).
The gentleman I spoke to at EC was very apologetic, and when I explained what we were doing (determining the opperating parameters for the new combustion turbine we were installing in the town’s power plant) he said “well, that’s exactly the sort of thing that our data should be used for!” They removed the block on our account, but then said if the information was more useful in hourly form they would add the functionality to request that level of detail on a year-by-year basis as a CSV download.
“And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.” John 3:19 KJV
Anthony;
I think that what Mann is talking about when he says “break into our machine (multiproxy)” is that McIntyre was trying to peak “under the hood” and unravel exactly what was going in inside the proxy reconstruction “black box”. I hold no brief for Mann, but I don’t think that he was actually suggesting Steve was trying to gain unauthorized access to a computer. If that had been what Mann was suggesting, I don’t doubt that the observation would have been accompanied by far more vitriol, and considering his litigious inclinations, no doubt a phone call to the police or other LEO.
Meanwhile the MSM are issuing tear jerker puff pieces about the Thompsons. Look, I come from a family filled with heart problems but that is beyond the pale. Here’s the world’s smallest violin playing the world’s saddest song.
It’s probably a misunderstanding on my part, but if you can’t reproduce results of scientific research, even if it’s because the data and methods are being withheld, it just isn’t science – it’s a belief.
Pointman
Hark… with the degree of duplicity on display the shepherds of Western academia must wander the desert for 40 years until all those who lied and sinned against the scientific method have died out.
Don’t forget that Mann repeated the lie in his recent book as well.
> “I see not affiliation for you – where are you located? You did not provide a signature and yahoo of course gives no information about the sender.”
Steve should send her a notarized signed letter with his e-mail address on it by regular mail, so she can be sure it is the real Steve McIntyre and not an impostor.
Peer review is NOT science when “peer” is defined as “only people who already agree with us.” It is simply politics of a pernicious sort. Remember Heinleins “second best way to lie; tell the truth, but not all of it.” So the True Believers say “All climate scientists [Who are already part of our clique and excluding anyone who doesn’t] agree that man made climate change is real.” And demonize anyone outside the Pale.
No independent replication = no science. No science = no scientist.
Is Mann not working anymore? He sure has a lot of time to monitor the web. The folks at the Obama Campaign have nothing on Mann, as he “truth” machine never seems to miss anything?
Can you get a research grant just to monitor the internet and interject your own “facts” whenever anybody questions your results?
The record is that Steve McIntyre has behaved throughout with exemplary honesty, patience, rigor, genuine scientific spirit, and good will.
Let’s just say that Mann & co. have too often displayed serious failings in those virtues.
“The Team” and Mann most of all should be a future case study for what not to do in research ethics, professional ethics, and proper academic conduct across all fields (even non-science fields can benefit from reviewing this train wreck). Courses, articles, and books for generations to come should utilize examples of Mannian misbehavior as cautionary tales about hubris, narrow-mindedness, malice, and anti-scientific attitudes.
Any trolls or CAGW true believers ought to get Mann and his RC acolytes onto this thread NOW so we can see what their current explanations are. Let’s have a real discussion of this and not just the usual RC denialism (oops, did I use that word?). I must say that having studied and taught case studies on professional ethics more broadly (across many fields of activity), “The Team” displays some of the more unprofessional, anti-scientific behaviors I have seen.
McIntyre: “Most of all, I was amazed at Mann’s baldfaced untruthfulness in claiming that we had asked for an excel spreadsheet and that the version that we had been given access to had been prepared especially for us. Both because of the untruthfulness itself and because of the ease with which the untruthfulness could be demonstrated (merely by producing my original email request…”
This is one of the mind boggling things, to me, about those who follow and defend Mann. We’ve seen him bob and weave like this for a long time. Please, there must be one of his supporters reading this who can explain why Mann continues to be revered by those who believe in disastrous AGW, despite this weasel-like behavior.
Yea, a very cloying and patronizing habit. And his serial abuse of the word :”folks”. GW Bush is a “folks” kind a guy, Obama… not so much.
————-
I noticed that lately Obama seems to purposefully avoid the ‘ing’ at the end of words so now he’s ‘speakin’ and ‘grillin’ in the back yard. You know this has to be based on a lot of research, focus groups and advice from experts on more effective ‘communicatin’ in America.
D. J. Hawkins says:
July 6, 2012 at 9:48 am
Anthony;
I think that what Mann is talking about when he says “break into our machine (multiproxy)” is that McIntyre was trying to peak “under the hood” and unravel exactly what was going in inside the proxy reconstruction “black box”.
=====================================================================
Could be. To me that would imply that Mann wasn’t just a scientist that arrived at an erroneous conclusion that pride keeps him from admitting to but rather a group (a team?) that set out to deceive from the start. They were out to sell the conclusion and were out to prevent anyone from spotting the machinations used to reach it.
D.J. Hawkins: “I think that what Mann is talking about . . . is that McIntyre was trying to peak “under the hood” and unravel exactly what was going in inside the proxy reconstruction ‘black box’.”
I agree–and this damns Mann as a numerologist rather than a scientist.
OldTiredEngineer hit the nail on the head: ” When a scientist no longer believes in the Scientific Method, he’s no longer a scientist. At the core of Scientific method, we have empirical data, full disclosure, and repeatability.
“The whole point about science is that scientists should be eager for their worst enemies and skeptics to take their data and repeat their experiments and come to the same undeniable truth that they have found. Indeed, the data, methods and results should speak for themselves and be undeniable.”
Why do non-scientists such as myself presume to question the word of “scientists”? Of course, there’s always the justification that not even the most eminent scientist is infallible; remember “Gott würfelt nicht.” But a more commonly applicable reason is that it doesn’t take a scientist to know the scientific method and recognize its violation. When the method is violated, the pronouncements of the “scientist” should carry no more weight than that of the guy on the next bar stool–maybe less, since the latter more likely to be disinterested is less likely to be a grant-writing hack.
What OldTiredEngineer said should be placed in the cubicle of every science reporter, and verifying that the researchers they quote had conformed to it should be as much a part of journalism as confirmation by a second source. (I know, I know. Allow me my fantasies.)
If I was religious I would take comfort in believing that Mann would eventually end up in hell being eternally challenged and mocked about his junk science by a persistently persistent demon.
As I am not, I have to hope that he will end up universally derided and stigmatized by his peers and the media some time in his own lifetime. Given the entrenched beliefs that members of his cargo cult peer group hold and the widespread belief in AGW by the media, this may not ever happen. However, at least we can be confident that history will judge him harshly. Too bad that offers no comfort for those whose lives today have been made poorer by the AGW scam.
Upthread someone made a comment about why Mann’s professional colleagues aren’t putting the boot in. As fields develop, they attract, new, younger, cleverer people; compared to Jones, Mann is a good example. So a more interesting question is why aren’t the younger generation putting the boot in to a clearly not very clever person, Jones (University of Lancaster early 1970s!), nor very competent – the kind of guy who manages to lose the data on the basis of which he expects all the world’s governments to change the way things are done! (Quickly googling, I can’t see any references to where Briffa was educated. Anyone know?) To annihilate the ‘achievements’ of those who taught you everything you know, is certainly a way to get ahead in the wonderful world of academia. Mann isn’t yet worth kicking, why isn’t Jones (& maybe Briffa) being kicked already by ‘colleagues’?
Ellen is being a bit disingenuous here:
2) I see not affiliation for you – where are you located? You did not provide a signature and yahoo of course gives no information about the sender
She must be the only crimatologist to not have heard of McIntyre, or she is seriously out of the loop.
This is 2003. Steve hadn’t yet given them reason to fear his name, but would shortly.
Steve McIntyre’s name would appear
On other docs within the year:
As only he can,
He pursued more than Mann
And soon just his mention struck fear
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
Reading these email exchanges, seems like to me both McIntyre and Mann have trouble keeping their facts straight. Both characters seem to make up elaborate stories to explain the conduct of the other. Both characters seem to have trouble communicating without making mistakes and generating confusion and misremembering stuff.
Maybe if McIntyre wasn’t bad mouthing people in public and then sounding all polite in private when he wants something, a lot of this bad feeling would not have developed.
If Mann had not inferred that McIntyre was running an agenda along the lines of attempting to discredit climate scientists, then there would not have been a problem. But if that inference is correct, the human nature what it is, you are not going to get cooperation.
There is a lot more to being educated than attending school. Hence the difference between education and schooling. Briffa and Mann attended schools but they obviously missed some classes on the scientific method.
What astonishes me is the degree of corruption that has so easily been wrought by money at the universities of Pennsylvania and East Anglia. This saga will make for a spellbinding episode (or two) on CNBC’s crime show “American Greed”.
And the obvious solution to this mess, LazyTeenager, is to provide data with scientific papers (since the papers are only there to explain and discuss the data, otherwise it would be a paper on philosophy, or the like).
No need to get personal, existential, or obfuscate.
Just the data.
Just the data.
Just the data.
@LazyTeenager,
McIntyre bad mouthing in public? What are you talking about? If you are referring to his succinct destroying of their pitiful paper, that isn’t bad mouthing. That is simply truth. Sometimes the truth hurts, especially when it discredits your best paper. Besides, as mentioned, this happened in 2003, well before anyone knew who McIntyre was.
Lazy Teenager, if you ever bother to read and see facts, you can see that McIntyre tells the truth and Mann is a liar.
And too may times here you’ve displayed those characteristics of Mann.
LazyTeenager says:
July 6, 2012 at 8:58 pm
Reading these email exchanges, seems like to me both McIntyre and Mann have trouble keeping their facts straight.
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That’s weird, because that doesn’t seem to be the case from my perspective. But, we can recap. Steve Mac asked, but wasn’t given. He persisted and was given a false data set. He evaluated that set in good faith. The set made no difference, because Mann’s bs methodology was wrong. Mann then made a point of Steve Mac using the wrong set. It there anything else relevant?
Corrupt scientists need called out. Corrupt scientists who have cost the world an untold treasure, health, and lives need to be on trial. Human nature being what it is, is no excuse for corruption with such a cost. Cooperation in this regard shouldn’t be optional.
If people think that’s over the top, I would remind all that people have died over this BS. Entire populations have been removed, burnt out, and displaced. Forced mass sterilizations have occurred and not without loss of life. $Trillions have been spent in these efforts. Aid for cheap reliable energy has been withheld in exchange for not developing.
All of this is because some jack asses decided to lie to advance themselves and their ideology.
bill
Usually the young sweep aside the prejudices of the old by looking afresh at the underlying facts.However, I’m not sure this will be the case here. I rather suspect that a lot of young scientists are going into climate science because they feel they want to play their part in saving the world i.e. they are going in with a prejudice which is very much in line with the current mainstream paradigm.
IMO climate science will be forced into a new paradigm by (a) a further lack of temperature rise or (b) a begrudging involvement with mainstream statisticians and physical scientists. Alternatively, the current paradigm may well be right in which case no change will take place.
Interestingly, and classically, this seems likely to backfire bigtime. Per the GAO, the Green River tight oil formations are likely to yield recoverable (light sweet) oil equivalent to the grand total of the current known recoverable reserves of the rest of the World. Say hello to USA, World Oil Empire.
A general comment: the AGWT people lay claim to the title ‘climate scientists’, and often reject criticism on the basis that the critics are not ‘climate scientists’; but the field is so complex, and involves so many different disciplines, that any contribution by a capable person who has done the work of understanding the issues should be welcome. Steve McIntyre brings relevant expertise and thorough thinking to the debate – that doesn’t mean he’s automatically right, but all should take his contributions seriously, and not dismiss him with ad hominem (ad personam, I’d prefer) arguments.
2) I see not affiliation for you – where are you located? You did not provide a signature and yahoo of course gives no information about the sender.
Ellen Mosley-Thompson
She never heard of Steve McIntyre? Really?……. Really?
REPLY: Note the date, Mann hadn’t even started calling people “deniers” yet – Anthony
Crispin in Waterloo
This saga will make for a spellbinding episode (or two) on CNBC’s crime show “American Greed”.
Nice Crispin! But would NBC even consider it? These probing documentaries (some narrated by famous blokes like Matt Damon) don’t probe that deep.
REPLY: Note the date, Mann hadn’t even started calling people “deniers” yet – Anthony
Ah, you are correct sir.
Manndacity: mendacious audacity with a flair for hockey sticks
I suspect there is more high significance in Lonnie Thompson’s non-archiving, to unearth. From Al Gore’s 1992 book, it looks as if the original cause for CAGW alarm was… Lonnie’s ice core measurements of CO2, which showed it fluctuating along with temperature very well in the geological past… but show it suddenly escalating in recent times, and when spliced onto the Mauna Loa record, goes up in a way that looks … alarming…
There was no temperature hockey stick in 1992. Mann would have known about the Ice Hockey Stick. People were already alarmed about it. He would have been delighted when he found his magic heat potion could be twiddled to deliver a Hockey Stick for temperatures.
Only to professors Jaworowski and Segalstad, trained before corruption descended on the science, was it clear that the ancient CO2 measurements are almost certainly far too low, and that CO2 probably gets preferentially squeezed out of the gases trapped in the ice under high pressure, emerging along the huge lattice of water surfaces that cover all ice crystals right down to -70°C.
Even if scientists have “allowed” for this preferential loss of CO2. I suspect they and IPCC fear the powers of Steve’s auditing, to show up some really bad science here. You only have to look at AR4 Summary for Policymakers, first picture, to see (a) how important the ice core stuff still is to the IPCC (b) how suspect those little ghg hockey stick upticks are, if one looks carefully.
JChris says:
Peter Hannan makes a good comment that we seem to forget sometimes with respect to “climate science and scientists”: the science is hugely multidisciplinary. Here are a number of disciplines related to climate studies: meteorology, oceanology, glaciology, geology, geophysics (Michael Mann has a PhD in geology and geophysics but his moniker is “climate scientist”), mineralogy, physics, astrophysics, chemistry, geochemistry, geography, paleontology, archeology, biology, botany, mathematics, statistics, computer modeling and economics.
How many have I missed? Probably several.
Will the real climate scientist please stand up?
JChris says
Oops that “oceanography”!
Name and shame. Any scientific paper that does not give access to the archived data and methodology to reach the conclusions is very probably numerology or something else but not science.
Public funded work is public owned and should have the data and methodology accessible for the public.
Once only the high priests were qualified to read the future in the entrails of the sacrificed animals, this did not change much, but it is not science. So I deny them the right to call it science – heck, I’m a denier, but this is not science and scientists.
Science and scientists base their work on scientific method and make their work transparent and replicable.
As Ivar Giaever puts it “Is climate change pseudoscience? If I’m going to answer the question, the answer is: absolutely.”
No data, data tampering, obscure adjustments, this is not science.
“Why should I give you my data when all you are going to do is try to find something wrong with it?”
This is the emblem of this pseudo-science and the contrary to the scientific method.
Dear Steve, thank you for your perseverance and patience in fighting for science and the scientific method!
Lazy Teenager, just out of curiosity, what do YOU do when the teacher asks to see your work?
David;
I’m guessing mystic hand passes, emulating Mandork the Magician?