NOTE: since this is clearly an important finding with far reaching implications, this will be a “top post” at WUWT for the next couple of days. I urge other bloggers to spread the word. – Anthony
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Just when you think the bottom of the Hockey Stick rabbit hole has been reached, Steve McIntyre finds yet more evidence of misconduct by the Team.
The research was from Briffa and Osborn (1999) published in Science magazine and purported to show the consistency of the reconstruction of past climate using tree rings with other reconstructions including the Mann Hockey Stick. But the trick was exposed in the Climategate dossier, which also included code segments and datasets.
In the next picture, Steve shows what Briffa and Osborn did – not only did they truncate their reconstruction to hide a steep decline in the late 20th Century but also a substantial early segment from 1402-1550:
As I’ve written elsewhere, this sort of truncation can be characterized as research misconduct – specifically falsification. But where are the academic cops? Any comment from Science magazine?
Steve also discusses the code underlying the plot and you can see how the truncation is a clear deliberate choice – not something that falls out of poorly understood analysis or poor programming.
In the comments, Kip Hansen posts the following:
In reference to Mann’s Trick….obliquely, yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling on Zicam (a homeopathic nasal spray) ruled in part:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/23/health/23bizcourt.html?_r=1&hpw
The Supreme Court has said that companies may be sued under the securities law for making statements that omit material information, and it has defined material information as the sort of thing that reasonable investors would believe significantly alters the ‘total mix’ of available information.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for the court on Tuesday, roundly rejected Matrixx’s proposal that information can be material only if it meets standards of statistical significance.
‘Given that medical professionals and regulators act on the basis of evidence of causation that is not statistically significant,’ she wrote, ‘it stands to reason that in certain cases reasonable investors would as well.’
Thus, hiding or omitting information, even if one feels it is ‘erroneous’ or ‘outlying’ (or whatever they claim) is still possibly fraudulent ( or in this case, scientifically improper) if it would ‘add to the total mix of available information’. Statistical significance is not to be the deciding factor.
In the case of Briffa and Osborn, no statistical fig leaf was applied that justified the truncation of data, so far as I can see.
Rob Honeycutt: Or you could compare it to a trial of a new kind of pain relief pill. 30 of 40 testers report good results, while the last 10 die of internal bleedings. It would be silly to mention those 10 in the report, don’t you think?
(/sarc)
Rob I like your analogy but not your reasoning nor your conclusion. There are not four sets of information, there is one – there is no inherent difference between the records before 1550 or after 1960 and those in between those dates, just the coincidence that there seems to be a rough match with the instrumental record – to the extent that it exists and is reliable – during the in-between years and not before or after.
You can either use the tree ring data, or reject it, depending on whether it is a good enough fit across the whole instrumental record to be relied upon for earlier years. (It clearly isn’t.) Putting in a little bit of code that allows you to pick the years that suit your argument (as Steve’s reader PaulM spotted in the code) is quite simply dishonest and unscientific, and renders B & O 1999 and any other work that depends on it entirely useless.
By the way, Noelle, there are Cold Case Units in many jurisdictions that use modern technology to investigate unsolved crimes, and in quite a few cases they have led to the apprehension of criminals or the overturning of wrongful convictions. Very few people seriously argue that their work is of no value, and that we should let sleeping dogs lie. Like justice, truth is too important.
Sam Parsons says:
March 24, 2011 at 10:01 am
‘There is no question that this is scientific misconduct. There is no question that “hiding the decline” is scientific misconduct. The people who did these things and everyone in the publication process who wasn’t deceived are guilty of serious moral error.
Dr. Muller in his Youtube video says that “hiding the decline” was deception but not morally wrong. Puhleeese Dr. Muller, if we accept that point then we accept the point that scientific publications can contain deliberate deception regarding the main point of the article but the authors have done no moral wrong.’
My friend Michael Turley says:
“Dr Muller’s comment is indicative of humanistic relative morality….he believes the metaphysical religion of global warming, therefore any LIE told to promote the religion is moral in relativistic terms…..darwinism uses this relative morality when known frauds (piltdown man, Nebraska Man, Haekle’s Embryos) are presented in text books to promote that unscientific position, and you see it in marxist societies as the relative morality is that any atrocity in the defense of the religion of marxism is “moral”, they justified the murder of over 100 million people like this…….these people are fundamentally, ideologicaly insane.”
In regards to…
<blockquote cite="The Supreme Court has said that companies may be sued under the securities law for making statements that omit material information, and it has defined material information as the sort of thing that reasonable investors would believe significantly alters the ‘total mix’ of available information.”>
What you are going run into is the definition of “material information.” Not all information is material information. If part of data is clearly not in agreement with most of the other data that it would be reasonably considered immaterial to the broader evidentiary conclusions.
David… Your argument suggests that you can never use tree ring data as proxies because you can never expect to get a perfect picture of temperature. It’s an unreasonable conclusion if you are endeavoring to learn something about climate.
Look, I don’t think that anyone working in the dendro world is going to tell you that tree rings are a wonderful proxy. Hence all the papers on the NH divergence problem. But they do provide a great many clues and collectively help to paint a broader picture of historic temperatures.
Do you abandon an area of research because it’s hard or has challenges? Of course not. But you do take the data with a modicum of skepticism and place it in the context of all the other data that is available.
Sorry Rob, you really don’t get it, do you? Try to stick with the subject – it may prove more helpful than analogies.
You have a dendro record that runs from 1404 to 2000, and the bits between 1550 and 1960 appear to correlate with the temperature record, while the rest doesn’t. So you conceal the bits that don’t suit your argument. You don’t of course, have any good reason to remove the first or last parts of the record – you can’t prove that forest fires or inadequate measurement mean that they are inherently unreliable – you just don’t like them, and to use a hackneyed phrase, they represent an inconvenient truth.
So you airbrush them away and then cover your traces for 12 years, until Steve uncovers them.
And you see nothing wrong with that? Really? Or are you just being tribal and they are your sonofabitches?
Eric Anderson
“Amazing that at some point one of them didn’t wake up one night thinking, “Wait a minute, this is wrong.””
Maybe they did – someone put the ClimateGate material out in the wild, and it hasn’t been shown to be a hack job.
TimTheToolMan says:
Moderator: Sorry I keep messing up the blockquotes. (blah!)
REPLY: Then stop using them, I’m tired of cleaning up messes – Anthony
Rob Honeycutt says:
March 24, 2011 at 3:08 pm
“If part of data is clearly not in agreement with most of the other data that it would be reasonably considered immaterial to the broader evidentiary conclusions.”
===============================================
Rob, if I’m not mistaken, the data is pretty much the same(same tree rings), the interpretations are what is different. But then, that’s probably for another query, wouldn’t you say?
[penalty snip for screwing up the entire thread with messed up bolding – Anthony]
See this: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/19/my-biggest-pet-peeve-on-running-this-blog/
Analogy. Four friends are trying to prove that the world is warming. Three live next door to each other in the city and have similar measurements showing warming over the past 50 years. The fourth is living on a golf course and has measurements showing no warming over the past 50 years. Seems rather silly not to kill the guy on the golf course and replace his measurements with an average of the other 3.
I agree wholeheartedly with Matt that these so-called scientists should be stripped of their ‘qualifications’ and publicly dishonoured. Spending some time in a pillory would allow them to reflect on the enormity of the harm their actions have caused, and continue to cause. Given that public policy decisions involving many tens of billions of dollars have been made on the basis of the so-called “sound science” spewed by these charlatans, they would deserve every minute spent in such contemplative thought.
Sam Parsons, March 24, 2011 at 10:01
Dr. Muller in his Youtube video says that “hiding the decline” was deception but not morally wrong.
Please note: irony – the use of words to convey a meaning that is the opposite of its literal meaning.
Richard Muller said, “They deceived the public, and they deceived other scientists but they did nothing that was immoral, illegal or anything like that.
When will other scientist speak up and say: this is pretty f%&¤#n far from ok?
Dear Moderator. I see my post that was somewhat critical of Steve McIntyre was deleted. I expect that sort of behaviour from RealClimate but am surprised it occurs on WUWT. If sceptic sites exclude all unfavourable comments their credibility may suffer
REPLY: I didn’t see it, some other moderator may have deleted it, or it is possible it may have ended up in the spam filter and got deleted. But you are welcome to submit it again. Be mindful of blog policy, put my name to attention- Anthony
GeneDoc you said on March 24, 2011 at 9:48 am
“I chair our school’s Committee on Scientific Integrity, which investigates all allegations of misconduct in our sphere.”
The answer is to insist that all the data, metadata and programs are properly archived at the time of publication and that this all should be freely and publicly accessable to all interested parties.
Total visability will not only make continued deception much harder to maintain, but it will make it much less likely to occur in the first place.
Nobody wants to be seen to be incompetent (at best) – at worst – I’ll leave that for others to express.
You should teach that to your students.
Hammer it in until they understand.
If they do not disclose what they do, then they will eventually fall into traps and will be failures.
We need to call this what it is. This is fraud and lies used in an attempt to influence and support a fraudulent theory. McIntyre has yet again done the heavy lifting that has either been neglected by the lazy scientific peer review process or willfully ignored by partisan scientific hacks.
Because of the profound implications of much of this research with respect to national economic policies, I believe the time has come to prosecute those who have willfully perpetrated this fraud through the criminal judicial system. A good starting point would be to contact the appropriate prosecuting attorney in the country of the fraudulent “scientist”. It unfortunately appears that neither the Universities nor the Periodical Publishers have the will to honor their obligation to the integrity of scientific progress.
Rob Honeycutt says:
March 24, 2011 at 3:42 pm
“You do NOT include those pieces of information that so obviously do not agree with all the other available data.”
This is total hogwash. What you are saying is that scientists should only publish data that agrees with the consensus because all other data is obviously wrong. This is corrupt and dishonest.
UnfrozenCavemanMD – you said in part, on March 24, 2011 at 10:47 am:
“These folks are either corrupt to the core, or so blinded by their belief in their noble cause that no depth of conduct appears too low if it serves their agenda.”
I believe that for the most part it is a case of “nobel cause corruption”.
There is a lot of cognitive dissonance as well.
Some part of their brain is telling them that what they are doing is wrong and morally corrupt.
But they have nailed their flag to the mast and cannot retreat without complete loss of face and probably career, income and fringe benefit overseas trips to luxurious places and other nice perks as well.
We should pitty them really.
A whole generation of scientists will be disgraced when the day of reckoning comes and the world realises that the emperor CO2 has no clothes.
As far as climate science is concerned, the whole scientific method has been corrupted.
In place of a fearless search for the truth, they have subsituted the legal barrister’s method of cherrypicking from all the data, thet best pieces of evidence to further the political objective they are supporting.
Rob Honeycutt says:
March 24, 2011 at 3:32 pm
…….Same with dendro proxies. Their job is to make a best guess as to what the data represents.
Surely NO.
Their job is to make an educated guess; and know and recognise when they have to junk the junk.
Surely they should INVESTIGATE why that data set that is supposed to agree with the other data sets; doesn’t ?
Either explain it – or develop a new theory that does explain it.
And the new theory that does explain it would appear to be : tree rings are NOT good proxies for temperature.
Picking a sub-set of the data that happens to match is a lie; presenting any conclusions based on such a lie is dis-honest.
Or is climate ‘science’ some how different from Engineering and normal science ?
are
guys!
Ian
Steve McIntyre is not becoming obsessive.
He is being thorough.
He is knitting the web so tight around these rather slippery gentlemen that eventually they will not be able to slip through.
Other people are taking different approaches.
Steve is doing what he does best – a thorough forensic examination.
AusieDan says:
March 24, 2011 at 4:35 pm
“I believe that for the most part it is a case of “nobel cause corruption”
You may well be right in your conclusion, however the following has always disturbed me greatly:-
From: Phil Jones
To: Tom Wigley
Subject: Re: MBH
Date: Fri Oct 22 15:13:20 2004
Cc: santer1@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
“Bottom line – their is no way the MWP (whenever it was) was as warm globally as the last 20 years. There is also no way a whole decade in the LIA period was more than 1 deg C on a global basis cooler than the 1961-90 mean. This is all gut feeling, no science, but years of experience of dealing with global scales and varaibility.”
“no science”