Steve McIntyre’s analysis of contaminated data used by Mann et al 2008 demonstrates that relevant criteria for retraction has been met based on PNAS publication policy.
Dirty Laundry II: Contaminated Sediments
From time to time, scientists inadvertently use contaminated data and their results are affected. For example, some time after publication of Grand et al (PNAS 2004), the authors determined that their results were erroneous as a “result of contamination of genomic DNA with plasmid DNA”. They promptly issued a retraction, expressing their regret for the error and any inconvenience. The reputation of the authors does not appear to have been diminished by the retraction. Mistakes happen and the mistake was promptly dealt with by retraction of the article.
Like Grand et al, Mann et al 2008 (M08) used contaminated data, in their case, the Finnish sediment data of Tiljander et al, the modern portion of which had been contaminated by agriculture and bridgebuilding. In addition to using the modern contaminated portion of the data, M08 made a second error by using the Tiljander lightsum and XRD upside down to the interpretation of its originators. Their handling of Tiljander data has been sharply criticized on different occasions by two eminent Finnish paleolimnologists – Atte Korhola here and Matti Saarnisto here.
In contrast to Grand et al, Mann et al have not issued a retraction or corrigendum or even admitted an error. Instead, in multiple venues (without explicitly admitting an error), they’ve asserted that, in any event, the error doesn’t affect their “central conclusions” [their PNAS reply, Feb 2009 here] or, more recently, “any” of their conclusions [Mann et realclimate, June 2011 here], as though that ended the matter.
It doesn’t. Even if the error didn’t have a material impact on the results, a Corrigendum should have been issued. Kaufman et al 2009, for example, issued a corrigendum when they learned that they too had used data (including their Tiljander series) upside down. But the situation for Mann et al 2008 is quite different. The most prominent claim for Mann et al 2008 was its supposed achievement of a “skillful” reconstruction without tree rings for the past 1300 years. Unfortunately, this “achievement” can now be seen to have been a complete mirage, dependent on the use of contaminated data in the EIV reconstruction without tree rings.
…
In the realclimate response to controversy over the Yamal proxy in September 2009, for example, the EIV no-dendro reconstruction of M08 was put forward as a supposed repudiation of Climate Audit:
Oh. The hockey stick you get when you don’t use tree-rings at all (blue curve)?
It has subsequently become a staple in public defence of the Stick, e.g. Skeptical Science here and here and numerous others. All such assertions rely on the supposed “skill” of the M08 EIV reconstruction. Unfortunately, the “achievement” was an illusion, as Mann et al quietly admitted in the SI to Mann et al 2009.
…
PNAS Policies on Retraction and SI
PNAS has the following policy on corrections and retractions:
PNAS publishes corrections for errors, made by the journal or authors, of a scientific nature that do not alter the overall basic results or conclusions of a published article. PNAS publishes retractions for major errors that may call into question the source of the data or the validity of the results and conclusions of an article. Errata are published at the discretion of the editors and appear as formal printed and online notices in the journal.
The use of contaminated sediments in M08 was, at a minimum, an “error”. This has been clearly stated by Finnish paleolimnologists Korhola and Saarnisto. Kaufman et al 2008, of which Bradley was a co-author, have already acknowledged a lesser error and issued a corrigendum.
As shown above, despite claims to the contrary, the error has a major impact on the EIV reconstruction without tree-rings and its verification statistics, both of which were relied on in the M08 assertion that they had achieved a “skillful” reconstruction without tree rings for the past 1300 years.
As noted in the lead paragraph, scientists sometimes use contaminated data. If science is to be “self-correcting”, then scientists actually have to issue corrections and, if necessary, retractions. As the example of Grand et al 2004 shows, this actually happens from time to time, but life goes on.
So too here. Mann et al 2008 meets relevant PNAS criteria for retraction. Hopefully, either PNAS or the authors will see the wisdom of retracting the article before it gets used by IPCC AR5.
============================================================
Full post here: Dirty Laundry II: Contaminated Sediments
For those that wish to bring this to the attention of PNAS edotors, here’s the contacts for PNAS from their website. Please be direct, factual, and courteous if you choose to send a letter.
PNAS
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Suite 450
Washington, DC 20001
Phone: 1-202-334-2679
Fax: 1-202-334-2739
General Questions:
E-mail: pnas@nas.edu
Web site: www.pnas.org
Permission requests: PNASPermissions@nas.edu Editor-in-Chief
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Devastating.
It’s time the global warming community (for want of a better description) started owning up to their mistakes.
Let the AR 5 use M08. When the error is exposed, as AR 4 errors have been, the damage will be even greater!
Why would Mann apologize? He suing Tim Ball the one honest scientist around, but not backed
by big sponsors. This man must be pulled up for the misinformation he has given, and the Australian government used in the incorrect ‘The Critical Decade’ report that the government
has used as a reason for introducing carbon tax? Mind you they added a disclaimer on pg 2
saying they could not be held responsible for inaccuracies?
“Unfortunately, the “achievement” was an illusion, as Mann et al quietly admitted in the SI to Mann et al 2009.”
Is there a link to this, so we can use it when the topic comes up?
“I did not know it would be a hit, Mickey” Fredo in Godfather II
So if we are talking about error correction, whatever happened to the error I found on the surface stations, site in this record
http://gallery.surfacestations.org/main.php?g2_itemId=694
The origin had a picture of the interior of the Stevenson screen showing this was in fact not a working instrument, but merely an unused screen in storage, I contacted Mr watts (or whoever admins the site) and pointed this out, I never received a reply but the very next day the image I refer to had been removed. This was ~2 years ago yet that record remains to this day.
bushbunny says: (July 6, 2011 at 10:45 pm)
“…Australian government used in the incorrect ‘The Critical Decade’ report that the government has used as a reason for introducing carbon tax? Mind you they added a disclaimer on pg 2 saying they could not be held responsible for inaccuracies?”
If our (Australian) government can “not be held responsible for inaccuracies” then who can? Is it even likely anyone ever will be? Disclaimers like this are being used as a licence to lie… guess they always have been, but it continues to sadden me that such caveats are used by any person over 10 years of age (when there is still time to beat the inclination out of them).
I have a lot of things I would like to claim, if I can be absolutely certain I have the out of a hungry dog and that judge and jury will accept my plea — and perhaps even express sympathy that I was even exposed to any suspicion of bad intent. But I would not try and run a country that way.
As suggested by the Climategate emails, Mann is vindictive and dishonest. This leopard is not going to change his spots regardless of any PNAS alterations in policy or institutional bias.
But his papers can and should be rejected for cause.
It has been asked before and I’ll ask again.
If the cAGW “science” is so certain, how come it has to be propped up by blatantly obvious dogma, incompetence, greed and malice?
For years I thought I was reading the errata from the CAGW community, and I waited patiently for the full papers.
Now you are telling me that they WERE the real papers and there is no errata.
Oh dear
@Dan typically can’t make a distinction between peer review science publication and web site admin.
Oh come one, next you’ll be asking Monckton to issue corrections – and to promise not to do it again!
The story of global warming science will go down as one of the classic case histories in the philosophy of science. There is a view that has been expressed on this blog and elsewhere that science progresses through the development of theories which survive until some refuting evidence is found that brings them down. That ‘Popperian’ view of science is highly influential among scientists and is taught as the key methodological principal on scientific research degree courses.
But Popper was not the last word on the matter and the undermining of Mann’s results by McIntyre and others is the latest in a long line of studies and commentaries which bit by bit are undermining the AGW research programme. Lakatos, for example gives a very coherent account of how scientific programmes progress and how they degenerate (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imre_Lakatos for a good discussion of Lakatos’s contribution). It is clear that there is a core of scientists who are highly committed to the core of their research programme. They have resolutely defended it, as Lakatos cogently describes in Lakatos and Musgrave ed. (1970). Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, by the development of ad-hoc modifications and arguments in a way which Popper would have said was quite inadmissible and led to pseudo-science.
The big question is where is climate science now? After a decade of solid critical work the AGW research programme is not as pristine as it once was. What I am sure will happen is that more and more studies will arise, based upon empirical observation, which undermine the primacy of core concept that CO2 is the global climate regulator and in this respect McIntyre’s critique is invaluable. No one, by themselves, will provide the ‘killer blow’ but gradually the guardians of the core of the programme will lose their influence and become increasingly marginal to the development of climate science. I can understand why the leading proponents of AGW seek to defend the core of their research programme to the bitter end but they will be judged not by what they defend but by their willingness to listen to their critics and to change.
Its good that they don`t clean up thier own mess!
It shows clearly the standards of the AGW “science”. Thugs dressed up as scientists protected by the activists politicans and the UN..They know they can get away with anything and they are.
Lol Dan, best you can moan about is a photo, brilliant, you do realise there where thousands and i’m sure a stats guy could give you the odds on there being one or two errors.
What you must ask yourself is does the error help the author in anyway? do you think Anthonys grant depended on it?
John Brookes says, July 7, 2011 at 1:41 am
“Oh come one, next you’ll be asking Monckton to issue corrections – and to promise not to do it again!”
I know you have a great dislike of Chris Monckton, John, but I think you should acknowledge two things about the man and the way he works:
1. When he makes a mistake, he is man enough to admit to it, apologise for it and ensure the people concerned know that (I have seen him do this on video and read his retractions nad apologies in print).
2. Chris Monckton is NOT responsible for policy-making documents that, in the hands of politicians are going to drain the world’s economies of trillions of dollars.
All we ask of those who are building these policies, is that they show competence, but not complacency; rigour, but not dogma; and, maybe, just a litlle humility in what they are doing – and planning to do to their fellow man – and not hubris. It also helps not to have a closed mind on the subject, as it seems, from my reading of the many negative posts you continually make around the world, you seem to have.
Is the following relevant, or am I missing something?
LETTER
Reply to McIntyre and McKitrick: Proxy-based temperature reconstructions are robust
McIntyre and McKitrick (1) raise no valid issues regarding our paper. We specifically discussed divergence of ‘‘composite plus scale’’ (CPS) and ‘‘error-in-variables’’ (EIV) reconstruc- tions before A.D. 1000 [ref. 2 and supporting information (SI) therein] and demonstrated (in the SI) that the EIV reconstruction is the more reliable where they diverge. The method of uncertainty estimation (use of calibration/validation residuals) is conventional (3, 4) and was described explicitly in ref. 2 (also in ref. 5), and Matlab code is available at http://www.meteo. psu.edu/mann/supplements/MultiproxyMeans07/code/ codeveri/calc_error.m.
McIntyre and McKitrick’s claim that the common procedure (6) of screening proxy data (used in some of our recon- structions) generates ‘‘hockey sticks’’ is unsupported in peer- reviewed literature and reflects an unfamiliarity with the concept of screening regression/validation.
As clearly explained in ref. 2, proxies incorporating instrumental information were eliminated for validation and thus did not enter into skill assessment.
The claim that ‘‘upside down’’ data were used is bizarre. Multivariate regression methods are insensitive to the sign of predictors. Screening, when used, employed one-sided tests
only when a definite sign could be a priori reasoned on physical grounds. Potential nonclimatic influences on the Tiljander and other proxies were discussed in the SI, which showed that none of our central conclusions relied on their use.
Finally, McIntyre and McKitrick misrepresent both the National Research Council report and the issues in that report that we claimed to address (see abstract in ref. 2). They ignore subsequent findings (4) concerning ‘‘strip bark’’ records and fail to note that we required significance of both reduction of error and coefficient of efficiency statistics relative to a standard red noise hypothesis to define a skillful reconstruction. In summary, their criticisms have no merit.
Michael E. Mann1, Raymond S. Bradley, and Malcolm K. Hughes Pennsylvania State University, Walker Building, University Park, PA 16802
1. McIntyre S, McKitrick R (2009) Proxy inconsistency and other problems in millennial paleoclimate reconstructions. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 106:E10.
2. MannME,etal.(2008)Proxy-basedreconstructionsofhemisphericandglobalsurface temperature variations over the past two millennia. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 105:13252– 13257.
3. Luterbacher J, Dietrich D, Xoplaki E, Grosjean M, Wanner H (2004) European seasonal and annual temperature variability, trends, and extremes since 1500. Science 303:1499 –1503.
4. Wahl ER, Ammann CM (2007) Robustness of the Mann, Bradley, Hughes reconstruction of surface temperatures: Examination of criticisms based on the nature and processing of proxy climate evidence. Clim Change 85:33– 69.
5. Mann ME, Rutherford S, Wahl E, Ammann C (2007) Robustness of proxy-based climate field reconstruction methods. J Geophys Res 112:D12109.
6. Osborn TJ, Briffa KR (2006) The spatial extent of 20th-century warmth in the context of the past 1200 years. Science 311:841– 844.
Author contributions: M.E.M., R.S.B., and M.K.H. wrote the paper. The authors declare no conflict of interest. 1To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: mann@psu.edu. © 2009 by The National Academy of Sciences of the USA
Bob Ryan says: July 7, 2011 at 3:05 am
The story of global warming science will go down as one of the classic case histories in the philosophy of science.
Totally agree!
But, I don’t think the conclusion will be “global warming science got it wrong”. I think the conclusion will be much bigger: “20th century ‘science’ was corrupted by its own success into believing that the science “brand” endowed omnipotence.
The reason I think the problem is much wider than climate “science” is because when presented by the evidence, far from chastising this “rogue” subject, the scientific elite merely closed ranks as if they simply couldn’t see what they had done wrong. Perhaps it was saving the “goose that laid the golden egg” … not willing to undermine this flagship area which had brought “science” so much prestige. Realistically, I think it is just like the corruption of the Catholic church in the renaissance: where the the elite gained so much from the machinery of their organisation that they lost sight of the real justification, philosophy and ethos that created the necessary foundation on which their organisations were originally built.
Perhaps the best way to describe this demise is that science is no longer a subsidery tool of our industrialised society, but now it is very much a secular religion. “Science” is not a tool to be used if and only if it is useful, now science all powerful all persuasive: it is something to be “followed”, something to give “moral guidance”, something that tries to force others to accept its viewpoint.
Bob Ryan says:
July 7, 2011 at 3:05 am
“The story of global warming science will go down as one of the classic case histories in the philosophy of science. . . .”
– – – –
Bob Ryan,
Excellent write up on the scientific method versus the problematic IPCC focused climate science. Thanks.
I would add a caution about Popper and Kuhn wrt their ideas that have contributed to the views of some current scientists on the scientific method. My impression is they put undue emphasis on limited parts of an entire process that is the broader view of the scientific method; their main focus was somewhat myopic. I think their minimizing of the broader process was unfortunate for the broader view of the scientific process.
John
Bob Ryan @ur momisugly 3:05 AM: Thanks for the very thoughtful comment. I checked out the Wiki entry on Lakatos (of whom, to my shame, I had never heard: I am still stuck on Popper in my ongoing auto-didactic program) and it’s great stuff. As for your thesis that McIntyre and other critics are providing impacts that will cumulate toward a “break,” when the (C)AGW programme is discarded as degenerate, I hope you’re right. I worry that the impulses will not cumulate but dissipate into heat; that they will die or wander in the contested space between science and politics. Blogs like WUTW are in the very center of that contested space; like hill-forts in prehistoric times, they allow scientists to take and hold strategic ground. Without them, the barbarians’ rule will only prosper.
John Brookes says:
July 7, 2011 at 1:41 am
John Brookes says:
July 7, 2011 at 1:41 am
“Oh come one, next you’ll be asking Monckton to issue corrections – and to promise not to do it again!”
When bereft of arguments, invent a straw man and attack that 🙂
John Brookes says, July 7, 2011 at 5:30 am:
“Is the following relevant, or am I missing something?
“LETTER
Reply to McIntyre and McKitrick: Proxy-based temperature reconstructions are robust…etc”
John, I’ve just come off CA reading the original blog post from Steve. I also read ALL the comments, including many from your alter-ego, Nick Stokes. I wonder why I didn’t find this fulsome comment of yours over there as well. Could it be the Steve M might just deal with you as thoroughly – and, I have to say, courteously and respectfully – as Nick Stokes?
Go on, grow a couple and cut ‘n’ paste your comment to CA. I love a good read.
John Brookes says:
July 7, 2011 at 5:30 am
Is the following relevant, or am I missing something?
——————————————
Probably missing something. In regards specifically to the screening method chosen creating hockey sticks, I seem to remember McIntyre specifically doing work that showed using randomized data and screening it in the same way Mann did had a bias for creating hockey sticks. Was it peer reviewed? I don’t know that it was, but it was certainly demonstrated for all to see, and I don’t remember anyone with knowledge of statistics being able to pick it apart.
The claim that M&M don’t understand regression screening/validation was laughable. Mann, a climate scientist, is claiming that world-class, published statisticians don’t understand basic principles around filtering data for regression analysis.
On multiple occasions M&M has demonstrated flawed statistical applications on the part of Mann and Company. Sometimes they show a significant error, sometimes the show not much error. Either way, the team usually refuses to acknowledge the errors, make corrections and then move on. It’s not that hard.
John Brookes,
the letter you note is relevant and very wrong. It is a good example of how they protect garbage and will not admit any error. You should drop by CA and ask Steve himself for the details of what is wrong with it. Of course, you will probably be politely instructed to search his site for the relevant posts where it was dissected.
Just a small amount of research would have saved you the embarassment of presenting this in public showing your gullibility.