By Dr. David Schnare
N.B., Dr. Schnare is the lead attorney in the UVA-Mann email case.
This week Nature Magazine published an editorial suggesting that “access to personal correspondence is a freedom too far” and that Michael Mann, whom they favorably compare to Galileo, should have his emails, written and received while he was a young professor at the University of Virginia, protected from public release on the core basis that to do otherwise would “chill” the work of scientists and academics. I note Galileo was forced to keep his work private. Had he the opportunity, he would have published it far and wide. Mann is quite the opposite. He wants to keep secrets and let no one know what he did and how he did it.
Nature, unfamiliar with the facts, law and both academic and university policy as applies in this case, conflates too many issues and misunderstands the transparency questions we raise.
The facts of the case include that these emails are more than five years old; that they contain none of the email attachments, no computer code, no data, no draft papers, no draft reports; that the university has already released over 2,000 of them, some academic and some not; that when they were written Mann knew there was no expectation of privacy; that all emails sent or received by a federal addressee are subject to the federal FOIA, and many have already been released; and that nearly 200 of the emails the University refuses to release were released by a whistleblower in England.
That latter group of emails, part of the “Climategate” release, do more than merely suggest Mann engaged in academic improprieties. They show he was a willing participant in efforts to “discriminate against or harass colleagues” and a failure to “respect and defend the free inquiry of associates, even when it leads to findings and conclusions that differ from their own.” Other emails document Mann’s communications were not “conducted professionally and with civility.”
Thus, emails already available to the public demonstrate that Michael Mann failed to comply with the University of Virginia Code of Ethics and the American Association of University Professors Statement on Professional Ethics.
A question, not mine, but asked by many who are interested in the history of this period, is not whether Mann failed to live up to the professional code expected of him. It is to what degree he failed to do so and to what lengths the university will go to hide this misbehavior. If we merely sought to expose Mann’s failure to display full academic professionalism, we would not need these emails. Those already in the public eye are more than sufficient for any such purposes.
I want those emails for a very different reason. Our law center seeks to defend good science and proper governmental behavior, and conversely to expose the converse. Without access to those kinds of emails, and, notably, research records themselves, it is not possible for anyone to adequately credit good behavior and expose bad behavior. This is one of two reasons we prosecute this case. It is the core purpose of a freedom of information act. Because the public paid for this work and owns this university, it has not merely a right to determine whether the faculty are doing their jobs properly; it has a duty to do so. This is not about peer review; it is about citizens’ acting as the sovereign and taking any appropriate step necessary to ensure those given stewardship over an arm of the Commonwealth are faithfully performing.
The second reason we bring this case is to defend science and the scientific process. Anyone who has taken a high school science laboratory course knows that the research or experimental process begins with recording what was done and what was observed. As UVA explains in its Research Policy RES-002, “The retention of accurately recorded and retrievable results is of the utmost importance in the conduct of research.” Why? “To enable an investigator to reproduce the steps taken.”
Currently public emails show Mann was unable to provide even his close colleagues data he used in some of his papers and could not remember which data sets he used. A query to UVA shows the university, who owns “the data and notebooks resulting from sponsored research,” had no copy of Mann’s logbooks and never gave him permission to take them with him when he left UVA. The university refused to inquire within Mann’s department as to whether anyone there knew whether he even kept a research logbook, so it’s impossible for me to know whether he stole the logbook or just never prepared one in the first place.
The emails ATI seeks are all that appears to be left of a history of what he did and how. Absent access to those emails, anyone seeking to duplicate his work, using the exact same data and methods, has no way to do so. That is in direct conflict with both good science and the UVA research policy.
Nor should access to these kind of emails “chill” the academic process.
As a former academic scientist, I understand the need and desire to keep close the research work while it is underway. Both I and the university have a proprietary interest in that work, while it is ongoing. Once completed, however, I have a duty to share not only the data and methods with the academic community, I also have a duty to share the mistakes, the blind alleys, the bad guesses and the work and theories abandoned.
Science advances knowledge by demonstrating that a theory is wrong. All the mistakes, blind alleys and bad guesses are valuable, not just to the scientist himself, but to his colleagues. By knowing what did not work, one does more than simply save time. One gains direction. One mistake revealed often opens a vista of other ideas and opportunities. The communications between scientists during a period of research are the grist for the next generation of work. Ask any doctoral candidate or post-doc how important being part of the process is on the direction of their future research. They will tell you that these unpublished communications are as much an important scientific contribution as the final papers themselves. Anyone who wishes to hide those thoughtful discussions hides knowledge.
If anything is “chilling” it is the thought that a neo-Galileo is hiding knowledge.
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Sure, there are links to some of Mike’s data now. All it took was the involvement of Congress.
To understand people’s feelings about Mann’s willingness to release data, you have to have been following this for almost a decade…or, as a shortcut, you can read “The Hockey Stick Illusion”, by Andrew Montford, and then you’ll not only get the history, but explanations of Mann’s early abuse of statistics, and how all of this led to Congressional intervention. It’s a fun read.
“Since you are at Duke you should also be aware of another blow to science. The FDA stating Cetero has Fabricated Trial Data for pharmaceuticals. ”
Oh yes. If there is any field that comes close to climate science with a record of confirmation bias, it is medical research esp drug trials. There it can kill people and generate lawsuits, and there is at least some effort expended policing researchers on the part of the grant agencies and Universities as a few cases like this and granting agencies take a dim view of the entire ORS and audit process.
When Mann STARTED OUT, nobody cared about climate science but climate scientists. Climate was beyond our control and basically unpredictable, so funding was at a reasonable level for what is basically a sideline to meteorology, which is immediately useful. Climate is still beyond our control and basically unpredictable, but climate science has become a major business in and of itself. It’s a modern version of biblical prophecy, where many people made a living out of predicting tempest and earthquake and crying out that it is all caused by the sins of man. It is a perfect psychological vessel wherein people can atone for their wealth and curse the unrepentant sinner.
“Climate Science crossed over this [first] divide, from harmless exploration to predictions with huge financial consequences, without anyone noticing that the engineering standards that should have been instituted, were missing. This change happened with the creation of IPCC. ”
Well said. It’s been said before, but that doesn’t make it any less true. The whole concept of “carbon futures” and large groups on BOTH sides of the issue with profoundly vested interests and billions of dollars at stake took a group of mid-level, average researchers — some of them appallingly young (as was Mann when the whole thing started) — and catapulted them into a fast track world where they were being treated like rock stars, where their results were being seen on the nightly news and trumpeted by famous people, movers and shakers.
I could almost feel sorry for Mann. He may have even had his moments of clarity where he acknowledged, to himself, that his work was badly done and probably wrong, but he didn’t know HOW wrong or what the right answer really was (nobody did) and so he chose to hang on and ride the tiger. Or if you prefer another metaphor, to continue to try to teach the horse to sing. Sure, if he fails the king will sooner or later have his head, but in the meantime the king might die. He might die. The horse might die. Or, however unlikely people on this list think it, the horse could learn to sing.
AGW isn’t a DISPROVEN hypothesis — it is just far from being proven, so far that it is foolish to be bending world policy into strange shapes and creating whole artificial markets on the possibility that it might end up being true. In the end, it will probably take decades of work and observation to understand the climate, and it might even end up being worth it. One of these decades the Holocene will end and the glaciers will return. Since we don’t know why it started when it started, what has modulated temperatures across its ten thousand plus year course, or what will cause it to end when it ends and we return to glaciation, it could literally start tomorrow, it could already have started with the current solar cycle. Even the heating of the 20th century could act as a trigger to a cold state, if there are cold attractors out there in a chaotic system. It might take decades of a quiet sun to really get it going; it might require some sort of “event” to nucleate a shift to a different (but stable) system of oscillation that completely changes the way heat is carried around, but the Younger Dryas rather convincingly demonstrates that this kind of thing can happen, entirely without the help of humans.
Maybe we will learn enough DISproving AGW to be able to predict this sort of thing with some degree of confidence, and that would be totally worth it. I am enormously skeptical about global warming being a problem EVEN if it is as bad as the alarmists claim that it will be. Warm isn’t bad, and even peak CO_2 if we do “nothing” and just burn fossil fuels until they are gone — or more likely mostly replaced by solar and other technologies that are already borderline cheaper — it won’t ever get that much higher. I fear the cold. With 7 billion humans, one or two “years without a summer”, no matter how they are triggered, could kill a billion people in war and famine and plague, and the start of the next glaciation, no matter that it is spread out over a century, would kill half the world’s population. AGW at its worst would do nothing of the sort.
In the meantime, it’s a pretty problem, and it seems as though sanity is slowly starting to prevail in climate science, as the latest IPCC report sounds like it is already starting to hedge its bets to try to keep “believers” on board if in fact the climate continues to hold steady or cool for the next two or three solar cycles. This is good news! What it means is that they are facing the stark realization that nature doesn’t give a damn for theories, that the models they are using don’t even have the correct SIGN for the sensitivity, and that with the current solar cycle heading to one of the lowest peaks seen in a century or more (and IIRC, with the next one predicted by Lief and perhaps others to be even lower), well, we will soon enough find out if global temperature tracks solar state (lagging by years to decades).
rgb
From Joel Shore on November 15, 2011 at 6:20 pm:
Pardon me for ignoring the static-like noise of obfuscation. I just Googled the following recent Climate Audit piece about Mann et al 08:
http://climateaudit.org/2011/07/06/dirty-laundry-ii-contaminated-sediments/
There I find out that important data relevant to Mann et al 08 wasn’t revealed until it was included in the Supplementary Info (SI) of Mann et al 09, where it was quietly admitted the “skillful reconstruction” of the Hockey Stick in Mann et al 08 was, in simple words, crap.
Fascinating article, well worth reading, ends with Steve McIntyre rightfully concluding, by the relevant PNAS criteria, that Mann et al 08 should be retracted.
Looks like McIntyre not only found the mountain, he’s busy counting the molehills on the sides of it.
Joel Shore says:
November 15, 2011 at 6:49 pm
In actual fact, the level of data and code sharing for Mann’s 2008 PNAS paper goes well beyond the norms of what I am familiar with in the areas of physics and applied physics that I have worked in.
Is it supposed to be a surprise to me that you and Mann don’t know what the norms for the practice of real science are?
Steve Goddard has explained it pretty well, me thinks;
http://www.real-science.com/paper-trail-mikes-nature-trick
Dr Schnare
In the light of recent public domain information relating to Penn State’s maladministration of internal inquiries relating to inappropriate behaviour by employees and as a result of this Steve McIntyre concerning William Easterling might I be so bold as to suggest two lines of enquiry.
First, the impassioned and expensive Penn State legal defence opposing your FOI request makes much more sense should there turn out to be correspondence involving Easterling and/or Wendell Courtney pertaining to the subject of SM’s article linked above. Perhaps that possibility might strengthen the argument for disclosure?
Secondly, should there be such pertinent information, might the scope of the FOI request be extended to include relevant information from both Courtney & Easterling’s electronic records?
Apologies, I forgot to add the link in my previous post
http://climateaudit.org/2011/11/15/new-information-at-penn-state/
Joel Shore
RDCII says: November 15, 2011 at 7:20 pm
Sure, there are links to some of Mike’s data now. All it took was the involvement of Congress.
To understand people’s feelings about Mann’s willingness to release data, you have to have been following this for almost a decade…or, as a shortcut, you can read “The Hockey Stick Illusion”, by Andrew Montford, and then you’ll not only get the history, but explanations of Mann’s early abuse of statistics, and how all of this led to Congressional intervention. It’s a fun read.
Joel, thanks for getting us all out to turn the mirror round to you, to show you that, far from the commenter’s statement being wrong, as you said, it actually is true not only in spirit but also in significant details. Please read and enjoy Montford, as encouraged. And you can easily remind yourself of our answers by using the search / find facility for “Joel”.
I hope this will end all repetitions of such comments, in future. You’ve been raising straw men long enough IMO.”When the facts change, I change. What do you do Sir” was spoken by economist Maynard Keynes during the Depression, but it neatly describes the true scientific attitude.
I hope Smokey et al bookmark this to use on future occasions as REMEMBER THIS [click] or CHECK THIS [click]. It would be nice to think that true scientific attitude can actually be practised and recognized again by scientists such as yourself.
Gail Combs says: November 15, 2011 at 7:36 am
I am horrified, having followed your link re NAIS, that the same situation exists here in Oz.
But more horrified in regard to other situations I am aware of here in Australia, and those that involved families with young children.
A colleague posted this link some time ago, it may be of interest.
He posted also with the link:-
Remember: It’s not what backs the money, it’s who controls its quantity
Perhaps these days ‘money’ is ‘carbon dioxide’? And the geography, of where it may be most profitable with as least transparency as possible?
Additonally, this academic paper may be of interest
Rockoff Hugh (1990) The Wizard of Oz as a Monetary Allegory The Journal of Political Economy 98(4) Aug p739-60
I greatly admire your and Lucy Skywalker’s comments on this post. Thank you.
Steve from Rockwood says: November 15, 2011 at 6:30 am
…it is the 2 others for every 5 who do the “me-too” research that really messes things up. Because now you have a consensus in a field (academic research) that is not well equipped to fight back.
Let alone the effect on the ‘me-too’ informing policy……. effective for the 3-4 years of governance and influence on expenditure at all three levels: local- state and federal (here in Australia). And of course non-govt organisations (NGOs) /not-for-proft. And taxation exemptions.
+ another year or two to overturn the policies. If they are evaluated or audited rigorously and these results disseminated.
In the saga of northern Australia – thirty years ran on, three generations of children born to suffer the consequences of gross research, reporting of and 30 years of policy in health, education, infrastructure, employment/welfare schemes and civil & criminal justice and the need for policing. The hypothesis being ‘self-determination’!
There has only been one comment in this blog on the role which the media may have (or not) played, given that the academic journals (and associations) make use of the web in publishing to the public. And access to academic institutions and subsidised access to developing nations. see JSTOR for eg.
pesadia — “Does anyone know of any scientist who is pro AGW and is calling for data and methods to be released?”
Absolutely. Phil Jones. He’s been working hard persuading every NMS to release their proprietary data to the public, but Poland just won’t play ball. It’s a shame I’ve yet to see a single sceptic write a post thanking Prof. Jones for doing what they seemed unable to do (organise a canvassing of NMS’s to release their proprietary data). It’s a harsh world.
JPeden says:
It makes no sense to talk about the proxies being put in upside-down: The algorithm automatically decides which way the proxies go by how they correlate with the temperature record over a certain period.
Because of concern about the contamination issue and which direction the authors of the Tiljander sediment proxies thought the data ought to correlate with temperature, Mann et al repeated the analysis with these proxies removed in the Supplementary Materials part of the NAS paper.
So, in other words, Mann did what any good scientist does when there is certain disputed data: He showed the results both with and without this data included.
Lucy Skywalker says:
Do you really believe that Montford is an unbiased account of things?
JPeden says:
Mann’s 1999 GRL paper discusses how the tree ring data from the Southwest U.S. is vitally important for getting a skillful reconstruction for the past 1000 years. Publishing something in GRL is hardly the recommended way of “censoring” it. In discussions, even Steve M. has admitted that it is true that Mann discussed this there; the debate he has with Mann is whether or not this was already true for the time period going back only to 1400 (as in Mann 1998). But even if McIntyre’s argument were correct, it is largely irrelevant since the 1000-1400 period is the period of most interest (i.e., the broad time referred to as the “Medieval Warm Period”).
I see that Joel Shore is still Michael Mann’s water boy. He says: “Do you really believe that Montford is an unbiased account of things?” Unbelievable. Pure psychological projection. As if Joel Shore is not one of the most heavily biased commentators since Gutenberg started copying the Bible.
And of course Joel swallows gallons of Kool Aid when he excuses Mann’s deceptive use of the upside down Tiljander proxy, conveniently omitting the fact that Mann was told before he published that he was using a corrupted proxy; he went ahead and used it anyway, because it reinforced his coveted hockey stick shape. It also reinforced my observation that Mann is a fraud with no professional ethics.
Michael Mann is a conniving climate charlatan, and Joel Shore is his Mini-Me apologist. It’s plain to see that Joel Shore is part of the climate alarmist runaway global warming propaganda clique. But where is that runaway global warming? Where is that hidden heat lurking? Joel Shore is trying to convince everyone that down is up, war is peace, ignorance is strength, and Mann is honest. That won’t work here at the internet’s Best Science site. Joel needs to run along back to Pseudo-Skeptical Pseudo-Science, where the mouth breathers all nod their heads in unison, and no pushback is allowed.
From Joel Shore on November 16, 2011 at 7:59 am:
So if a proxy shows the temperatures going down, but the “temperature record”, whatever that is before thermometers came about, shows the temperatures going up, the algorithm will automatically flip the proxy to show temperatures going up. And no one is at fault, especially not the people who put forth the final results, because “It was the algorithm what done it!” Yeah, that sure makes sense…
Joel Shore –
I don’t think it’s possible to find an “unbiased’ report of things. It doesn’t sound to me like you’re unbiased, for instance, when you report things here.
The key to learning is to read both sides, looking for verifiable facts…and then verifying them for yourself, if you have doubts. There’s no excuse for having an interest in this issue, and not reading Montford’s book.
Montford gives a really good outlining of the timeline of the events, along with skeptical opinions you can ignore or investigate. His is the longest, most detailed explanation of the timeline I’ve seen, so if you want to know why people here get a little ill when anyone says Dr. Mann has released all the data, as if he did it promptly and willingly, that’s where you can go to get that understanding.
Further, I’ve never seen anyone being able to criticize his explanation of the statistics used by Mann and the problems with it (for instance, that the methodology leads to hockey sticks from input red noise).
You could do us a service by reading the book and independently verifying where he’s right or wrong. You’d be better at it than I would, because of confirmation bias.
If, instead of reading it, you want to come late to the party and not know what everyone else has already experienced as they lived through this stuff, well, don’t read the book. But don’t expect to get taken seriously.
“[…]these unpublished communications are as much an important scientific contribution as the final papers themselves. Anyone who wishes to hide those thoughtful discussions hides knowledge.”
If this were true then we wouldn’t be able to decide if Mann’s critics were true until they released the correspondence surrounding the publication of their paper. I eagerly await the release of McIntyre and McKitrick’s email. Until then I’ll just assume they are wrong 🙂
RDCII says:
November 16, 2011 at 10:07 am
…
Further, I’ve never seen anyone being able to criticize his explanation of the statistics used by Mann and the problems with it (for instance, that the methodology leads to hockey sticks from input red noise).
…
———————
Then you haven’t looked very hard…
http://deepclimate.org/tag/michael-mann/
Joel Shore says:
November 16, 2011 at 7:59 am
It makes no sense to talk about the proxies being put in upside-down:The algorithm automatically decides which way the proxies go by how they correlate with the temperature record over a certain period.
Right, Joel, it makes no sense at least not in your Apocalypic Religion’s already upside-down Fantasyworld, which willfully operates in direct opposition to reality, and according to the same sacred Mannian algorithm above which magically reverses sediment reality as needed!
And which explains, for example, why your Religion’s CO2 = CAGW “hypotheses” have a perfect record of prediction failure compared to objective reality.
But, hey, your method also predicts that if you just keep on repeating and generating more of your equally unhinged “perception is reality” verbiage, your own “perceptions” finally become reality, and then even the Communist Utopia therefore “exists”, right? But me, I don’t know if that actually works in North Korea, so maybe you should go there and find out how well it does before continuing on with your preferred “method”?
But I’m afraid you will instead find only Apocalypse Now!
1. Aristarchus. He came up with an incorrect solution because he did not compensate for the refraction of light by the atmosphere. When the Sun appears to be in contact with the horizon, she is actually below the horizon.
2. Galileo. He was arrogant, abrasive, and caustic.
He deliberately insulted the Pope by a) writing in Italian and b) putting the Pope’s observations into the mouth of Simplicio (the simple one) in his dialogue. And he had no proof of a moving Earth. He was 250 years early for the Focault pendulum.
Nevertheless, his discoveries (pendulum, projectile motion, phases of Venus, satellites of Jupiter, handles on Saturn, sunspots, mountains on the moon, and so on) sparked the Renaissance.
Galileo was NOT a poseur, an amateur, or a fraud. Read the story of his recording of his sighting of the planet Neptune. Yes, that’s right, Neptune. A couple of hundred years early, yet.
Read his dialogue on physics.
He overturned Aristotle with experiment, and gave a push to the Scientific Method.
Of course he was in disgrace from 1650 to 1715 because of the Maunder minimum, but we had to wait that one out for sunspots to return!
the beast of traal says:
November 15, 2011 at 1:20 pm
Gail Combs says: November 15, 2011 at 5:53 am
Leif Svalgaard says:
November 14, 2011 at 9:56 pm
In 46 years of research I have never kept a ‘log book’ nor have I known anybody who has.
_______________________________________
This absolutely floors me!
==============
What century are you living in !! Why write in a log book then copy to a computer….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I did it that way for a very good reason. It is called the Food and Drug Administration.
You make DARN sure everything is double signed and dated. Heck if you do drugs you even have to count and sign out the labels and then sign them back in, accounting for any that were destroyed.
That type of signed, double checked and signed by a second person requirement (among others) is why the Baxter flu vaccine scandal never made any sense to me.
Of course now most companies have gone over to electronic lab notebooks which meet the same FDA compliance requirements as the paper notebooks making life a bit easier since I left the Laboratory, but the concept is the same. SEE: http://www.labtrack.com/tab5.html
I still wonder how much information will be lost forever because of the reliance on computers that have gone obsolete. Old floppy disks from the 1980’s come to mind, not to mention the computer the chem Engineer managed to fry when the lab temp got to hot. (Melted the mother board)
Joel Shore and John B
Steve McIntyre has demolished with facts every single one of Mann’s Hockey Stick Papers and showed them to be false. Andrew Montford has shown in the HSI a very detailed fact based description of how the Hockey Stick was derived by Mann and what were the faults. If any of you have any knowledge, competence or capability, go ahead and prove factually where Andrew Montford was wrong and where McIntyre was wrong. Steve would even offer you gladly a chance to post at Climate Audit, defending the Hockey Stick, if you can. Anthony would do the same here. Go ahead and do so.
Venter says:
November 16, 2011 at 9:43 pm
Joel Shore and John B
Steve McIntyre has demolished with facts every single one of Mann’s Hockey Stick Papers and showed them to be false. Andrew Montford has shown in the HSI a very detailed fact based description of how the Hockey Stick was derived by Mann and what were the faults. If any of you have any knowledge, competence or capability, go ahead and prove factually where Andrew Montford was wrong and where McIntyre was wrong. Steve would even offer you gladly a chance to post at Climate Audit, defending the Hockey Stick, if you can. Anthony would do the same here. Go ahead and do so.
———————–
Here you go…
http://www.skepticalscience.com/broken-hockey-stick.htm
And if you don’t trust SkS, follow the links to the primary sources.
I’d like to add that “Good Science” doesn’t mean correct (as in the hypothesis is correct) science, it just means that the scientific method has been used to test the hypothesis. Failed hypotheses doesn’t mean bad science, it means faulty analysis.As long as the data, analysis tools and code is available, it’s good science, even if incorrect.