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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Ferdinand Engelbeen says: October 9, 2010 at 5:24 am
“It is on page 32…”
No, Wegman shows that the bristlecones form the dominant PC, but not that there’s anything wrong with them.
The white noise examples are totally artificial. The effect of decentring on PC1 relates to a mathematically derived subquantity. The basic issue is, does the HS curve follow from the data. W made math criticisms – W&A showed that a calculation with the criticisms complied with gave a similar result. As have the multiple other recomstructions since, none of which used decentred PC.
I think Wegman knew this – he had read, but not discussed in the report, the W&A paper. So he tried to frame the criticism as one of incorrect method, not incorrect results.
It’s pretty unusual to hold Congressional hearings into scientific papers. It may be justified if the actual results are wrong, although it is far more sensible to let the scientific process correct that by having other scientists publish the right results. But to hold congressional hearings into a paper which got the right results by allegedly wrong methods is absurd.
Gil Grissom says: October 9, 2010 at 11:37 am
“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, “
Well, it’s an article of faith by many here that the data is faulty, but the Wegman report wasn’t about that. Wegman got his dendro info from Bradley’s book. As for the bad methods, Wegman mainly criticised the decentred PCA. None of the other papers used that. And they used a variety of different stat methods, but still got similar results.
What “bad methods” do you think they had in common?
Nick Stokes said:
Got the right results using the wrong method? Sounds like the idiotic conclusion in the NAS report. It is impossible to get the right results using the wrong method. The results obtained must be discarded. Since no others have used a proper method and gotten identical results, we may assume that Mann was not lucky enough to get the same results by coincidence or perhaps by offsetting errors. Mind you Wegman did not do an analysis of the science behind Mann’s paper. Others have done that and shown that the handful of bristlecone pines are the principle component behind showing anything similar to Mann’s results.
So stop the nonsense that Mann got the right answer. Wegman was not discussing science, he was discussing Mann’s statistical methods. He acted as a math professor. Mann flunked the exam. His results are meaningless.
I sent this email to Elsevier and Ray Bradley who wrote to my publisher implying that I committed plagiarism in my book Assessing Climate Change:
Dear Mr. Fedor and Dr. Bradley:
You recently wrote to Praxis/Springer Publishing, the following message:
“Thanks to everyone for your prompt reply. I’ve copied author Ray Bradley and a couple of representatives from our Legal team on my reply. This is a bit of a complicated scenario. Dr. Edward Wegman (author of the Wegman Report) originally plagiarized from Bradley, and from what we can tell, some of that same content was then used by Rapp without attribution. The details can be found in the links below. Once you’ve had the opportunity to investigate this further, please let me know how best to proceed. We’ve yet to hear back from George Mason on the Wegman situation. I’ve had the misfortune of having to manage plagiarism throughout my career, but this is the first triangular instance. If Rapp did plagiarize, he did it from a report that isn’t ours, but some of the content in that report is ours. Bit of a head scratcher.”
My book: Assessing Climate Change” published by Praxis/Springer contains 1,348 specific citations to references giving credit to authors for their work. It also includes 411 specific quotations by authors with their own words included in quote signs. In addition, my book provides the specific attributions to Dr. Wegman:
“A team led by Professor Edward J. Wegman performed an independent examination of the hockey stick controversy (Wegman, Scott, and Said, 2006). They produced a lengthy report, full of details. According to Wegman, Scott, and Said (2006):”
“Wegman, Scott, and Said (2006) performed a calculation…”
“Wegman, Scott, and Said (2006) went on to say…:”
“Wegman, Scott, and Said (2006) performed a calculation…”
“The findings of Wegman, Scott, and Said (2006) are quite lengthy and only a very brief summary is given here.”
“Adapted from Wegman, Scott, and Said (2006).”
“Wegman, Scott, and Said (2006) have suggested that the field…”
“Wegman, Scott, and Said (2006) also said…:”
“According to Wegman, Scott, and Said (2006)…:”
“A team led by Professor Edward J. Wegman performed an independent examination of the hockey stick controversy (Wegman, Scott, and Said, 2006). They produced a lengthy report, full of details. According to Wegman, Scott, and Said (2006):”
“Wegman, Scott, and Said (2006) have suggested that the field, temperature history of the Earth, is dominated by a cadre (cabal) that is vitally concerned about the potential impacts of global warming, and supports the hockey stick result, as well as the procedure used to derive it. Wegman, Scott, and Said (2006) said:”
It is possible that in a few places, I may have slipped up and used words from a paper and forgot to give attribution. Let’s suppose I did this 10 times, or 20; that would be around 0.1% or 0.2%. That was not, is not and cannot be plagiarism.
I am warning you now that if you persist in spreading the idea that I committed plagiarism, I will sue you for all you are worth. If I ever find out who the asshole is who put this on deepclimate.org, I will sue his ass for all it is worth.
I also plan to contact Wegman in case he feels that he should sue Ray Bradley who is clearly at fault here.
By the way, this is what Wegman had to say in a recent email: “It is my opinion that Dr. Rapp has not plagiarized anything and I hold him harmless” and claims that these are “wild conclusions that have nothing to do with reality”.
Donald Rapp
Evidently that jerk John Mashey has nothing better to do with his time than read books and reports line by line and pounce on instances when authors may have inadvertently forgotten to give attribution. The deepclimate.org website is full of malicious and probably illegal charges against me and they have refused to print my rebuttals. They are not a science organization but a bunch of donkeys braying to the great god CO2. In addition to claiming I committed plagiarism, they also accused me of using the “gray literature” implying my book is based on material not passing peer review . As it turns out, there are 400 references in my book, and 93% are from peer reviewed journals. By the way, with Jones, Mann, Schmidt, Santer, and the rest of the Junta controlling what gets published, some of the best articles are in the gray literature!
This whole program is an attack on those who do not pray to the god CO2. I am happy to say that I subscribe fully to the Wegman Report which shows unequivocally that the “hockey stick” is fallacious. I note that those making wild claims of plagiarism have no rebuttal for the technical arguments in the Wegman Report.
I’ve always been a fan of “unintended consequences”. The Hockey Team has seen fit to attempt to destroy yet another academic career, this time through a claim of “plagiarism” of a number of definitions in a congressional report. I wonder how long it will take for someone to run through all their publications and compare them to the vast repositories of digitised works? It seems it is their thesis that the use of unattributed similar material to other published works in definitions is enough to invalidate the entire substance of a document and to endanger one’s career. I wonder how many of these “scientists” who’s work already looks shoddy enough, will be happy to be judged by this same standard.
You reap what you sow.
D.King can’t you make the difference between a report and a peer reviewed paper or a PhD?
I wrote : “Unfortunately for Wegman, he claimed his report WAS peer-reviewed
(109th Congress House Hearings)”
Ferdinand Englebeen replied : “He didn’t claim that, Mr. Whitfield did claim that and Mr. Stupak rebutted it.”
From the transcript :
MR. STUPAK. Did anyone outside your social network peer
review your report?
DR. WEGMAN. Yes.
…
MR. STUPAK. Did you ask these people to do your peer
review?
DR. WEGMAN. Yes.
Read it for yourself – there is more in between those two comments above – but surely you can’t deny that he definitely claims that his report HAS been peer-reviewed.
Nick Stokes says:
October 9, 2010 at 2:32 pm
Ferdinand Engelbeen says: October 9, 2010 at 5:24 am
“It is on page 32…”
No, Wegman shows that the bristlecones form the dominant PC, but not that there’s anything wrong with them.
If you should have read the NAS report, they said to avoid “strip bark” trees for reconstructions. Why? Because these show a non-temperature dependent growth spurt during the calibration period, thus effectively suppressing the past variability. In addition, the method mines for HS shapes and reinforces the effect. That was clearly demonstrated by Wegman. Thus both the HS proxies and the method are important.
The white noise examples are totally artificial. The effect of decentring on PC1 relates to a mathematically derived subquantity. The basic issue is, does the HS curve follow from the data. W made math criticisms – W&A showed that a calculation with the criticisms complied with gave a similar result. As have the multiple other recomstructions since, none of which used decentred PC.
W&A included after-the-fact changes in method to include the HS shape in PC5, as in the original work only PC1-3 were included. Without PC5 no hockeystick. Without bristlecone pines nor Yamal dirty dozen, no HS. All construction include bristlecone pines or alikes, Mann’s PC1, Yamal or the upside down Tiljander sediments. Without these, no HS. See:
http://climateaudit.org/2009/09/29/the-impact-of-yamal-on-the-spaghetti-graph/
DCC says: October 9, 2010 at 3:12 pm
“It is impossible to get the right results using the wrong method.”
As in many areas of math/stats, it isn’t as simple as that. Decentred PCA is not the best normalisation, and Wegman criticised it for that. But it is a normalisation, and produces very similar results, as Wahl and Ammann showed.
Using 22/7 for pi isn’t right, but gives adequate results for many purposes. Using 3.14159265 is better, but isn’t “right” either. You could use 40-figure precision (very few do) and it still isn’t “right”.
Let’s read Deep Climate so they too enjoy their own Hockey Stick…
Seen on the DC comments:
GMUGrad | October 9, 2010 at 2:01 am | Reply
I’m really rooting for my Alma Mater here to get this out in the open.
Good job Andrew and John Mashey
We know John Mashey but who is Andrew?
“MapleLeaf | September 27, 2010 at 3:41 pm | Reply
This pretty much sums up the situation nicely:
“It [the Wegman report] was promoted to Congress by Representatives Joe Barton and Ed Whitfield as “independent, impartial, expert” work by a team of “eminent statisticians.” It was none of those.”
I hope that copies have been sent to the relevant authorities and contacts at GMU and the US Congress. Hopefully someone has also sent a copy to the major players Wegman, Barton and Whitfield.
And if McIntyre wishes to redeem whatever little credibility he has left, he should no longer link to or discuss the Wegman report. Because, if he does, he is endorsing plagiarism, poor scholarship and poor statistical methods.
How did all these failures and blatant wrong-doings in the Wegman report go unnoticed by the so-called “Auditor” (i.e., McIntyre)? I have a hypothesis, but I’ll leave it there….”
===
Back in Business? Nice way to thank Steve after he saved his bacon…
Desmon G,
You ask ‘Why would Wegman have this item in his bibliography?’
Perhaps because he, unlike your good self, would not wish to commit the genetic fallacy.
I have no idea why here listed it, but let’s actually look at your attempt to poison the well by linking a source cited by Wegman to Lyndon LaRouche.
The poster over at Deltoid states:
‘I note over at Deep Climate you mention the Valentine reference. The “full” details (well, extra bits of “useless” info) . . . [of] which I got from the refs listing on p. 150 of Maduro and Schauerhammer’s “The holes in the ozone scare: the scientific evidence that the sky isn’t falling” . . . . That book’s publisher, 21st Century Science Associates (Washington, DC) . . . .’
So a poster on a blog finds the full bibliographical details of a source cited by Wegman in the bibliography of a book published by LaRouche’s publishing house. Therefore, we are expected to dismiss both the source cited by Wegman (and Wegman’s report) on the basis of this association? Logic is clearly not your long suit. I just hope LaRouche never cites Einstein, or we’ll have to look for a whole new basis for physics!
But thank you for directing us to Deltoid, because the thread there contains some comedy gold from Mashey that gives great insight in to the strength of his claims.
Take this: ‘Of the 80 references in the Bibliography, 40 aren’t even cited in the text. . . .’ Yes John – that would be why it is a bibliography, not headed ‘References’ or ‘References Cited’!
Or this grand claim from Mashey:
‘Another 25 pages of Summarized Papers is mostly plagiarized from those papers. “mostly” means: ~50% of the total words are locally word-for-word identical in-order cut-and-paste. Another ~30% are trivial changes, simple text moves, minor rephrasings. If people think that isn’t plagiarism (since the original sources are known), they will want to read the various university policies quoted in my report.’
If this is Mashey’s best shot, Wegman has little to worry about. Mashey acknowledges the sources are identified. He just doesn’t think the paraphrasing in a lit review is sufficiently different.
Here’s a challenge for Mashey or anyone else: Write a paraphrasing of the above quotation that differs by more than 50% from the original.
Oakden Wolf, please look in
http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/mwpp.php
you will find a good many studies, from all over the world, that confirm the validity of the 1990 IPPC chart.
Aynsley Kellow says:
October 9, 2010 at 1:56 am
“Curious, I looked briefly at some of Mashey’s ‘evidence’. I stress SOME. Much of the case seems weak: several claims of plagiarism amount to claims that paraphrasing does not differ sufficiently from the source, and (since the source is attributed) would not pass as plagiarism in a student essay.”
I looked at the first real “side by side example” after reading “Skeptical readers are welcome to check all 35 pages, but I suspect most will read no more than few before the repetitive style gets tiring.”
Mashey claims “They also note the limited due diligence of paleoclimate journal peer review…” is plagiarism. Sheesh. “They” are “The authors of MM05…”. That identifies the authors, it isn’t plagiarism in any sense. He also made a lame claim about the paraphrasing being a “major Change of Meaning, plus Bias” which is not at all apparent. That’s as far as I needed to read. Mashey is a mad dog.
http://deepclimate.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/strange-scholarship-v1-02.pdf
(page 18)
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/WegmanReport.pdf
Nick Stokes says:
So your argument is that Mann should have gotten a D instead of an F? Why are you even bothering to defend a paper so lousy that even the author has distanced himself from it? Let’s move on to something important. The hockey stick paper doesn’t qualify. It’s so bad that it is no longer an issue. It’s the data!
Oakden Wolf says:
October 9, 2010 at 2:08 pm
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?
#################
1. who put the graph in the report.
2. why did he do it.
3. They all “knew” the graph was wrong.
4. How and where was the graph corrected in the literature prior to the publication
in the IPCC.
5. why was the correction hidden in an obscure journal.
6. why did they think the history of this should remain buried?
You know how to read, start reading the mails. When you find the relavant mail you will see how the graph plays in the story. Its not what skeptics think and not what you think. Get all the facts and we can have an intelligent conversation. Expect me to do your work for you? why would I think I can reason with a lazy sod? A couple mails cover all it.
Glenn says on October 9, 2010 at 6:52 pm
desmog:
“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.”
As a former instructor of English at UCLA who has spent more tha his fair share of time tracing influences from one work to another, I have to say that Mashey’s piece is a train wreck. This is NOT to say that there isnt a case to be made, but rather that he makes quite a mess of it. I’d certainly suggest that he rewrite it ( avoid obvious mistakes– like “finding” that works listed in the bibliography are not cited..DUH!) i would suggest he work with someone who has experience putting this type of case together, toss out the innuendo and other extraneous crap and just present the plaigarism case. then folks can argue it on the merits. The biggest hurdle is the standard of citation that obtained. There probably was no standard governing the production of the text. In assessing literature of any type one has to realize that the concept of plaigarism is relatively modern and context specific.
I’m far more interested in Nick Stokes argument about PCA. Here, I would still not refer to wegman as an authority, but would defer to the actual math. I have no issue throwing EVERY “authority” under the bus. But its strange that some, like you, think that Wegman is somehow an “authority” for us. The criticism of the HS isnt advanced by wegman and its defense isnt advance by Mann. I learn more from jeffid, SteveMc, and Nick stokes than any of those guys. Not because they are “authorities” but simply because they explain things in a way that can be verified.
TomRude says:
October 9, 2010 at 3:58 pm
D.King can’t you make the difference between a report and a peer reviewed paper or a PhD?
Yes Tom, I can. I agree with you. The video is
a reference to where I think this is going….nowhere!
Dear Steven Mosher:
I might be a lazy sod, but I got lucky with a search phrase the first time off. January 5-6, 2007? It’s going to take a couple of days for me to sort out that first one, but your questions can guide me. Thx.
Oakden:
read more than those. up to the 9th
The bottom line has to do with deference paid to Lamb. Sometimes science is about protecting somebody’s reputation. Like we said in the book, the mails dont undo the science. They give us a view into the sociology of science. Skeptics latch onto that figure and think the point is that the science is unsettled. The real point is that figure shows us how human emotions ( sometimes noble, sometimes less so) turn the science down wrong paths. Correcting these human frailties requires diligence and oversight. Just a small lesson.
There is a current campaign by those who practice the CO2 religion to discredit those who have published books and reports that disagree with the CO2 belief system. At the heart of this is a website populated by morons called deepclimate.org. Having no technical arguments whatever to defend the fallacious “hockey stick”, they have turned to character assassination instead of technical discussion. They spend their time reading reports and books line by line and seek to find an occasional place where the writer inadvertently used material and forgot to make a proper attribution. They have done this on my book “Assessing Climate Change” which they say plagiarized the so-called Wegman Report. However, anyone with any sense would note that my book contains 1,348 specific citations to references giving credit to authors for their work. It also includes 411 specific quotations by authors in quote signs with proper attribution to the authors. What in hell did I have to gain by plagiarizing Wegman? There was nothing in it for me. Furthermore, I did give proper attribution to Wegman in 12 separate places in my book:
“According to Wegman, Scott and Said (2006) …”
“Wegman, Scott and Said (2006) performed a calculation…”
“Wegman, Scott and Said (2006) went on to say…”
“The findings of Wegman, Scott and Said (2006) are quite lengthy and only a brief summary is given here…”
“Adapted from Wegman, Scott and Said (2006)”
“Wegman, Scott and Said (2006) have suggested…”
“Wegman, Scott and Said (2006) also said…”
etc. etc.
Recently, Ray Bradley and his publisher Elsevier sent an email to my publisher accusing me of plagiarizing Wegman. I replied:
“I am warning you now that if you persist in spreading the idea that I committed plagiarism, I will sue you for all you are worth.”
I have not heard back from Mr. Bradley or Elsevier.
By the way, this is what Wegman had to say in a recent email: “It is my opinion that Dr. Rapp has not plagiarized anything and I hold him harmless” and claims that these are “wild conclusions that have nothing to do with reality”.
Meanwhile, deepclimate.org cast other aspersions on my book saying that I used the “gray literature” (not peer reviewed). I have about 400 references in my book of which 93% were peer reviewed. Some o[f the best references were indeed in the gray literature (e.g. the Wegman Report) because the climategate junta (Mann, Jones, et al.) prevents contrary articles from getting published.
The Wegman report is not a Ph.D study or journal article. It was touted as an authoritative report for the US Congress. Unfortunately there is now considerable evidence of plagiarism in the Ph.D. theses of 3 of Wegman’s students. One such case could be attributed to bad behavior by the student and a lack of adequate supervision. Several cases suggest a problem with the faculty mentor.
D.King gotcha, agreed.