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
[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