Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?
Guest post by Thomas Fuller
Regular readers will remember that the fuss generated by Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick chart caused an investigation. A U.S. Congressional committee, led by Congressman Joe Barton, asked Edward Wegman to investigate the methods and findings of Michael Mann. (See the Wegman report titled “AD HOC COMMITTEE REPORT ON THE ‘HOCKEY STICK’ GLOBAL CLIMATE RECONSTRUCTION” here)
Now Wegman’s work is being investigated in much the same manner by people alleging that Wegman’s work contains plagiarized material.
The investigating institution, George Mason University, is responding to a formal complaint by Raymond Bradley, who was a co-author with Michael Mann of the work Wegman looked into.
One of the anonymous weblogs specializing in climate hysteria, Deep Climate, has been trumpeting charges about Wegman’s work for quite some time, alleging among other heinous crimes that some of the post grads working with Wegman had plagiarized work. Given the source, I had not paid much attention to it.
But if there is a formal complaint, we need to look at it seriously. Wegman’s criticism of Mann’s work is widely cited–his famous claim that ‘right answer, wrong method equals bad science’ is certainly and obviously correct–but it will have to apply to him, too.
I should also note that this is being handled better than Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s investigation of the University of Virginia’s grants for Michael Mann–basically because it’s being handled by the institution involved, as it should be.
I don’t like the weblog Deep Climate, and I very much respect the report Edward Wegman put out. I understand what the report said and I agree with its conclusions. So I’m hoping this investigation is thorough, quick and that Wegman’s work stands.
But there’s no way we can ignore this and complain about a lack of vigor in finding out what went wrong with CRU, Climategate and the Hockey Stick. This is bad news (for me). But it is news.
Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick will not be resurrected–there is enough criticism of it from his own colleagues in the leaked emails of Climategate to insure that. But Wegman’s report may sink under the weight of plagiarized material and while that would be a pity, that’s sometimes the way things work.
Let’s watch this and see, and report on the results in a clear-eyed fashion. Just because we have policy preferences and have opinions doesn’t mean we can ignore the facts.
Thomas Fuller http://www.redbubble.com/people/hfuller
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45 pages out of the 90 pages of the Wegman Report are plagiarised. This is what Mashey’s evidence shows, and Fuller refuses to link in this blog post. The best that Fuller could do is provide just a link to the http://www.deepclimate.org blog.
Did Wegman cite those sections he plagiarized? No, he did not. He made them appear as if they are his own work.
The plagiarism is not the only problem with the Wegman Report. But it is the easiest for someone that can only afford to skim.
Just wondering about this: if a rape or burglary occurs on campus, who the heck should investigate? Left to their own devices perhaps no-one would, or maybe a cursory inquiry followed by a whitewash. After all, that would keep the public and alumnus away from embarrasing details and maintain the flow of tax dollars, donations and bequeathments. Thomas Fuller must be a tacit fan of the ClimateGate whitewashes. Funny Note: I actually found myself typing [BLOCKHEAD] instead of [BLOCKQUOTE] in those HTML tags. I should have left them in. 😉
I’m sorry, did you mean to suggest that Virginia Taxpayers have had their money misused or squandered by Wegman? Have you anything to back that up? Try to focus on Cuccinelli as working for the Taxpayers instead of some political/scientific entity and it might make sense to you. But if you know something, by all means contact the AG. Let the chips fall where they may.
This thread has illuminated one thing though: In order to discredit AGW Dogma all we need to do is find plagiarism, erratum, mis-attributions or low-level screw-ups in the writings/reports from the cabal, Hansen, Mann, IPCC, Gore, Princess Charles, etc, ad nauseum.
On the other hand, Pandora’s Box comes to mind here. It seems to me that up until now most discussion and criticism has been on the merits and I can’t remember any that focused on the dotting of i’s and crossing of t’s (post grads, interns, attribution). I suspect that when the ‘skeptic’ community gets through with rectal exams of all the big mouth blogs pushing AGW propaganda, few if any will be left standing.
We may have just crossed the Rubicon.
I read John Mashey’s PDF a week or so ago. I came away with the sense that Mashey, who starts out atrociously, manages to become progressively more and more unhinged through his document. Whatever Mashey’s piece is pretending to be, it’s far from being convincing as a rational review of Wegman’s report.
I agree that the matter needs investigation and I’m happy, for now, that this is happening at GMU. But if the investigation’s prosecution only has the splurgings of Mashey’s rant, I anticipate the end of the tale will carry more severe ramifications for Mashey than for Wegman.
I think discussing the climate of the last 1000 years is indeed a difficult thing to do.
My personal opinion, as I told here before and can be read on my blog: http://mittelalterlichewarmperiode.blogspot.com is that if we accept a global “Little Ice Age” (differing in location and time), we also have to accept a “MWP” in this area.
If we accept that the sun was one of the major factors of influence for a warmer “MWP” in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s quite logical to think about a global “MWP” (differing in place and time, modificated by intern osciallations). We can`t name this “MCA” – why anomalous, with reference to what?
“MWP” only stands for a period in historical time. Within this period the mean temperatures were warmer than at least in the subsequent Little Ice Age and at least for the Northern Hemisphere – that’s all.
Best
W.v.B.
What a farce this hockey stick business is. With enough error bars on the proxies anything can be shoved to flat. In any case it makes no difference to the fact that the temperatures are not unprecedented. All one has to do is look at proxies before 1000AD,. Here is the nice reminder
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/noaa_gisp2_icecore_anim_hi-def3.gif that hockey stick or not, the 20th century is a blip on the long record, and not an unusual one.
What is sad is that the link above clearly shows that we are on the downslide towards the next ice age. Instead of wasting money trying to thought control a bit of beneficial warming ( I believe it is hubris to think that we can control the weather by playing with CO2) the UN should be concerned of solutions for coming cold seasons, maybe in decades or even hundreds of years, but come they will.
I think that mirrors in space should be seriously studied, not to reflect away the sun, but to increase insolation when it becomes necessary if the ice starts marching again following its clock.
Just to be clear, Mashey is directly accusing Wegman of lies. Entirely distinct from and unrelated to accusations of plagiarism, this accusation stands in Mashey’s piece. I’m expecting that Mashey will have to defend this very serious, very grave accusation. And I really think he should be forced to do so. Ultimately, this may not be the “Scepticgate” some warmists are anticipating, especially if “Scepticgate” has its day in court, with Mashey as a defendant.
Reading the comments above I suspect that people are trying to draw attention away from the investigation into Dr Mann. You can’t go far wrong if you listen to H.L.Mencken who wrote:
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
Tonyb
Ferdinand, October 9, 2010 at 3:05 am
“As repeatedly said, the fuss is NOT only about the difference between central and decentral PCA, but about the presence of abnormal growth spurt trees in the past century.”
Well, there certainly isn’t much eventual difference between centred and decentred PCA for MBH98, as Wahl and Amman showed. So if the fuss is about the presence of abnormal spurt trees, why is Wegman the authority? Is it anywhere in his report?
At least this is not as terrible as deleting/destroying/losing raw data. Or tampering with peer review processes. Or not allowing others to replicate your work. Or citing unfounded claims as scientific evidence.
Lets investigate all the issues in chronological order starting with the earliest incidents and moving forward as see where we stand at the end of it all.
Nick Stokes says:
October 9, 2010 at 3:58 am
Nick, Wegman isnt the authority. The Warmistas are experts on derailing the argument.
Look at the IPCC’s curves from 1990 and 1998. So the “authority” is the same in both cases.
The IPCC.
No wonder the word “fraud” comes to mind.
“I’m expecting that Mashey will have to defend this very serious, very grave accusation. And I really think he should be forced to do so.”
So far, none of the litigation Wegman mentions in the USA Today article has been directed towards Mr. Mashey. It MAY be from the publishers of some of the books Wegman is alleged to have pilfered from aand directed towards Wegman. Copyright issues, possiby.
A discussion of the top left figure from IPCC can be found over at Climateaudit:
http://climateaudit.org/2008/05/09/where-did-ipcc-1990-figure-7c-come-from-httpwwwclimateauditorgp3072previewtrue/
It seems to be a graph of temperatures from England that just got smoothed and relabeled as global temperature. Maybe this is a hint why MBH was seen as a significant improvement of the state of the art in temperature reconstruction.
The great mystery with the Wegman report is why Wegman was picked in the first place. Since he had no background in climate science it’s not surprising that he had to plagiarize to produce a reasonable sounding text.
Nick Stokes says:
October 9, 2010 at 3:58 am
Well, there certainly isn’t much eventual difference between centred and decentred PCA for MBH98, as Wahl and Amman showed. So if the fuss is about the presence of abnormal spurt trees, why is Wegman the authority? Is it anywhere in his report?
It is on page 32 of Wegman’s report: the effect of proper centering and decentered PCA on PC1, with the bristlecone pines. The proper centering moves the HS shape to PC5, which is included (by W&A?) to show a small difference with the original, but that is moving the goalposts after-the-facts.
Wegman shows a clear example of what happens when one includes a
HS shape as only one of many proxies: he used 69 pseudo-proxies generated from white noise and added the 1990 graph of the IPCC showing a warm(er) MWP and cold LIA as 70th. Then he used proper centered and Mann’s decentered PCA method The result shows that the latter distorts the whole reconstruction with the 1990 graph as the dominant form. See page 34-35 of the Wegman report.
Lucy Skywalker says:
October 9, 2010 at 2:21 am
Deep Climate says
Cuccinnelli’s legal pursuit of Michael Mann relies heavily on the Wegman Report.
That looks like the reason for the timing.
Bradley complained to GMU in April so no.
Back when I worked in the mini-supercomputer arena, John Mashey was an extremely vocal, extremely well informed spokesman for his employers. He was also completely certain of his stand and anyone who tried to present a different view or introduce other data was sure to face an energetic response.
I was really quite surprised when his name started showing up in the climate change debate, but with this report I think he’s exceeded his stand from before. At least now he’s not limited by having to represent his employer.
I thumbed through his Strange Scholarship report, I’m going to have to take another look with a different version of acroread – the .pdf if full of font changes from the bulk (using a sans-serif font I think my acroread doesn’t recognize) to something like Times Roman, often in mid-word.
My initial sense is his report is classic Mashey with all the trees, branches, and leaves, it will take some time to find the forest, but any disagreements will be beaten back with all those trees, branches, and leaves.
One thing that bothers me is it just doesn’t have the same feel that Steve McIntyre’s work has – McIntyre writes with a strong focus toward understanding the meaning behind the data. Mashey seems to be writing to crush his focus of dislike, and has strayed from trying to learn about how the world works.
Please accept my apologies for writing about the man, not the content. The latter is well covered above.
You sound totally passive. You do not need to say that we want a good, fair investigation of Wegman. That goes without saying. That is who we are. No one benefits from Cairo speeches. They just make the speaker look misguided.
It’s not really allowed in undergraduate reports to lift sentences and paragraphs straight out of other people’s books and articles. It is more than ironic that Wegman lifted large amounts of material straight out of a book by Bradley, a scientist who he attacked. The right way of going about this is to read an article that you find useful and then to rewrite in your own words, citing the report. Wegman padded his list of citation with many articles not cited and then copied from at least one book that he did not cite.
Evidently four of his previous Ph.D. students are being investigated as well. Plagiarism is strongly discouraged at Universities.
The plagiarism is not the only problem with the Wegman Report. But it is the easiest for someone that can only afford to skim
It’s also – assuming there are, indeed, other problems – the most irrelevant. Assuming the charge of plagiarism is true, it damages Wegman personally, but says nothing about the accuracy of the report itself, and has no relevance to McIntyre and McKitrick’s demolition of the “Hockey Stick”.
Is there a list of what is meant to have been plagiarized so it can be put to one side for the lawyers to salivate over and so that we can continue to focus on whether there is a valid criticism of Wegman’s analysis of Mann’s methodology.
Starwatcher says:
The graph to the left looks like a schematic. Are there no actual reconstructions that can be shown?
Oakden Wolf says:
WHY are you showing that schematic diagram from the 1990 IPCC report that had limited data basis? It was a sketch to guide discussion based on general concepts, including anecdotal evidence (primarily European, for that matter).
Steve Mosher says:
Oakden Wolf.
Do you know the full story behind the graph? Did you read the mails. Its an interesting example of hiding corrections to save face
Steve McIntyre says on his blog:
In Figure 7, IPCC 1990 used the CET estimates as a “schematic” for the global temperature, even though, as shown above, it was an estimate for the CET [Central England], which is taken from only one location.
The main point that Steve Mosher may have missed is this:
This schematic graph from the first IPCC report has become itself something of a poster child for sceptics, but we should be careful to avoid any suggestion of approval for this graph on account of its dubious use of the sources.
It is true that often the comparison of the schematic with the hockey stick is used only to point the finger and say: Look what you said in 1990 and now look what you say in 2001…my havent you changed your tune! But if it is our wont to do this, then it might help to point to the dubious science behind both graphs.
The main problem with the 1990 graph is that the IPCC seems to have writ global Lamb’s sketch for Central England. Lamb’s graph is supported by a mass of perhaps dubious evidence, but for Central England only. While Lamb has some evidence to suggest generalisation across northern Europe, the IPCC provided meager supplimentary evidence to suggest global application.
Find various versions of Lamb’s graphs from 1966 on, and a growing collection of historical global climate graphs here:
http://enthusiasmscepticismscience.wordpress.com/global-temperature-graphs/
(I have not seen McIntyre’s post, nor the Brit Antarctic graph, but thank Oakden Wolf for the link.)
Browsing the Mashey report, I observe that it lacks references for most of its claims. Surely Mashey didn’t plagiarize other material. I suppose he just made things up then (I am surprised he didn’t write it all in CAPS, though).
Maybe this statement from Mr. Tom Fuller is what has been the underlying skepticism I have of a lot of what he posts here on WUWT:
“Just because we have policy preferences and have opinions doesn’t mean we can ignore the facts.”
No, Mr. Fuller, I DON’T have particular “policy preferences”. I’m one of those straight-laced scientists that just want THE TRUTH! Especially when it comes to SCIENCE!
So if that’s how you view everybody that doesn’t buy into the fraud and cult I see as “climate science”, then you’re wrong, at least in my case. I think you should consider that when making unsubstantiated blanket statements.
I will not be shuddering and quaking in my boots over these charges of plagarism–no, I want to see it ALL, warts and everything–on both sides of the argument. I want to see ALL of the emails from Mann and his cohorts, from Hansen and his cohorts, an entire data dump from the CRU, NASA, etc., etc., as well as all critics of their work. Everything the government and does with respect to climate should be under a complete and total open book policy (and that applies to every scientist, engineer, advocacy group, or research body that receives one nickel of government funding, too!)
That’s my only preference.
Deepclimate and Mashey are warmist nitpickers, insinuators, witchhunters and vague whisperers par excellence.
It is DeepClimate’s style to be fully sure of his own position, at the same time be extremely twitchy and nervous enough to restrict argument about it. Another favorite past time is of course, is hunting for plagiarism in Wegman. He did that with Donald Rapp, got soundly whacked for it and had to withdraw significant chunks of text at his blog.
“Wegman said that Mann was wrong, but he ‘plagiarized'”. This simple fact shows up the absolute poverty of ideas and pathetic quality of the warmist activist blogs.
It’ll be interesting to note how much US media attention this story gets compared to the coverage climategate received.
… “his famous claim that ‘right answer, wrong method equals bad science’ is certainly and obviously correct…
Mann and Jones showed that it’s really ‘wrong answer, wrong method equals bad science’!