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
Please note that the link for the full report has problems downloading, damaged file was one message.
Here is where I found it after googling
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/reprint/ad_hoc_report.pdf
desmong said October 9, 2010 at 3:24 am45 pages out of the 90 pages of the Wegman Report are plagiarised.That is outrageously unbelievable! Only a fool would believe it.The plagiarism is not the only problem with the Wegman Report. But it is the easiest for someone that can only afford to skim. Equally absurd. If there are real problems with the report, those should be addressed, or at least referenced! You have the gall to say Fuller did not link to climateaudit and then you make an outrageous claim about “real problems with the report” (as opposed to this phony plagiarism problem) without citing them because plagiarism is easier for them to understand?
That line of reasoning stinks.
Oops, poor HTML. I’ll try again
desmong said October 9, 2010 at 3:24 am
That is outrageously unbelievable! Only a fool would believe it.
Equally absurd. If there are real problems with the report, those should be addressed, or at least referenced! You have the gall to say Fuller did not link to climateaudit and then you make an outrageous claim about “real problems with the report” (as opposed to this phony plagiarism problem) without citing them because plagiarism is easier for them to understand?
That line of reasoning stinks.
sharper00 says:
October 9, 2010 at 8:21 am
@James Baldwin Sexton
“Well the issue must surely be why they did copy and paste so liberally in the first place. Furthermore why did they include so many unused references? Given that the IPCC reports see so much controversy over a single bad reference it seems curious you’re willing to apply a different standard where you agree with the conclusions.”
They were documenting the background of their findings. Not closely following published materials would have left them open to the charge that they did not fairly represent those background materials. Nothing that Wegman wrote about this background material was offered as original work. Plagiarism means offering another’s original work as your original work. The charge of plagiarism is facetious.
As McIntyre has so eloquently explained at his website, again and again and again, the best that can be said about Mann’s statistical work is that it is idiosyncratic in a way that Mann cannot justify.
Your comment about the IPCC report is jaw-dropping. If any serious scientist had done a final reading of that report with a critical eye, the number of simple deletions would have staggered the imagination. The errors were at a kindergarten level. If Pachauri is responsible for that report then he has no understanding of science whatsoever or he is a propagandist for AGW-AGCD in the manner of Al Gore. I don’t suppose you would care to defend Gore’s movie would you?
If there is an important scientific error in Wegman’s report, what is it? Put up or shut up.
It should be remembered that the political funders of science have long memories & good reason to wish to pillory anybody expressing any support of scepticism “pour encourager les autres”. This does not mean this story is false but it certainly means that innocent until proven guilty & in a clearly impartial court applies – particularly for somebody with the reputation he has.
It seems to me there are 3 likely possibilities:
1) It is a complete stitch up.
2) He dunnit
3) There are some irregularities which are open to an interpretation of plaigerism but not clear cut, perhaps not involving him directly &/or of little actual effect, which would never have been questioned if somebody had not been out to get him.
This last appears to me to be what got Andrew Wakefield, of MMR fame, struck off – technical infractions which didn’t affect his findings. I do not say Wakefield was right – I am not qualified to judge but people I respect say he wasn’t. However it is a legalistic tactic which, we humans all being the falible creatures we are, are all vulnerable to. In a different field the tactic was used some years ago to smear the policman John Stalker who refused to cover up goings on in Northern Ireland. I would not wish Wegman to have the sort of supportive “investigation” Jones had but it should be no more thorough than any ordinary scientist would expect. We must also guard against “no smoke without fire” assumptions.
RobertM says:
October 9, 2010 at 8:51 am
“Huub Bakker (October 8, 2010 at 11:10 pm), your faculty-member viewpoint that universities have “abrogated the right to make their own investigations” is an interesting one, but I suspect it goes a bit too far. Surely the universities, societies, and journals should be the first line of defense.”
You do not understand the isolation from ordinary society that exists at American universities. They operate like planatations. Let me give you an example that might grab your attention. In most universities, if a student charges another student with rape then the university will handle the matter and not notify the police. Fortunately, through the efforts of many protestors, more universities are adopting the policy that reports of rape go to the police directly and immediately. Duh! That should have been the policy throughout our history. If universities do not report evidence of fraud to the local prosecutor then they are making exactly the same mistake as not reporting rapes. At best, they are short changing the victims.
sharper00 says:
“We know that the National Academy of Sciences concluded Mann’s work had statistical flaws but that they didn’t affect the conclusions.”
Mann has since reversed his own conclusions. His M.O. [repeated examples are shown in The Hockey Stick Illusion] is to loudly squeal like a stuck pig when he’s been caught — then quietly back and fill later, as surreptitiously as possible. He has done the same thing with his Hokey Stick.
The problem with Mann’s Hockey Stick chart isn’t with the blade, it is with the arrow-straight shaft, which showed an unchanging temperature for many centuries: no MWP, no Maunder, no Dalton, etc. Mann claimed that the planet’s temperature remained flat until the industrial revolution.
But that was then and this is now; after loudly protesting like an Islamist with hurt feelings, Mann has quietly resurrected the MWP and LIA. That sleight of hand most certainly did affect his original conclusions. In fact, Mann has now altered his MWP position to the point where it directly contradicts his flat MBH99 Hokey Stick shaft. Quietly, of course, per his M.O.: no IPCC fanfare this time, no press conferences, no admission that his original hockey stick shaft was flat wrong.
“We know that the National Academy of Sciences concluded Mann’s work had statistical flaws but that they didn’t affect the conclusions. We also know that subsequent publications from different authors using different methods have further affirmed those conclusions.”
Another “fake but accurate” argument. Mann’s “statistical flaws” were a central issue in the Wegman Report, and form the basis for his apologists’ convenient excuse that Mann wasn’t being devious, he was simply incompetent.
The repeatedly debunked Michael Mann claim that there was almost no change in temperature [the shaft] is the issue, not the recent natural warming cycle [the blade]. But Mann’s apologists focus only on the blade, which shows a routine, natural warming cycle juxtaposed with the natural rise in CO2 resulting from the MWP that occurred 800 years earlier.
The Hockey Stick blade has always been a red herring/strawman argument. Mann’s attempted erasing of the MWP and the LIA was deliberate, as was shown by McIntyre & McKitrick’s publishing of Mann’s hidden data set labeled “censored“. Had that data been used, Mann would have falsified his own CAGW hypothesis. So he hid the data.
berneil:
“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.”
And how exactly did I miss that point. There is a nuanced story behind that graph that has absolutely nothing to do with the science and everything to do with the sociology we discuss in the book. The point is not about the science at all. AT ALL. the point is in the climategate mails. If you read them all, you would know what the point is. For me it’s a test of people’s diligence and willingness to get to the truth on their own. The difference between lazy people who rely on secondary sources and those who know that the primary source is key. So, it’s obvious to me that you havent read the mails, or have a horrible memory. Either of which means that engagement with you is pointless.
TomRude says:
October 9, 2010 at 8:25 am
Wegman’s work is a academia bureaucrat’s report not an original research published in a peer review paper that would steal someone’s idea.
Thank you !
Engage Trans-Warp investigation in 5…4…3…2…1
For the love of God, you can visit deepclimate.org and read the Mashey’s work. The full document is 250 pages with a six pages executive summary. You just exclaim ‘outrageous’, how shall I respond to that?
Fuller did not provide a link to the report, and commenters above suggest not to visit deepclimate.org so as not give hits (absurd!). Are you going to deny yourself the chance to read the report?
Here is the blog post with Mashey’s work: John Mashey on Strange Scholarship in the Wegman Report.
I get this impression from wuwt that it dumps so many new blog posts that there is no chance to get in depth in any single post. This issue about Wegman’s messed up report will probably be forgotten soon. I wonder if he will become expendable and dropped from the sceptic talk points. Mosher already kicked him up.
Theo Goodwin says on October 9, 2010 at 9:44 am
Actually, the charge of plagiarism is tendentious and disingenuous.
It is clearly made for political reasons.
Mike (October 9, 2010 at 8:17 am):
Look at the NAS panel composition and you will objectively find it far from being biased. If the Wegman panel was biased against the hockey stick, the the NAS panel was biased in favour. However, Wegman and the NAS reached the similar conclusions, but no one explained how the NAS panel could criticise the use of bristlecone pines and Mann methodology in reconstructions, then use other hockey team studies that included bristlecone pines and similar methodology in order to support the hockey stick. This is why Steve McIntyre rightly described the NAS panel report as ‘schizophrenic.’
Plagiarism won’t save the hockey stick – it’s dead because of the selected data and methodology used to create it is statistically insignificant. Read the verifiable and referenced account in ‘The Hockey Stick Illusion.’
Ooops! I meant “far from being unbiased.”
Nick Stokes says:
No, I don’t believe anyone (even Mann) is seriously saying that decentred PCA is a good idea. It’s a suboptimal method that makes little difference to the result (as Wahl and Ammann showed). It was used once, almost certainly due to a programming error, in a paper in 1998. There are a large number of papers since that have produced similar hockeystick results; none used decentred PCA.
——————————————————————————-
Nick,
It has been shown many times and stated in many different blogs, papers, etc., that every one of the dozen or so papers that you refer to, used the same bad data, with the same bad methods as MBH98. Bristlecone pine data to be precise, that has even been stated by the NAS should not be used as a temperatire proxy, was the centerpoint of these papers. No bristecones, no hockey stick. Decentred PCAs was far from the only criticism M&M, Wegman, and others had of MBH98.
These “papers” you like so much have been discredited just as much as MBH98. This has been known for years, by you and almost everyone close to the debate. McShane and Wyner are the latest ones to show just what junk MBH98 is. They even included bristlecone pine data and still showed that proper statistical techniques do not support the conclusions in MBH98. Without them the results would be even worse for the hockey stick.
The fact that you continue to spout this bunk as vindication of MBH98 shows your intellectual dishonesty.
John Mashey does comprehensively demolish the actual substance of the Wegman Report, it’s on pages 114 – 142 if anyone is interested. For me that is more interesting and relevant than the argument about plagiarism, but I guess plagiarism may constitute actual academic misconduct which may merit investigation whereas sloppy and incompetent scolarship can just be down to, well, sloppiness and incompetence. Although there are also grounds to suspect that Wegman either had an agenda or was (consciously or otherwise) following the agenda of the committe that appointed him.
Desmong said
Read 250 pages with claims that parts of the Wegman report were plagiarized? Absolutely not. It’s a meaningless claim. Wegman was not doing original scientific research like a PhD thesis. It’s a report for God’s sake! And the subject is statistical methods. No thanks, I’ll wait for the report on the report rather than waste my time on accusations that have no obvious relevance to the subject at hand.
This smells of diversionary tactics. It leads me to think that, unlike the broad opinion on WUWT, UVA is terrified of Attorney General Cuccineli.
Sharperoo>
You’re conflating two meanings of plagiarism here. There is textual plagiarism, and conceptual plagiarism. The first is only serious when the text is the product – in a novel, for example. The latter is important in science, but not suggested to be an issue here. Even if Wegman is guilty as charged, it’s only a matter of bad manners. In fact, though, allegations of plagiarism here make as much sense as, say, a lawyer complaining that a formal letter of response uses wording from his original text.
You believe that Fuller is a fool for not picking this up in the post? Why do you think you are the first to mention this argument? Do we rewrite the academic rules?
Plagiarism is something that everyone understands, so it is easy to comprehend. If you want to go for the core of Mashey’s work, read what “andrew adams” (October 9, 2010 at 11:41 am) said just above.
Unfortunately for Wegman, he claimed his report WAS peer-reviewed
(109th Congress House Hearings)
so it must be assumed that it wasn’t done very well or it was done by people who were a part of his social network.
Who made a complaint about stuff like that, again ?
Also, has anyone noticed the following reference Wegman uses :
Valentine, Tom (1987) “Magnetics may hold key to ozone layer problems,” Magnets, 2 (1) 18-26.
What’s that all about ? Did Wegman actually READ his own report because it looks like someone slipped in a humorous link for a joke !
Sometimes the best answer to _Quis custodes?_ is _ Res ipse dixit_.
Here for those deeply shocked by the IPCC ‘s exclusivity is Wegman & Co.’s DIY review of their newly coined journal http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wics.85/fullAbstract
WIREs is a WINNER
Edward J. Wegman1,*, Yasmin H. Said David W. Scott
“A group of us met with the editorial management of John Wiley and Sons… our new journal was launched officially in July-August 2009 titled as Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Computational Statistics. … a hybrid review publication that is by invitation only, “
One bound to be an object of skepticism now that the co-editors have morphed into codefendants in the GMU plagiarism scandal. The dumbing down of climate science as PR focus groups left and right power up new vanity presses to feed the mills of K-Street brings Auden to mind: “instead of an event requiring words to describe it, words had the power to create an event”.
This website has long provided spectacular examples of how pop science can segue into self-parody when words take over and leave sense behind, and Watts Iron Sun & Cosmic Ray Railroad runs on such a predictable schedule that one can rest assured that its next crack-up will be confusing first and second derivatives in solar UV flux variability to exaggerate its relevance to the rate of anthropogenic radiative forcing.
REPLY:Oh puhleeeze.
Mr. Seitz, you can reword your response in an apology. I’ve never advocated an iron sun theory, in fact Oliver K. Manuel, the main proponent of such theory, has been banned from WUWT for constantly pushing it against my wishes.
But given your “abortive pretension to fact checking” I can see how you might have missed it when I told him no more of this would be tolerated.
Unless I get an apology for labeling me with something I have refuted, you’ll be joining him.
– Anthony Watts
andrew adams says:
October 9, 2010 at 11:41 am
John Mashey does comprehensively demolish the actual substance of the Wegman Report, it’s on pages 114 – 142 if anyone is interested.
I have read, cursory, these pages. Lots of allegations, which could be commented and/or rebutted with the same length of arguments, to no avail, I suppose. But I was interested in particular for his comments on pages 34-36 as that are the pages where Wegman investigates the influence of Mann’s method on picking out the right (HS) shapes out of any amount of other (pseudo) proxies. Here Mashey’s lengthy comments (page 135) on these essential pages:
WR p.34
This is a long-obsolete, irrelevant and even distorted sketch, W.4.2. It is likely from MM05x, p.5.
WR p.35-36 The WR offers two pages of noise superimposed on an irrelevant graph.
Only two sentences? Or are the rest of the 250 pages used only to hide this lack of comment on the essence of Wegman’s report?
Wegman used the old sketch of the 1990 IPCC report as fake “proxy” to show that only one bizarre proxy with a HS shape in the previous century would become the dominant proxy for the whole reconstruction with Mann’s method. Quite essential for Mann’s method and Mann’s PC1 used in many following proxies, all thanks to only a few HS shapes inbetween lots of “normal” proxies.
JMurphy says:
October 9, 2010 at 12:22 pm
Unfortunately for Wegman, he claimed his report WAS peer-reviewed
(109th Congress House Hearings)
He didn’t claim that, Mr. Whitfield did claim that and Mr. Stupak rebutted it.
JMurphy: That Wegman Report reference,
is explained in detail at the Deltoid blog on The Wegman Scandal.
L.H. Publishing Agency is connected to the LaRouche movement, which is a worldwide fringe group, with diverse links to both fascism and Marxism. Check the Wikipedia page; LaRouche also denies climate change.
Why would Wegman have this item in his bibliography?
Steven Mosher said:
There is a nuanced story behind that graph that has absolutely nothing to do with the science and everything to do with the sociology we discuss in the book. The point is not about the science at all. AT ALL. the point is in the climategate mails. If you read them all, you would know what the point is.
People with distinctly different POVs on any particular issue could read the same source text and interpret it in very different ways. If the graph story is so nuanced, then it’s entirely possible that people lacking the correctly-aligned POV would miss the point that those with the proper alignment discern.
IN other words, why don’t you simply explain the point, instead of being so oblique? Even if I read all the climategate emails, I might very well miss the “nuanced story” you refer to. All I know at face value is that the figure in the 1990 IPCC report was likely based on Lamb’s Central England temperature series. How much more nuanced does it get?