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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Desmon G 2:06 you refer to it being “explored in detail”c on Deltoid but since Deltoid censor sceptical points they cannot, by definition, be exploring anything in impartial or full detail. That is the nature of censored “debate”.
Plagiarism is the result of academic laziness or incompetence. There is rampant plagiarism in the Wegman Report. So what you are really saying Tom Fuller is:
I don’t like the weblog Deep Climate, and I very much respect the report Edward Wegman put out even though Wegman was lazy or incompetent. I understand what the report said and although Wegman was lazy or incompetent, I agree with its conclusions.
Really?
If the entire content that was claimed to be plagiarised was ommitted, it changes nothing about the paper. In fact, I don’t see anyone disagreeing with what was said, just how. I guess when they can’t discredit the substance of the paper they can still claim a victory over ancillary annotations. Only someone totally disinterested in science could see this as any sort of victory.
A syllogism is a poor scientist’s reasoning, Mandia is that the best you can come up with?
I read a great deal of Mashy’s long diatribe.
I don’t think that he has much experience with academic writing. Saying things like “the end of the ice age” and comparing that to another paper that said the same thing is hardly actionable.
Most of his criticism is of similar vein. Similar mispellings of words are also a pet peeve of his but for those who have grown up with a querty keyboard we understand that similar misspellings are often due to how the keystrokes work out when you miss a key. Now for someone who does hunting and pecking that does not apply, but most professional academics know how to type and learned on a querty keyboard.
[SNIP – violation of site policy – wtf@fu.com is not a valid email address. the fu.com domain is in Arlington, VA and your comment originates at The University of Reading, UK., until you use a valid email address, all of your comments will be discarded – Anthony]
MarkR, the MWP has since been identified around the globe.
Somewhere in one of these posts Eli remarked that the sections that were problematical in the Wegman Report were also unneeded. In reading the to and fro between Dr. Rapp and others it increasingly appears that everyone may have had this exactly backwards. Rapp may have given Wegman a draft of his book which Wegman copied. This would make Rapp the plagiarizer of Bradley (remember it ain’t just John Mashey and Deep Climate who think this is a valid claim, but also Elsevier), and Wegman the authorized copier of Rapp. As Deep Climate says, is your head spinning now?
Then again, the issues associated with the social network analysis in the Wegman Report remain.
What Mashey is trying to show is that sentences and paragraphs have been lifted from other work (much of Bradley’s) and a word or phrase substituted here and there that changes the meaning of the original text. It looks very much like Wegman appropriated Bradley’s work and then distorted it. Plagiarism also suggests the author is either lazy or doesn’t truly understand the subject, or both more usually. In this case, if Mashey is correct, the offence is more scurrilous. Particularly as this was tabled for Congress, where I understand there are penalties for deceit.
To those commenters above suggesting the validity of the Wegman report is being ignored for a (supposedly) minor infraction of plagiarism, you would do well to read Mashey’s work and others looking at how unattributed language was distorted. Some of the posts at Deep Climate point it out explicitly. For example.
http://deepclimate.org/2009/12/22/wegman-and-rapp-on-tree-rings-a-divergence-problem-part-1/
Scott Mandia October 10, 2010 at 4:11 pm
I guess the old chesnut could be modified to “right answer + wrong method = poor scholarship” and just chanted back?
I note that Eli Rabett doesn’t mind speculating on crimes of others when he has no information whatsoever to back it up (by the way I never read Bradley’s book nor do I have a copy of it). The real points are that the hockey stick is a pile of bunk, that Wegman showed why, and regardless of any claimed similarities between Wegman’s words and those of Bradley, Bradley as a founding father of the hockey stick has a great deal to lose from the message in the report. Thus, Bradley, Mashey and various nuts on the deepclimate.org website often hiding behind the cloak of anonymity, who defend turf not truth, are out to personally attack those who point out that the hockey stick is a pile of junk. My book supports the Wegman Report conclusions. But the Taliban of climate have resorted to personal attack rather than scientific argument. For example, they have written to my publisher and my employer in an attempt to besmirch me with nothing to gain for them except some hope that maybe they can save the hockey stick from its natural death; yet I referred to the Wegman report 12 times in my book, and Wegman himself is happy with what I wrote. They are also attacking Wegman, and Bradley now demands that Wegman remove his report from the Congressional Archives, as if that would make the hockey stick OK. For more details, go to http://www.spaceclimate.net
“…the Taliban of climate…”?
I think that Donald Rapp just forfeited the argument with a post-modern Godwin.
Bernard J. says:
October 12, 2010 at 3:22 am
“I think that Donald Rapp just forfeited the argument with a post-modern Godwin.”
Frankly, I consider Godwin’s Law itself to be “post-modern” rubbish. If an analogy is apt, use it. If people don’t want to be compared to the Nazis (or Taliban), they shouldn’t behave like them.
Similarly with the prejudice against “conspiracy” theories, when, in simple fact, iniquitous conspiracies are ubiquitous!
Ditto with the silly “never infer malice over incompetence” saw, when malice or deliberate dishonesty are often blatantly obvious. You don’t get to be influential or powerful by being stupid, but, more often than not, by being clever and evil.
Even if Wegman (or one of his graduate students) was guilty of plagiarism, there is no indication Wegman got anything wrong. His results stand.
I am happy to see that at least one person (Ron Cram) is more interested in content than form. Many others are more interested in who said what or how they said it or whether they repeated what someone else said. The validity of the hockey stick or lack thereof is the issue of importance because there are basically only two foundations for the claim that rising CO2 was the sole cause of the warming of the 20th century: (1) the hockey stick implying that something unprecedented and dramatically new occurred in the 20th century, and (2) the global climate models. If you take away the hockey stick, and examine climate models critically, the structure topples. Many of the other people involved in these discussions don’t seem to be interested in these key points, but rather, seek to find sensation and scandal, even when it is phony.
Plagiarism in science usually refers to one person taking credit for another’s new and startling research results, in an effort to enhance their reputation, fame and fortune. When one is writing a review article or a review book, such as my book Assessing Climate Change, there are no new and startling research results involved. The book has over 400 specific quotations by others with proper attribution to those authors and over 1,300 attributions to authors without quotations. Evidently my book is a collection of what the best people in the field had to say. If in the process of writing it, I inadvertently forgot to attribute a few passages to authors, my response is “so what?” – nobody is perfect. I had absolutely nothing to gain by using other people’s words because it was obvious that very little in my book was original – and that was whole context of my book. Similarly for the Wegman Report. He wrote a review of the hockey stick methodology which involved Bradley since Bradley was one of the original authors of the first hockey stick papers. If he used some language from Bradley’s book (I have no information on that) – who cares? I don’t. The point is that Wegman showed through detailed analysis and calculation that the methods used by Mann and Bradley are mathematically incorrect, and the hockey stick is misinformation perpetrated on an unsuspecting public by Al Gore, the U. N. and many other groups and people with an agenda of alarmism for their purposes.
Donald Rapp.
The point is not whether your book contains plagiarism, but whether the Wegman report does.
A more valid question for your own work is whether your interpretations of others’ work are correct. For example, are you claiming that every ‘hockey stick’ ever produced by any team, whether associated with Mann or entirely independent of him, is “mathematically incorrect”?
Bernard J.:
Who are you and what is your interest in this? I have divulged who I am. You should do so also.
There *is* a point as to whether I plagiarized Wegman. The whole Internet is full of websites repeating the charges made by the morons on deepclimate.org claiming that I plagiarized Wegman.
As to whether Wegman committed plagiarism – nonsense. How can you plagiarize someone’s work that you are reviewing negatively?
If you read my book, Assessing Climate Change, you will see that I discuss a number of hockey sticks, those started by Mann, Bradley and Hughes, and those continued by others, mainly at CRU. They all disagree with one another, and they all make the same mistakes. Take a look at spaceclimate.net for more details. Better still, read the Wegman Report or visit climateaudit.org for a lot more details than I give.
“the claim that rising CO2 was the sole cause”
beware the phantom alarmist
ipcc ar4 wgi fig. 2.20
Donald Rapp.
You seem to have misunderstood my question…
Are you claiming that every ‘hockey stick’ ever produced by any team, whether associated with Mann or entirely independent of him, is “mathematically incorrect”?
Note: this question refers to all scientifically-constructed ‘hockey sticks’, and not to the subset that you selected for inclusion in your book. If you believe that they “all disagree with one another, and that they all make the same mistakes”, then are you by default claiming that they are all “mathematically incorrect”?
Dear Bernard J.:
You still have not identified yourself. Who are you? What is your interest in this? You seem intent on somehow cornering me into making an unfair generalization. But you have made no specific inputs of any value. Are you a lawyer, a scientist or a brick layer?
All hockey sticks depend on principal component analysis (PCE) in one form or another.
McKitrick (2005) summarized PCA as follows:
‘‘Principal components analysis involves replacing a group of data series with a
weighted average of those series, where the weights are chosen so that the new
vector (called the principal component or PC) explains as much of the variance of
the original series as possible. This leaves a matrix of unexplained residuals, but
this matrix can be reduced to a PC as well. In that case the original PC is called the
first PC (PC1), and the PC of the residuals is called the second PC, or PC2. And
there will be residuals from it too, yielding PC3, PC4, etc. The higher the number
of the PC, the less important is the pattern it explains in the original data. PC1 is
the dominant pattern, PC2 is the secondary pattern, etc. In many cases a large
number of data series can be summarized with relatively few PCs.’’
PCA operates in terms of deviations from the mean—not the
primary data. However, it is essential that the mean used in the PCA must be the
mean for the entire data set. Unfortunately, Mann, Bradley, and Hughes (1998, 1999)
did not do this.
In a conventional PCA, if the data are in different units it is common to
standardize them by subtracting the mean of each column and dividing by the
standard deviation. This re-centers and re-scales all the data to a mean of 0 and a
variance of 1. In the MBH program, a scaling was applied, but rather than subtract
the mean of the entire series length, they subtracted the mean of the 20th-century
portion used for calibration, and then divided by the standard error of the 20th century portion. The overwhelming majority of individual proxy series do not have
the form of hockey sticks, but appear as random noise, and since they don’t change in
the 20th century, this procedure did not make much difference for them. The mean of the calibration period is roughly the same as the mean of the whole series (as is the
standard error) so either way of standardizing yields more or less the same result. But
a few of the proxy series trend upward in the 20th century. For these, the MBH
method has a huge effect. Since the mean of the 20th century portion is higher than
the mean of the whole series, subtracting the 20th-century mean de-centers the series,
shifting it off a zero mean. This, in turn, inflates the variance of these series with
increases in the 20th century. PC algorithms inflate the weights of data series with the
highest variance. If one series in the group has a relatively high variance, its weight in
the PC1 gets inflated. The MBH algorithm did just this. The PCA procedure would,
in effect, sift through a data set and identify series with a 20th-century up-trend, and
then load almost all the weight on these series. In effect, it data-mines for hockey
sticks. As it turns out, of 1,082 proxies used by MBH, only a handful exhibit the form
of the hockey stick, and all of these suffer from the potential CO2
fertilization problem in the 20th century. As McKitrick (2005) showed, if you take two tree-ring chronologies from the MBH data set: Sheep Mountain, CA and
Mayberry Slough, AR. both series are the same length, but due to the 20th century
trend in the Sheep Mountain data, the MBH algorithm gives it 390 times the weight of the Mayberry series in the PC1.
Basically, if you start with 1,000 proxies and use incorrect math, you will heavily weight a few of them with hockey stick forms and ignore the others.
Then, if you replace the model (which says the temperature should go down after 1980) by actual data after 1980 you can use the “trick” referred to by Jones to Mann.
If you look at other hockey sticks, such as Jones, Osborn, and Briffa (2001), they do much the same thing.
Donald Rapp.
I am a scientist; specifically, a biologist. As I have indicated elsewhere this week (I seem to receive the request once a month or so), I have over the years worked my way through an undergraduate degree, a postgraduate diploma, a Master’s, and a PhD, whilst simultaneously working for almost a decade and a half in several different disciplines of biomedical research, and for the last dozen years in ecology.
I am not a bricklayer or a lawyer (heavens forfend!), nor am I a “janitor…, trash collector… [or a] hash slinger…” I do not “subscribe to a belief system like a religion”, unless it is the parsimonious true scepticism of the scientific method.
I do not require a monograph about PCA, nor did I request one. I simply asked if you are claiming that every ‘hockey stick’ ever produced by any professional scientific team, whether the team is associated with Mann or is entirely independent of him, is “mathematically incorrect”. There are many hockey sticks in the literature, whether they be statistically-derived composites of a number of discrete datasets, or whether they are directly derived from simple empirical data. I am curious to know if you have scrutinised each and every one of them, and if you have determined that the hundreds of authors and reviewers, who have collectively pored over this body work in their own turns, are all wrong?
Your response was impressively long, but for the second time it did not actually address the point.
As Misogi said in “Karate Kid”:
“Answer only important if ask right question”
Donald Rapp.
It’s one thing to write a book and call it “Assessing Climate Change”.
It’s entirely another thing to write such a book, and to actually assess climate change correctly.
I was attempting to establish the grounds on which you conducted your assessment, and especially your assessments not included in the book but to which are atttributed the same conclusions as those in the book. Apparently that is not a question for which you have an answer, because it is not the “right” question.
I have my answer nevertheless, and at this point I have nothing further to say.
Bernard J. says on October 15, 2010 at 10:03 pm
There are many creation stories. Have you examined every one of them to determine that they all fail to provide a superior alternative to the theory of evolution and that none of them are falsifiable?
Dear Bernard J.:
In my opinion, you not only have nothing further to say, but you had nothing to say in the first place. And having stated your background, you evidently do not have the skill to determine whether I assessed climate change correctly. The question you asked was idiotic. There are good questions to ask. Some of them follow:
1. Was the earth’s climate constant and benign for thousands of years prior to large scale impacts of humans? Answer = We have only incomplete evidence but the preponderance of imperfect data suggest that the answer is no.
2. Is it likely that human activity has affected the climate in the 20th century? Answer = yes.
3. How have humans affected the climate? Answer: Large scale emissions of greenhouse gases, production of aerosols, and deposition of black carbon soot on north polar snow and ice.
4. Do we understand quantitatively how these factors have influenced the climate in the past ~120 years? Answer = no.
4a. Do we understand why there was a sharp rise in temperature from 1910 to 1940, prior to buildup of greenhouse gases? Answer = no, but deposition of black carbon soot on north polar snow and ice probably was involved.
5. Has the climate been mainly controlled by greenhouse gases these past 35 years? Answer = no. The climate has mainly been controlled by the El Nino – La Nina sequence in the Pacific Ocean.
5a. Has the Pacific Ocean undergone a major change since about 1976, in which the usual equality of El Nino and La Nina has been replaced by persistent and sometimes strong El Ninos? Answer = yes.
5b. Do we understand why? Answer = no.
6. Can climate models adequately predict the effect of say, doubling CO2 from the pre-industrial era? Answer = no, mainly because most of the projected temperature rise is not due to CO2, but rather due to secondary effects of water vapor and clouds, and these are not well understood.
7. If you take a thousand temperature proxies over the past thousand years or so and plot them, what do you get? Answer: a spaghetti chart. It is like dropping a pot of cooked spaghetti onto a table top.
8. If you add up the aforesaid thousand proxies what do you get? You get almost zero over a 1000 years, because all the pluses and minuses tend to cancel out.
9. If you use principal component analysis to weight the various proxies in such an improper manner that those proxies with a rise in the 20th century are overwhelmingly weighted, and superimpose this on the zero for a thousand years, what do you get? Answer = a hockey stick.
10. Are those few proxies with a rise in the 20th century tree ring proxies susceptible to CO2 fertilization? Answer = yes.
11. Do the tree ring proxies continue to rise after 1980 as they should if greenhouse gases are driving the climate and tree rings are valid proxies? Answer = no.
12. How did the hockeystickers deal with this difficulty? They did not show the proxies after 1980, and instead used the “trick” of Mann and Jones by substituting measured temperatures.
13. Can paleoclimatology resolve small global temperature excursions in the past? Answer = no.
13a. When McIntyre and McKitrick and Wegman pointed out that the hockeystickers had made mathematical mistakes that vitiated their results, how did the hockeystickers react? Answer = They didn’t react. They just ignored the criticism and never responded or rebutted.
13b. How how adherents and devotees of the hockystickers dealt with the critics of the hockeystickers? Answer = with personal attacks. One hockeysticker is attempting to remove Wegman’s criticism from the Congressional Record – a kind of burning of the books.
14. Is much of multi-proxy paleoclimatology bogus? Answer = yes.