Steve McIntyre uncovers another hockey stick trick – where are the academic cops?

Let’s face it, the Team, in this case Mann, Jones and Briffa, purported to be tree rings experts able to show global warming. That’s the reason their “science” was funded. To have been honest and objective would have cut their gravy train. As Steve points out, this practice of writing code to specifically delete certain data sets is misleading and deceitful and was apparently done with the intention to mislead.
How much more is in the climategate release?
Please also note that the 225 voters (to date) only gave this post 2 1/2 stars. Is that congruent to the high post listing, or are there other factors at play in this voting?

John A Fleming says
“What makes this significant, is that these Mannian graphs show up everywhere. In the March 2011 issue of SciAm, Julian Sachs, et. al., who nd-of-rain”> document their measurements over time of the latitude location of the ITCZ rainfall bands, rather than plot their data, they just copy in Mann’s latest version. Apparently, the ITCZ location is not a good proxy for temperature, yet.”
Scientific American has now removed the graph and cut half the article after numerous commenters pointed out the copied hockey stick, plus the inaccuracy of the study. No reason, no excuse.
I stopped paying attention to them after the Bjorn Lomborg fiasco. They should be called Pseudoscientific American.

Although he doesn’t come out and say it, Steve McIntyre is pointing the accusing finger at a technical peer review process that is failing miserably. The kinds of things he has been digging up ordinarily wouldn’t come up during the normal 45 or so day technical peer review of a submitted paper. Steve goes far deeper than that, and his revelations amount to the kind of peer review my professors at UC Berkeley warned me about back in the early 1970’s — that’s why they demanded total transparency of data, analysis codes and analyses in my PhD thesis.
Will the editors of Science magazine take these revelations seriously? Don’t count on it — they didn’t when it was shown that the infamous Oreskes article on “global warming consensus” in the December, 2004 issue of Science could not be replicated by independent investigators, myself included. As a member of AAAS, I’m getting sick and tired of seeing this organization demanding more of the peer review process when it comes to medical research, but, at the same time, not demanding the same for climate research.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Climategate
“Much of the furor is over the scientists’ use of the word “trick,” such as when one of the scientists wrote: “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” While the denialists see this as some sort of conspiracy, it is really a mathematical way of dealing with a problem (a mathematical “trick”) and reflects scientists interacting with each other.”
Edward Thorpe of “Beat The Dealer” fame described a “mathematical trick” of cheating blackjack dealers. Cheaters would peek at the top card. If the card helped the dealer or hurt the player, the dealer would honestly deal out the card. If the top card hurt the dealer or helped the player, the cheating blackjack dealer would hold back the top card and deal a second card. The net result was dishonest dealers winning more than normal chance.
Mann’s mathematical trick is exactly equivalent to dishonest dealers withholding bad cards (data) and dealing seconds

Steve.. I can’t believe you’re still spinning that news. The method is called removing outliers. Basic stuff, for a mathematician or statistician, i’m not impressed.
REPLY: You really have no idea what you are talking about do you? Datapoints are one thing, entire decades and centuries worth of data are something else altogether.
Read the section on exclusion
“Deletion of outlier data is a controversial practice frowned on by many scientists and science instructors; while mathematical criteria provide an objective and quantitative method for data rejection, they do not make the practice more scientifically or methodologically sound, especially in small sets or where a normal distribution cannot be assumed
In regression problems, an alternative approach may be to only exclude points which exhibit a large degree of influence on the parameters, using a measure such as Cook’s distance.[11]
If a data point (or points) is excluded from the data analysis, this should be clearly stated on any subsequent report.”
If you can demonstrate that they have a document basis, such as Grubbs’ test for outliers, you might have an argument, as it stands you are just blowing noxious gas – Anthony

“Jenn Oates says:
March 24, 2011 at 9:02 am
And yet still my students bring in their weekly science articles–ever more and more shrill–that proclaim that the world is coming to an end because it’s warming. No matter how many times I refute it they just don’t believe it because they don’t read it on yahoo news.”
Spot on. There is a large chunk of the population that is media driven. Yahoo is part of that media. Just as Wikipedia is. The idea of honest rational debate does not fit into this situation. We need to change the politics first.

While Steve McIntyre and a multitude of others are doing tireless work without the massive funding and exposure that the Believers enjoy, I feel it incumbent that the more erudite and articulate among you do as much as you can to get the message outside the blogosphere and into the arenas that have the greater effect. As great a venue for communication as it is, you are largely preaching to the choir.
This scam is not the first one perpetrated by this same ideological ilk. CFC, silicone implants, asbestos, second-hand smoke, chromium 6 and others where achieved by the same processes. Cook the books, toss out tons of questionable pal-reviewed papers, do some judge shopping throw in a liberal dash of anecdotal, heart rending fluff to stay atop the moral high horse and lo and behold with a free pass from a mass media that votes and donates 90% your way, your rich, famous and a hero in the weeping eyes of the guilt-ridden festering mass of anthro-apologists. All of this has given them whatever confidence they needed to not give up. Let alone the penalty incurred when this house of cards collapses (but then the public and the media has such short attention spans).
Our good friend John Coleman proposed class action lawsuits. While the mass-media had no trouble at all ignoring Climategate and anything else that questions the Belief, a litigation that forced the principles to put up or shut up might force their hand. Meanwhile the rest of you that have credentials and the abilities to convey rational and civil discourse to the public at large need to hit all of the MSM outlets that allow comment in as large of numbers as possible.
Oh. we also need leadership and organization.

Erm…passing aside the issue of whether or not this is bad practice (full disclosure: it seems sensible to me, and what surprises me, actually, is that any of the data series was left in at all; were I in Briffa’s place, I would have probably ended up removing the entire series due to the possibility that its intersection with the rest of the tree series was just a coincidence, and made a note to that effect in the paper. If you disagree with me and want to say so, by all means go ahead, but do me the courtesy of responding to the rest of my post, as well), am I the only one who’s really curious about WHY, exactly, this particular tree series is behaving in such a weird way? I mean…That’s really quite bizarre. I do note that the proxy temperature derived from it appears to nosedive during warmer periods (that is, now-ish and towards the tail end of the MWP), which might or might not be telling; perhaps warm periods are associated with an odd shift in precipitation patterns in the area? Is there any way to check that (historical records, ideally, but if that’s not an option surely there must be some other proxy for rainfall available).