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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Dear Richard Sharpe:
Again, I quote Misogi: Answer only important if ask right question.
DR
Shameless evasion noted, Rapp.
I’m really not sure why I am bothering any more.
Donald Rapp.
Unfortunately, despite your self-impression of being a Renaissance Man with a “rare talent” for assimilating whole scientific disciplines for breakfast, your opinion about my original question to you is irrelevant. That you could not in any objective way find a coherent answer to it is answer enough.
And for the record, having stated my background, you evidently do not have the skill to determine whether I, as a scientist who has spent decades using complex statistics and reviewing the work of other scientists, might actually have the skills to determine whether you have assessed climate change correctly.
Now, to the rest of your posting. Your self-addressed questions are a future-me indulgence of strawmen that you wish you could be asked. They fall apart at the simplest scrutiny however, by any examination other than the most credulous…
1) The difference between contemporary climate, and the climate milieu operating when humans expanded from their evolutionary base, is that in recent geological time humanity has expanded to cover the entire planet during a period characterised by a relatively benign climatic regime, to the point where we now densely cover a large portion of the habitable planetary surface. In the past pre-modern humans would simply have moved with the changing climate to new, climatically-moderate regions. This is no longer possible for today’s population as there will be insufficient future ‘moderate’ areas, and it certainly is not possible for all of the agriculture and the non-human ecosystems threatened by climate change to move without significant negative impact.
2 – 3) Trivial.
4) Answer =
no“rather better than you seem to think”, but that is probably just because you haven’t read as widely as you seem to think.5) El Niño and La Niña are themselves aspects of global climate/energy translocation, and do not exist outside of it, so your claim is specious.
6) Can climate models adequately predict the effect of say, doubling CO2 from the pre-industrial era? Answer = “it depends on one’s definition of ‘adequately’ – sensitivity and feedings-back are better understood than you concede, and sufficient to infer the larger-scale consequences of increased emission.
7) If you take a thousand growth curves and plot them, what do you get? Answer: a spaghetti chart. It is like dropping a pot of cooked spaghetti onto a table top. The thing is, the spaghetti will still trace an overall sigmoid growth curve, because of a thing called statistics, and which you believe to be “mathematically incorrect” in the hands of scientists of all disciplines, other than yourself. If such curves were not possible, then the charts in my childrens’ neonatal books would show that there was no human growth after birth.
8) Please refer me to a specific “add[ing] up [of] the aforesaid thousand proxies where [y]ou get almost zero over a 1000 years, because all the pluses and minuses tend to cancel out”. I’m very interested to see the actual “mathematical correctness” of such graphs.
9) If one uses principal component analysis to weight the various proxies in a proper manner, so that those proxies with a rise in the 20th century are appropriately 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 that are susceptible to CO2 fertilization compensated for? Answer = yes.
11 – 12) Widely-read dendroclimatologists have a more sophisticated understanding of divergence than do you.
13) Can paleoclimatology resolve small global temperature excursions in the past? Answer = “how small, at what scale in time and space, and how long ago”. Oh, and to what end, exactly? There are “good” questions and there are “right” questions, and there is no demonstration that this one actually fulfils either criterion…
14) If by “much” you are referring to the work of those not trained in, experienced in, or working in science, and specifically in climatology, then your answer is correct. Some would say that you are being rather too hard on yourself, but personally I think that you have finally hit the nail on the head.
1 out of 14 ain’t that bad.
Dear Bernard J.:
Too bad you weren’t born 50 years earlier. You could have been a panelist on the radio show “It Pays to be Ignorant”. You could have debated questions like “Who was buried in Grant’s Tomb?” or “What was George Washington’s first name?”
DR
Donald Rapp.
I see that you are not about to address questions of science anytime soon. I will return to this subject anon, but for now I’d like to revisit the matter of the Wegman report.
As has been drawn to my attention, you are on record as saying:
“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”.”
A simple question: does Wegman not have any problem then at GMU?
After you’ve answered that, you might like to think more on the matter of the hockey sticks, as I have a burning curiosity about the different assessments of such proxies, and I might pick at that scab for a while yet.
The simplest question asked of Donald Rapp above is the one he puts to himself but he manages to get even that answer wrong not once but twice: there is no character named “Misogi” in his favorite movie “The Karate Kid”. The practice of misogi is, in reality, something dyspeptic Donald might benefit from. At the moment I pity readers of his textbooks.
Congrats to Bernard J. for venturing at last from the safe haven of Tim Lambert’s Deltoid where sooner or later anybody who dissents from his manic views gets banned , like myself repeatedly.
As ever here as at Deltoid he is verbosity personified, and shows an IQ less than that of his infant twins.
1. Wegman never plagiarised Bradley or anybody else, so he has no case to answer at GMU. His remit from the Senate was to “review” (geddit?) the work of Mann Bradley Hughes against that of McIntyre&McKitrick. Amazingly that involved summarizing those texts (Bernard thinks summarizing = plagiarizing, even when you disagree with what you are summarizing as in the case of MBH).
2. In regard to your rhetorical question to Rapp above, “are you claiming that every ‘hockey stick’ ever produced by any team, whether associated with Mann or entirely independent of him, is ‘mathematically incorrect’ ”?, the issue is not mathematical but statistical. Sadly, MBH made a crucial error with their statistical analysis, as explained by Rapp and Wegman.
3. That error led to the expunging of the MWP. Despite your impressive academic credentials, I note history is not amongst them, and it is obvious you know nothing of the MWP.
Dear Bernard J (and other heel nippers):
I published over 60 papers in refereed journals, including two “citation classics” that were widely referred to. I published seven books including quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, solar energy, human missions to mars, assessing climate change, ice ages, and financial bubbles. I also wrote chapters in several other books. I wrote dozens of major reports for NASA including the NASA Technology Plan of 2003 at the invitation of the NASA Technology Director. I was the proposal manager on two winning proposals for multi-hundred million dollar NASA space missions. You can find all these on my personal website. I was a full professor at the University of Texas by the time I was 40, and I was a fellow of the APS soon thereafter. I have studied climate change these past five years by reading hundreds of papers and dozens of books and reports, and from this published my book on climate change which is now in its second edition. The internet is free. You can say what you want. What did you ever do in your life? Why should I answer your questions? Who are you?
Yesterday Donald you were impersonating Miyagi-san, all zen and inscrutable, today it’s Ozymandias – “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Next “the Emperor with no clothes”?
I’ve read none of your academic or professional work but I sincerely hope it’s as good as you believe it to be. But what I have read of you appears on this page and it is … underwhelming. I don’t care who you think you are and it’s irrelevant who I might be behind my pen-name. Claims to one’s own authority are always specious! In fact there comes a time in all our careers when our best work is behind us and younger people would do well to treat with skepticism our authoritative declarations and presumptions of superiority.
You say Donald that you know better than the work that’s published in the specialist literature of climate science? – you might consider then deigning to correct their errors with your own work in journals of comparable scientific rank.
Krusty says says October 20, 2010 at 4:57 pm
Yours is clearly behind you and you didn’t even leave us your real name so we can nod knowingly when we pass you in the street. Coward.
Donald Rapp.
I did not ask you to give me your curriculum vitæ, nor did I ask what you thought of me. It matters not what I do with my life, nor does it matter what my name is.
I asked you some simple questions about the nature of your ‘analyses’ of hockey sticks, and you have refused to answer them. You are making significant blanket statements about the work of hundreds of professionals, and disparaging this same corpus of work in the process, and I am simply asking for some evidence or other clear indication that you actually have a case.
None has been forthcoming.
That you distract from the salient point of the matter by targetting a person – myself – whose bona fides are irrelevant to the discussion, and which have been summarised nontheless for a hint at the the level of my understanding of science and its processes, speaks volumes.
If you are confident in your dismissal of all hockey sticks, you should be able to offer a comprehensive answer to my questions.
Tim Curtin. Most of your guff is simply that, and does not merit a response. One point though – intelligence quotients are age specific so your implication that my IQ is less than that of my children is meaningless. For what it’s worth mine consistently scores in the top 1%, but I won’t tell you what the number is, because it is as irrelevant to the discussion at hand as is any other personal fact about me.
And yes, at least one of my twins is ‘gifted’.
Now, can we answer the questions?
Dear Bernard J and Krusty (and other heel nippers):
I don’t owe you any answers. You are masked people hiding behind your cloak of anonymity. I have stated my credentials. The rest of the bloggers can decide who is more credible – you or me.
Tim Curtin is a distinguished climatologist. I have profited from his papers and reports from his website. What have you guys done in climatology that merits any attention at all?
The beauty of the Internet is that it is the ultimate democracy. All bloggers are equal – even those who have done nothing and spend their time bugging serious scientists.
Donald Rapp says “Tim Curtin is a distinguished climatologist. I have profited from his papers and reports from his website.”
I’d thought that Tim identified himself as an economist and agronomist not “distinguished climatologist”.
Yeah, so democratic that a scientifically-illiterate, retired economist to third-world countries can gain accolades as a “distinguished climatologist” by another emeritus who, gifted with a “rare talent” to read hundreds of papers and a few dozen books, can thereby become expert in the same discipline. Apparently.
So, which of the papers of Curtin’s did you read that warranted you referring to him as a “distinguished climatologist”? Can you assure me now that you actually have read “hundreds” of papers, and have talentedly become expert in the field of climatology, if you do not recognise those who really are expert, and those who are not?
And it’s not about to whom you “owe” answers. It’s simply about a straight-forward question in direct response to your claims, that merits an answer independently of those who ask it.
I will say again though – the fact that you prevaricate and dodge and weave and bluster and harumph like a walrus on a rock tells me more about the veracity of your “expertise” than any answer that you might deign to bestow.
“Distinguished climatologist[s]” indeed. Hehehe…
There’s a lot of huffing and puffing by a blow hard or two above, but it now seems that Wegman has little to worry about with respect to Bradley.
By the way blow hard Bernard J, I can claim to have an IQ of 199 (which would put me 6+ SDs above average), but since my real name is on my posts anyone can look me up to see whether there is any evidence that I have such a stratospheric IQ. Likewise, with Donald Rapp, we can check him out and see that he has done what he claims. I have come to respect people who have actually done a few things and to be able to tell them from people whose writing is “full of sound and fury and signifying little.”
With you, all we can see is a blow hard who doesn’t know that IQ is age normed not age specific.
Is this the quality of an answer that we expect from a scientist?
Donald, you completely lost it. Instead of providing any acceptable answer, you put your toys in your bag and refuse to participate.
This conduct may indicate weaknesses in your scientific work. Are you hiding anything?
Donald Rapp:
Could you point out his papers in climatology and the journals they were published in?
Bernarnd:
Donald Rapp has connections with the libertarian think tanks GMI, CATO, Heartland which probably explains his problem as being more of a belief system one.
It is very hard to argue with someone who is entrenched in their belief system whether religious, environmental, econonmic etc. as they will rationalize away any facts that contradict their deeply held convictions.
The continuing gathering of a preponderance of facts and research will hopefully convince people that maybe they should be worried a bit, and moderate their belief systems.
http://resources.ofdan.ca/docs/2009-science-bypass-v3.pdf
Donald Rapp.
If you cannot or will not answer questions about your self-proclaimed comprehensive analyses of hockey sticks, are you able to explain why you believe that Tim Curtin is a “distinguished climatologist”?
Tim Curtin is a distinguished expert in proportional rates of change.
Donald Rapp.
It seems that you are not above organising for the surreptitious editing of some of your comments on this blog.
On October 13, 2010 at 7:51 am you posted a comment wherein you referred to me using the terms “janitor”, “trash collector” and “hash slinger”. You also said that I “subscribe to a belief system like a religion”.
Now, I have myself once or twice asked for an editing of a blog post because I had inadvertently posted identifying or misattributed information. This, however, is an attempt to expunge your denigrating commentary about those who quite reasonably are requesting that you explain your “analyses”, and the claims that you make here and elsewhere, including in your book.
The fact remains though that my post, immediately below yours, retains the evidence of your words with appropriate quotation marks. For posterity I have also been saving this thread every time I post, should exactly this contingency occur. I am now archiving it, for the same reason.
Your original behaviour was not becoming of one who seeks to be held as a doyenne of science. Your attempt at cleaning up is not better.
Your continued refusal to engage with me about the nature of your hockey stick analyses is fast eroding any credibility that you might believe you hold. Are you seriously not able to simply address my questions and provide the material I seek?
Your refusal to engage with me on the matter of the Wegman scandal is also damaging to your cause. To this end, I will try a different tack and ask you for comment on the latest post from Deep Climate. Can you response with detail and evidence to the substance of the thread, and most especially can you refute the substance and defend your own stance on this entire matter?
Donald Rapp.
Perhaps, in your pondering emeritas, it is necessary to step back somewhat in order to discover exactly at what point it is that you and your professional colleagues diverge on the matter of atmospheric physics.
To that end, could you indulge me and go back to first principles to answer several very simple questions:
1) Does carbon dioxide absorb and re-emit infrared radiation?
2) Is the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increasing?
3) Now for the essay… assuming that you answered the first two questions in the affirmative, what ‘best’ estimate do you accept for the temperature sensitivity of the atmosphere to carbon dioxide? Upon what evidence and data do you base your answer?
As it is Halloween, please feel free to play the wildcard and answer the previous questions which you have avoided until now. However, if they continue to pose the challenge for you that they have to this point, it may be that we can approach the whole matter from a different direction in order to elucidate which of the paradigms – ‘consensus’ physics or the ‘sceptical’ alternative theories – best fit the empirical data. The three questions (+ 1 supplementary) above could be a good first step along that path.
Donald Rapp.
Why are you avoiding this thread?
If someone has Rapp’s ear, could they please ask him to revisit his reluctance to engage in the substanbtive questions I’ve posed?
Bernard
Unfortunately you have run into the WUWFT modus operandi. This is to flood the blogosphere with tons of posts, thus reducing any real discussions in the threads. You will note that many posts are just kowtowing to the poster, rather than contributing to the real message at hand. This method was used in the past by many Libertarian think tanks to fight tobacco legislation, ozone hole legislation etc. So any thread older than say 2 or 3 days is just ignored by all the posters here as there are just so many articles to follow. An interesting strategy.
[REPLY – Whereas the MO of nearly all ACW blogs is simply to delete the opposition. This method was used in the past by far worse than libertarian think tanks proposing far worse than opposing tobacco legislation. (Of course, allowing posts like this is more of a cruelty than a kindness.) ~ Evan]
Hmm this leads me to think of the stategy that could be created in a Blogowar. Recruit a large number of people with multiple accounts to visit and comment on a blog to make it seem more important than it is. Also recruit “monitors” to constantly view “enemy” blogs and to immediately post FUD and dissention on their blogs. HMMM..