Mann and coining the AMO and claims of credit

Junkscience.com writes:

Did Michael Mann falsely claim to coin a famous climate term actually coined by someone else?

In Mann’s new book “The Hockey Stick and Climate Wars”, Mann writes:

The multidecadal oscillation I’d helped discover would nonethless become a cause celebre among climate change contrarians. It would even get a name: the “Atlantic Multidecadal oscillation” (AMO) — a moniker I coined off the cuff in a phone interview with science writer Dick Kerr. [footnote omitted; it reiterates the same claim]

But in an e-mail exchange with Dick Kerr today, Kerr wrote to JunkScience.com:

Steve, yes, I must confess. They just had a paper out on this phenomenon, but I needed a convenient label to write the news story. So I followed meteorological naming conventions and suggested AMO. That was okay with Mike for a news story. Subsequent papers in the literature also found it handy but had no source but my story in Science, so they would cite me. Looks fine because such a citation appears to be a scientific paper in a prestigious journal. “Oscillation” has since begun to fall out of favor because it conveys too strong a sense of regularity. We’ll see how long AMO hangs in there.

Adding credibility to Kerr’s version is the below post on Mann’s RealClimate web site.

But there’s far more to this story, as I’ve discovered in the discussions that went on in my email group.

From the discussion:

I have been bugged by Mann’s revisionist story on this point for a while now (since he has made such claim several times in the past …)

The document from Juan this morning—his interview printed in Scientific American March 2012 issue, p. 74, “I coined the term “Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation [AMO]” …”

just pushed me over the edge …

Only one possibility left for this to be TRUE—that Richard Kerr from Science come out to say that he heard it from Mann first during the interview for his June 16, 2000 article (see attached, where this AMO phrase appeared for the first time …)

Dave pointed me to this story in RC storyline on AMO:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/11/atlantic-multidecadal-oscillation-amo/

which also point to Kerr as the source …

we can see from Steve’s blog that a lot of Mann worshipers found this AMO coinage to be key … (especially john cook of skeptical science)

http://junkscience.com/2012/02/09/mann-or-myth-part-1/

(sorry Steve Schlesinger and Ramankutty 1994 did not come up with that phrase … i know this is WIKI saying … I know Schlesinger aka Elvis—his hair and sideburns look like Mr. Elvis of Graceland!)

if you can be burdened to check this 2000 paper by Delworth and Mann, you can see that in however many thousand words they wrote —they never mentioned AMO—so what is the chance of Mann coining AMO during his brilliant interview by Richard Kerr as Mann would also claimed in his new book?

Note that I was into this multidecadal variability thing also by 1994 …Mann printed an interesting paper with Keff Park and Ray Bradley in 1995 in Nature … also no AMO being said … so I really do not think we can let him get away with this possible lie …

And…

The Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) was identified by Schlesinger and Ramankutty in 1994.^[1]

Enfield, D.B., A. M. Mestas-Nunez and P.J. Trimble, 2001: The Atlantic multidecadal oscillation and it’s relation to rainfall and river flows in the continental U.S.. Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 28, 2077-2080.

So it appears that when the phenomenon was identified in 1994 by Schlesinger and Ramankutty, the abbreviation didn’t get used until Dick Kerr suggested it for an article he was writing.

Here is the full email exchange with Steve Milloy of junkscience.com:

From: Steve Milloy <milloy@xxx.xxx>

Date: March 8, 2012 10:42:18 AM EST

To: Richard Kerr <rkerr@xxxxx.xxx>

Subject: Re: Question about Mann, AMO

Dick,

Will note the confusion/uncertainty.

But note that RealClimate credited you in a 2004 posting.

Thanks,

Steve

On Mar 8, 2012, at 10:37 AM, Richard Kerr wrote:

Steve,

A clarification is required concerning the coining of the term “Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation” or AMO. It turns out that my recollection, as I recounted it to you, differs from Michael Mann’s recollection (which I had not been aware of). I have always assumed that I suggested the obvious term to him and had him okay it, he recalls my asking for a term and his suggesting it.

That was a long time ago. My handwritten notes from the phone interview were discarded after some years in the course of routine cleaning and condensing of my files. My recollection could well be faulty, encouraged by all those ego-stroking citations of my news story in the refereed literature. There is no way to say whose recollection is fuzzier, and it matters not.

Dick

Richard A. Kerr

Senior Writer, Science

phone 202 xxx-xxxx

fax 202 xxx-xxxx

rkerr@xxxxx.xxx

1200 New York Avenue, N.W.

Washington, DC 20005

>>> Richard Kerr 3/7/2012 4:35 PM >>>

Steve, yes, I must confess. They just had a paper out on this phenomenon, but I needed a convenient label to write the news story. So I followed meteorological naming conventions and suggested AMO. That was okay with Mike for a news story. Subsequent papers in the literature also found it handy but had no source but my story in Science, so they would cite me. Looks fine because such a citation appears to be a scientific paper in a prestigious journal. “Oscillation” has since begun to fall out of favor because it conveys too strong a sense of regularity. We’ll see how long AMO hangs in there.

Dick

Richard A. Kerr

Senior Writer, Science

phone 202 xxx-xxxx

fax 202 xxx-xxxx

rkerr@xxxxxx.xxx

1200 New York Avenue, N.W.

Washington, DC 20005

So who’s recollection is “fuzzier? Mann or Kerr’s. Since RealClimate gave Kerr credit in 2004, and not RealClimate co-founder Mann, I’d go with Kerr having a more accurate recollection.  It seems there isn’t any ego going on with Kerr in his exchanges. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

With all the other credibility issues cited in Mann’s book, we may have a case of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.

I think Mann’s “credit report” just took a hit. It may be harder to get government loans grants now.

Related articles

• Climate’s Stolen Valor: Did Mann lie about coining ‘Atlantic multidecadal oscillation’? (junkscience.com)
• A detailed review of Mann’s book: The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars as it relates to the Wegman report to Congress (wattsupwiththat.com)
• Mann in damage control mode over ‘AMO’ coinage? (junkscience.com)
• Mann or Myth: Part 1 (junkscience.com)
• Mann on Irreproducible Results in Thompson (PNAS 2006) (climateaudit.org)

UPDATE: In my email group discussion this morning, Dr. Christopher Essex proposes a new naming convention for the AMO and other similar series. After Steve McIntyre gave his nod (and a wink) for the naming I wrote:

I’m with Steve on the new naming. That way, Mann doesn’t have to fight Kerr for credit [on the AMO].

Happy to put this up on WUWT in the article and give you full credit Chris, so that scholarly discussions in the future can trace back to the moment that Widely-averaged Times series Fluctuation made it into the lexicon. – Anthony

And he agreed, so here it is:

But Demetris, you know full well that the world is filled with Fourier determinist chauvinists who will recoil at the notion that things are not fundamentally deterministic and not usefully decomposable into Fourier modes. Although I have walked on both sides of the deterministic stochastic divide, I am not sure that I am even comfortable with simple “fluctuation”. It seems kind of nihilistic to me, but this is perhaps more a matter of taste that is not in the domain of falsifiability. But objections noted  perhaps we could call it the Atlantic Widely-averaged Times series Fluctuation: AWTF. And we could have the El Nino Southern WTF etc. 😉  -c