Gavin Schmidt, Michael Mann, and Scott Rutherford have written a comment letter to the Annals of Applied Statistics to the Hockey Stick busting McShane and Wyner paper covered on WUWT in August.
It’s quite something. Here’s the M&W graph:
It only took reading the first paragraph of the Team paper for me to get cheesed off. Emphasis mine:
McShane and Wyner (2010) (henceforth “MW”) analyze a dataset of “proxy”climate records previously used by Mann et al (2008) (henceforth “M08”) to attempt to assess their utility in reconstructing past temperatures. MW introduce new methods in their analysis, which is welcome. However, the absence of both proper data quality control and appropriate “pseudoproxy” tests to assess the performance of their methods invalidate their main conclusions.
Why am I cheesed off?
The sheer arrogance of claiming improper “data quality control” when Mann himself has issues with his own papers such as incorrect lat/lon values of proxy samples, upside down Tiljander sediment proxies, and truncated/switched data, is mind boggling. It’s doubly mind boggling when these errors are well known to thousands of people, and Mann has done nothing to correct them but then speaks of data quality control issues in rebuttal. And yet Schmidt defends these sort of things on RC. It’s like the Team never read the McShane Wyner paper, because they clearly said this about data issues:
We are not interested at this stage in engaging the issues of data quality. To wit, henceforth and for the remainder of the paper, we work entirely with the data from Mann et al. (2008)
So MW used Mann’s own data, made it clear that their paper was about methodology with data, and not the data itself, and now the Team is complaining about data quality control?
The Team egos involved must be so large that the highway department has to put out orange road cones ahead of these guys when they travel. And they wonder why people make cartoons about them:
They go on to whine about the MWP being “inflated”.
MW’s inclusion of the additional poor quality proxies has a material affect on the reconstructions, inflating the level of peak apparent Medieval warmth, particularly in their featured “OLS PC10”
Well, here’s the thing gents; you don’t KNOW what the temperature was during the MWP. There are no absolute measurements of it, only reconstructions from proxy, and the Team opinion on what the temperature may have been is based on assumptions, not actual measurement. You can’t set yourself up as an authority on knowing whether it was inflated or not without knowing what the temperature actually was. They also rail about “poor quality proxies” (their own) used in MW. Like these?
Half the Hockey Stick graphs depend on bristlecone pine temperature proxies, whose worthlessness has already been exposed. They were kept because the other HS graphs, which depend on Briffa’s Yamal larch treering series, could not be disproved. We now find that Briffa calibrated centuries of temperature records on the strength of 12 trees and one rogue outlier in particular. Such a small sample is scandalous; the non-release of this information for 9 years is scandalous; the use of this undisclosed data as crucial evidence for several more official HS graphs is scandalous. And not properly comparing treering evidence with local thermometers is the mother of all scandals.
Read the entire Team response here, comments welcome.
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/notyet/inpress_Schmidt_etal_2.pdf
Backup location in case it falls down a rabbit hole: inpress_Schmidt_etal_2
For balance, the McShane and Wyner paper is available here: http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/mcshane-and-wyner-2010.pdf ======================
h/t to poptech
======================
UPDATE: Here are some other views:
Jeff Id, The Air Vent:
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/09/23/ostriches/
Luboš Motl, The Reference Frame:
http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/09/schmidt-mann-rutherford-just-clueless.html
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Gentlemen,
Please consider the chance SMR is correct. Perhaps we misunderstood where MW wrote:
“We are not interested at this stage in engaging the issues of data quality. To wit, henceforth and for the remainder of the paper, we work entirely with the data from Mann et al. (2008)”
I think everyone, myself included, thought this meant they included and excluded exactly the same data Mann used. Perhaps they were saying they were including all of the proxies used by Mann and were not excluding any trees excluded by Mann on the basis of data quality issues? This seems to be consistent with the claim made in the SMR paper.
Or perhaps MW simply did not realize Mann has excluded certain trees? It could be a simple error. How will this play out? I don’t know. Perhaps Mann was correct to exclude those trees. Or perhaps it is another example of Mannian cherry-picking. I don’t know at this point. I think it is too early for most people to know.
Carefix is right: Mann has subtly has submitted a self-critique. And it ain’t pretty.
Corrected (hey, it’s early!)
Carefix is right: Mann has subtly submitted a self-critique. And it ain’t pretty.
Rule of holes.
#3 When climbing out, do not get stuck between a rock and a hard place.
They complain about their own data in an attempt to defend their dogma.
Fascinating.
Obviously, the Oxburgh enquiry was quite close to the truth in one point.
Transcript:
Q38 Pamela Nash: “The report suggests that the key task of the CRU was to analyse the data sets of others. However, the CRU scientists did not have the level of statistical skill to do this. Do you think that the CRU scientists are people of integrity but out of their depth when it comes to statistical analysis”?
Lord Oxburgh: “You are quite right…”
(And how could Mann and Schmidt increase their depth in statistcal analysis, if they do not interact with the statistical community, particularly the leading branch with regards to climate science at climateaudit.org ? )
Looks like MM is going to pound the final nails into his own hockey stick’s cofffin. Wow. Trashing your own data to defend yourself when the people looking at your METHODS said in the paper that they did not evaluate the data quality……WOW. This is how you become a well respected climate scientist?
glacierman, SMR is not trashing Mann’s data. They are saying MW wrongly included trees which Mann had excluded. I don’t know if Mann is guilty of cherry picking and MW were calling him on it or if MW made an error. But let’s be clear, SMR is saying the data used in MW is not the same data.
re Tom in Florida- “Are you sure this isn’t a Fawlty Towers episode?”
Excellent!
This fuss will be moot in 20 years when average global temps have continued on their upward trajectory, rising clearly above the MWP.
I have no real problem with Mann’s criticisms of the MW paper – Schmidt et al made their case well and they raised valid issues.
What further proof do we need to know that the work of Gavin Schmidt, Michael Mann, and Scott Rutherford is more about the advocacy of an evil doctrine than it is about climate science.
Despite our success to debunk all the semi scientific crap from all the AGW advocates, from Gore, Schmidt, Mann, Rutherford and the gate watchers of the world’s temperature data sets, the UN IPCC our Governments and the Sustainable energy mafia, the wheel of social and economic destruction of the Free World is turning as Obama (again) pay’s his humble respect to our future Global Government.
http://i.usatoday.net/news/_photos/2010/09/22/presobamax-large.jpg
Really, Schmidt, Mann and Rutherford are the smallest of our problems.
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/27928
Time to inform the public big time.
Schmidt and Mann wave their arms so much they think they’re flying.
That is not what MW said in their published paper. So who is telling the truth? Should be easy to figure out. MW stated clearly that they only used the data from MM08 – “To wit, henceforth and for the remainder of the paper, we work entirely with the data from Mann et al. (2008)”
Is SMR attacking a strawman? Or did MW make a mistake?
SMR’s comment letter to the Annals of Applied Statistics on the subject of the MW paper seems significantly inconsistent with “the team’s” apparent past techniques for dealing with non-team papers they wanted to disrupt.
Before, it appeared “the team’s” power base allowed them to do behind-the-scene manipulation of the publishing process of journals and influencing peer review. Now, that power base looks so much diminished that they are left with debating in the stark light of day in public.
“The team’s” current lowly situation reminds me of that of old Ozymandias in the poem of the same name by Percy Bysshe Shelley.
John
glacierman, see my comment at 5:08 am. I think it is clear there is a difference in the data. I don’t know if MW chose to include the trees Mann excluded or if it was unintentional. I expect MW will respond to the SMR comment.
I assume you are a climate scientist. If not, you should be. You already possess the requisite complete lack of respect for uncertainty.
Based on what MW stated in their paper, it would appear that if they did include proxies specifically excluded by Mann, it was unintentional because it sounds like they believed they were analyzing all the proxy data in Mann08.
“Finally, there is a database of 1,732 local
annual temperatures dating 1850-2006 AD (also expressed as anomalies
from the 1961-1990 AD average)5. All three of these datasets have been substantially
processed including smoothing and imputation of missing data
(Mann et al., 2008). While these present interesting problems, they are not
the focus of our inquiry. We assume that the data selection, collection, and
processing performed by climate scientists meets the standards of their discipline.
Without taking a position on these data quality issues, we thus take
the dataset as given.We further make the assumptions of linearity and stationarity
of the relationship between temperature and proxies, an assumption
employed throughout the climate science literature (NRC, 2006) noting
that ”the stationarity of the relationship does not require stationarity of the
series themselves” (NRC, 2006).”
Since the McShane Wyner post, I’ve been reading up on multiple regression, trying to
understand the arguments. I found these articles extremely enlightening:
http://www2.owen.vanderbilt.edu/bobwhaley/Research/Publications/jf97.pdf
http://www.iasbs.ac.ir/chemistry/chemometrics/history/8th/pdfs/an%20improved%20approximation%20to%20the%20estimation%20of%20the%20critical%20f%20values%20in%20best%20subset%20regression.pdf
This looks like a replay of the McIntyre-Mann wars…
As I recall Mann complained on occasion that McIntyre analyzed the wrong data. This was because (I recall) that McIntyre was always “guessing” as to what data was actually used. It seems that the Mann articles were never exactly clear as to what data was or was not included or excluded, and the meta-data that accompanied any data never made this clear either. Quite a neat trick actually. That way you can always claim that your critics got it wrong. See the Climate Audit site comments regarding the data for MBH98 to refresh your memories.
Isn’t there a song about this?
“Here we go again…”
I will take the risk of sounding elitist, but if you bear with me you you might understand what I am trying to say and not label me.
I went to college and graduate school from 1958 to 1964. Mine was the generation after WWII and not many people were going for higher education. There were no loans to be paid later by the students themselves. There were scholarships, but the scholarships depended on merit, i.e. hard work and high grades. Graduate school also followed the pattern. This meant that it was not enough to have the IQ to follow a course, you had to have the dedication and focus necessary to do as well as possible and compete for the assistantships and the scholarships.
For the generations that came after me, academic inflation set in. By this I mean that a self growing system, a bit like the economy, grew, where assistant professors became professors and needed graduate students, affluence allowed more students to go to graduate school instead of facing the real world, even though academy was not a dedication but just work, in a growing spiral. The requirements fell, when loans became available too, like organisms expanding to the resources available universities and academia expanded.
The result is what we see now which is being demonstrated with climatology but I am sure holds in all disciplines which are fortunate not to be under the microscope of the science community. An inflation of mediocre scientists and science, with a sociology of science , how to publish, how to advance etc, in a group think that has little to do with the creativity and dedication and method requirements of honest scientific work.
And you get hockey sticks, cargo cult science really, because when sociology takes over, it is the power over that is important, not the power for, and the people who survive the competition are not the real scientists but they are the manipulators of science for their own and their groups advancement.
To wit, henceforth
Major red flag words for me and a near perfect indicator of “bafflegab” to follow.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bafflegab
Might I suggest that The Team logo be “Bafflegab Brigade”?
From the MW paper, it sounds like they considered proxy selection and the method used by Mann08 to reduce the number of proxies used, but was suspect that the method may give spurious results:
“Alternatively, the number of proxies can be lowered through a threshold screening process (Mannet al., 2008) whereby each proxy sequence is correlated with its closest local
temperature series and only those proxies whose correlation exceeds a
given threshold are retained for model building. This is a reasonable approach,
but, for it to offer serious protection from overfitting the temperature
sequence, it is necessary to detect ”spurious correlations”.
This should prove interesting to see how this shakes out.
WillR, the good news is the SMR paper claims to have archived all of the data and code. Thanks to McIntyre, and probably the fact this is a statistical journal and not climate journal, SMR archived something. Hopefully they archived everything needed to replicate their results.
If MW did make an error by including data excluded by Mann, it was probably because Mann did not archive his data properly back in 2008.
Sometimes academics start discussing their own work as if third parties. It gives a more authoritative tone (as if being thoroughly objective) and also concedes that past papers may be wrong yet so important that they cannot be withdrawn, and also that papers that are the result of a collaboration can be criticized by any of the authors.
OTOH, these guys have been arbitrarily suppressing the MWP. That’s the thing I hate most about their approach: they suppress what is known of human history and replace it with their own version guided by their needs.
Just a little less than 6 weeks to go and the Climate Wars are over.
When the promise of the Big Payoff is officially Dead, (which will happen as soon as the new congress is seated) the support for climate alarmism is going to collapse completely, except for a few sad people who will spend the rest of their lives trying to resuscitate their vanished reputations. (paging joe romm!) But no one will read them and no one will care what they say – they will all simply fade away.
we have been in a battle of the bulge scenario for the last 6 months, the great counterattack of the harried defenders of the status quo – but what stands out most is how ineffectual the counterattack has been. They have accomplished nothing, and as I said at the start, in a little less than 6 weeks all of their most powerful political patrons are going to start to fall.
and there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth.