McIntyre's rebuttal of Michael Mann's pants-on-fire book

I suspect that Mann is [SNIP: Speculatively over-the-top and defamatory. Let’s not do this. -REP] scientific objectivity is impossible.

There has been no statistical warming in 12 years. so….

For Steve McIntyre to post such inflammatory content, the book must be trash! I have been censored on his site for merely carping at the press (it was warranted). He is the model of civility when it comes to discussion.

If Lovejoy has joined the ground troops, we welcome him.

Note: This comment was also posted @ur momisugly CA.
I have read Mann’s book twice now. I had to really force myself, but did it because I thought it is good to know more about his thought patterns and it is good to know the substance of his fundamental worldview.
The two seemingly contradictory impressions of mine are:
1. He is adopting a kind of scorched earth strategy; sort of an approach where, if he goes down (intellectually), he will take everyone with him including both skeptical critics and his previous allies. He projects the image that he will never accept being a martyr.
2. He is myth building on a grand scale. He is creating the kind of mythology that is a theatrical production; one which dramatically shows himself as the main heroic player leading his worthy fellow IPCC supporters against the critics of both himself and of the IPCC. In the process he depicts critics as lesser/inferior beings both morally and intellectually. His myth building skills could use some additional professional PR help.
John

The extreme hatred of Michael Mann being exhibited by so many posters here is awesome to behold. So much negative emotion directed at a once obscure scientist, who pioneered in paleo-climate reconstruction using proxies seems at first unreal. The work of Mann and his colleagues has clearly hit a vital nerve among the posters here, and it should make the more curious and scientific to analyze why this is so. It is especially so because basically his work has been confirmed by subsequent research..
I believe that this reaction comes about because the haters cannot bear to entertain the prospect that his pioneering work is basically correct. Validation of his work, would cause some things to happen that the Michael Mann haters seem to fear the most. Government would be forced to regulate GHG emissions, changes in life style would result, and international treaties would require cooperation with foreign countries. This prospect has caused political conservative bloggers to go on the attack against scientists who have done work that supported AGW most strongly, James Hanson, and Michael Mann. It should be understandable that scientists who have been subjected to such attacks would push back.
Many posters believe, that Mann, and his colleagues, have cooked this work up as part of a political takeover of world government by Socialists. Indeed the history of the global warming controversy shows that much of the opposition to the idea in the US, has come from the extreme right – i.e. Marshall Institute, Cato, Heritage, Heartland Institute etc.
To me this hatred is an ugly thing to look at, and has certainly detracted from the haters’ ability to contemplate and analyze the scientific aspects in a clear fashion. Of course since political conservatism in a statistical sense seems to be strongly dependent on biology and brain physiology, this is nothing new or unexpected. The same kind of dynamic is at work around the theory of evolution, which is seeing pushback from political conservatives, and interestingly enough dates from the same year 1859,

REPLY: Don’t talk to me about “haters” here, you myopic apologist, until you walk a mile in my shoes. Take another time out, say a week this time, before I write something I’ll regret.- Anthony

In response to Frank O’Dwyer, the spreadsheet story is symptomatic of much that is wrong with Mann’s responses. Mann claims that errors were introduced when preparing a spreadsheet for McIntyre and that these errors were responsible for McIntyre’s inability to reproduced the Mann results. But this whole story is nonsense. McIntyre did not request the data in a spreadsheet,just a ,
location for the data; the data McIntyre was given was clearly prepared about a year before and not in response to the McIntyre request; and the admitted errors in the data were not what was primarily responsible for the failure of reproduction, which was instead caused by Mann’s failure to disclose his eccentric version of principal component analysis and the way he had treated the problem of there being very few proxies which actually went back to medieval times. This is the context in which this controversy ought to be viewed. And McIntyre published all the email correspondence years ago, yet Mann repeats his misleading account…

@-davidmhoffer says: April 24, 2012
“1. The error bars are so big that you could stuff the titanic, the iceberg it hit, and two copies of the tiljander data series (one right side up and the other upside down) and still be between the error bars.”
It was the first paleoclimate reconstruction ever done with enough rigour to provide error bars. If you think they are too wide then I presume you have a method for reducing the range of uncertainty in the data that Mann failed to use. I await your explanation with interest.
@-“2. I’ve personaly read over 50 peer reviewed paleo reconstructions confirming the existance of the MWP and LIA, directly refuting Mann’s work. ”
There is no claim or implication in the MBH reconstruction that the MWP or the LIA do not exist. In fact it confirms their existence and for the first time gives a range of values that they might have had. You cannot ‘refute’ a claim that was never made….
Having read over 50 paleo reconstructions you will be aware that as I said they all fall within the range delimited by Mann et al’s first paleo reconstruction – pretty good record for a first paleo attempt!
If you really think that the MBH98 was too generous in its assessment of the uncertainty then presumably you have an alternative that did better you can present?

izen says:
April 24, 2012 at 8:28 am
@-davidmhoffer says: April 24, 2012
“1. The error bars are so big that you could stuff the titanic, the iceberg it hit, and two copies of the tiljander data series (one right side up and the other upside down) and still be between the error bars.”
It was the first paleoclimate reconstruction ever done with enough rigour to provide error bars. If you think they are too wide then I presume you have a method for reducing the range of uncertainty in the data that Mann failed to use. I await your explanation with interest
>>>>>>>>>
You said that all other studies fit within the error bars of mbh98 and I pointed out that the error bars are so large that the statement is meaningless. I matters not in the least if I have a method for reducing it or not, the point is that the statement is meaningless.
izen says:
@-”2. I’ve personaly read over 50 peer reviewed paleo reconstructions confirming the existance of the MWP and LIA, directly refuting Mann’s work. ”
There is no claim or implication in the MBH reconstruction that the MWP or the LIA do not exist. In fact it confirms their existence and for the first time gives a range of values that they might have had. You cannot ‘refute’ a claim that was never made….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>.
Yes it does, and yes I can. MBH98 is pretty much a straight line with a sharp uptick at the end. No rise and fall of the MWP, no fall and subsequent rise of the LIA. Just a straight line. Afterward, when confronted with clear evidence of same from Europe and Greenland, Mann argued that these events were “local” and not global. Now confronted with study after study, from all over the world, using a wide variety ot techniques showing that a straight line is utter nonsense, the excuse is that these fit within the error bars? Can you remind me who said, in the ClimateGate emails, “we have to get rid of the MWP”? Why would ANYONE say that? And now you want to claim that this wasn’t his intent? Funny…. but oh so sad.
Izen:
Having read over 50 paleo reconstructions you will be aware that as I said they all fall within the range delimited by Mann et al’s first paleo reconstruction – pretty good record for a first paleo attempt!
If you really think that the MBH98 was too generous in its assessment of the uncertainty then presumably you have an alternative that did better you can present?
>>>>>>>>>>>
I need not present an alternative to show that something is garbage. The “oh, so you can do better?” sneer is nothing but an attempt to change the subject.
On that note, I’d like to add that you’ve managed to hijack the discussion of the problems with Mann’s work by sniping about data formats, supposed plagiarism, pca, and so on. The central facts are that:
1. MBH98 was demonstrated to be the result of computer code that produced a hockey stick graph from virtually ANY climate data. The rest of the issues you raise are irrelevant and a deliberate attempt to distract the reader from this central point.
2. Phil Jones and Michael Mann have both admitted to dropping substantive data from the paleo record and substituting in temperature data for the graphic that was supposed to grace the front cover of IPCC AR4. Review of what they did shows conclusivley, and by their own admission, that they did so because the paleo data from 1950 on showed a decline rather than a hockey stick rise.
Putting aside for a moment the shear audacity of doing this while “neglecting” to explain what they did, might you be able to resolve the obvious conundrum this raises?
If the paleo data and techniques that Mann used in MBH98 are valid, how is it that the paleo data and techniques that he used for the AR4 report, not to mention his submission to Nature, showed the exact opposite? His OWN work refutes MBH98!

[snip – see Anthony’s note above ~mod]