WUWT readers may recall “copygate” surrounding the Wegman report and all of the accusations of plagiarism from the man behind the curtain “Deep Climate”, and John Mashey. This item from Wednesday got lost in all the opening furor over Fakegate.
Bishop hill reports that:
The accusation of plagiarism against Edward Wegman, author of one of the Congressional reports into the Hockey Stick, appears to have been upheld, but I think it’s fair to say the university hasn’t treated it as a capital offence, presumably because the passages in question were background material.
In a statement to GMU faculty, provost Peter Stearns said that one investigation committee unanimously found that “no misconduct was involved” in the 2006 Congressional report. “Extensive paraphrasing of another work did occur, in a background section, but the work was repeatedly referenced and the committee found that the paraphrasing did not constitute misconduct,” he said, in the statement.
A second university committee found unanimously, “that plagiarism occurred in contextual sections of the (CSDA) article, as a result of poor judgment for which Professor Wegman, as team leader, must bear responsibility.” Wegman will receive an “official letter of reprimand”, Stearns said, as sanction for the plagiarism.
The Chronicle of Higher Education says:
George Mason U. Professor Reprimanded Over Climate Paper
February 23, 2012, 2:43 pm
George Mason University has issued a reprimand to Edward J. Wegman, a professor of data sciences and applied statistics, after more than a year of investigation into accusations that Mr. Wegman included plagiarized material in a 2006 report that congressional Republicans used to challenge scientific findings about global warming. The reprimand followed the unanimous vote of a faculty committee that plagiarism occurred and that it was the result of “poor judgment” attributable to Mr. Wegman, USA Today reported. A second faculty committee also reviewed the matter and concluded unanimously that Mr. Wegman’s report contained “extensive paraphrasing” but no misconduct, the newspaper said.
One committe says some plagiarism occurred in backup material (probably due to lack of citations) while a second committee says “poor judgement, but no misconduct”.
According to USA Today, Mike Mann’s hockey team member Bradley is upset:
“This is an absurd decision,” Bradley says, noting the university committees split on essentially similar instances of copied text. “It must give lots of encouragement to students at GMU who think that copying somebody else’s work without attribution is acceptable.”
Despite filing the complaint, “I have not been told about this decision by GMU directly — I was notified by others,” Bradley says. “Pretty shabby.”
…
In the phone interview, GMU’s Stearns [said]:
Stearns says the university is not investigating any other complaints.
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If GMU found Wegman guilty of plagarism as you claim, why was the penalty so light.
The truth is they found him guilty of being sloppy. The only dishonest here is yours.
The reason why the paper withdrawn has more to do with the power of those opposing it, than any problems with the paper itself.
All the evidence points to an honest mistake. Do you have any evidence to the contrary?
As others have pointed out, Wegman is a statistician and the paper was about statistics. The content in question regarded biological questions that Wegman had never claimed expertise in and were from a paper that was being extensively quoted throughout the paper.
Hmmm. Connelly is correct about plagiarism. I am sure that he guards the halls of wikidom for such instances and strikes down entire articles as invalid due to such lack of citations.
Typing from my phone sucks. My apologies to Connolley for misspelling his name.
Not of plagiarism, but of poor judgment:
I.e., he condoned the plagiarism of one of the other authors. I think, from what I read in another thread in the past, that was Said.
Thank you, Anthony!
You must have the patience of a saint! You repeatedly allow Mr Connolley to enter your internet home and spout his tired rhetoric and invective CAGW religious views as though it were the acme of scientific thought, rather than its nadir.
I would like to add one quote that seems appropos to the current warmist agenda:
Mr. Connolley should be grateful to you for only giving him a 24 hour time out. I have invited others to leave my physical home for less serious offenses.
WTF was GMU doing involved in this in the first place? The report was for Congress, not a journal. Wegman should have been totally exonerated.
Sounds like a balanced response from GMU. No whitewash, for his poor judgement he was found to have committed plagiarism and recieved a letter of reprimand, which will hang over him the remainder of his academic career.
As opposed to the shameful whitewashes for hockey team members…
Dave L. says: February 24, 2012 at 7:37 pm
So, regarding the most important matter, there was nothing factually wrong in the report and its conclusion: Mann’s statistics were flawed.
Smokey says: February 24, 2012 at 7:46 pm
Dave L., exactly. Wegman’s results have withstood all attempts at falsification. And the ‘crime’ amounted to a missing footnote.
Agree Dave and Smokey.
This plagiarism nonsense is a shameful smear – a slimy smokescreen intended to discredit the Wegman report, which correctly detailed the fatal flaws in the Mann “hockey-stick” papers.
As the Wegman report clearly showed, Mann’s work was mathematically flawed – worthless at best, and in reality highly misleading.
The objective of Mann’s “hockey stick” was to eliminate from the historic record both the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. This was a bold falsehood, that was then widely promoted by the IPCC to scare the public about manmade global warming. The IPCC has since quietly dropped the Mann hockey stick. When even your close friends drop you, that says something is terribly wrong.
Furthermore, it took eight years before the “Divergence Problem” was revealed, also in testimony. Mann grafted modern surface temperature data onto older tree ring temperature proxies to produce his upward-sloping “hockey stick” graph. Grafting together two different datasets is usually NOT good scientific practice. Why did Mann do this? Because if he had exclusively used tree-ring data, the blade of the hockey stick, instead of showing scary warming in the last decades of the 20th Century, would have shown COOLING.
The scientific conclusion, in my opinion, is that using tree rings as a proxy for temperatures is not sufficiently accurate for the major conclusions that were drawn from the Mann study.
The sociological conclusion is that one should never believe anything written by global warming alarmists – their predictive track record is perfect, but in the NEGATIVE. Every one of their scary global warming predictions has failed to materialize!
Mann and the IPCC were clearly wrong about the hockey stick – the only remaining question is not one of error, it is one of fraud.
For more on the Divergence Problem, see
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1530
and
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=899
Footnote:
I first wrote much of this text myself, several years ago, and edited it this morning – just in case anyone accuses me of plagiarism. 🙂
evilincandescentbulb says:
“And all of this because he put an “e” on the word potato… Sheesh!”
That was one Vice-president (Dan Quayle).
The current Vice-President, Joe Biden, has admitted to receiving a failing grade for plagarism in law school, as well as perpetrating other instances of plagarism.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history_lesson/2008/08/the_write_stuff.html
Allan MacRae says:
February 26, 2012 at 4:08 am
…
Footnote:
I first wrote much of this text myself, several years ago, and edited it this morning – just in case anyone accuses me of plagiarism. 🙂
Self-plagiarism! The worst kind, because it’s so hard to resist altering and corrupting the text. For shame!
>:-(
):-Q
Those sceptical of the potential of human-induced climate catastrophe tend to point out the scientific errors and omissions of the proponents, while presenting scientific evidence and data supporting non-GHG causes of climate variation.
Those proposing the potential of human-induced climate catastrophe tend to obfuscate over the scientific evidence and data they present in support of GHG causes of climate variation, while failing to engage sceptics on the scientific merits of contrary evidence and data. Instead, every logical fallacy going is committed in order to discredit sceptics.
Whenever I see one side of a debate being open with their case and engaging on the substance, while the other side pulls every trick in the book to avoid doing so, I usually suspect the motives of the latter.
Keith,
I drew the same conclusion after reading authors on both sides.