Wegman whiners: this post's for you

I suppose I should let people in on a secret,
i to the negative square is = -1, I don’t say this because I agree with it, I say this because most statisticians hold this to be true. Math isn’t like climate science, to where truths can be true and false at the same time, but rather, proper mathematics, regardless of the avenue, takes you to the same place.
Some people are concerned that Wegman and McIntyre are showing similar results? THEY’RE SUPPOSE TO!!!!!! That’s the proof of math! If they were significantly different, then I’d be concerned.

JK says:
November 22, 2010 at 9:11 pm
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“Remember, this was a response to a congressional request. This was not a study, nor an academic endeavor. It was simply a report to Congress.”
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I’m glad to know there are so few restrictions on what a congressional report may contain.
Some definite overtime work here.
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Is it your assertion that congress should be withheld information because certain people weren’t attributed to their liking?
Why don’t you girls attack Wegman on his substance? If he was wrong, show where he was wrong. (Please show where he didn’t attribute Bradley.)
That’s the long & short of it. I have told the University that I am prepared to drop this matter if Wegman makes a request to have his report withdrawn from the Congressional Record.
Thanks
Ray [Bradley]
Well, I can see the motivation from Alaska. It certainly isn’t his claim to unique thought………. See here for more laughs……. http://climateaudit.org/2010/10/20/bradley-copies-fritts-2/
D’oh!!!!

James Sexton says:
November 22, 2010 at 10:02 pm
“jose says:
November 22, 2010 at 9:12 pm
Deep Climate and John Mashey have demonstrated that: (1) large sections of the Wegman report were plagiarized,…
No, copied, yes, plagiarized, no. Look up the difference and get back. It was a report to Congress!! It wasn’t an academic endeavor, nor was it a book to buy. It was simply a gathering of statements and an interpretive response. Please look up the legal definition of “plagiarism” and then show me or anyone else how this applies.
Lastly, you said, “2) Wegman’s “independent verification” consisted of re-running McIntrye and McKitricks R code from their 2005 GRL paper – code which cherry-picked the randomly generated principal components for those that showed the greatest hockey-stick shape. If you look at nothing else, look at these figures:
http://deepclimate.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/wegman-fig-4-4.jpg
http://deepclimate.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/wegman-4-4-reproduction.jpg
The PC1 curves generated from the MM05 code and those found in WR are IDENTICAL.”
Uhmm, sis, you’re beyond credible. No, they are not identical. Look at the far right of each graph, which is the point of contention. Now, it is true that I don’t see as well as I used to, but even for a blind man, the graphs are not IDENTICAL! But thanks for showing the world how alarmist view things.
This is an example of why climatologists and their followings shouldn’t venture into the world of realism, nor mathematics. Same is = equal. The graphs are obviously not.
My interpretation is there were similar critiques by statisticians. Both offered similar results, yet not the same. Two different approaches, similar results.
Please show me where I’ve erred in in that interpretation. Better, please show Steve Mc. I’m sure he’d love to hear how Wegman copied off of him.”
It seems that neither of you has looked at DeepClimates blogpost carefully.
http://deepclimate.org/2010/10/25/the-wegman-report-sees-red-noise/
The two links shown by Jose would, from their labels, both be copies of Wegman’s fig 4.4. They each contain 12 graphs and the figures are identical to one another. DeepClimate does not claim that fig 4.4 is an exact copy of what McKintyre did. His argument about fig 4.4 is that the wrong conclusions were drawn because the wrong noise model was used by Wegman et. al. to generate the data, and in fact downward and upward pointing hockey sticks are a result of using the MBH calibration procedures on this data, not the exclusively upward pointing hockey sticks that M&M would have us believe happens. Twelve upward pointing hockey stick graphs were shown out of the 1000 that were generated, and none of the downward pointing ones were shown.
What Deepclimate says is that Wegman’s fig 1 is an exact replica of McKintyre’s fig 4.1 in his 2005 paper. This can be seem very clearly by looking at the two graphs.

[Now, now. No trolling comments. We all know that in the Diskworld universe, trolls have silicon brains and exhibit exceptional intelligence – but only once their brains have cooled down. 8<) Robt]
Sorry Robt – but please don't lump Detrus in with WUWT Forum trolls, ones a thick, knuckle dragging moron who follows his Captains orders and the other is a fictional character, along with Vimes and Carrot.
I think you deserve a pat on the back though for deal with the trolls Robt as they can be as about as intelligent as a lump of coal.

John F. Hultquist says:
November 22, 2010 at 5:45 pm
“Every once in awhile I jump in and ask folks to try just a bit harder to communicate. Having read each of the “Wegman” posts and comments on WUWT and several elsewhere — as they were introduced — I too was astonished by the phrasing of Tamsie’s statement as shown in the box. Then, the comment at 3:33 pm is about like throwing a scoop of chocolate ice cream in the throat of a volcano. What’s the point?
Please, all regular commenters, lurkers, trolls, and children of all ages – add a bit of information to the discussion, point out something interesting, or say something funny.
Sometimes even the weather is interesting. The northern tier of USA States is about to get overrun with one very cold and massive flow in the next few hours. I’m told to expect -21Co (aka -6 Fo) by Tuesday night. Thanksgiving week is one of the most heavy traffic periods in the US. Look for all but the most bizarre stories – even Wegman — to get pushed off the airwaves in the next days by all the weather related issues. Even the folks in Cancun will be hard pressed to counter the cold”.
Right, and recent snowfall records are broken already.
People like Tamsie should look out of the window a bit more often to get a grasp on real world weather conditions.
I once attended a meteorological briefing during a flying contest when the meteorologist told the audience he didn’t expect any rain for that day.
Had he looked out of the window he would have known better because the weather was horrible with pouring rain.
http://www.iceagenow.com/Billings_snowfall_shatters_record_set_in_2007.htm

Ohh dear I am worried now ! if the warmists are right about this then my entire schooling was spent plagiarizing others work Ulp I still have the note books ! where me matches !.

BillD says:
November 23, 2010 at 4:00 am
“….Now, if he would only make his code available.”
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Oh, the irony!……And it burns.

The important part of the Wegman report shows that these guys (42 “climate scientists”) were in cahoots and controlling the peer-review process. This an attempt to distract from that very serious issue. Coupled with Climategate, who in their right mind would defend this corruption?

A couple more comments:

What Deepclimate says is that Wegman’s fig 1 is an exact replica of McKintyre’s fig 4.1 in his 2005 paper. This can be seem very clearly by looking at the two graphs.

And since WR says clearly that Fig. 4.1 is a “Reproduced version of Figure 1 in McIntyre and McKitrick (2005b)”, this matters how? We would only be concerned if it wasn’t an exact replica, or nearly so.

DeepClimate does not claim that fig 4.4 is an exact copy of what McKintyre did. His argument about fig 4.4 is that the wrong conclusions were drawn because the wrong noise model was used by Wegman et. al. to generate the data, and in fact downward and upward pointing hockey sticks are a result of using the MBH calibration procedures on this data, not the exclusively upward pointing hockey sticks that M&M would have us believe happens.

If you look at the commentary for WR Fig. 4.2, the point that both upward and downward pointing hockey sticks are produced is made explicitly – “The negative values between –2 and –1 indicate the 1902-1980 mean is lower hence the blade of the hockey stick is turned down, while the positive values between 1 and 2 in the bottom panel indicate the hockey stick blade is turned up.”

cohenite says:
November 23, 2010 at 4:37 am
“It is interesting from eadler’s link to DC that DC supports his dusting of Wegman by relating that to M&W’s dusting of Mann; DC says that M&W are incorrect because in their comparison with the proxy data the first and last blocks are well correlated with actual temperature; but this is something M&W anticipated:
“On the other hand, limiting the
validation exercise to these two blocks is problematic because both blocks
have very dramatic and obvious features: the temperatures in the initial
block are fairly constant and are the coldest in the instrumental record
whereas the temperatures in the final block are rapidly increasing and are
the warmest in the instrumental record. Thus, validation conducted on
these two blocks will prima facie favor procedures which project the local
level and gradient of the temperature near the boundary of the in-sample
period. However, while such procedures perform well on the front and
back blocks, they are not as competitive on interior blocks. Furthermore,
they cannot be used for plausible historical reconstructions!”
DC has attempted to repudiate Wegman by repudiating M&W on the basis of an extrapolation from the 1st and last blocks of temperature; but M&W have offered cogent reasons why such an extrapolation is statistically unsound. So DC’s attempt to say Wegman is wrong because M&W are wrong fails because M&W are right!”
DC’s condemnation of the Wegman report has nothing whatever to do with M&W, which is in publication at present. A summary of the charge against Wegman’s Report is as follows:
It’s hard to imagine a more egregious and fatal analytical flaw than Wegman et al’s utter misunderstanding of the very procedure said to demonstrate the extreme bias of Mann et al’s PCA methodology. Wegman’s mischaracterisation of McIntyre’s pseudo-proxies as conventional “red noise”, along with the accompanying failure to actually analyze McIntyre’s methodology, surely ranks as one of the epic gaffes in statistical analysis. Indeed, no one can reasonably continue to claim that Wegman’s central analysis and findings hold up.
It turns out that DC has an extensive article critical the the McShane Wyner paper.
http://deepclimate.org/2010/08/19/mcshane-and-wyner-2010/
There are two parts to DC’s criticism:
M&W simply echo secondary sources including newspaper articles and non peer reviewed papers as the basis of much of their criticism of the Mann’s 2008 paper. They distort quotes, leaving out parts which actually negate the arguments they present, and they present an inaccurate picture regarding the PCA work that was done by Mann et. al., falsely claiming the only one PC, PC1 was used in the paper. This indicates that they have not bothered to consult the original sources, which is not an acceptable process for writing a scientific paper.
The second half of the discussion relates to the statistical method used by M&W to create their own version of the hockey stick. Some of the things they do are questionable, like using a shorter validation period then MBH, after complaining that the validation period MBH used was too short. They actually do come up with a graph that is shaped like a hockey stick. That should come as no surprise. There are a large number of papers that reconstructed global temperature from proxies and ended up with a similar hockey stick, but with different levels of uncertainty in the reconstruction.
The M&W paper surfaced in August, when it was in proof, having been submitted but not yet published. As far as I can tell, from a Google search, it has not yet been published. I wonder if DC’s criticisms of the paper are causing the journal editor to have some second thoughts.

eadler says:
November 22, 2010 at 11:15 pm
His argument about fig 4.4 is that the wrong conclusions were drawn because the wrong noise model was used by Wegman et. al. to generate the data, and in fact downward and upward pointing hockey sticks are a result of using the MBH calibration procedures on this data, not the exclusively upward pointing hockey sticks that M&M would have us believe happens.
I am not a statistician and my statistics knowledge is mostly from 40 years ago…
But I suppose that Deep Climate is wrong here. The MBH calibration method compares any (pseudo) proxy data with a period in the temperature record which is upgoing. Any statistical method will pick out these (pesudo) proxies which have an upgoing profile in the same period, even if they need to be switched upside down (as happened with the upside down use of the Tiljander sediment proxy in Mann 2008 and others). The result always will be a hockeystick with an upgoing end, no matter that many (halve) the (pseudo) proxies are going downward at the end. Mann’s method simply increased that effect by the decentralised mean, which in addition suppresses the historical variability. That was nicely demonstrated by the inclusion of the 1990 IPCC graph in Wegman figure 4.6. It simply shows that any HS shape proxy (even not related to local temperatures) will force the total reconstruction into a HS shape, whatever method is used, but especially with Mann’s decentralised method.