Steve McIntyre is back blogging and writes (links mine):
I had also spent some time considering a response to Mann’s book. It amazes me that a reputable scientific community would take this sort of diatribe seriously. Mann’s world is populated by demons and bogey-men. People like Anthony Watts, Jeff Id, Lucia, Andrew Montford and myself are believed to be instruments of a massive fossil fuel disinformation campaign and our readers are said to be “ground troops” of disinformation. The book is an extended ad hominem attack, culminating in salivation in the trumped up plagiarism campaign against Wegman, arising out of copying of trivial “boilerplate” by students (not Wegman himself). Wegman’s name appears nearly 200 times in the book (more, I think, than anyone else’s).
Virtually nothing in its discussion of our criticism can be taken at face value. Mann begins his account by re-cycling his original outright lie that we had asked him for an “excel spreadsheet”. Mann’s lies on this point had been a controversy back in November 2003. The incident was revived by the Penn State Investigation Committee, which had (anomalously on this point) asked Mann about an actual incident. Instead of “forgetting”, as any prudent person would have done, Mann brazenly repeated his earlier lie to the Penn State Investigation Committee. Needless to say, the “Investigation” Committee didn’t actually investigate the lie by crosschecking evidence, but accepted Mann’s testimony as ending the matter. In the book, instead of leaving well enough alone, Mann once again re-iterated the lie.
Steve’s full essay is here.
One only has to read Mann’s latest whine over at Climate Progress to know that Steve McIntyre is spot on.
Related articles
- Jolis Reviews Mann (climateaudit.org)
- Mann of the people (wattsupwiththat.com)
- Ambler’s rebuttal to Mann in the Wall Street Journal (wattsupwiththat.com)
- Booker mentions Mann – Mann has a Twitter tantrum (wattsupwiththat.com)
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Smokey says:
I suppose for someone who doesn’t care whether what he says is truth or falsehoods, it would make little difference. For someone who does, it would.
joeldshore says:
April 24, 2012 at 6:46 pm
“Fortunately, rational, thinking human beings don’t have to simply believe what they’re told to believe. Rational, thinking human beings can and do check things out for themselves.”
And, coincidently, most of them come to the conclusion that the science says what their ideology wants it to say. This is why we have had scientific policy set by having scientists advise on scientific matters rather than turning scientific matters into political footballs that ideologues use to advance their own agendas.
In addition to a pathetic use of the logical fallacy of Appeal to Authority, that’s a total lie, joel, but pretty much what one expects from a CAGW ideologue. Skeptics/climate realists come from all political persuasions. We are driven by one thing, and one thing only; a passion for truth and for truth-telling. Most of us, to one degree or another used to believe the hype about manmade warming, but for whatever reason, began to look into it further. My own reason for delving into it a little over four years ago was to be able to counter what I viewed at the time as “climate cranks”, with their occasional (somewhat poorly-written) letters-to-the editor. The more I looked, the more problems I found with the whole CAGW argument, not least of which was their claim that “the debate is over”. Debate? I didn’t even know there was one, much less that it was “over”. Something seemed very much amiss. And, indeed, it was.
davidmhoffer says
Jones writes about completing “Mike’s Nature trick” which is a clear reference to the original paper submitted by Mann to Nature in which he ALSO did not disclose until exposed by climategate that he had substituted temperature data for proxy data.
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I keep on telling myself to go find and read this Nature paper you guys keep on referring to. Because if that paper describes the splicing of the data in black and white, it would makes liars out of an awful lot of people.
@LazyTeenager – Go see Steve McIntyre’s explanation for starters:
http://climateaudit.org/2009/11/20/mike%E2%80%99s-nature-trick/
Bruce Cobb says:
(1) While “appeal to authority” may be a logical fallacy in the sense of rigorously proving something, in the civiized world we have generally acknowledged that scientists are the best ones to evaluate the current state of the science for the purpose of informing the public and policymakers. One of the notable features of pseudoscience, whether it be related to climate, creationism, or other such things are claims that the entire scientific community / process has basically been corrupted to the point that we can’t trust the usual scientific authorities and must instead believe a few scientists and many more non-scientists whose opinions are being suppressed..
(2) While it may be technically true that one can find “AGW skeptics” from all political persuasions, in my experience the overwhelming majority of them come from the conservative or libertarian political persuasion. (This is particularly so in the U.S.; it may be a little less overwhelmingly so in Europe.) The only really notable person on the Left who I can think of who is an AGW skeptic is Alexander Cockburn, a columnist for The Nation who seems to enjoy being a gadfly and believing in big conspiratorial theories.
I see that Troll Day is progressing nicely. Amazing set of snide trolls, countered initially by calm responses. But, as the thread progresses, the snideness ramps up, and the calm responses begin to rumble. Typical outcome. Snide wins in its own mind by exasperating the calm. So listen, trolls, please: what are you trying to prove? That your champ, Mike Mann, is some kind of hero? The tone of his book is a rambling whine. The tone of your defending posts is a similar symphony of moral-high-ground posturing and smoke screening. Stick with the facts, please, and stop snivelling. It’s getting to be a kindergarten sandbox in here. Akin to the Stanley Cup Playoffs, where the best team is the one who pisses off the other team to the point that they begin drawing penalties, and lose by never touching the puck. Hockey. Hockey Schtick.
Stick with the facts, please,
Facts: Michael Mann has authored >150 scientific papers, was named by Scientific American as one of the fifty leading visionaries in science and technology in 2002, he has an ISI “H Index” of 40 (40 of his papers have been cited at least 40 times), more than twenty of his papers have over 100 citations each, and two have over 700. Now he is recognised by his peers – the EGU awarding him the prestigious Oeschger medal for ‘his significant contributions to understanding decadal-centennial scale climate change over the last two millennia and for pioneering techniques to synthesize patterns and northern hemispheric time series of past climate using proxy data reconstructions.’ He has also been made a Fellow of the AGU.
Compare with McIntyre’s relatively tiny contribution and recognition. Populist blogs are one thing, however the debate that matters and the one that advances scientific understanding is the one that occurs in academia, primarily in the scientific literature and scientific associations. Witness the recognition and kudos granted to Mann in that arena, survey the number of such associations that endorse the IPCC (I’ll save you some time, it is all of them) and review the literature for studies that give evidential backing for doubting AGW (Oreskes found none).
Those are some facts. Get back to me when you’ve come up with the killer argument that proves that so many scientists have all got it so wrong.
Mike Bromley,
Mention a troll and *poof!* ^it^ appears.
Climate charlatan Michael Mann admits in the Climategae emails to rigging the pal review system, so Phil Clarke is appealing to a corrupted authority… not to mention another appeal to a complete non-authority, Naomi Oreskes. I know more about the subject than she does, and so do plenty of other commenters. Therefore, by Clarke’s twisted logic, our authority trumps hers.
Steve McIntyre is ethical and honest, whereas Michalel Mann is dishonest. McIntyre is the David to Mann’s Goliath, hitting Goliath right between the eyes: Mann will never be seen as honest again. His reputation is in tatters, and bogus awards will never be enough to resurrect it.
The question is, why are Clarke and Shore carrying water for a known liar, who hides inconvenient data in an ftp file labeled “Censored”, and who knowingly uses corrupted data in Mann08 to fabricate yet another fake hokey stick? What are they getting out of it, besides personally identifying with a provable climate charlatan?
Phil Clarke says:
April 25, 2012 at 10:40 am
Stick with the facts, please,
Facts: Michael Mann has authored >150 scientific papers, was named by Scientific American as one of the fifty leading visionaries in science and technology in 2002,
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So all it takes to be a leading visionary in science is to keep other scientist in the dark regarding your data and methods?
I’m not a scientist, let alone a “Climate” scientist. (Go ahead, say “That’s obvious.) I’m not a farmer either. I couldn’t tell you if that pile came from a horse or a cow, but I can recognize what it is.
Naomi Oreskes. I know more about the subject than she does, and so do plenty of other commenters.
Wow. Naomi Oreskes is Professor of History and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego, and Adjunct Professor of Geosciences at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, A Fellow of the AAAS, author of many acclaimed books on the history and philosophy of science and was invited to deliver the George Sarton Award Lecture on the exact topic of Proof and Concensus in science.
I had no idea we were in such exalted company.
Oh, and by the way, in statistics it is quite common to perform an analysis several times with a subset of the data withheld. This is known by people with a working knowledge of stats as ‘censoring’.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censoring_%28statistics%29
Storing such data in a folder named ‘censored’ is a completely mundane, ordinary, logical and innocuous act.
I bet Naomi wouldn’t make such a blunder.
REPLY: Having watched one of her book tour talks, I’m in agreement that many people here know more than she does about climate science. She’s an historian with a political axe to grind in the CA university system, not a hard sciences person. Dime a dozen here in CA.
Also, you might want to learn to spell “consensus”. And Phil, I keep wondering, since you spend so much time defending these clowns like Oreskes (and she us a hateful political one), what do you do with your “consulting” business? Are you one of those paid commenters we keep hearing so much about? It would seem so given your track record. Greenpeace or WWF payroll perhaps? – Anthony
I hope Phil is a paid lobbyist because if he’s spending this amount of time winding up looking foolish in his defense of Michael Mann for free, that would be just sad.
Really? Geology is no longer a hard science? Who knew?
“Having started her career as a geologist, received her B.S. (1st class Honours) from the Royal School of Mines, Imperial College London, and then worked for three years as an exploration geologist in the Australian outback. She returned to the United States to receive an inter-disciplinary Ph.D. in geological research and history of science from Stanford University, in 1990.”
My day job is at a complete tangent to posting on climate blogs – nothing to do with paid lobbying of any type.
REPLY: Hmmm. She no longer practices that “hard science” of geology but instead, as Steve McIntyre pointed out with Mann, [Oreske’s] ..world is populated by demons and bogey-men. She’s [looking for people like me]…believed to be instruments of a massive fossil fuel disinformation campaign and our readers are said to be “ground troops” of disinformation.
Having seen her talks, I’d say Steve’s description on Mann is also an accurate assessment of Oreskes. I actually have more respect for you than I do her, and that’s saying something. She’s out for damaging anyone any way she can, while selling tickets and books in the process. – Anthony
Mike Lewis says:——-
April 25, 2012 at 8:22 am
@LazyTeenager – Go see Steve McIntyre’s explanation for starters:
http://climateaudit.org/2009/11/20/mike%E2%80%99s-nature-trick/
—————
Sorry, didnt answer the question. Answered some other question. But looking at the graph it seems that
1. it is a number of reconstructions that agree vaguely with each other.
2. In the region of overlap reconstructions and actual temps agree. It’s not clear if the reconstructions are calibrated to actual temps. It would be an impressive match if they were not.
3. The reconstructions and the actual temps are significantly above the medieval warm period even in the overlap region.
Obscuring the splicing would be bad in a paper. Not so bad for a bit of obscure cover art since no one takes cover art seriously.
Judging from the tone it appears Steve is really keen to shove one up Michael, so I am not going to take Steve too seriously.
Looks like I need to look elsewhere for a proper cite of Michaels paper.
I am astounded at the “it was only cover art” excuse. The cover art wasn’t art, it was a reproduction of the graphs from actual studies that turned out to be comprised of two data sets for the express purpose of hiding the results of one by substituting the other. Suddenly claiming it was only “cover art” is a whole new level of “cover @ss”.
Remember, only skeptics can have financial motivations. Any link to funding from an energy company invalidates the science, however indirect or insignificant. Heck, if a connection is merely imagined the findings can be disregarded.
Funding directly from a political organization that is seeking to justify HUNDREDS of BILLIONS of dollars in transfer payments is above reproach. After all, the integrity of politicians at the UN is beyond question.
Why, I’m sure that if AGW turns out to be nothing we’ll hear from the UN right away. They’ll say, “Hang on to that check! It turns out you might not have to send us billions and billions of dollars after all!”
Phil Clarke says:
“I had no idea we were in such exalted company.”
You are. Oreske’s problem is that what she ‘knows’ ain’t necessarily so. In fact, it is flat wrong. That explains why lots of WUWT readers know more than she does.
And it is obvious that Steve McIntyre knows more than Michael Mann about data, code and methodologies. When you look closely, Mann is a charlatan who doesn’t really know all that much. His real expertise is in re-writing climate history.
That is why Mann hides out from the public, and only appears when he totally controls his completely scripted appearances. If he believed what he’s trying to sell, he would not be afraid to answer questions in public.
http://www.geo.umass.edu/faculty/bradley/mann1998.pdf
Is this the Michael Mann paper you guys have been banging on about.?
There is a hockey stick in there ,but there is also a graph legend that acts as a key to a dashed curve representing actual temperatures. Admittedly the graph reproduction is poor and it’s very hard to distinguish the actual temperature curve.
Seems those climate skeptics who claimed “trick”, meaning an attempt to deceive people, might have some big fat explaining to do.
Let me help. The moving the goal post trick is always helpful in these situations.
P.S. reading the paper it appears the instrumental temps are used to calibrate the reconstruction. So it makes sense that:
1. They match in the overlap region.
2. They are all shown on the same curve.
The trends in the overlap region match, which is good, but it’s not clear if this is a sufficient constraint, considering the statistics, to calibrate the whole time period accurately.
Lazy,
Mann was caught cheating by Steve McIntyre. This time it was Mann hiding a bigger and more relevant data set in an ftp file labeled “censored“. As you can see, if the better data set had been used the temperature trend would have gone in the opposite direction.
Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.
Smokey says:
April 25, 2012 at 9:05 pm
Lazy,
Mann was caught cheating by Steve McIntyre. This time it was Mann hiding a bigger and more relevant data set in an ftp file labeled “censored“. As you can see, if the better data set had been used the temperature trend would have gone in the opposite direction.
————–
So you don’t want to run with the splicing is misleading argument. That’s fine. So now the question is; does the file named “censored” actually represent a better data set for a particular reason, or is it only better because you prefer the result of it’s analysis. I assume that it’s the former and so I will go poking around Steve’s site to see what arguments are made there.
One of the lamest, dumbest pro-CAGW arguments I’ve seen yet, given by Shore, above:
“in the civiized world we have generally acknowledged that scientists are the best ones to evaluate the current state of the science for the purpose of informing the public and policymakers.”
By all means, we must be civilized, then, and go along with “the scientists”. My goodness, what will happen to society if we have the audacity to disagree. Yes, that’s what is important. Never mind what is actually true, never mind spending trillions on a non-problem, creating great suffering and hardship worldwide for no reason.
We should be good little sheep. Ba-a-a-a-a-a-a.
Lazy says:
“…I will go poking around Steve’s site to see what arguments are made there.”
The education will do you a world of good, if you keep an open mind. Seriously.
Bruce Cobb says:
What alternative are you seriously proposing? That if the NAS issues conclusions on a subject that agrees with conservative / libertarian ideology then we should make public policy based on these conclusions and ignore the shrill cries of those on the Left who feel the NAS is wrong but if the the NAS issues conclusions on a subject that disagrees with conservative / libertarian ideology, as with climate change, then we should not make public policy based on these conclusions and but should instead listen to the shrill cries of those on the Right who feel the NAS is wrong?
I mean, do you seriously want politicians to draw their own conclusions of what the science says (or choosing their own “pet scientists” who coincidently happen to agree with their ideological point-of-view) rather than listening to the scientific community through the organizations set up to allow the scientific community to give the best scientific input on public policy issues.
I have a definite proposition, which is that the policymakers should use the NAS and other respected scientific bodies convened for this purpose to advise the policymakers on the current state of the science. If scientists or members of the public disagree with these scientific conclusions, then they should be trying to convince the scientists in the field of their point-of-view rather than instead trying to get politicians to abandon the methods that we have of advising public policymakers on the current state of the science.
joeldshore says:
April 26, 2012 at 7:15 am
“If scientists or members of the public disagree with these scientific conclusions, then they should be trying to convince the scientists in the field of their point-of-view rather than instead trying to get politicians to abandon the methods that we have of advising public policymakers on the current state of the science.”
WTF do you think we’ve been doing? Gosh you’re a jackass.
I assume that it’s the former and so I will go poking around Steve’s site to see what arguments are made there.
One thing you will not find there is balance. Blogs have no accountability, and McIntyre is
skilled in finding flaws in analyses, but curiously and consistently fails to point out the impact the flaws have on the overall conclusions. In the case of the MBH studies, the first of their kind, there were indeed flaws, but they turned out to have a negligible impact on the conclusions of the study.
By all means peruse the CA blog, but then also take a look at Wahl and Ammann 2007 and RealClimate, or for a general discussion, Mann’s book.
Robustness of the Mann, Bradley, Hughes reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere surface temperatures:Examination of criticisms based on the nature and processing of proxy climate evidence.
David Ball says:
David: I realize for you in particular, I have a one-name answer, which is “Slaying the SkyDragon”, the book on which your father is a co-author. If you think this is an attempt to convince the scientific community anything other than how ridiculous some “AGW skeptics” are, you are beyond the delusional!
REPLY: Actually, David’s father, Tim Ball, has taken himself out of the “slayers” circle, and has even removed the book from his website.
http://drtimball.com/
He, as many others realize, see the “slayers” as off the rails. For the record, the only coverage I’ve ever given those clowns is a cartoon from Josh. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/01/josh-on-dragon-slaying/ – Anthony