Post updated below – see my own experience with plagiarism by NOAA and how it was solved easily – Anthony
I get word that USA Today reports that the caterwaulings of the anonymous Canadian named Deep Climate and his accusations of plagiarism made against Dr. Edward Wegman in the Wegman report to Congress, which later became the paper Said et al, (published in the journal Computational Statistics and Data Analysis) has succeeded.
The paper, which revealed some questionable behavior by climate scientists has been yanked by the journal’s legal team after it went through a private 3 person review. Here’s what USA Today says:
The journal publisher’s legal team “has decided to retract the study,” said CSDA journal editor Stanley Azen of the University of Southern California, following complaints of plagiarism. A November review by three plagiarism experts of the 2006 congressional report for USA TODAY also concluded that portions contained text from Wikipedia and textbooks. The journal study, co-authored by Wegman student Yasmin Said, detailed part of the congressional report’s analysis.
Wegman’s attorney told USA Today:
“Neither Dr. Wegman nor Dr. Said has ever engaged in plagiarism,” says their attorney, Milton Johns, by e-mail. In a March 16 e-mail to the journal, Wegman blamed a student who “had basically copied and pasted” from others’ work into the 2006 congressional report, and said the text was lifted without acknowledgment and used in the journal study. “We would never knowingly publish plagiarized material” wrote Wegman, a former CSDA journal editor.
Well, congratulations to Deep Climate for being able to attack a man in another country without having having to put your name behind it. Such courage. You must be proud.
So, no problem from my view. I expect the report will be rewritten, with citations where needed, maybe even adding extra dictionary definitions of words and their origins to satisfy the imagined slights against our lexiconic ancestors envisioned by DC and Mashey man, and they’ll resubmit it with the very same conclusions. That’s what I would do.
UPDATE: Some folks have erroneously come to the conclusion that I’m siding with the idea that plagiarism is OK . Let me be clear, that’s not true at all. My issue is how this whole affair was conducted. I had my own issue with plagiarism in the case of NOAA/NCDC which I dealt with in an easy, simple way. Here’s the issue:
More dirty pool by NCDC’s Karl, Menne, and Peterson
Menne solved the attribution issue at my request…and here’s the solution and path forward I offered, with a hint to DC, Mashey, et al to take it.
How to solve attribution conflicts in climate science
I wrote then:
So, apology made, attribution added, document updated, and the problem was solved. Simple, I’m satisfied. Of course I could have been a jerk about it and demanded all sorts actions via formal complaints, copyright claims, etc. But I didn’t. It simply didn’t rise to that level.
It would have been easy for DC and Mashey to follow that example, instead they chose the “dark side” and demanded that pound of flesh along with a national newspaper writer acting as an accessory for public flogging. It’s ugly the way it was handled. Again, the best way forward, now that they have their pound of flesh, is for Said et al to make the appropriate edits and citations were needed, and resubmit the paper. – Anthony
As pointed out by some commenter or blogger, maybe yourself elsewhere, what a journal does or doesn’t do has no force with respect to Congressional hearings; they determine their own sources and standards.
deep climate is [snip – sorry, as much as I dislike the guy’s actions, I’m not gonna out him. Hopefully he’ll have the integrity to out himself – Anthony]
“Deep Climate” has always impressed me as something of a priss. So, as you state, these things will get added but they won’t make a bit of change to the conclusion.
It is sadly amusing that when people can’t argue the message, they begin to search for peripheral technicalities on which to focus as if imply that because a cite was missing, the entire paper is invalid.
Yeah, it delays things, but that’s about it.
Academic bad practice, if established, is not acceptable but it is certainly true that those of us who come to rely upon the assistance of others in doing our research run the risk that they will not do their job properly. Wegman, has almost certainly fallen into this trap and is having to pay the price. I hope that his reputation has not been damaged beyond repair. However, the retraction of this article means absolutely nothing as far as its conclusions are concerned. They still stand.
It is a tactic no one should pursue to this extent, nevertheless a warning about just how careful you have to be if you want to take on the “team”.
I’m sorry, if the paper was sloppy enough to contain plagiarised text, then it is sloppy enough to contain other mistakes. Whether warmist or sceptic, we should be aiming for the highest standards and just because some annoying individual came out the blue and asked annoying questions which the journal properly investigated, we shouldn’t be supporting bad papers.
It would be better to contrast how this individual was received and Steve McAlpine. That would be a far far better comment than to criticise the journal for acting properly.
OT.
Hathaway looks like ‘marching’ his prediction uphill again.
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/ssn_predict_l.gif
Is this a further salvo in the societal war to end all (wars), the fight to control hearts and minds, where truth is the first casualty and the end result is one that only a dictator can solve? Is this the path to an ideal world?
We all make mistakes. The answer is to stand up, take it on the chin and do the job again properly and according to the rules.
That way lies respect and honour.
EO
This entire issue makes my head spin.
With regard to “The hockey stick” one side asserts all that matters is the conclusion while the other side asserts all that matters is transparency, code/data availability, flaws in the method and so on.
With regard to a report and follow-up paper criticising “The hockey stick” the sides reverse. Suddenly one side only cares about the conclusion and whether those that found problems are anonymous or not.
Is there no possibility of rationality in this debate? Does it really have to be divided up into camps that don’t care about anything but whether the bottom line supports them or not? Can we not all agree that the answers reached are much less important than the processes and methods used to achieve them?
Too bad the IPCC isn’t subject to the same level of scrutiny.
+1 to what McSceptic says.
This is fair game. I have no problem with the entire process. Live and learn. Next.
According to the USA Today piece, it was “Computer scientist Ted Kirkpatrick of Canada’s Simon Fraser University [who] filed a complaint with the journal after reading the climate science website Deep Climate”
If Dan Vergano, the author of the article, is not able to distinguish between a “website” and a “blog” [the latter of which is not deeemed to be “an acceptable source of information” under the IPCC’s new, improved “rules” wrt non-peer-reviewed literature, btw], I’m not sure that I would give much credence to the rest of his account.
But that aside, it seems to me that Vergano (or his editor) is attempting to fudge a conflation of the actual Wegman Report with whatever was published in the Journal.
The Journal has retracted an unnamed “study”. But the same paragraph indicates that the “analysis [in this study] was an outgrowth” of the Wegman Report.
Furthermore, there’s no indication in the article of whose work was allegedly plagiarized … Wikipedia?! It was the publisher’s legal beagles who advised retraction of the “study” … and publishers’ legal beagles have their own “precautionary principle”, don’t they?!
As this is a short string I’d like to enter a slightly off topic comment: all of the material collected by WUWT and similar bodies is NOT getting through to the public at large. This needs to be addressed, as there is little public discussion on the subject, because at the moment there is very little actual physical evidence (except that my garden here in SE England needs rain!) The stories of melting glaciers, droughts, floods, sinking islands, etc are mostly too far away for people in Britain to worry about. The stories are therefore half-believed, which means that the people who shout the loudest will be listened to for want of front page refutation.
On the rare occasions I can get anyone to listen, all I get is “well you would say that, wouldn’t you?” as I follow Socrates in trying to make people question their statements, which is really annoying to them, and childishly satisfying to me. I know why Socrates enemies wanted to get rid of him!
If it’s plagarism then it means others agree with him and so strengthens the concensus on the point he is making.
The take home message is “Do it properly first time”.
Doubtless the RC lot will be trumpeting this as complete vindication of Mann & all his works.
Deep Climate’s allegations are ill founded when they come to the substance of the report; but in a politicized atmosphere close citation is vital simply to deny this sort of cheap shot.
That blog that no one reads any more, Sincere Climate?, will have its usual field day using a missed cite to hide little items like the complete corruption of the GISS temp record.
However, in the end, the reversal of the PDO will put paid to the loonier claims of the warmistas and there need be no citation for steadily declining temps caused by, well, er, nature.
This is unfortunate, but changes nothing about Wegman’s findings – which were not plagiarised and have not been impugned.
Simply listing the publications (as I did in Science and Public Policy) in which the Hockey Team had collaborated is sufficient to show what a tight-knit group they were. All Wegman did was a SNA that showed the degree of collaboration statistically.
It is worth noting that this would not have been a great problem in the past, but the communications revolution has mean that the clique interacts with effectively zero cost. The jumbo jet made travel cheap, so there is much more personal networking. (The IPCC process has exacerbated this). And e-mail has made communication immediate and easy and has brought those who might serve as independent referees into contact (remember Climategate?). This undermined peer review.
Some of the practices of relevant journals (allowing authors to nominate potential referees; revealing the identity of authors to referees) have also corrupted the quality assurance process — as has the IPCC practice of allowing these same people to sit in judgment on their own research and that of any critics, as if there is no conflict of interest in this.
From my recollection at the time of ‘Mashey-gate’ the passages at which the plagiarism charge was levelled were descriptions of method that were essentially ‘boilerplate’ descriptions that resembled similar statements elsewhere. Sloppy scholarship but you’d probably find a high degree of agreement is you ran the same description of method for most scientific papers through approapriate plagiarism detection software, such as Turnitin (which is what my university uses).
So this, as far as I can see, changes nothing in the results, but will be damaging nonetheless. There was a similar case in sociology in Australia in the 1980s that was worse, but had the same cause: over-reliance on a research assistant.
Apologies – only Science and Public Policy was supposed to be italics. I don’t seem to have any clue how to turn italics off!! (Fixed – Anthony)
Chris @ 1:49
Make that +2. There has been too much dodgy science committed. Our only recourse is meticulous methodology. Nothing less.
Ah the trouble is now that a benchmark has been set, Mann et al will have to not only meet it but exceed it and with all the sloppy work that their team puts out, just how long do you think it’s going to take before it comes back to haunt them?
While it is true we should give credit where credit is due, the facts remain the facts. I don’t give a d— if a fact is plagerized, if it is truely a fact.
What has bothered me from the start, concerning fellows like Hansen and Mann, is that facts are turned into these odd things called “adjustments,” and also facts are arranged in strange ways, where a single tree matters a lot, whereas a whole forest is ignored.
There is no copyright on truth. As soon as people start mumbling that truth is theirs, and others can’t see their data, I sense a smokescreen, especially when the truth has been gathered using my tax dollars.
I agree with Scottish Skeptic. We should demand high standards for all publications — those we think are right as well as those we think are wrong.
sharper00 says: May 16, 2011 at 1:36 am
Is there no possibility of rationality in this debate? Does it really have to be divided up into camps that don’t care about anything but whether the bottom line supports them or not? Can we not all agree that the answers reached are much less important than the processes and methods used to achieve them?
Shaperoo, the conclusion reached should be a logical outcome of applying the scientific method. If one side (the warmists) are not applying the scientific method, then we can hardly accept their results without criticising the method (gut feeling) that they use.
Of course, if climate “science” were a proper science, then they would understand that open and honest debate of their methods is a vital component in improving and validating their methodology.
In contrast, they see open and honest debate as some kind of heretical attack on their belief system: a belief system which basically is that they and they alone should be the arbiters of what counts as “science” in climate “science”.
This is a situation that shouldn’t have happened. The message has been drowned in the noise from vital omitted details. If you put your name to a paper then you must surely check the contents very rigorously before submitting it. The blame lies with the author(s) and no one else.
You know what the Nixon-era tactic of ‘manufactured, irrelevant, cruel and incorrect rumors or outright falsehoods designed to damage or destroy an opponent’ was called?
It began with the word ‘rat’, with a four-letter word attached right behind. We all know who exactly the rat-lovemaking gang is.
Anthony, he seems pretty giddy about this…
http://deepclimate.org/2011/05/15/retraction-of-said-wegman-et-al-2008-part-1/
http://deepclimate.org/2011/05/15/retraction-of-said-wegman-et-al-2008-part-2/
I’ll bet $100 that the headlines in the alarmists blogs, articles, etc. say something to the effect of…”Wegman report retracted! Hockey stick Vindicated!”, even though it did no such thing.
I read this blog with enthusiasm every day and have for years. I am on your side.
But this post is a disappointment, and ill-advised if you value your scientific reputation.
I really think the Accuweather site is 100% AGW but is lited as lukewarmer here. For example
http://www.accuweather.com/blogs/climatechange/Science look at what they post!
Wegman needs to rewrite the report and resubmit it regardless because the conclusions don’t change.
UK Sceptic: Agreed. We should all beware relying on the lazy research assistant. But copying boilerplate descriptions of what the method of SNA entails is not in the same league as, say, running an analysis and finding that the result depends upon the inclusion of one series of data, then not declaring that in the publication submitted, but putting the results in a secret folder. Or, say, constructing a method that mines red noise for the desired pattern. Or, perhaps, hiding a decline, or representing a jaw and a skull as coming form the same species as in Piltdown Man. How many ‘n’s are there in man?
Not only rewrite the report but include a ridiculously detailed supplement with updates since it was published, including stuff on Climategate and McShane and Wyner etc…
This is a golden opportunity to bring all the conclusions from the report back into the debate and officially bury the Hockey Stick.
“Well, congratulations to Deep Climate for being able to attack a man in another country without having having to put your name behind it. Such courage. You must be proud.”
Odd, I don’t remember any comments like this from Wegman about the anonymous person who stole the mails in ClimateGate…
I would add that if you are going to cite to a particular paper, do not quote a passage, and then use that to bolster a conclusion opposite to the one the source actually came to. That really doesn’t support your work, makes you look like you never looked at the original source (which you probably didn’t anyway) and reduces your credibility in the eyes of someone who follows up on sources. Sadly, it supports your credibility and conclusions in the eyes of someone who just uncritically reads the paper, which is probably most people. Article to follow soon.
So what does this mean for Bradley then?
http://climateaudit.org/2010/10/18/bradley-copies-fritts/
icecover says:
May 16, 2011 at 4:16 am
Careful! Some members are definitely true believers and others not so. I will not name names though.
Open season on Bradley then.
starzmom says:
“I would add that if you are going to cite to a particular paper, do not quote a passage, and then use that to bolster a conclusion opposite to the one the source actually came to. That really doesn’t support your work, makes you look like you never looked at the original source (which you probably didn’t anyway) and reduces your credibility in the eyes of someone who follows up on sources.”
Sorry but that is not necessarily true. I quoted a passsage from a paper by a well-known Harvard academic in a peer-reviewed paper journal to prove that his conclusion was false. The citation (for which I did not seek permission) was necessary to show how he had misused a statistical technique to manipulate the data (perhaps unconscioulsy).
My own article, which was published in a professional magazine drew criticism from several of his disciples (who had bothereed to read it) but, following further explanation, each conceded my point and agreed that the original conclusion was nbot supported by the facts.
Slavishly following starzmom’s recommendation would inhibit all rebuttals.
USAToday gets it wrong of course. They state:
The Wegman Report takes great pains to state they are not discussing global warming – just the statistics used in the Mann studies on tree rings.
It was Mann and his “Team” that used the hockey stock studies to make the case that global warming was unprecedented.
I wonder if Said et al. will be asked to correct the problem and produce an amended paper. From what I have ascertained about the content that was cribbed all it lacked was attribution. Sounds like a pretty simple fix.
Also note that while the paper is by Said et al., the USAToday article is all about the Wegman Report.
Editorial note:
In the top post, you should name the journal which published Said et al. 2008, viz., Computational Statistics and Data Analysis.
OK.
I agree it should be retracted, as long as the IPCC AR1/2/3/4/etc that contain improper citations & references according to their own rules are retracted also.
I agree that your response to this has been disappointing.
If this had been an AGW scientist trotting out a plagiarised paper, you would be (quite rightly) sooooo all over it by now.
But instead we get an attack on an otherwise anonymous blogger.
This is very weak indeed!
vukcevic says:
May 16, 2011 at 1:06 am
Hathaway looks like ‘marching’ his prediction uphill again.
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/ssn_predict_l.gif
Hathaway’s forecast is based on data up to the day of the forecast, so will change every month and simply represents the fit to the cycle so far to his standard 3-parameter formula. This is the way it should be. Just as the forecast for next week’s weather should be based on the latest data.
I’m not surprised whatsoever that a student plagarised material from Wikipedia. The inability to think creatively among people in general has become an epidemic. For the most part society has become mindless, as evidenced by the success of the contemporary environmental industry.
Wikipedia should out DC… LOL
Everyone knows this isn’t about plagiarism, it’s about eliminating political obstacles.
Andrew
Sigh…… ok, math and science doesn’t count unless we dot our i’s. What a bizarre and laughable concept.
Anthony, I agree and encourage Said to reword and republish.
The warmistas are such a tiresome group.
Poptech may be on to something…..
I think it bears repeating that Dr Wegman and his colleagues did their work at the request of a duly authorized congressional committee for the great price of FREE-gratis-that is, without compensation.
For this minor terpitude to stain an otherwise praiseworthy effort to ferret out the Truth is too extreme for anyone to abide in good conscience.
Thomas says: May 16, 2011 at 4:45 am
“Well, congratulations to Deep Climate ..
Odd, I don’t remember any comments like this from Wegman about the anonymous person who stole the mails in ClimateGate…
Good point!
but then again, on reflection, if this were climategate Wegman would have been vindicated as some national hero having had a completely different paper checked for signs of bubonic plague (plaguerism!)
Were any warmists bitching about this plagiarism in 2006, 2007, or 2008?
Prior to Climate Gate, the Wegman Report was no more than an ant on the picnic table for the Warmists. Then, after the Wizards of Warm were exposed behind the curtain, then they had to try to destroy any credible skeptical arguments. The Wegman Report served their purpose (even though the warming fraud and the subversion of the peer-review proccess had been documented extensively since).
Scottish Sceptic says:
May 16, 2011 at 12:55 am
**I’m sorry, if the paper was sloppy enough to contain plagiarised text, then it is sloppy enough to contain other mistakes.**
Have you found them and proven your innuendo? If not then you should retract your remarks.
[Snip. Pejorative use of the d-word violates site Policy. ~dbs, mod.]
Does anyone have links to the specific sections of plagiarized text by Wegman, from the original report and/or the Journal article?
Plagarism. What a horrible crime. So horrible that the US has a sitting Vice-President who has been guilty of it on multiple occasions. Will Deep Climate seek to have Joe Biden retracted?
Taphonomic says:
May 16, 2011 at 8:42 am
Plagarism. What a horrible crime. So horrible that the US has a sitting Vice-President who has been guilty of it on multiple occasions. Will Deep Climate seek to have Joe Biden retracted?
===========================================
lol, very nice! In a show of solidarity for truth, I’d join him in such effort!
Hathaway’s forecast is based on data up to the day of the forecast, ….This is the way it should be. Just as the forecast for next week’s weather should be based on the latest data.
Met office has abandoned long range forecasts. Perhaps Hathaway should do the same, and forecast the next week’s SSN.
“As far as I can tell, nobody is disputing the paper’s findings though.”
Although, according to a new article from Dan Vergano, in the opinion of a social networks expert the paper was not very good and furthermore it was not properly peer-reviewed:
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/sciencefair/post/2011/05/retracted-climate-critics-study-panned-by-expert-/1
Apologies for the random quote “As far as I can tell, nobody is disputing…” that doesn’t come from this blog. It was on my clip board and was pasted by mistake. Copy and paste can be a dangerous thing!
Thomas says: May 16, 2011 at 4:45 am
“..Deep Climate… attack a man….without having having to put your name behind it. Such courage. You must be proud.”
Odd, I don’t remember any comments like this FROM WEGMAN about the anonymous person who stole the mails in ClimateGate…(emphasis added)
***************
First, it was our beloved Anthony, (no sarc intended) not Wegman, who made the comment. That aside, you have made a faulty comparison.
The “outing” of Deep Climate would not expose him/her to the same kind of brutal retribution that whoever released the “Climategate” emails would have been exposed to. We have seen the AGW crowd demand everything from revocation of certification to war crime trials, to organized thuggery against those they perceive as being enemies. For example their entire “peer review” process was nothing but a corrupt organization to promote “True-believers” and cast out (blacklist) the “Non-believers”.
I expect that whoever released the “Climategate” emails would have been blacklisted as a minimum and probably sent to prison.
No equivalence at all.
Regards,
Steamboat Jack (Jon Jewett’s evil twin)
What I find newsworthy is that USAToday finds newsworthy a retraction of 4+year old article in the journal Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, based upon a Congressional Report. Not only do they find it newsworthy, but worthy of immediate publication Monday and a followup with peer review by “network analysis expert Kathleen Carley of Carnegie Mellon” on Tuesday morning. What coverage!
When I did my degree, the rule was plagarism was if you copied from a single source. If you used multiple sources, this was called research. I guess you have to be really picky on your researchers. But the bottom line is that the guy who publishes is responsible. The simple truth is that you have to check everything and then check it again. This will not appeal to the warmist. If it fits the religion – it’s OK. But if you are a scientist, you will check and check again.
Paul A says:
May 16, 2011 at 9:07 am
Apologies for the random quote “As far as I can tell, nobody is disputing…” that doesn’t come from this blog. It was on my clip board and was pasted by mistake. Copy and paste can be a dangerous thing!
=====================================
No problem, it was what I was thinking and I suspect many others.
So let me get this straight, the “social networking” aspect isn’t regarded as being very good???
I’m sure by now, all people interested have read the original report and we can make our own judgment as to what that means. It was a side issue (yet detailed) of the report, and the climate-gate e-mails have bore it out the inferences as valid and very relevant.
Sorry, I’ll take reality over the word of a social networking expert every day.
Paul A,
Per the article you linked:
Ri-i-i-i-i-ght. The dog ate his homework.
“Thou shall not plagiarize” is the first thing an undergraduate students learns.
Plagiarizing is dishonest. and i find it truly amazing there are people here defending dishonesty.
Plagiarism is scientific misconduct. Period.
On top of that, Plagiarism from Wikipedia in a supposedly peer reviewed journal article is about as embarassing as it gets. For the authors, the journal and the reviewers.
Found in steven mosher on May 16, 2011 at 12:31 am:
Sorry Anthony, the name was mentioned several times in the comments of this 2009 WUWT post. I just Googled the mentioned name with the blogging handle, the name was given in a comment by Mosh in this 2011 post on Judith Curry’s blog.
And Steve McIntyre outed him in this January 2011 Climate Audit post.
As you have too much integrity to edit the archives to say “It wasn’t done on my site!” you’d best just admit the name is out there and let it be used here, again.
REPLY: With volunteer moderators, I don’t see every comment that gets approved here, there are far too many. Thanks for bringing that one to my attention in 2009. Since he put his name on his website registration then, it became a matter of public record then. Though it appears now he has hidden it, but the genie can’t be put back in the bottle. -Anthony
I have an idea who Deep Climate is in actuality.
kadaka.
Everybody in the know knows who he is. It’s not a big deal. maybe he is worried it will harm his music career. I dont see how, I still watch susan sarandon movies. he needs to get over himself.
Never Mind….His name is common knowledge.
“Not only do they find it newsworthy, but worthy of immediate publication Monday and a followup with peer review by “network analysis…”
this is politics.
they go for the talking points.
the skeptics haven’t got that type of political savoire-faire.
until you have a warmist head.on.a.pike, you’ve not made a dent in their political machine.
next time there is a chance to win over anything in court, it would be politic to ram it home.
one talking point can be used to grab another.
failure to get one when it’s there for the taking becomes a talking point against you, too. e.g., “all this time they have totally failed to nail a catastrophist – so obviously the catastrophists are unimpeachable.”
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
May 16, 2011 at 10:57 am
Found in steven mosher on May 16, 2011 at 12:31 am:
deep climate is
==================================
Heck, and I thought Mosh was just stating he disliked a certain style of oldies music!!! Mosh, I apologize for the thoughts about you after my misunderstanding! I really liked the group! Alot!
Seriously though, it is correct that DC is known, but, he does still enjoy a certain degree of anonymity. Mainly because of people like me that don’t care what his name is. To date, other than typically being fodder for informed skeptics, his greatest claim to fame in the climate discussion is that he forced an understudy to re-write a paper because he copied off of someone else. I can see why he still goes by DC, doesn’t seem like much to hang your hat on.
A lot of judges in the comment section here. I’d just as soon withhold judgment until I saw what was plagiarized and by whom. Plagiarism isn’t necessarily dishonest. It could be a simple oversight in citing sources. In addition, if this plagiarism wasn’t related to the meat and substance of the paper, but minor points/descriptions that the paper could have done without, then how does one call that “scientific” misconduct. I call what the AGW scientists are doing misconduct, immoral, and just plain wrong. I don’t think we can classify the alleged plagiarism in the Wegman paper as misconduct unless some new information is revealed.
How can WUWT’s 5,000 blog postings go unplagiarised as its Editor’s one peer reviewed paper?
This glaring Warmist discrimination merits scrutiny by the Attorney General of Virginia and the Canadian Civil Rights Commission.
Just about everything I think I know came from somewhere . . . . with very very few exceptions . . . does that make me a walking, talking “plagerist” especially if I can’t recall exactly where I learned it?
Plagarism by anyone is dishonest. Such a paper must be withdrawn. Also there must be an investigation (and sanction) of anyone who does this.
This has the smell of vengeance over ClimateGate. Now when someone brings up ClimateGate to a global warming believer the believer can put back Wegman. Maybe they will feel they’ve neutered ClimateGate now by tit-for-tat.
I know Who DC is, well that is to say I know his name. Other than that it means nothing to me here in the UK. Why this individual sees fit to attack papers that don’t toe the warmist line or why he has a vested interest in causing issue by trying to discredit authors of those papers ( if his concern is for the protection of science and the peer review process then I could point out a few papers he ought to be looking more closely at ) I simply can not fathom.
As I said, this is probably because I don’t know ‘who’ he is. Even if he turns out to be the most famous DC that Canada has produced then I still don’t have a clue who he is and nor would I ever care. But you know us in Britain, not fond of keeping tabs on the old colonies.
As has been pointed out. All that matters here is that this is not allowed to be used by warmists to represent some form of victory for warmists and that the findings of the Wegman report are not discredited because Said et al was pulled on the advice of the lawyers after a complaint that that the wording of some methodology has been copied from another source.
My understanding is that the findings remain the same and unchallenged.
I forgot to add that this will be a storm in a teacup if it turns out to be a small matter of citation and attribution.
Let’s hope that the author has the will to rewrite and resubmit with a huge supplement given the knowledge that has come to light since.
Doug in Seattle says:
May 16, 2011 at 6:21 am
I wonder if Said et al. will be asked to correct the problem and produce an amended paper. From what I have ascertained about the content that was cribbed all it lacked was attribution. Sounds like a pretty simple fix.
Indeed but rather embarrassing to have a significant part of the paper attributed to an unknown author on Wikipedia!
Better late than never
REPLY: So inspired by your buds DC and Mashey, you are finally going to give attribution to the photographer? From that post:
“By the way, since “Rabett Run” didn’t provide a source, to give proper credit where it is due, the photo of Alma, MI was taken by http://www.surfacestations.org volunteer Don Kostuch, whom is our most prolific and dedicated volunteer.”
Go ahead, make my day, screwy wabbit, watch the journals too. – A
If I remember correctly, Deep Climate found the programming trick McI used to select for the 100 ( out of 10,000) curves that were the flattest. The hockey sticks and the anti-hockey sticks were conveniently forgotten . As DC pointed out Wegman, knowing little about climate science blindly regurgitated McI’s tricks.
Deep Climate didn’t just find the plaigarism: he found the scientific faults.
Who is Deep Climate?
The USA Today item unintentionally conflates the Said,
et al., 2008 report with the Wegman Report, 2006. The crowing
verbiage at Deep Climate covering the retraction deliberately
obfuscates the differences. The current coverage at Deep Climate
still doesn’t disprove (or actually dispute) the conclusions of the
original Wegman Report.
The Said, et al., 2008, Computational Statistics and Data
Analysis paper being with withdrawn for a legal consideration:
usage without proper attributions, a.k.a. plagiarisms, does not
invalidate the earlier Wegman Report of 2006.
Deep Climate and its fellow travelers carefully avoid any guidance
on how one might cite anonymously authored or edited text
material from an amorphous source such as Wikipedia. The
Wikipedia material itself may have unattributed plagiarisms
throughout. Most high school students would lose a grade on
any report using any material from Wikipedia no matter
who claimed to be the author. Using such less-than-pristine
source material as was done by Said should have been
considered problematic from the start.
The original Wegman Report of 2006 can be found at:
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/WegmanReport.pdf
With proper citations appended to the original Wegman
Report via the Congressional Record, known as an addendum
in academia, it will be an unassailable piece of history.
Thanks to Symon says @ July 19, 2009 at 2:57 pm,
on WUWT, the old rockers among us will always have the
mnemonic ”The DC5” when we contemplate material and
opinions originating from Deep Climate.
Deep Climate and it followship will continue to agitate and
foment a ruction trying to blogmail George Mason University
into opening an academic misconduct investigation of Said, et al.
Perhaps they feel left out of having the vicarious thrills of
shouting, “Whitewash !” as other have had with the multiple
Mann and UEA “investigations”.
John McManus, I don’t think you remember correctly . . .
Just a suggestion, never cite Wikipedia.
So DC is a guitarist. Fascinating. Tamino is a musician and the inimitable dhogaza os a photographer. Next I’ll be learning that Joe Romm is a juried artist and Michael Mann has won awards for his ballet performances. What is with these sensitive types?
Plagiarism in the Wegman report and article make headlines but they aren’t the core problem. The core problem, which plagiarism highlights, is that Wegman was in over his head, using an analytical approach (social network analysis) that neither he nor his coauthors understood, and drawing from that unjustified conclusions. The USA Today article brings this out by interviewing someone who actually does know social network analysis, and turns out to have briefly instructed Wegman’s student (perhaps the poor soul on whom Wegman is now blaming the plagiarism). The retracted paper likely would not have been published had not Wegman’s friend, the editor, waved it through with no peer review.
The surprising thing is that a similar problem applies to the Wegman Report’s statistics, an area where Wegman has fine credentials. But he turns out to have copied code directly from McIntyre, without understanding or being able to explain what it did — where that “hockeyfest” graph really came from, or what McIntyre meant by persistent red noise.
Found at my previous post:
Hey, no problem. I already had dug up that post while researching a highly questionable claim by Gneiss against UAH (namely Dr. Spencer and Christy) where he also attributed to Tami what that 2009 post shows is better attributed to DC. (And why has no one responded to that Gneiss post when it was a mis-characterization per Christy’s 2009 post?)
I had thought you might have simply forgotten those comments. That was, what, more than 400,000 comments ago?
BTW, I hope you didn’t think I was implying you’d do anything nefarious with my “edit the archives” remark. But I did wonder if you’d be “retroactively consistent” with your gentlemanly pledge to not out DC on this site once you were aware it had been done before. 😉
John McManus writes,
“If I remember correctly, Deep Climate found the programming trick McI used to select for the 100 ( out of 10,000) curves that were the flattest. The hockey sticks and the anti-hockey sticks were conveniently forgotten .”
That’s oddly wrong.
What DC found is that McI out of 10,000 replications, McI had picked 100 with the highest “hockey stick index” (and only the upward-turning or positive ones; about half apparently turned down) for this famous graphical “proof” that a sort-of random procedure could make hockey sticks.
Another problem turns out to be what McI was actually doing with that sort-of random procedure, the persistent red noise. DC had to reverse-engineer this because McI would not clearly describe it, and Wegman simply did not know and described it incorrectly in his report.
Poptech says:
May 16, 2011 at 4:26 pm
Who is Deep Climate?
More evidence that “manmade global warming” is a poorly put together rickety contraption that can be found out with just a little bit of research—where’s the substance!
Re: Gneiss on May 16, 2011 at 6:43 pm
All you’re doing is recycling the same garbage that was tossed around last year around (American) Thanksgiving when Wegman came up then.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/23/wegman-responds-to-usa-today/
From that post comes numerous references debunking that nonsense.
From Ross McKitrick:
http://climateaudit.org/2010/11/22/escape-from-jonestown/#comment-245719
From Steve McIntyre:
http://climateaudit.org/2010/11/08/the-hockey-league/#comment-245884 and http://climateaudit.org/2010/11/08/the-hockey-league/#comment-245886
The same bile was spewed at the slightly-earlier WUWT post about Wegman:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/22/wegman-whiners-this-posts-for-you/
DC’s “mistaken” assumptions and flawed analyses were taken apart before when Wegman was brought up, the above was six months ago. Why bring them up now? Are you hoping to make all the many new WUWT readers believe this is some brand-new cutting-edge damning criticism of Wegman and McIntyre and McKitrick that is sitting here unanswered, rather than the same smelly muck that was flushed away and forgotten half a year ago?
>>
Shub Niggurath says:
May 16, 2011 at 3:43 am
It began with the word ‘rat’, with a four-letter word attached right behind.
<<
Rat-fink?
>>
steven mosher says:
May 16, 2011 at 11:15 am
. . . I still watch susan sarandon movies.
<<
Yuck!
Jim
Let me get this strait.
Deep Climate showed that Wegman copied and pasted text from Bradley’s book, and then modified it so he could conclude that Bradley’s work is invalid. Wegman then adds McIntyre’s fabricated hockey sticks, concludes that Mann’s work is invalid. He then and sends his reports to US Congress.
Now it turns out that Wegman dodged peer-review in his scientific publication, where chief editor Stanley Azen (a friend of Wegman) personally accepted it within 5 days after submission. Records of the paper’s external review “were destroyed in an office move” according to Azen.
Wegman meanwhile tosses an unnamed student under the bus to protect himself against the allegations of scientific misconduct and plagiarism.
Deep Climate discovered possibly the most blatant violation of scientific ethics and the peer-review process since the Soon and Baliunas controversy (not to mention the possible legal implications about misleading a US Congress) and Anthony still insist that Wegman and Said should “resubmit it with the very same conclusions” meanwhile critisizing Deep Climate, whose only role here was to discover the truth.
And you guys call yourself skeptics ?
kadaka, here is the reason we have had to endure much of these attacks,
http://climateaudit.org/2010/07/25/the-team-defends-paleo-phrenology/#comment-236353
“Gavin Schmidt’s inline responses to Judy Curry here relies heavily on Wahl and Ammann … 2007 includes a complaint that we haven’t published a rebuttal of Wahl and Ammann in the peer-reviewed litchurchur….Doubtless it would have made things easier for people if we’d responded to Wahl and Ammann/Ammann and Wahl (the SI to which only became available in summer 2008) and it’s on my list of things to do.” – Steve M.
“It’s on my list of things done a long time ago, which might eventually see the light of day if my coauthor would get around to returning the draft. Ahem.” – Ross M.
“… resubmit it with the very same conclusions. That’s what I would do.”
Please do. Choose a nice name, e.g. W. (for ‘Watts’) E. (for Eschenbach) Gman, make up the same old story of CO2 being anything but a greenhouse gas without saying this in any direct manner, copy some stuff from well known frauds like http://www.climategate.nl and publish and get attention, much attention 🙂
REPLY: Heh. You really are a tool, aren’t you? – A
Rob says:
May 17, 2011 at 12:37 am
You must not get out much. The Climategate e-mails showed a much larger violation of the peer-review process and probably a larger ethical violation too. And if you dug a little, you’d find that there are frequent violations of scientific ethics all over, just most of them get swept under rugs by universities (only the politicized topics get out, and often even they only get out if it’s convenient for the MSM bias). Just this past year my university had a professor just disappear overnight once his students turned him in for data fabrication…a little digging showed improper actions in roughly a dozen publications. This never made the newspapers…didn’t even warrant a headline in the school newspaper! The only way I found out about is from my wife’s lab that works with some of the students of that professor.
These things happen all the time. Many times no one reports it because it’s not a big deal. No, that doesn’t make it right and I’m very disappointed in the Wegman group for this. But to declare it “the most blantant violation” in 8 years?…hardly. Maybe in the last 8 days.
-Scott
McManus and Gneiss apparently miss the obvious: The IPCC no longer uses Mann’s Hokey Stick chart because it was shown to be fraudulent. The IPCC loved Mann’s chart. It was visually perfect for scaring the public into opening their wallets. They never would have stopped publishing it if they had not been forced to. The IPCC had to stop using Mann’s chart due to the unarguable fact that it was proven to be bogus.
OTOH, Wegman’s conclusions were valid. Mann, however, deliberately hid important data [in an ftp file labeled “censored“], which would have falsified his conclusions. And Mann knowingly used the corrupted Tiljander proxy to produce yet another bogus hockey stick chart.
Mann’s shenanigans amount to clear scientific misconduct. Seems to be quite the double standard here, no?
[snip over the top – resubmit – Anthony]
Rob says:
May 17, 2011 at 12:37 am
“Let me get this strait.”
‘Straight’ Rob. ‘Straight’.
Smokey writes,
“McManus and Gneiss apparently miss the obvious: The IPCC no longer uses Mann’s Hokey Stick chart because it was shown to be fraudulent.”
Two mistakes in one sentence. Mann’s 1999 reconstruction has since been superceded by newer, better reconstructions done by Mann and a number of other other research teams, but it was never shown to be fraudulent, and is not regarded as such by scientists. Second, the IPCC AR4 does show the 1999 reconstruction for a historical comparison alongside newer ones.
“OTOH, Wegman’s conclusions were valid.”
Very few scientists or statisticians would agree, apart from one point: Mann’s short-centering PC method was sub-optimal, although that proved not to make much of a difference to the results (and not even Wegman claimed that it did). Mann and everybody else has since corrected this and moved on. In other respects Wegman’s conclusions have not stood up at all, whereas Mann’s have been widely replicated. Nor do Wegman’s methods still look valid. It turns out that his statistical work, and not just the lit review, was copied from other sources, without understanding or admission by Wegman. One striking example is his copying McI’s code without even knowing what its noise process was. Instead he wrote a false description (AR(1, .2)) in his report. Not only is that factually wrong, it reveals that Wegman did not know how the results in his “own” report were produced. What’s more, they could not possibly have produced by the claimed AR(1, .2) process, which as a competent statistician he should have recognized himself. (The NAS panel saw this right away, although McI had not told them what he used either.) That’s three failures in one, further reason why it is Wegman, not Mann, whose reputation is now shredded among scientists.
“Seems to be quite the double standard here, no?”
No, single standard, scientific misconduct is bad. As more of Wegman’s misconduct comes to light, his effort to blame it on a student is telling, and also not likely to succeed.
Gneiss is fun to debate. May I deconstruct his post above? Thank you:
I stated that the IPCC can no longer use Mann’s original Hokey Stick chart, and I linked to his original chart, so there can be no doubt which chart I was referring to. Contrary to what Gneiss claims, AR-4 didn’t publish Mann’s original scary chart: “…the IPCC no longer uses the “hockey-stick” graph, they have replaced it with a “spaghetti-graph” of multiple proxy studies…” [source].
Instead, AR-4 used this horrendous spaghetti conglomeration, which is nowhere near as visually arresting as Mann’s original [falsified] chart. The IPCC absolutely loved Mann’s original chart. But since it was debunked by McIntyre & McKittrick, they’ve been forced to use sadly inferior and confusing charts like this. Not nearly as scary, is it?
Next, as I showed in my earlier post, Mann deliberately hid relevant data in a file he labeled “censored“; hidden data which would have falsified his bogus runaway global warming conclusions. As we see, inclusion of the censored data would have showed a declining temperature, instead of Mann’s rising temperature chart. Since the data that Mann hid was done deliberately, I stand by my charge of scientific misconduct. Michael Mann cherry-picked only the data that supported his conclusions, something only a climate charlatan would do.
And I am not alone in saying Mann’s Hokey Stick chart was debunked; the journal Nature was forced to issue a Correction, publicly admitting that Mann’s widely cited global Hockey Stick is erroneous. It is extremely rare for Nature to issue a Correction. But Mann’s chart was so egregious that Nature was forced to take that action.
Next, Gneiss’s ‘accusation’ that Wegman didn’t throw his staffer under the bus is in sharp contrast to the odious Michael Mann, who promptly blamed Ms Tiljander for the corrupted proxy that allowed him to fabricate another bogus hokey stick in Mann ’08. Note that Mann was informed before he published that the Tiljander proxy was NFG.
Mann used the corrupted proxy anyway, because it supported the fraudulent hockey stick he published in his 2008 paper, and in the process he threw the unfortunate Ms Tiljander under the bus to cover himself. The Tiljander fiasco also highlights the corrupt climate pal-review system, where any paper with Michael Mann’s name on it is hand-waved through without uncomfortable questions being asked. Journal referees know where their bread is buttered, and Mann is the rainmaker. And he actively goes after journals that don’t play along with him. By comparison, the Wegman affair looks like a tempest in a teapot: “Look over there, a rainbow!”
It should also be kept in mind that the Wegman Report conclusively showed the incestuous relationship between the “Team” members – which was verified by the subsequent leaking of the Climategate emails.
Wegman’s demonstration of Mann’s “clique” was a major part of the report to Congress, and it has never been falsified. It clearly shows how climate “pal-review” benefits a handful of climate co-conspirators at the expense of the taxpaying public.
Regarding the claims about the Wegman et al. methodology, Gneiss claims that the “NAS panel saw this right away…”. If so, then the NAS needs to explain why they were negligent for so many years before taking any action. Truth be told, the Wegman accusations are minor, and others on the side of the “Team” have plagiarized to a much greater extent, as has been shown here on WUWT.
But action has been taken only against Wegman! Why? Because the Wegman Report to Congress exposed Michael Mann et al. as true scoundrels. Can’t have that, can we – not if the grant gravy train is being jeopardized – thus proving my point that there exists a double standard.
This information won’t be found on the censoring climate alarmist blogs. That’s why WUWT is so amazingly popular [78 million unique hits, and almost six hundred thousand reader comments in only four years]. Folks get the real story here, instead of sanitized alarmist propaganda.
For a detailed debunking of all the nonsense claims made by Gneiss relating to the Hockey Stick read this,
Auditing Temperature Reconstructions of the Past 1000 Years
(International Seminar on Nuclear War and Planetary Emergencies – 40th Session, pp. 69-84, August 2008)
– Stephen McIntyre
http://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/mcintyre.2008.erice.pdf
What a pathetic post Mr Watt.
“UPDATE: Some folks have erroneously come to the conclusion that I’m siding with the idea that plagiarism is OK . Let me be clear, that’s not true at all. My issue is how this whole affair was conducted. ”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Why not mention how the Barton Commission was conducted and the Wegman Report was a political smear campaign?
Why not question why GMU is dragging it feel with their internal investigation?
Why not look around at what is going on in the real physical world out there?
REPLY: Why not learn to spell my name correctly when you insult me from the cowardly safety of the shadows? – Anthony Watts
When everything you “know” about a field of science comes from nonscientists and political blogs, you can feel great certainty without being right.
For example Smokey writes,
“And I am not alone in saying Mann’s Hokey Stick chart was debunked; the journal Nature was forced to issue a Correction, publicly admitting that Mann’s widely cited global Hockey Stick is erroneous. It is extremely rare for Nature to issue a Correction. But Mann’s chart was so egregious that Nature was forced to take that action.”
But in reality neither the journal Nature nor Mann (who wrote a corrigendum, as authors often do) said anything about his reconstruction being erroneous; in fact it said the opposite, while simply correcting the description of supplementary material that had accompanied his article. You’d know that if you read the journal, but not from the Heartland spin Smokey cites.
Poptech writes,
“For a detailed debunking of all the nonsense claims made by Gneiss relating to the Hockey Stick read this”
Or, you could read some work by other paleoclimatologists.
Poptech, thanx for that interesting resource.
And at the rate he’s digging, Gneiss is going to emerge somewhere in China pretty soon. So, to deconstruct Gneiss’s latest attempt to rescucitate Michael Mann’s evaporated credibility:
First, Gneiss was unable to explain away Mann’s shenanigans, so he attacked the messenger instead – Heartland. But facts are what matter, not who reports them. The facts show conclusively that Mann deliberately falsified his data set in order to arrive at a predetermined and bogus conclusion. That is fraud in anyone’s book. Gneiss just can’t get away from the fact that Michael Mann is a climate charlatan.
Next, Gneiss implies something that is provably false: he claims that Nature routinely issues Corrections regarding a peer reviewed submission – when in fact it is excruciatingly painful for any journal to be forced into issuing a Correction, which certainly impacts a journal’s credibility.
And Gneiss avoided responding to my pointing out that Mann’s bogus Hokey Stick chart was never published in AR-4, as Gneiss falsely stated.
Finally, Michael Mann was forced to issue a retraction of some sort, having been caught out in a lie. Does Gneiss believe that Mann wanted to admit that his hokey sticks were bogus?? Damage control; that was Mann’s only option. But those of us who follow the Mannian soap opera know all the playas, and we know charlatans when they see them.
Michael Mann is the Elmer Gantry of climatology – and his true believer acolytes are backing a three-legged nag. Gneiss will protest. But it’s true.
McIntyre is a smart guy who was offered a graduate scholarship to MIT,
Stephen McIntyre, B.Sc. Mathematics, University of Toronto (1969), Graduate Scholarship, Mathematical Economics, MIT; Commonwealth Scholarship, Oxford University, UK; PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics), Oxford University, UK (1971), Policy Analyst, Government of Ontario, Canada; Expert Reviewer, IPCC (2007)
Jimmy, thanks for correcting my spelling.
Scott: “The Climategate e-mails showed a much larger violation of the peer-review process and probably a larger ethical violation too.”
Kind request : can you mention ONE paper that is shown by the Climategate e-mails to be a much larger violation of the peer-review process (and probably a larger ethical violation too) ?
Otherwise, my statement still stands : Deep Climate discovered possibly the most blatant violation of scientific ethics and the peer-review process since the Soon and Baliunas controversy.
Smokey : “Michael Mann was forced to issue a retraction”
Please provide evidence for your increasingly ignorant statements.
Found in citizenschallenge on May 17, 2011 at 8:49 pm:
May I shine a light on those shadows?
He signs his blog posts with “Peter.” That was enough to search out an open letter posted on a blog to Lord Monckton signed Peter Miesler, of Durango, Colorado, with the address of the citizenschallenge blog, posted in the Responses here (first one):
http://bbickmore.wordpress.com/about-this-blog/
There’s a barely-there Facebook entry for Peter Miesler listing the “citizenschallenge” blog as his website (“Friends” include Michael Tobis, Tim Lambert, and Chris Mooney!):
http://www.facebook.com/people/Peter-Miesler/100001317890731
Peter Miesler got a “Letter to the Editor” published in a local newspaper in 2010, as found at the online version, however it sadly lacks the blog link:
http://www.summitdaily.com/article/20100612/LETTER/100619966
It’s going after Monckton (seems a reoccurring theme), whom he identifies as “One of the most outspoken proselytizer of obstinate denial…” Cute excerpt:
Thus we know, as of June 2010, he had likely never read much if not never seen before the majority of posts at WUWT, Climate Audit, Bishop Hill, etc.
There was a guest post by “Citizen’s Challenge” from February 2011 where he identified himself as being a “bright eyed high school science student” forty years ago, so he can’t just be summarily dismissed as a young idiot: (Yes I’ve petulantly altered the URL in an easily-fixed manner to deny a trackable link to this deplorably-named blog.)
http://watchingthedeniers.wordpress-dot-com/2011/02/14/the-denial-machine-keeps-on-cranking-guest-post-from-citizens-challenge-2/
Let’s all thank Al Gore for his invention which makes the shadows not as dark nor as deep as they used to be. 😉
Some folks have erroneously come to the conclusion that I’m siding with the idea that plagiarism is OK . Let me be clear, that’s not true at all.
Plagiarism is a silly little thing. Hardly worth mentioning. A lot of fuss over nothing. Everybody plagiarises. Academics do it all the time. It’s clearly nothing to call your lawyer about. Retraction? Smackshion!
I expect the report will be rewritten, with citations where needed, maybe even adding extra dictionary definitions of words and their origins to satisfy the imagined slights against our lexiconic ancestors envisioned by DC and Mashey man, and they’ll resubmit it with the very same conclusions.
No doubt. No doubt at all. Should take a couple of weeks at the most. Just you wait.
Then the shoe will be on the other hand!
My issue is how this whole affair was conducted.
Exactly. We need to focus on the important stuff. The whole academic plagiarism thing and presenting it before the government is just a distraction from the real story.
Rob says:
“Please provide evidence for your increasingly ignorant statements.”
The truth hurts, so Rob now resorts to name-calling. *tsk, tsk!* The Robster is upset because of unimpeachable evidence that Michael Mann was forced to issue a Corrigendum – the equivalent of a retraction of deliberate errors in his original paper – and because Wegman’s oversight of attribution pales into insignificance compared to the outright corruption endemic to the climate pal-review process, as documented in A.W. Montford’s exposé:
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2008/8/11/caspar-and-the-jesus-paper.html
Sorry to bust Robbie’s naive bubble, but the “Team” are simply professional thieves with letters after their names, stealing money from the public trough based on their debunked CAGW pseudo-science.
The “Team” wouldn’t know the scientific method if it bit ’em on the butt, and to this day, thirteen years later, Mann still refuses to release all of the code, data, metadata and methodologies that fabricated his original MBH98/99 Hokey Stick chart that was so worshipped by the UN/IPCC. The IPCC really, really loved Mann’s debunked chart. Too bad they can’t use it any more, eh?☺
Smokey writes.
“unimpeachable evidence that Michael Mann was forced to issue a Corrigendum – the equivalent of a retraction of deliberate errors in his original paper”
So after all this bluster, you still haven’t read it. That’s the point I was making above.
Poptech writes,
“McIntyre is a smart guy who was offered a graduate scholarship to MIT”
Apealing to authority? Let me help.
“Mr. Steve McIntyre has been appointed as Director of Trelawney Mining and Exploration Inc with effect from April 4, 2011. Mr. McIntyre has more than 30 years experience in the mining and mineral exploration business, including over 10 years with Noranda Mines Ltd. and 20 years as an officer and director of several junior mineral exploration companies, including Dumont Nickel Inc., Northwest Explorations Inc., Timmins Nickel Inc. and Vedron Gold Inc. Most recently, Mr. McIntyre has achieved international prominence through statistical analysis of climate research. In 2010, he was named as one of “50 People Who Matter” by the New Statesman, an English magazine, and was co-winner of the Julian Simon Award from the Competitive Enterprise Institute.”
Smokey says:
You were previously called out on these claims and were unable to support them:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/01/rebuttal-to-the-skeptical-science-crux-of-a-core/#comment-611707
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/01/rebuttal-to-the-skeptical-science-crux-of-a-core/#comment-611611 (see also http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/01/rebuttal-to-the-skeptical-science-crux-of-a-core/#comment-612250 )
And yet, even though you are unable to defend them, you make them again? I presume, given the high standards that you hold others to, you will now either support these claims or never more repeat them?
Smokey says:
Really…and where does that definition come from? Here is a discussion of what a corrigendum actually is:
So, it is correction, not a retraction and there is nothing about the errors being “deliberate”.
Sorry…Left out the link in my last post: http://www.apsstylemanual.org/formattingAPSJournalArticles/corrigendum.htm
Smokey says:
Can you describe for us EXACTLY what he hasn’t released in this regard?
Joel Shore says:
“A Corrigendum (also called an Erratum) is a correction made to a previously published article.”
So Mann’s original paper was wrong, and Mann was forced to admit it.
And it is risible that Joel Shore quotes himself as some sort of authority in his pathetic attempt to dispute the plain fact that Mann deliberately hid important data. Being a Mann apologist has its downside: the truth gets sacrificed.
Here is the full text of the body of Corrigendum (not including the table and supplementary information referred to) http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v430/n6995/full/nature02478.html :
Smokey:
What I quote is evidence that I presented that you have been unable to refute…and yet you continue to make your charges anyway. Indeed, the truth seems to get sacrificed, but not by me.
Smokey says:
A paper being right or wrong is not a binary thing. Is a paper completely wrong if it contains a spelling error, what about an imprecise usage of terminology, or an incorrect listing of some of the data used?
The corrigendum is clear on the point that there were a few errors in listing what proxy data sets were used (and their start and end dates) and in citations and says “None of these errors affect our previously published results.”
Joel Shore quotes Michael Mann:
“None of these errors affect our previously published results.”
The exact same statement can be made regarding the Wegman Report to Congress. Overlooking an attribution to an author’s comment in no way affects the Wegman et al. previously published conclusions.
Gneiss, yes I am appealing to an authority much more knowledgeable and qualified than you on this subject. As it is hilarious to watch you get so many things wrong in one paragraph.
Anyone interested in the truth can read the paper I provided above.
Rob says:
May 18, 2011 at 2:46 am
So you’ve switched your claims to only be specific to peer review regarding papers instead of other peer-reviewed items such as the IPCC? Why would you do that? Would it be to avoid having to address this:
http://www.climate-gate.org/email.php?eid=419&s=tag116
So maybe you’re right…can’t name a paper off the top of my head that’s shown in the Climategate e-mails to be a peer review and ethics violation. Of course, that’s not what I was talking about. I was talking about the IPCC AR4 itself, but somehow you decided to make it an argument about papers only. Is the IPCC not peer reviewed? Considering that the IPCC is intended to guide policy, it clearly answers how this is a bigger ethical violation…done for the intention to sway policy on a worldwide basis.
LOL, you clearly either didn’t read the rest of my comment or purposefully didn’t quote it because it shows your above statement to be wrong. The problems with the paper being discussed are relatively minor compared to many issues that appear out there on nearly an everyday basis but never get discussed. I suggest you spend some time in real labs with some postdocs and grad students…you’ll hear all sorts of stuff. For instance, I suggest you look at what this guy has produced in detail:
http://www.engr.colostate.edu/faculty-staff/profiles.php?id=112
Several of his papers were essentially copy/paste from others, and at this point, no one knows what’s real and what’s not. He finally got outed by one of this senior grad students last year when the student questioned some of the data in a plot because he knew it wasn’t generated in the lab (and wasn’t in the original submission but was requested by a reviewer). The prof claimed he had it sourced it to an outside company. The student followed up on it by calculating how long some of the data would take to collect…over a year! Once the student reported the made up data, the professor disappeared…literally overnight. I believe he may not even be in the country now. I’ve searched Google for the news on this…happened months ago, but still no reporting, LOL. So how is some missed citations in a single paper worse than the fraud perpetuated by this guy? Oh, could it be because you only pay attention to things you have a personal grudge against?
-Scott
Scott says:
May 18, 2011 at 9:53 am
Rob says:
May 18, 2011 at 2:46 am
Kind request : can you mention ONE paper that is shown by the Climategate e-mails to be a much larger violation of the peer-review process (and probably a larger ethical violation too) ?
So you’ve switched your claims to only be specific to peer review regarding papers instead of other peer-reviewed items such as the IPCC? Why would you do that? Would it be to avoid having to address this:
“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
http://www.climate-gate.org/email.php?eid=419&s=tag116
You are aware that didn’t happen?
So maybe you’re right…can’t name a paper off the top of my head that’s shown in the Climategate e-mails to be a peer review and ethics violation. Of course, that’s not what I was talking about. I was talking about the IPCC AR4 itself, but somehow you decided to make it an argument about papers only. Is the IPCC not peer reviewed? Considering that the IPCC is intended to guide policy, it clearly answers how this is a bigger ethical violation…done for the intention to sway policy on a worldwide basis.
Are not Congressional hearings intended to ‘sway policy’? Wouldn’t you consider presenting plagiarized material, produced by a student in an area you have no expertise in, to such a hearing an ethical violation?
For instance, I suggest you look at what this guy has produced in detail:
http://www.engr.colostate.edu/faculty-staff/profiles.php?id=112
Several of his papers were essentially copy/paste from others, and at this point, no one knows what’s real and what’s not. He finally got outed by one of this senior grad students last year when the student questioned some of the data in a plot because he knew it wasn’t generated in the lab (and wasn’t in the original submission but was requested by a reviewer). The prof claimed he had it sourced it to an outside company. The student followed up on it by calculating how long some of the data would take to collect…over a year! Once the student reported the made up data, the professor disappeared…literally overnight. I believe he may not even be in the country now.
Looks like he’s here:
http://primetprecision.com/primet-forms-battery-research-team/
So how is some missed citations in a single paper worse than the fraud perpetuated by this guy?
Well the evidence is that Wegman is a serial plagiarist and that his supervision of his students was lax and such behavior permeated his group. I have seen undergraduates suspended for a year for far less than this.
Joel Shore asks: “Can you describe for us EXACTLY what he hasn’t released in this regard?”
Shore I can: Mann won’t release his code, for one thing. Or his metadata, even though they were paid for by the public. See, it’s what he doesn’t want people to see that matters. Thirteen years of stonewalling and counting…
When Steve McIntyre states that he’s satisfied that Michael Mann has provided full and complete disclosure per the scientific method, that will be good enough for me.
Until then, I consider Mann to be a self-serving, devious charlatan who takes payola disguised as “malaria” studies, and who crows about being “exonerated” when no such thing ever happened. IMHO Mann is an Elmer Gantry with none of Gantry’s redeeming features, and I really wonder about anyone who defends someone so lacking in professional ethics.
Go, Cuccinelli!
Phil. says:
May 18, 2011 at 11:31 am
I wasn’t aware that the e-mail was a fake. Is that e-mail fake and not the others? When was that found out? Now, if you’re refering to their success or not, does it matter if they were successful? Anyway, with some help (thanks James) and reading, I did find in the Climategate e-mails where there is evidence of direct tampering of a journal’s peer-review process (as asked earlier by Rob). The answer comes in the Kamel paper, which was looking at temp trends in Siberia. This is likely one of the papers that Jones “went to town” on. I do suppose one could argue that he was just being an honest reviewer though… So what about when there was discussion to get Saiers booted as an editor of GRL because he was in the “greenhouse skeptics camp”?:
http://www.climate-gate.org/email.php?eid=484&s=kwSaiers
Saiers did get the boot later in 2005…don’t know how related it was to the e-mails. And of course there’s the dodging of FOIA requests…is that unethical? I would certainly say it beats out plagiarism from a single paper…
Absolutely it’s an ethical violation. My first post on this thread made it clear that I don’t agree with said violation. The question now is whether it’s a larger violation than manipulating (or trying to) both journal’s and the IPCC’s peer-review process to remove dissenting papers. Clearly I disagree with you and Rob and think that international manipulation is worse than manipulation towards the U.S. congress.
Thanks for finding that, I have some friends who would be interested to know that. Funny that the website doesn’t mention his time at CSU (probably why I failed to locate him), LOL. Also, I’d be interested to know if he’s located at the NY site or in Japan.
He’s a serial plagiarist? What are the other instances of his plagiarism? I’m glad you’ve seen ugs suspended for such. My experiences are the opposite…I’ve seen cheaters, data fabricators, and thieves get through graduate school with barely a slap on the wrist, if any punishment at all.
-Scott
Really? We actually have people here still obsessing about a missing footnote in a report to Congress? Really? You know it isn’t that I’m surprised by DC’s obsession. I’m not. He’s a moron and has to grasp at the smallest of straws to allow himself to believe he’s relevant. But I am surprised by what seem like otherwise intelligent people that run around with the belief that a report to Congress should be held to the same standards as an English paper.
Did you people bother to read the report? It is quite clear that Wegman wasn’t trying to pass that off as work of his own. Do you think Congress asked Wegman for information because they wanted to grade papers? You people are insane! You engage in character assassination because of a missing footnote? Do you really care? You want to talk about character? Let’s talk about hypocrisy. There is a plethora of evidence in the e-mails that the precious peer-reviewed process was subverted. The team colluded to do so. You’re worried about a missing footnote that holds no relevance to Congress. More to character, we’ve got e-mails essentially saying “Great news!!!! So and so died today!!! Yea!!!!” FREAKING SCUMBAGS!!!! More about character, we’ve got other e-mails saying, “we’ll keep it out even if we have to redefine what peer-review is.” Turns out the IPCC simply ignored that rule, so it wasn’t a problem. Worse though, then they were going to pretend the writer of the e-mail wasn’t familiar with the IPCC process when it is blatantly clear nothing could have been further from the truth. More about character, we’ve got other e-mails from one member of the team asking for help as a reviewer to find a way to block a paper from being published. And you dolts are worried about a missing footnote.
Alarmists, the only group of people with less scruples and brains than the U.S. Congress. What scares the hell out of me is that I believe you people actually participate in the democratic process and vote. God help us all. And thank God Canada is stuck with that imbecile DC.
And now someone is saying they did the social networking part wrong? WTF? The e-mails prove that the report to congress was exactly correct. Guys and gals, this may come as a shock to you, but most of the American people really only want reports to Congress to be true. They don’t care about a missing footnote or academic standards. While you’re at it, look up the word academic. FREAKS.
REPLY: Why not learn to spell my name correctly when you insult me from the cowardly safety of the shadows? – Anthony Watts
Yea, yea, I’m sorry Mr. Watts, those pesky typos.
But, that’s nothing compared to the double standard displayed throughout your blog.
Why no indignation at manipulation of information…
~ ~ ~
“Of 91 pages, 35 are mostly plagiarized text, but often injected with errors, bias and changes of meaning.” John Mashey
PS. I’m not hiding in any shadows.
http://citizenschallenge.blogspot.com
REPLY: Sure you are, just another alarmist blog where the proprietor does not have the courage to put his/her name to the words they write. Dime a dozen these days, and have your really looked at what John Mashey writes? It’s full of conspiracy theory. I don’t cover that sort of thing here. Be as upset as you wish, but your opinion is worthless. – Anthony
James, they have nothing else which is why they are hysterical over this but this is so easy to deal with. Just rewrite the report with proper citations and include a large supplement dealing with everything since then, including Climategate.
Poptech says:
May 18, 2011 at 7:06 pm
James, they have nothing else which is why they are hysterical over this but this is so easy to deal with. Just rewrite the report with proper citations and include a large supplement dealing with everything since then, including Climategate.
===============================================
You’re right, and I probably could have used less vitriol, but its gobsmacking for them to pretend to have some moral high-ground. Anyone paying attention knows that ship sailed years ago. I really do hope they do re-word and re-submit. I guess I shouldn’t expect more from people that so obviously put form over substance. They have the prettiest conjecture but almost none of it is correct.
http://citizenschallenge.blogspot.com/
Hey look another clueless individual spouting off nonsense about the Hockey Stick debate. Where are all these clueless individuals getting their nonsensical information from?
Before you people embarrass yourselves further I suggest some light reading,
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/APEC-hockey.pdf
http://www.klimarealistene.com/Holland%282007%29.pdf
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/commentaries/caspar_and_jesus.pdf
http://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/mcintyre.2008.erice.pdf
Get back to us when you have some REMOTE clue about ANYTHING you are talking about.
Please, please stop embarrassing yourselves.
Smokey : “Michael Mann was forced to issue a retraction”
After inquiry :
“The Robster is upset because of unimpeachable evidence that Michael Mann was forced to issue a Corrigendum – the equivalent of a retraction of deliberate errors in his original paper”
Smokey, [snip – play nice now ~ac]
Here are your “the equivalent of a retraction” :
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_nOY5jaKJXHM/SxWG-qlVrHI/AAAAAAAAASI/tw7KwdZjLfg/s1600/Fullscreen+capture+1212009+125715+PM.jpg
Now, for your information, a ‘retraction’ is what happened with the Wegman publication. The paper is declared null and void.
A ‘corrigendum’ is what you see above. A correction of minor omissions and typos (in this case only in the Supplementary Material) which explicitly do not affect the published results.
Please provide evidence where “Michael Mann was forced to issue a retraction”.
Being skeptical is good, but ignorance and unsubstantiated allegations of wrongdoing are NOT a sign of skepticism.
This thread has become tedious – well below the usual standard, and I’m not going to bother reading further. But, before I go, let me say this:
Wegman seems to have erred. But his error pales into insignificance when compared with suppressing inconvenient results in a file labelled ‘Censored’. If the trolls here who have come out from under the bridge really want to engage with the Billy Goats Gruff, the least they can do is read something on both sides of the debate instead of taking their lead from RealClimate, which was established by Al Gore’s mate Arlie Schacht and his mates at Fenton Communications and Environmental Media Services to run interference when Mann got into trouble.
Until they at least read and understand the basics (have a look at Hans von Storch if you want an established scholar largely outside the blogosphere), I do not have the time to waste reading their attempts to rehabilitate Mann because one of Mann’s critics might have erred.
I took the trouble to visit http://citizenschallenge.blogspot.com/
Despite endless sycophantic posts like ‘Ben Santer: This is what a scientist sounds like’, there seems to be nil interest, even from those that are being flattered. A sample:
‘It begins with an introduction from the late great Stephen Schneider where he takes the time to explain what happened at the infamous IPCC plenary where-after Ben Santer was slandered with false charges of having manipulated Chapter 8 of the 1995 IPCC report.’
This is an account of Santer rewriting the text of the account of the science to align it with the Summary for Policymakers that had been agreed among the government and NGO representatives. ‘What happened’ was that he was able to do so because the IPCC rules permitted this, which tells you more about the IPCC than ‘what a real scientist sounds like.’
And keeping research out of peer-reviewed journals and IPCC reports is just robust behaviour from ‘real scientists’!
But I can see why he’s come here. It seems to be awfully lonely on his blog:
Posted by Peter at 10:11 AM 0 comments
Posted by Peter at 3:17 PM 0 comments
Posted by Peter at 1:14 AM 0 comments
Posted by Peter at 12:25 PM 0 comments
Posted by Peter at 1:23 PM 0 comments
Posted by Peter at 1:00 PM 0 comments
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A single comment will produce a hockey stick there — and he won’t need any fancy PCA or inverted proxies to produce it.
[snip -policy violations – link bombing for traffic for your website, plus the d word – see the about>policy page – Anthony]
Citzenchallenge tried to link bomb to one of the worst sites I have ever read? He rants ignorantly on about the Hockey Stick debate, uses Greenman (another cartoonist) to “analyze” hide the decline and the best one yet – he believes government ownership of roads, municipal water treatment plants and warfare has remotely anything to do with the free market! He then commits the #1 progressive cardinal sin of ignorantly confusing social conservatives with fiscal conservatives!!! ROFLMAO!!!! I seriously cannot stop laughing.
Smokey says:
Mann released the code during the time when Barton was on his witch-hunt…even though the NSF had made it clear before that to McIntyre that Mann had provided McIntyre with all that the NSF requires those who they fund to release.
You and McIntyre aren’t the ones who get to decide what Mann is required to release. The NSF, which funds him, is (along with the journals he publishes in). And, the fact that Mann released the code (which is going beyond what the3 NSF requires) doesn’t stop you from continuing to spread the falsehood that he hasn’t. (Mann has also gone above and beyond any requirements in his more recent [2009?] paper on this subject.)
I noticed that you still haven’t defended the others claims that you made against Mann (that I discuss in this post: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/05/16/wegman-paper-retraction-by-journal/#comment-662964 ); I assume that means we will never see you make those again since you seem unable to defend them against the counter-evidence that has been presented?
It seems that most of your arguments against Mann are, to put it kindly, at variance with the facts.
http://climateaudit.org/2010/05/03/correspondence-with-the-university-of-virginia/
“The request for computer code was partly satisfied in summer 2005 without reference to the University of Virginia when Mann placed code online that had been supplied to the House Energy and Commerce Committee. However, the code was incomplete as I reported at the time. The code for the critical and controversial retention of principal components, the battleground issue, was withheld.
Mann’s actual procedure for retention of principal components remains unknown to this day. This has not stopped Mann and others from saying that anyone doing it differently from them was “wrong”. (The procedure advocated at realclimate in December 2004 for the North American network was not used in other networks and appears to have been developed after the fact…”
Joel we are well aware you are for withholding and/or making excuses for withholding all code, data and methods not allowing anyone to reproduce their work.
Nature Admits Widely Cited Global Warming Graph Was Erroneous
“Erroneous” = wrong.
That’s why the IPCC cannot use Mann’s debunked Hokey Stick chart any more… because it’s wrong. The IPCC absolutely LOVED Mann’s alarming chart. But it has been falsified by the ultimate authority: planet Earth.
So the alarmist crowd clings to a missing footnote like a drowning man clings to a toothpick – and from the number of his wild-eyed posts, it looks like Joel Shore is obsessed with moi. Should I get a restraining order?☺ [Just kidding, Joel. You gotta play the hand you were dealt, right? It’s just a missing footnote.]
That’s cool, I don’t fit in here anyways.
But, if anyone is curious that post is at my blogspot.
[Snip. You know why. ~dbs, mod.]
Cheers all
I find it interesting that Smokey here is free to express unsubstantiated allegations, falsehoods, ad hominems and slander including :
“Michael Mann was forced to issue a retraction”…”having been caught out in a lie”
“Robbie’s naive bubble”
“The Robster is upset”
“The “Team” wouldn’t know the scientific method if it bit ‘em on the butt”
“The IPCC really, really loved Mann’s debunked chart”
“it has been falsified by the ultimate authority: planet Earth”
“outright corruption endemic to the climate pal-review process”
“So the alarmist crowd clings to a missing footnote”
“stealing money from the public trough based on their debunked CAGW pseudo-science”
and numerous other unsubstantiated statements and slander.
But when I find such statements “hilarious” then WUWT finds it necessary to replace that word with a “snip – play nice now” remark, as if I had just been cursing.
By firing a constant barrage of attacks on science and scientists and anyone supporting them, the Smokey entity avoids having to actually reason and provide actual evidence for his statements rather than spin already spinned opinion pieces.
And the truth is, I find that behavior “funny” (to use a different word which may be more acceptable to WUWT moderators) since it so clearly shows the irrelevance of his statements and opinions.
Wegman’s publication is retracted for plagiarism, and none of Mann’s publications are. That’s the truth (sorry if that hurts, Smokey).
Let’s leave it at that.
[Twas I who said “play nice” – we are all volunteers here, and perhaps have differing standards – we are merely human after all. I do try to be consitent and regret if you feel my moderation too severe compared to others – but I do the best that I can ~ac (note I have not snipped your citations)]
[Reply: There are more than a half dozen volunteer moderators at WUWT. I have no idea of why your comment was snipped, but there is no doubt that it was for a good reason; read the site Policy. Differences of opinion are not snipped. ~dbs, mod.]
Thanks ac. That shows integrity.
dbs: Thank you for your perspective, but ac already indicated that the snip of my “hilarious” remark was a minor oversight, and subsequent post of that opinion was acceptable.
I appreciate and understand the daunting task of WUWT volunteers to keep discussions civil and respectable with expressions of unsubstantiated opinions being standard practice amongst posters here. Still, it must be difficult to be “consistent” (as ca mentions) when the site-policy explicitly mentions “denier” and “denialist” as name-calling, but, as Smokey’s posts prove, “alarmist” seems to be an acceptable rethoric here on WUWT.
For example, I wonder how quickly my posts would be eliminated from WUWT if I regularly start mentioning rethoric as Smokey does, but would turn the subject around, even when I stick to the subject of this thread, with exclamations like :
“Wegman was forced to issue a retraction”…”having been caught out in a lie”
“Smokey’s naive bubble”
“The Smokey entity is upset”
“The McIntyre/Wegman “Team” wouldn’t know the scientific method if it bit ‘em on the butt”
“The fossil-fuel funded Think Tanks really, really hated Mann’s iconic and 12 times re-affirmed chart”
“it has been confirned by the ultimate authority: planet Earth”
“outright corruption endemic to the Wegman pal-review process”
“So the science-denialist crowd clings to a footnote in a private email”
“stealing money from the public trough based on Wegman’s debunked pseudo-science”
with the side-note that it is much easier for me to provide solid evidence of the above statements, than it has shown to be for Smokey to sustain his statements.
Bottomline, it would enhance the quality of your site if the cite policy would apply to all posters, irrelevant of their opinion.
Poptech says:
No…I am just for a little bit of balance. Science relies on good faith: Both good faith of the authors in making truly necessary materials and information available and good faith of requesters not to just go around demanding that people to give them every last bit of code that they have but only request it if they have a very specific reason and there is no other way to resolve the point of contention.
In my 30 years of doing science, I don’t think anybody has ever requested my code…nor have I ever requested theirs…even though there have been times when others were trying to reproduce my work or I theirs. It certainly would have made my life either just to demand their code but it never occurred to me that this was an appropriate thing to do.
In many cases, papers are published using code that is proprietary; there are in fact many papers I have published while working in industry where my employer would have had grounds to fire me if I released the code to anyone outside the company.
The point is that there is a balance…and even if the work was produced with government funds, the author still maintains some intellectual property rights. NSF and the other organizations make these rules, and they respect the need for a balance for good reasons.
In recent work, like his 2009 paper, Mann went well beyond the norms that I see at least in physics in terms of makingthe code and data so readily available. Such openness should be encouraged, but it cannot be demanded because under current rules and laws it is not required.
The issue with the Wegman Paper Plagiarism is that there is no way to use material copied from papers reporting global warming / climate change to argue against the observed fact of global warming / climate change unless Wegman et al included reasoned arguments to disprove them. That was not done.
The “global warming is not happening” folks shouldn’t feel too bad. That retracted 2006 “Register” story claiming NSIDC got it wrong is still being cited by the “not happening” faithful even though the Editors, and Steve Goddard himself, added a retraction at the bottom of the web page:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/15/goddard_arctic_ice_mystery/
The rushed 2008 paper citing uncorrected 2006 Argo ocean buoy data as showing ocean cooling was still being cited in papers after the publication of a retraction based on instrumental errors.
wattsupwiththat readers should be familiar with the concept of instrumental bias or error.
When NOAA removed the data from “poorly sited” ground stations identified by Anthony Watt et al from USA data records the remaining data showed a higher increase in temperature readings. Mr. Watt should be acknowledged for his role in improving the quality of NOAA temperature observations, and strengthening the observed evidence of Climate Change within the USA.
That is, the “poorly sited” ground observation stations had older equipment which had a bias toward cold readings, like the Argo buoys.
Joel Shore, “No…I am just for a little bit of balance. Science relies on good faith: Both good faith of the authors in making truly necessary materials and information available and good faith of requesters not to just go around demanding that people to give them every last bit of code that they have but only request it if they have a very specific reason and there is no other way to resolve the point of contention.”
No, science has NOTHING to do with faith. Science is not a religion. At any time a dispute is raised about reproduction of a scientific process, all code, data and methods should be made available to reproduce said science. If not you have no interest in true science.
“In my 30 years of doing science, I don’t think anybody has ever requested my code…nor have I ever requested theirs…even though there have been times when others were trying to reproduce my work or I theirs. It certainly would have made my life either just to demand their code but it never occurred to me that this was an appropriate thing to do.”
Who cares about your personal experience? Science is not religious and if someone is unable to examine your code then they have no reason to take your science seriously. I am well aware many natural scientists put false faith in their computer code, largely because they are computer illiterate but this is actually my area of expertise and I can say with 100% certainty NO ONE should.
“In many cases, papers are published using code that is proprietary; there are in fact many papers I have published while working in industry where my employer would have had grounds to fire me if I released the code to anyone outside the company.”
Then it should not be accepted for publication in a science journal. No science journal should publish a science paper were all code, data and methods are not available.
“The point is that there is a balance…and even if the work was produced with government funds, the author still maintains some intellectual property rights. NSF and the other organizations make these rules, and they respect the need for a balance for good reasons.”
There is no “balance” in science, either you work can be reproduced or not. Failure to allow reproduction means you are not practicing science and your work should not be taken seriously.
Mann has not gone beyond the norm and has done everything he can to prevent reproduction of his earlier work. The only reason is because he has something to hide.
Poptech: Well, you clearly want to radically change how all science is done in most fields. I suppose that is your right but to define science in such a way that it excludes nearly all science as it is currently practiced is…how should we say…interesting.
This seems to be an element of religious faith for you, so far be it from me to challenge with things like fact and evidence.
Unlike you I am not religious and do not have faith in science, I need reproducible results based on empirical evidence. It is not surprising the number of people who treat science like religion, this is not my problem.
Poptech : “I need reproducible results based on empirical evidence”.
Good to hear that you support Prof. Ritson’s effort to obtain reproducible results from the Wegman, specifically on how to reproduced Mc.Intyre’s “red noise hockey sticks”.
http://deepclimate.org/2010/10/24/david-ritson-speaks-out/
Unfortunately, Wegman hides behind the excuse that his work was not “federally funded” and that code cannot be released without approval from the Naval Surface Warfare Center (who were they funded by?), and that he “will create a website that fully discloses all supporting material related to our report”. That was 4 years ago.
Meanwhile, the Wegman report results are not reproducible, while Mann’s results have been re-confirmed 12 times over.
Only the truely religious still believe Wegman and his copy-and-paste of McIntyre’s cherry-picked red-noise graphs.
Steve McIntyre has a excellent, detailed piece supporting Wegman 2006 with information from Climagegate email (unavailable to Wegman).
There are two networking charts worth seeing, especially his GIF of the
“Exactly who was emailing who in climategate” http://www.warwickhughes.com/agri/crunet.gif
created by “The Iconoclast” in a warwickhughes thread.
McIntyre’s 5/23/2011 page:
Climategate Documents Confirm Wegman’s Hypothesis
http://climateaudit.org/2011/05/23/climategate-documents-confirm-wegmans-hypothesis/#more-13628
Stephen Rasey says:
May 23, 2011 at 9:52 pm
Steve McIntyre has a excellent, detailed piece supporting Wegman 2006 with information from Climagegate email (unavailable to Wegman).
Please, it’s a blatant apologia, fails to mention the only expertise in the network analysis was a grad student who took a short course with Carley!
As to the PC analysis supposedly done by Wegman, we’re still waiting for his promised website detailing the analysis (4+ years later), since it was probably cribbed from McIntyre that will never happen.
Phil. says:
“As to the PC analysis supposedly done by Wegman, we’re still waiting for his promised website detailing the analysis (4+ years later)…”
And we’re still waiting for Mann’s code, metadata, etc., THIRTEEN YEARS LATER!
Besides, Wegman’s work hasn’t been debunked. Mann’s has.
Smokey, you seem to be the only one left over that is not able to find Mann’s data, or seem to recognise that Mann’s work has been not just reproduced by anyone who tried, but even confirmed by at least a dozen independent scientific studies.
You also seem to be the only one that failed to notice that the only scientific publication that came out of the Wegman report has just been retracted.
And you seem to be oblivious of the fact that Wegman’s results are not reproducible unless you duplicate exactly the graphs that McIntyre cherry-picked from his red-noise compilations.
One may wonder why you keep on clinging to a fake report created for political reasons and why you discard science that has been reconfirmed a dozen times and again.
What is your motivation to continue belief in a plagiarized political report that never produced any scientific publication that could stand the test of time ?
Rob,
Produce the total methodology, metadata, and code that Mann used to fabricate his bogus Hokey Stick, and I’ll concede that poor little Mikey is being unfairly hounded. Of course, you can’t.
The fact is that THIRTEEN YEARS after MBH98, Mann continues to stonewall. His true believer sycophants seem to think that is A-OK, according to the scientific method.
It is not.
Smokey, you don’t need “the total methodology, metadata, and code” to reproduce Mann’s findings. The paper and the data are enough to reproduce Mann’s graph. Did you even try ?
If you are even remotely familiar with science then you know that, and you know that code is fairly useless since you would need to reverse-engineer the methodology from it which was already explained in the paper any way. And besides, Mann even surrendered his code. So what is your problem ?
Rob,
Mann’s debunked Hokey Stick chart is no longer allowed to be published by the UN/IPCC.
Why not? Mann’s bogus chart was LOVED by the IPCC! They promoted it repeatedly because it was visually stunning. It scared the bejesus out of the credulous public, which was in the interests of the IPCC. The lame spaghetti graphs that replaced it are weak tea by comparison.
Once again: I challenge you to post all of Mann’s code, data and metadata. Words don’t count; the posting of facts is all that matters. And the fact is that Mann is still stonewalling after 13 years shows that he has plenty to hide.
The scientific method requires transparency. The fact that Mann continues to hide his code and methodology shows that he deviously avoids the scientific method – a trait common to all climate charlatans.
If you think Mann’s 1998 temperature reconstruction ‘scared the bejesus out of the credulous public’ then I wonder what the Arctic Sea Ice volume graphs would do :
http://img543.imageshack.us/img543/2145/piomasmonthlyvolumes.png
As for Wegman (the subject of this post), the only scientific publication that originated from the Wegman report has now been retracted after Wegman through one of his unnamed students under the bus. Nobody can reproduce McIntyre’s (oops, I mean Wegman’s) red-noise graphs because Wegman did not release his data, neither after requests from the scientific community nor the Chairman of the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee himself. Besides, the Wegman report itself is under investigation for plagiarism and scientific misconduct by his own George Mason University.
Wegman is grasping at straws, WUWT can only produce an ad hominem on Deep Climate, and Smokey here still can’t reproduce MBH98 findings.
What’s up with that ?
Rob,
Since you would not post Mann’s code as requested, I can only assume you are a sock puppet for Mann’s climate charlatanism. And that piomas chart and similar piomas charts have been debunked here at WUWT. I leave it to you to do your own homework on that score using the WUWT search function.
The Wegman Report to Congress stands. The fact that there is simply a missing footnote does not negate the conclusion that Mann’s clique gamed the system. After 13 years, MBH98 [and MBH99] still hide thier code, methodologies and metadata. If you disagree, I challenge you to post their code, etc.
For more detailed information on Mann’s shenanigans, see here and here.
Since you are a sock puppet, I request that the mods delete any further comments from you on this issue. Have a nice day.
Smokey says:
May 24, 2011 at 6:12 am
Phil. says:
“As to the PC analysis supposedly done by Wegman, we’re still waiting for his promised website detailing the analysis (4+ years later)…”
And we’re still waiting for Mann’s code, metadata, etc., THIRTEEN YEARS LATER!
Besides, Wegman’s work hasn’t been debunked. Mann’s has.
Earth to Smokey, Wegman has been debunked, that’s why the paper has been retracted and why he is under investigation by GMU. Mann’s results have been supported by subsequent research.
Smokey: “The fact that Mann continues to hide his code and methodology shows that he deviously avoids the scientific method – a trait common to all climate charlatans.”
Can you explain why Mann’s “code” has become such a linchpin to all this scandal mongering?
Are you actually claiming climatologists are charlatans?
Why isn’t all the data that was/is available enough?
What specifically is Mann still “hiding”?
And how exactly do your claimed omissions wipe out all the other lines of evidence?
{To say nothing of physical global observations and happenings supporting the scientific understanding of global warming}
Why don’t the real happenings upon our planet seem to be of interest to you folks?
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What about Mr. Santer’s comments:
43:35 “. . . the climate model data that we use are freely available, in fact, three and a half thousand researchers around the world use the climate model data that we have archived at Livermore, it’s an open data base… Mr. McIntyre had in his possession, or had the ability to access exactly the same data that we have used in our study. And indeed I should point out that the Douglass et al. paper used the same archive…”
54:10 “One of the really troubling things is the asymmetry in this auditing.
Mr. McIntyre purports to have significant statistical training, yet he did not audit the Douglass et al. paper which had a grievous and very obvious statistical error. If someone really where interested in dispassionately getting to the bottom of things and why two papers reach fundamentally different conclusions they would not behave in the way the Mr. McIntyre has behaved.”
~ ~ ~
What do you think about Schneider’s claim (1:38:55 – ):“… the process of science is much better served by having independent codes… ”
{time signatures from the Ben Santer talk: “The General Public: Why Such Resistance?”
Earth to Phil.:
Wegman’s conclusions have never been falsified. They merely left off a footnote. But nice try, and Vanna has some lovely parting gifts for you on your way out.☺
# # #
citizenchallenge says:
“Can you explain why Mann’s ‘code’ has become such a linchpin to all this scandal mongering?”
Sure: the climate charlatan is hiding something bad. Othewise, he would provide the full transparency that the scientific method requires.
And please, don’t pester us with the disreputable Ben Santer. Who in their right mind is going to watch over an hour and a half of his crybaby whining? Santer is almost as odious as the conniving Michael Mann. I wouldn’t waste my time on ten seconds of his sniveling BS. He’s lost the debate and he knows it.
Quite an attitude you display here Smokey. Calling Mann’s climate science “charlatanism” and calling me a “sock puppet”, asserting that Mann’s “clique” (who are that?) “gamed the system” and accusing Elsevier for retracting Wegman’s publication for a missing “footnote” (without mentioning what that footnote would say). Interesting that after all spouting all these insults (which could be considered a violation of WUWT site policy) you are requesting the WUWT mods to delete MY comments ? All this without you providing any evidence for your increasingly ignorant statements.
You mention homework. So here is something for you :
Here are all the data and methodology descriptions for MBH98 (it’s been there since 2004) :
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v430/n6995/extref/nature02478-s1.htm
With this, you can reproduce MBH98 findings, and that is your homework.
You keep on whining about missing ‘code’, but as I mentioned before, if you know a little bit about science and software you know that an algorithmic description is much more helpful than ‘code’.
If you really want to look at Mann’s code, then ask McIntyre. He still has a copy hanging around IIRC. He was not too impressed with the readability of Mann’s code (why am I not surprised), so I suggest you write your own in M or R or C++.
But you don’t want to do that, now do you Smokey ?
Instead of doing honest science and engineering work, you prefer to spend your energy blurting insults at top-notch scientists and whining and complaining about “shenanigans” and their “sock puppets” on this blog which you then request to be muted. You are one of a kind, my friend.
Now that we covered MBH98, back to Wegman : where is Wegman’s data that he promised to congressman Waxman ? Can Prof. Ritson get an answer to his questions ?
Smokey says:
May 26, 2011 at 9:55 am
“Earth to Phil.:
Wegman’s conclusions have never been falsified. They merely left off a footnote. {deleted insulting nonsense}”
Rob says:
Smokey, “back to Wegman: where is Wegman’s data that he promised to congressman Waxman ? Can Prof. Ritson get an answer to his questions ?
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
citizenschallenge asks:
“Can you explain why Mann’s ‘code’ has become such a linchpin to all this scandal mongering?”
~ ~ ~
Smokey says: “Sure: the climate charlatan is hiding something bad. Otherwise, he would provide the full transparency that the scientific method requires.”
~ ~ ~
Earth to S, is that what you consider an explanation?
Aren’t explanations supposed to explain something??
What is not transparent about all the data being publicly available?
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Smokey says: “And please, don’t pester us with the disreputable Ben Santer. {…}
I wouldn’t waste my time on ten seconds of his sniveling BS. He’s lost the debate and he knows it.”
~ ~ ~
Well Smokey that was an insightful reply.
How can you know what Santer made available or not, if you refuse to “waste” any of your precious time learning about it?
Funny thing about evidence, data, facts… that stuff will never exist for you so long as you willfully refuse to examine it. Intellectual integrity is a beautiful thing.
If there was an award for the most content-free opinion, citizenchallenge would be on the short list.☺
Rob says:
“you seem to be the only one left over that is not able to find Mann’s data, or seem to recognise that Mann’s work has been not just reproduced by anyone who tried, but even confirmed by at least a dozen independent scientific studies.” Wrong. And nice try re-framing my comment. But my statement was about Mann’s code. Produce that, if you can. There’s a reason Mann is still hiding it after 13 years of requests: it’s an amateurish piece of crap that uses the GIGO technique to manipulate the data into his hockey stick shape. Word up, buddy.
And as I correctly pointed out, Mann’s hokey stick chart has been debunked to the point that the UN/IPCC is no longer able to publish it. And make no mistake, the IPCC loved Mann’s scary chart. It must torture their climate propagandists that they can’t use it any more.
McIntyre and McKittrick proved that Mann improperly cherry-picked a small proxy sample to fabricate his scary hockey stick chart. By using a much larger local proxy sample, the hockey stick becomes smaller than the MWP, which debunks the claim that GHGs are the cause of the current natural warming cycle. Mann deliberately hid the correct proxy data in an ftp file labeled “censored“. He’s a conniving, self-serving little charlatan. IMHO, of course. Read A.W. Montfort’s The Hockey Stick Illusion and see if you don’t agree. You will also read about Mann’s shenanigans with the corrupted Tiljander proxy; more proof of his scientific misconduct.
Finally, since Mann’s MBH98 code is supposedly out there for anyone to see, why don’t you just post it for us?☺
Smokey says:
You can find all sorts of data and code related to that paper here: http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/shared/research/old/mbh98.html In particular, here is the algorithm description and actual FORTRAN code: http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/shared/research/MANNETAL98/METHODS/ Have fun!
Now, as Rob has requested, I assume you will return the favor by providing links for Wegman’s code and data?
Joel Shore,
Saying we can ‘find all sorts’ of code isn’t the same thing as saying that all the code is publicly archived. Until Mann produces all of the information necessary to replicate his work, I stand by my opinion that he is a conniving, self-serving scientific charlatan.
And why are you asking me for Prof Wegman’s information? I don’t have it. Go ask Wegman yourself. Great example of misdirection, BTW. The issue is MBH98/99. Thirteen years of stonewalling and counting. Mann wouldn’t know the scientific method if it bit him on the butt. You either, apparently:
Contrast that with the disreputable Michael Mann and his clique, hiding out from FOIA requests and refusing to cooperate with other scientists trying to replicate his work. That’s some hero you worship.
Smokey,
What information are you missing that you need to replicate Mann’s work? Other scientists have in fact replicated Mann’s work, so I am not sure what is holding you back exactly.
By contrast, Emeritus Professor David Ritson apparently asked Wegman for information in order to replicate Wegman’s work, and over 4 years later Wegman still has not given him the requested information: http://deepclimate.org/2010/10/24/david-ritson-speaks-out/
Your concern about the release of information to allow replication seems very selective.
I assume since Wegman is, by the standards you have outlined above, “a conniving, self-serving scientific charlatan”, you will no longer make reference to his report? (Unfortunately, I have also assumed that you would stop making charges about Mann that you can’t support like those involving the “censored” directory and the Tiljander proxies, but it appears that you continue to make them even though you cannot substantiate them when shown direct evidence that they are falsehoods.)
Excuse me for piping in here, but it is a point worth repeating.
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Smokey says:
June 1, 2011 at 4:11 am
Joel,
Saying we can ‘find all sorts’ of code isn’t the same thing as saying that all the code is publicly archived. Until Mann produces all of the information necessary to replicate his work, I stand by my opinion that he is a conniving, self-serving scientific charlatan.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
So what is missing?