On the Climate Audit thread, The Vergano FOI Request the irascible Nick Stokes provokes another commenter “mpaul”, to lay out all the history in a simple summary that even Nick might understand. I thought it was worth repeating here for readers who have not followed the twists and turns in detail, and also in the hope that Dr. Michael Mann might read it and get a clue. Obstruction doesn’t pay.
From this Climate Audit comment:
mpaul
But I don’t think snooping through people’s private emails is a dignified activity.
Nick, I’ll turn the sarcasm off for a moment. I agree with you on this point. I have been an advocate for Cuccinelli CID process. Say what you will about Cuccinelli’s motives, but the American justice system provides protections for the accused and standards of procedure that do not exist in the court of public opinion.
We have arrived at this point in history along the following path:
(1) Steve wanted to replicate MBH98 and asked for data. Mann initially complied, but then began to obstruct.
(2) Steve successfully obtained the needed data and demonstrated serious flaws in Mann’s approach.
(3) Mann defended his work by saying that other Hockey Stick reconstructions validated his method and his conclusions.
(4) Attention turned to replicating the other reconstructions. By now, the Team had become extremely defensive and a sort of bunker mentality took over. Years of obstruction followed.
(5) Those seeking the data and methods used in the HS reconstructions became more and more aggressive, eventually turning to FOIA as a tool to pry loose the information.
(6) Then “a miracle happened’. A file containing materials and emails requested under FOIA turned up on the internet. Most everyone would agree that the contents of the emails warranted an investigation. The only investigation that specifically looked into Mann’s conduct was undertaken by Penn State. Penn State cleared Mann noting that Mann stated:
(a) he had never falsified any data, nor had he had ever manipulated data to serve a given predetermined outcome;
(b) he never used inappropriate influence in reviewing papers by other scientists who disagreed with the conclusions of his science;
(c) he never deleted emails at the behest of any other scientist, specifically including Dr. Phil Jones, and that he never withheld data with the intention of obstructing science; and
(d) he never engaged in activities or behaviors that were inconsistent with accepted academic practices.
(7) Critics have charged that the Penn State investigation was inadequate. Michael Mann has subsequently stated that he did, in fact, participate in an orchestrated effort to delete emails covered under FOIA, raising questions about the veracity of statements he made to the Penn State investigators. Penn State seems untroubled by this.
A real, independent investigation, subject to rules of evidence and judicial procedures, is needed. Such an investigation is the only way to put and end to Climategate and is the only way to restore the tattered reputation of climate science. I think both Virginia and Pennsylvania should conduct an investigation. However, if UVa continues to obstruct the CID, then FOIA is the only option and Mann will be afforded no protection of his privacy.
Mann and UVa are playing a losing game. Its sheer folly to attempt to frustrate a State AG in a law enforcement investigation. Cuccinelli has nuclear weapons at his disposal and UVa has water pistols. If Cuccinelli loses the CID battle, he will simply file a lawsuit and obtain the materials through discovery. Or, if UVa really pisses him off, he will convene a Grand Jury. For Mann personally, this would be catastrophic. Mann and UVa should cooperate with the CID process.
It’s sad that we have arrived at this place. But at every juncture in this journey, Mann has chosen the wrong path.
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Joel Shore says:
Does it ever trouble you guys that the only sources that seem to support your version of reality are clearly biased sources?
No, Joel, it’s pretty simple. I in fact like my sources biased toward objectivity, reality, and empiricism and the use of the Scientific Method, all in service of improving the well-being of Humanity. However, by virtue of your own antagonism to my “biased sources”, that necessarily leaves you in league with the cynically propagandistic “CO2=CAGW” purveyors of what is clearly Dogma [a.k.a., the PNAS’s “tenets”] whose intent is to use their “method” and the words of their “theory” not toward the interests of science, understanding, and the practical well-being of Humanity, but instead as anti-intellectual means in service of completely other, destructively manipulating and regressive ends – such as “equality” and “sustainability” = Social Justice = Communistic Slavery.
To make a long story short, according to your “biased sources” – rational thought and real science be damned! – “the ends justify the means”, but it turns out also that the means you favor are the same as the ends you favor = Totalitarian Thought Control, from which all other Control flows.
Joel, from your above question as well as your other output, I already pretty much know that this certainly doesn’t bother you. And that makes all the difference between you and me, Joel.
Joel Shore says:
“Greenland does not the globe make.”
Right, and who needs Greenland when you’ve got Mann’s bristlecones and Briffa’s YAD061 to tell you what GMT’s have been doing for a thousand years?
Smokey says:
You are showing graphs on a totally different timescale and temperature scale. Yes, when you look at dramatic changes in temperatures that occur on the time scales of ice ages, then there is a pretty good correlation of the change in the two hemispheres (probably thanks, in large part, to the greenhouse gases which help to synchronize the two hemispheres). However, this does not mean that there are not less dramatic temperature changes on shorter timescales that do not have a larger effect on some areas than others.
The irony…It burns. I was talking about SCIENTIFIC debate…you know the ones that occur in the scientific journals. You responded by just giving another example of how you are exactly like those who question evolution. They also want to have the science decided on the basis of public debates, where deception will often beat out science and substance, rather than in the proper scientific venues. The more you try to claim you are different, the more similar you sound to those of us who are familiar with all attacks on science.
I am busy doing a statistical analysis of some weather stations to determine whether global warming is natural or man made.
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/henrys-pool-table-on-global-warming
I stumbled upon some data from Gibraltar (UK) which appear strange when compared to the neighbouring Spanish stations. More specifically it seems the incline of maxima at Gibraltar does not tie up with that observed by other surrounding stations. That would seem like a case of “hide the incline” . Funny enough I noticed the same opposite trend result on Hunululu. As a result I now view all USA and UK results with some suspicion. Any comments on this by WUWT from the USA?
JPeden says:
This is what it all ends up coming down to for you guys. You have this extreme ideological viewpoint under which everybody is corrupted and the only people who can be trusted are those who share your extreme ideology. The Far Right has invented your own “facts”, “evidence”, and “science” because the real facts, evidence, and science conflict with your ideology.
This whole debate has very little to do with science and very much to do with ideology…just like the debate regarding evolution. Really, when you boil it down, all ideological attacks on science are very much the same.
Joel Shore asks about the MBH99 discussion relating to the PC1. A couple of issues. Part of the problem is that inconsistent claims are made on behalf of the reconstruction. For example, MBH98 claims: “the long-term trend in NH is relatively robust to the inclusion of dendroclimatic indicators in the network, suggesting that potential tree growth trend biases are not influential
in the multiproxy climate reconstructions.” A related claim is made in Mann et al 2000. In fact, the Mann reconstruction is really only the bristlecones plus a sprinkle of noise.
MBH99 also asserted that the dependence on bristlecones was restricted to the AD1000 network:
This isn’t correct for the AD1400 network either (which was what we primarily looked at in our 2005 articles.)
NIck Stokes continues to defend his fabricated history of events. He originally made the untrue statement:
I responded that this was totally untrue
Nick asks:
Every so often, Nick should try reading something other than Team accounts. As I said previously, Wahl and Ammann’s claim to have developed the scenarios in their article is untrue – most of the scenarios were originated by Mann, not by Wahl and Ammann.
The results were shown in Figures in MM2005 and archived at the time. These results were replotted on the same scale as WA here – see particularly this figure.
While Wahl and Ammann do not clearly state that their methods almost exactly replicated ours, buried in their text are concessions that their scenarios 5a and 6c match ours.
On any specific calculation, Wahl and Ammann got the same results as we did. The difference was their spin and misrepresentations. For example, they claimed that MBH had argued in favor of RE as against verification r2 (or CE). Untrue. They only attempted to argue against verification r2 when the failed MBH results were exposed.
Joel, in regards to “… clearly biased sources”, I would also like to point out that WUWT that links all the important warmist blogs, lukewarmers , and skeptical ones on the right of the webpage for all to visit, read, and study. If you visit Realclimate and other pro warmists sites, they like to pretend the skeptical sites don’t exist, they do NOT want people who visit warmists sites to know about any skeptical sites if they already aren’t aware of them. Kinda like they are afraid to let people read arguments from both sides. So who do you think people should trust more? The side trying to control what evidence gets seen or the side that encourages you to look at all the sides and then make a decision?
The number and nature of the above inputs from Joel Shore, Nick Stokes , sceptical, and Phil Jones are probably part of the AGW Communities’ recently announced plan for active resistance against the Global Warming Deniers. The battle may be on!
Joel Shore:
At June 4, 2011 at 11:51 am you assert:
“Really, when you boil it down, all ideological attacks on science are very much the same.”
That may be true.
But it is certainly true that when you boil it down, all fabricated misinformation attacks on science are very much the same: the Piltdown Man and the MBH Hockey Sticks being prime examples. Red herrings about ideology cannot hide this truth.
Richard
“This whole debate has very little to do with science and very much to do with ideology…just like the debate regarding evolution. Really, when you boil it down, all ideological attacks on science are very much the same.”
Oh the Irony!
The INTERGOVERNMENTAL Panel for Climate Change
The Kyoto Treaty
The many politically designed climate conferences
The Politicization of the science
The smearing of skeptics,by environmentalists and warmist blogs
Need I go on?
FAO James Sexton
It doesn’t pass notice that I mentioned McShane and Wyner but no one from the alarmist side addresses it. I find this amusing. If M&W10 isn’t properly refuted, none of this matters.
“McShane and Wyner (2010) analyze a dataset of “proxy” climate records previously used by Mann et al (2008) to attempt to assess their utility in reconstructing past temperatures. MW introduce new methods in their analysis, which is welcome. However, the absence of both proper data quality control and appropriate “pseudoproxy” tests to assess the performance of their methods invalidate their main conclusions.”
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi?id=sc06400f
See also Tingley on the Lasso method http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~tingley/Blakeley_Discussion_Tingley_Submitted.pdf and 13 contributions in the original journal (S&W was published as a discussion paper) and RC http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/12/responses-to-mcshane-and-wyner/
Joel Shore
AGW theory has always been an idealogical attack on science, the Hockey Teamsters trashed science to get their ideology imposed.
Joel Shore says:
“You are showing graphs on a totally different timescale and temperature scale.”
I just knew this would be coming from Joel Shore!
A while back Shore argued about a few graphs I had posted. So I posted FIFTY new graphs, from numerous sources – most peer reviewed – showing the same thing the original graphs showed. Joel Shore disputed all 50 new graphs in one comment, every one of them. Joel Shore is just like Harold Camping. Instead of Camping admitting that he was wrong about the end of the world, Camping just re-scheduled doomsday to October.
Joel Shore’s mind is made up, and closed to verifiable facts that contradict his belief system. Joel’s beliefs are all based on models, not on the real world; when recently I asked him to provide real world evidence of global damage due to CO2, per the scientific method, he quietly went away and didn’t respond.
Anyone who cannot provide empirical evidence of global harm to support their belief system [after a very significant ≈40% run-up in CO2] should honestly admit that the real world is demonstrating that CO2 is harmless.
Such logic is foreign to the alarmist crowd. They’ve made up their minds that CO2 is all bad, when the planet is showing that it is harmless and beneficial. The net effect of more CO2 is a good thing. More warmth is a good thing. Joel just doesn’t see it. His mind is made up.
Smokey, your view seems to be that if we haven’t seen damage from 1 C, we won ‘t see any damage from 3-4 C. Correct?
Jim D,
Incorrect. If global damage traceable specifically to higher concentrations of CO2 starts to appear, I will begin to change my view. But so far, there is no evidence of any global harm due to CO2.
Don’t you think you should adopt a more skeptical view regarding the demonization of “carbon”? After all, those banging that drum have an enormous financial motive to demonize CO2. An entire university / journal / pal review industry has grown up around the $6 – $7 billion of government grants handed out every year to study “climate change”.
That grant money does not go to scientists who point out that the whole scare is model-based, with no empirical evidence identifying global harm. The ones who get the taxpayer loot are the ones predicting climate catastrophe. Don’t you even wonder why practically every paper that is published has some kind of reference to CO2, or to carbon, or something similar?
You should be at least a little suspicious. Where is the escalating global temperature? Where are the annual increases in tornadoes, hurricanes, floods and droughts? Where is the accelerating sea level rise? In fact, they are all moderating, not increasing. Just about every alarmist prediction has been falsified. Why do you still believe what they’re saying?
“If the IPCC wasn’t there, why would anyone be worried about climate change?” ~Rajendra Pachauri, Chairman of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Science, February 5, 2010
Exactly. And:
“The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded”.
~ President Dwight Eisenhower
Scientists have been trained with grant funds the way Pavlov’s dogs were trained with dog biscuits. You don’t see that?
Joel Shore says:
June 4, 2011 at 11:51 am
Correct so far as to my view, Joel, that is, until you next returned to your apparently obsessive need to resort to describing the elements of your own psychological projection, which then define what you mean by “ideological”, contrary to what I described asmy definition of “bias” regarding the need for objectivity, etc., but which you then attribute to me and the “Far Right”:
Then you conclude with another self-serving, but again self-projecting, platitude, from which you seem to think you have excluded yourself, when you haven’t, as I then re-emphasize following your weak attempt to place yourself “above it all”:
Really, when you boil it down, all ideological attacks on science are very much the same.
Obviously so, Joel, but, once more, unless you consider being “biased” toward the practice of real, scientific method, science to be included within your definition of “ideological”.
Such “ideological” attacks, which my “bias” precludes, would otherwise have been totally irrelevant to a truly scientific discussion of the climate, again as they should be, had ipcc Cimate Science simply adhered to practicing real, scientific method and principle, science, instead of specifically avoiding it in favor of the prosecution of its CO2=CAGW Climate Science Propaganda Operation, with its ultimate intent being Totalitarian Controlism!
But my post to this same effect is one to which you have not yet responded, Joel, except by simply and quite lamely repeating your original charge alleging that the skeptics here get their info from “biased [Far Right] sources”. Which makes your most recent response only exactly like more of the same old Climate Science Propaganda Operation itself, both in form and content – granted that possibly as a matter of your own personality you might simply be innocently stuck on an infinite infantile cycle of, “No, you can’t make me’s,” in other words that we simply can’t make you admit that you are wrong as to your charge, which no one is disputing! But which nevertheless still does in fact characterize your own response to evidence and logic as well as that of CO2=CAGW’s “Climate Science” – very pointedly, again, when it simply won’t let its “theory” be called into question by empirical evidence, much less be falsified.
Joel, if you are not getting paid to apply your Political Science to Climate Science’s Political Science or are not simply a being born as natural fodder for and requiring Totalitarian rule, you need to make a break with Climate Science’s anti-science.
Steve:
So, in regards to this post http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/02/manns-hockey-stick-climategate-and-foi-in-a-nutshell/#comment-673759 and in light of your previous post http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/02/manns-hockey-stick-climategate-and-foi-in-a-nutshell/#comment-673396, are you saying that they knowingly hid the fact that their reconstruction from AD 1400 was sensitive to these particular proxies although they very publicly announced to the world in their 1999 GRL paper that their reconstruction from AD 1000 was in fact sensitive to these particular proxies?
If so, what would even be their motivation for doing that? (After all, although the MWP is often used to label a broad interval of time, it seems like most people date the MWP as being before 1400 anyway.) If not, then what exactly are you claiming?
Bill says:
June 4, 2011 at 1:32 pm
The number and nature of the above inputs from Joel Shore, Nick Stokes , sceptical, and Phil Jones are probably part of the AGW Communities’ recently announced plan for active resistance against the Global Warming Deniers. The battle may be on!
I agree, but they really offer no more than their same old Post Normal [Climate] Science Propaganda Op.’s m.o., which specifically avoids using real, scientific method and principle, science. As to the latter, they’ve toted up a big Zero. Some Post Normal Science advocates actually admit and even argue that, once you’re there in a Post Normal “condition” – which they think is societal when it actually describes only some people’s panicked state of mind – real science will not be applied.
Joel, as I observed, whatever the reason, it isn’t true for the AD1400 network. I suspect that the reason was that they didn’t want to retract any claims in their Nature article, but that’s just a guess.
Viking settlement of Greenland lasted from ~1000 (when it was warm) to 1400AD (when Greenland was much colder). MBH98 temperature reconstruction begins in 1400. There’s wild inconsistency here, but not as you perceive.
Phil Clarke says:
June 4, 2011 at 2:12 pm
Blather……more blathering…….. most blathering.
Phil, this is the stuff that angers me the most. Phil, I like you. You are an intelligent person………seemingly. I’m saddened and a bit disheartened by your comment. You responded to some of what I stated, but not the heart of what I stated. My summation was clear. I’ll repeat.
By looking at this tree ring(or several tree rings), I can tell the earth’s temp was 54.85 degrees F.
Anyone believing that thought has any validity is operating solely on faith, not science.
Lasso that.
Phil, at this moment, I’m drunk, but even in my worse state, I can beat your treeometers to death. Its hilarious that people feel compelled to defend tree rings and the idiotic HS graph………….. Why don’t we look at a real temp graph?…….. http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2001
Phil, I apologize for the bluntness, but your insult to me doesn’t go unnoticed. Your offerings are pathetic. It is beneath you to present such tripe and, as I stated, it doesn’t address my summation. I’ll repeat, ….only because it is apparent some people are a bit slower than others……….. By looking at this tree ring(or several tree rings), I can tell the earth’s temp was 54.85 degrees F.
I’ll be more than happy to address the issues you brought up as soon as you show the ridiculous thought that treeometers carry such precision as the posit I presented.
Joel Shore says:
June 4, 2011 at 5:52 pm
|If so, what would even be their motivation for doing that?|
$
Alcheson says:
June 4, 2011 at 9:09 am
Bravo, Alcheson! Bravo!
Does the ‘preponderance of the evidence’ of peer reviewed science hold any weight with the AGW faithful? Or must it only be ‘peer reviewed’ by their own disciples?
I write in attempt to refocus this discussion on the real issue and not opinions concerning ideologies and motivations.
Whatever the merits of statistical procedures and tests, one finding of the MBH 98 and 99 studies is not disputable: viz.
The indications of global temperature provided by the MBH method showed falling global temperature after 1960 while the surface temperature measurements showed rising global temperature after 1960.
This divergence of the two sets of measurements after 1960 could only be indication that
(a) the MBH method provides false indications of global temperature change
or
(b) the surface temperature measurements provide false indications of global temperature change
or
(c) the MBH method and the surface temperature measurements both provide false indications of global temperature change.
These indications were – and could only be – the most important finding of the MBH studies.
Any paper reporting results of the MBH method which failed to mention these indications would be severely flawed. But MBH98 and MBH99 did not mention them. Instead,
(i) those papers made a deliberate attempt to hide the divergence
while
(ii) their authors attempted to protect themselves from having made this deception by mentioning the problem in another paper in another journal.
The deception was severe and consisted of obscuring the divergence by plotting the two data sets on the same graph with the plot of surface temperature measurements being placed over the MBH results to obscure them. Phil Jones called this “Mike’s Nature trick”.
And ‘Mike’s Nature trick’ is precisely the same activity as the infamous Piltdown Man. In both cases, parts of two different items were grafted together as a method to construct an artefact which provides a misleading indication, and the artefact was presented to the scientific community with deliberate intent to mislead.
It is appalling that anybody would condone the deception or would pretend that the artefact (i.e. the MBH Hockey Stick) has any worth. But, as this thread demonstrates, there are people who do both.
Richard