He certainly understands John Mashey. Here are some examples of the debunking for this whole affair:
Wegman whiners: this post’s for you
Here’s the USA Today article
He certainly understands John Mashey. Here are some examples of the debunking for this whole affair:
Wegman whiners: this post’s for you
Here’s the USA Today article
The cowardly trolls are working themselves up into a lather about this again.
They must sense that their dogma is inexorably going down the tube.
Just be happy about the damage your silly beliefs have already done to the world’s poorest & most vulnerable, trolls! Leave it there.
Notice how “Maple Leaf” posting is quite discreet now after being outed at Judith Curry’s site…
In a way, the plagiarism is a minor distraction from the actual problems of the Wegman paper. From http://deepclimate.org/2010/11/16/replication-and-due-diligence-wegman-style/#comment-6510 where those that understand the maths can read for themselves the analysis that leads to the conclusion of:
“Indeed, the real reasons Wegman et al never released “their” code nor associated information are now perfectly clear. Doing so would have amounted to an admission that the supposed “reproduction” of the M&M results was nothing more than a mechanical rerun of the original script, accompanied by a colossally mistaken interpretation of M&M’s methodology and findings.”
James Sexton says:
November 23, 2010 at 11:14 am
Wow, the skeptical community entirely dissected the bs plagiarism claim over a month ago and now the alarmists are bringing it up? Is their attention span as deficient as their critical thinking?
===
LOL,
That was my take but they decided on new “Alarmist” Spin.
Let’s see if Congress has “enough” Bug Spray and Sense.
This is the dumbest thing ever…
It’s always appeared to me that logic hasn’t been a great strength of the AGW crowd but surely even they can see that attacking Wegman for plagiarism for a chapter of his report on basic background information about (the pseudoscience of) paleoclimatology doesn’t contradict in any way, shape or form the fact that Wegman tore Mann and friends a new a**hole over Wegman’s specialty, statistics.
You’re grasping at straws and you really should stop…
eadler
November 23, 2010 at 11:09 am
Bull!
The arguments raised against Wegman are ridiculous; he didn’t write a paper using copied material, he wrote a report assesing the maths in the paper he was asked to report on by the US Congress. What is so difficult to understand?
IMHO, the argument put forward by Mashey is incomprehensible nonsense which should have been ignored.
From what I understand from the various pieces done on this site, it wasn’t a peer reviewed paper anyway, just a simple report, where cut-and-paste is about expected. If it’s just to inform a congressional committee of some information, it doesn’t matter. There wasn’t any science, or independent research or any proofs or anything in it.
@theduke
“Again, the content of Wegman’s report has never been successfully refuted. That’s all that matters here. “
Well I would think the quality of the work also matters or does that standard only apply to things you disagree with?
There’s a very odd divide and right at the centre of it is the Mann-Wegman-Deepclimate thread.
We have one group of people who argue simultaneously that Mann’s work was invalidated by Wegman because it showed he used a bad method to reach the correct result but Wegman’s bad method is irrelevant while also saying that Deepclimate’s substantive criticisms should be dismissed because of the conspiracy theory stuff (while themselves also claiming a massive conspiracy of scientists and world governments to create AGW in the first place).
I cannot accept the chain of reasoning above. It’s contradictory and reveals only one principle “When someone agrees with me they’re right no matter what. when someone disagrees with me they’re wrong no matter what”. That’s before we even get into McIntyre’s claims about Bradley which so paper thin I keep expecting the whole thing to be revealed as some sort of joke.
I can accept Mann’s method is flawed but the conclusion is correct. I can accept whether Wegman plagiarized is not particularly relevant to his conclusions but is still an issue that needs explaining.
Just as some cannot ever bring themselves to say Mann made some mistakes there are many others who will never bring themselves to say Wegman was wrong to plagiarize, indeed they’re happy to redefine plagiarism as “ok” to let it through.
I wonder whether Wegman will every agree to release his code? I don’t buy the idea that sworn, supposedly scientific testomony before congress should be held to a lower level than normal academic publications. In the 1990s extensive presentation of raw data and materials was not the standard, but it has been over the last five years or so. At one point, Wegman said that he was planning to an academic publication for his congressional analysis. Why did he seem to give up on that?
Louise says:
November 23, 2010 at 12:09 pm
“…..where those that understand the maths can read for themselves the analysis that leads to the conclusion of:
…. Doing so would have amounted to an admission that the supposed “reproduction” of the M&M results was nothing more than a mechanical rerun of the original script, …..”
======================================================
lol, right, Louise, would you be as so kind to point to the “maths” that indicate reproduction of M&M?
sharperoo wrote: “I can accept Mann’s method is flawed but the conclusion is correct.”
Really? What “method” proves his flawed method led to a correct conclusion?
D. Patterson says:
November 23, 2010 at 11:25 am
“eadler says:
November 23, 2010 at 11:09 am
Congress asked Wegman to reproduce M&M for purposes of validation. It is a dishonorable act for you to deliberately misrepresent this obvious fact in a bid to harm Mr. Wegman’s professional reputation with a false claim of plagiarism.”
You should apologize for accusing me of a dishonorable act. In fact Wegman said he was asked to do more than reproduce what M&M did.
Quoting from the Wegman Report itself:
“The Chairman of the Committee on Energy and Commerce as well as the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations have been interested in an independent verification of the critiques of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) [MBH98, MBH99] by McIntyre and McKitrick (2003, 2005a, 2005b) [MM03, MM05a, MM05b] as well as the related implications in the assessment.”
An independent verification is the opposite of reproducing the work of M&M. Simply reproducing the work, and claiming it is an independent verification is what is dishonorable. In fact the so called indpendent verification makes precisely the same errors as M&M made, so it is not at all what Wegman claims was requested.
http://deepclimate.org/2010/11/16/replication-and-due-diligence-wegman-style/#more-2745
In fact M&M’s claim that the method of M&M has a good chance of producing hockey sticks is actually wrong. M&M examined 10,000 instances of random noise, and found about 1% had a significant Hockey Stick Index. They didn’t mention that there were and equal amount of hockey sticks that pointed negative.
Wegman has never produced the code that was used in his so called “independent verification”.
If mother nature isn’t cooperating, obfuscate, obfuscate, obfuscate. They are doing it here on this topic right now. Try not wasting too much breath, my fellow WUWT?er’s. Could sure use some of that GW where I live. It is cold as a witches mammalian protuberance (Anthony runs a clean blog). My post on the last Wegman thread still stands.
James Sexton says:
November 23, 2010 at 12:37 pm
“Louise says:
November 23, 2010 at 12:09 pm
“…..where those that understand the maths can read for themselves the analysis that leads to the conclusion of:
…. Doing so would have amounted to an admission that the supposed “reproduction” of the M&M results was nothing more than a mechanical rerun of the original script, …..”
======================================================
lol, right, Louise, would you be as so kind to point to the “maths” that indicate reproduction of M&M?”
http://deepclimate.org/2010/11/16/replication-and-due-diligence-wegman-style/#more-2745
“The first thing I noted in my original discussion was that, although the PC1 shown was supposedly a “sample”, it was identical in both the M&M and Wegman et al figures. How did that happen? A quick peek at the code gives the answer – this PC1 is read from an archived set of PC1s previously stored, and is #71 of the set. The relevant lines reads: …”
The results shown by Wegman indicate that he used code identical to Wegmans, and it was not really an independent verification. To date he has not supplied the code that was used. The evidence points to an exact copy.
Continuing discussion of the plagiarism claim against Wegman seems a very foolish move for the AGW crowd. The true agenda behind this weak complaint has already been revealed in correspondence between Ray Bradley and a third party which reads –
“I filed a complaint with George Mason University (where Wegman is a Professor) & they have set up a committee to investigate my complaint. I[A] recent letter from their Vice-Chancellor indicates that they expect the committee to report their findings by the end of September.
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. No response on that.
Thanks
Ray [Bradley]”
What is most revealing is that this was a request for the withdrawal of the whole report rather than corrections or additions to references and attribution for material in the report. CA has a thorough discussion of the implications of Bradley’s correspondence here-
http://climateaudit.org/2010/10/21/bradley-tries-to-deal/
However in attacking the Wegman report, the sound and fury that AGW believers are creating could prove very useful. I would love to see the report reworked with special attention to the social networking section. Especially after the Climategate leak showed that the situation was worse than Wegman indicated. I am sure that Mann’s email 31/10/03 which included the line –
“Let’s let our supporters in higher places use our scientific response to push the broader case against M&M.”
-requires further investigation. Just who were these supporters in higher places?
From the Wegman Report Executive Summary:
“It is not clear that Mann and associates realized the error in their methodology at the time of publication. Because of the lack of full documentation of their data and computer code, we have not been able to reproduce their research. We did, however, successfully recapture similar results to those of MM. This recreation supports the critique of the MBH98 methods, as the offset of the mean value creates an artificially large deviation from the desired mean value of zero.”
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/WegmanReport.pdf
Peter Bloomfield of the NRC agreed:
MR. BLOOMFIELD. Thank you. Yes, Peter Bloomfield. Our committee reviewed the methodology used by Dr. Mann and his coworkers and we felt that some of the choices they made were inappropriate. We had much the same misgivings about his work that was documented at much greater length by Dr. Wegman
http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=109_house_hearings&docid=f:31362.wais
Wegman can easily position this inquiry in a wider context, which will get excellent press for the ill wind toward problematic climate science that is blowing around the country of recent years.
This is a windfall opportunity for increased public awareness of the weakness of IPCC supported consensus climate science.
It is a gift. We keep getting these gifts from the IPCC supported consensus climate science followers. Just a few gift examples are: Climategate itself; No Pressure; Patchy, IAC report on IPCC, and everytime Gore & Mann opens their mouths. : )
Precious gifts.
John
The trolls here today appear to assume that folks who read WUWT are as ignorant of the facts as they are.
So this must be the war on skeptics we were told about last month. Pretty weak.
Based on their announcement, that we would be “debating” the “facts” of global warming theory, I had expected folks would use real names and debate “facts”. Looks like what we have here instead are the class of some community college professor who know nothing about the issues and think “debate” means to argue for the sake of argument, and who feel they need to malign their opponent since they can’t even win even those arguments.
@ur momisugly eadler and louise
Do you people even read the stuff you guys are throwing around?
From the linked article,“Thus, McIntyre and McKitrick’s original Fig 1-1, mechanically reproduced by Wegman et al, shows a carefully selected “sample” from the top 1% of simulated “hockey sticks”. And Wegman’s Fig 4-4, which falsely claimed to show “hockey sticks” mined from low-order, low-autocorrelation “red noise”, contains another 12 from that same 1%!”
Wow, pretty damning stuff, it appears the writer of this article is stating Wegman copied M&M and then misrepresented the significance of the graphs. Let’s go to the report itself and see what it says about figure 4.4
“Figure 4.4: One of the most compelling illustrations that McIntyre and McKitrick have produced is created by feeding red noise [AR(1) with parameter = 0.2] into the MBH algorithm. The AR(1) process is a stationary process meaning that it should not exhibit any long-term trend. The MBH98 algorithm found ‘hockey stick’ trend in each of the independent replications. then, immediately under the hockeystick graphs,
“Discussion: Because the red noise time series have a correlation of 0.2, some of these time series will turn upwards [or downwards] during the ‘calibration’ period6 and the MBH98 methodology will selectively emphasize these upturning [or downturning] time series.
Yeh, he copied, he said he did! Further, when reading after the word “discussion” we can see that the graphs in 4.4 weren’t implied to be random, but rather illustrative. It states clearly some will turn upward while others turn downwards. All of the graphs shown in 4.4 turn upwards. So, clearly Wegman’s graph weren’t placed to reflect a random selection of the runs. More from section 4
“We have been able to reproduce the results of McIntyre and McKitrick (2005b). While at first the McIntyre code was specific to the file structure of his computer, with his assistance we were able to run the code on our own machines and reproduce and extend some of his results. In Figure 4.1, the top panel displays PC1 simulated using the MBH98 methodology from stationary trendless red noise.”
You guys are something else.
Thank you so much for demonstrating so clearly once again how you are incapable of understanding plain English or the scientific method and/or willfully pretending so.
They blindly read DC (and the like) and assume he *must* know what he is talking about (he agrees with the consensus and all that) and then reword and repost what he is claiming (ironic, eh?) without understanding the details.
When ideology is involved, a person can make himself believe all sorts of things simply by ignoring anything contrary.
Mark
Louise says:
November 23, 2010 at 10:53 am
“these attacks are unprecedented in my 42 years as an academic and scholar.”
He means he’s never been caught before
I would imagine that Wegman critics have been burning the midnight oil, scouring the interweb for any trace of plagiarism he may have committed in past decades – to establish a “pattern”.
Anything they found which could have been questioned (or distorted) would have been trumpeted from the highest mountain from the likes of Schmidt, Tamino, Romm et al.
It’s been over a month now, and strangely, there has been no sounding of the horns.
Louise, your statement is trolldribble.
sharper00 says:
November 23, 2010 at 12:33 pm
‘I can accept Mann’s method is flawed but the conclusion is correct.’
Enough said. Guess the brain washing is working then or as you say do you acept the conclusion even though you know the method is wrong. Sorry Antony but you cannot do anything about people that just cannot see what is wrong with comments like this.
Or WUWT has finally gotten true trolls that only write comments without substance to get a rise.
For those who really want to know what the scientific debate is about I STRONGLY recommend reading Dr Lindzen’s submission to congress. It is complete and up to date having been submitted on 11-17-2010. It is only 48 pages long and covers the real debate very well. It says almost nothing about the hockey stick, since the hockey stick adds almost nothing to the scientific debate. IMHO it was intended as a marketing tool from the day it was first contemplated.