From Steve McIntyre on Climate Audit:
Trenberth and Lifting Text Verbatim
In case readers think that Trenberth’s outburst discussed yesterday represents an isolated and unfortunate climate scientist incident, this is not the case. In fact, some of Trenberth’s most objectionable language was lifted verbatim from an article in Nature Geoscience earlier this year. Trenberth here; Hasselmann here.
Trenberth summarized the UK whitewashes as follows:
Three investigations of the alleged scientific misconduct of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia — one by the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, a second by the Scientific Assessment Panel of the Royal Society, chaired by Lord Oxburgh, and the latest by the Independent Climate Change E-mails Review, chaired by Sir Muir Russell — have confirmed what climate scientists have never seriously doubted: established scientists depend on their credibility and have no motivation in purposely misleading the public and their colleagues. Moreover, they are unlikely to make false claims that other colleagues can readily show to be incorrect. They are also understandably (but inadvisably) reluctant to share complex data sets with non-experts that they perceive as charlatans (Hasselman 2010)
Trenberth’s entire paragraph is actually word-for-word identical to the corresponding paragraph in Hasselman’s Nature article. (While Hasselmann was cited in this paragraph, the fact that the text was lifted verbatim was not shown – something that John Mashey will no doubt weigh in on.)
Three recent investigations of the alleged scientific misconduct of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia — one by the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee[1,2], a second by the Scientific Assessment Panel of the Royal Society, chaired by Lord Oxburgh[3], and the latest by the Independent Climate Change E-mails Review, chaired by Sir Muir Russell[4] — have confirmed what climate scientists have never seriously doubted: established scientists, dependent on their credibility for their livelihood, have no motivation in purposely misleading the public and their colleagues. Moreover, they are unlikely to make false claims that other colleagues, working independently on similar data sets, can readily show to be incorrect. They are also understandably (but inadvisably) reluctant to share complex data sets with non-experts that they perceive as charlatans.
Trenberth continued:
Scientists make mistakes and often make assumptions that limit the validity of their results. They regularly argue with colleagues who arrive at different conclusions. These debates follow the normal procedure of scientific inquiry.
Hasselmann’s corresponding text was virtually identical:
Scientists can, of course, err. They regularly argue with colleagues who arrive at different conclusions. These debates follow the normal procedure of scientific inquiry.
Steve has much more here.
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I just know those two defenders of plagiarism in climate science, John Mashey and the shadowy figure known as “DeepClimate”, will rush to lodge a complaint with NOAA/NCAR as they’d done with Wegman.
Raymond Bradley’s academic misconduct complaint against Wegman at George Mason University was based on this same sort of (partially) unattributed copying behavior for presentation delivered in a public forum, so I’m sure Dr. Bradley will move to file a similar complaint against Dr. Trenberth to maintain the standards and integrity of climate science.
/sarc
Of course, I’ve shown these fellows a way out here. If only they could pile themselves into the clown car and drive themselves there.
WUWT’s discussion of Trenberth’s address to AMS continues here, now approaching 300 comments.
The question is, would he verbally cite that the words he just read in the speech to AMS were written by Hasselman? He will probably do so now.
Where is “Maple Leaf” when you don’t need him? LOL
What boggles the mind is – why plagarize bad stuff?
Couple of hints
This isn’t so much plagiarism as repeating a well-rehearsed message
If The Team’s fig-leaf falls any further, they will need a Maple leaf to cover eirarses.
Dave Springer says:
January 14, 2011 at 10:12 am
Ummm… please disregard my previous. Trenberth cited Hasselman thus I don’t see any nefarious actions afoot. So what if he copied it? It was properly cited.
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Bradley’s complaint against Wegman was not that Wegman didnt CITE bradley, he clearly did. His complaint was that he did not indicate the MANNER of his borrowing. he cited bradley, but didnt use quote marks to indicate that bradleys words were used.
in every plagarism there are two issues at play.
1. if you borrow ideas you have to cite the source of the idea
2. if you borrow words you have to indicate that you borrowed them.
so, you have to indicate sources and the manner in which they are used.
Bradley, Wegman and Trenberth all fail to do a proper job of this. The situation is remedied by following established style guides.
Everyone knows that in difficult economic times its important to recycle as much as possible.
Kevin is away from his email at the moment!!!
(SarcOn) You’re ALL missing the point here, a tremendous part of the Green Movement (aka “Save The Planet For The Worthy”) is the reuse of carded and discarded materials for the benefit of all mankind. Plagerism is an antiquated, rich world concept that we can no longer afford in the new World Order. But it does matter who is cycling or recycling. Not everyone is entitled. You must first show that you are truly Green before you can cycle or recycle someone else’s material. Otherwise, antiquated Common Law is applicable and you must suffer the consequences and give up all claims and titles to public and private entitlements forevermore. Before anyone can put a shoe on another person’s foot, the foot must fit the shoe. (SarcOff)
As advised below I checked Motl who says the document is a prepublished draft.
If this is correct, editing is ongoing.
Is Motl wrong?
Isn’t he allow to copy him, they are on the same team?
@Steven Mosher
> he cited bradley, but didnt use quote marks to indicate that bradleys words were used.
It was more than that. The sections dealing with Bradley’s plagiarism covered not only word-for-word copying, but also copying with errors that showed a lack of expertise. This is without even going into the plagiarism of other, unattributed sources identified in their analysis.
I’ve always said, though, the plagiarism of Bradley is just the easiest to grasp problem with the WR, and of course the one focused on here because that’s where the official complaint originated, and hence is the most “public”.
The lifting of the Wikipedia article on social networks is to me the biggest “plagiarism-related” problem, because in doing so they seemed to demonstrate a shallow knowledge of the subject, especially when rewording introduced errors. That they then went on to use this shallow knowledge to reach *highly controversial* conclusions about climate science being a closed shop that suffered from groupthink is extremely poor (conclusions that SNA experts disagree with). A key finding of the WR – and a key differentiator of the WR conclusions from the NAS report – thus seems to rest on poorly researched, poorly understood and heavily plagiarised and unattributed material.
Attempting to use Trenberth’s draft speech to belittle the charges against the WR as the original posting does is IMO a pretty weak move.
Dave H, another thing you didn’t mention: DC showed that Wegman didn’t actually do any “analysis” in his report, he simply took M&M’s code, which cherry-picked a trivial 1% subset of “hockey sticks” from 10,000 pseudoproxy simulations, and ran it on his computer. Wegman didn’t demonstrate any statistical expertise in this particular instance, and it’s apparent that he didn’t even understand the details of what M&M’s code did. Unsurprisingly, he got the same insignificant results, which had no meaningful impact on the MBH’s paleoclimate reconstructions. In other words, there aren’t any valid, supportable conclusions left to defend in Wegman’s report. It’s as worthless as dust-bunnies.