The 'class act' of Michael Mann and Joelle Gergis

John Whitman says:
November 22, 2012 at 6:57 am
{ A fairy tale }…
___________________________
ROTFLMAO, I love your fairy tales… Where is Josh to illustrate them?

“… you are an inspiration to many of us…”
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There’s the problem.
“Who is the greater fool, the fool or the fool who follows him.”
Shakespeare
“DON’T let the b@ur momisugly$#aRds get you down!”
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Oh dear, wrong again. It’s “carborundum”, meaning “don’t let the…….GRIND you down.”

Mann’s hockey stick has been vastly overrated. It was never the central issue that the IPCC would have had people believe. After the “Climate Research” episode, much less the backstory that came out in the Climategate emails, it’s no wonder that he felt persecuted, and now wants to play the elder sage, dispensing advice. But then, the criticism he took over that episode was over the top, and mostly unfounded.

JazzyT says:
November 22, 2012 at 4:27 pm
Mann’s hockey stick has been vastly overrated. It was never the central issue that the IPCC would have had people believe. After the “Climate Research” episode, much less the backstory that came out in the Climategate emails, it’s no wonder that he felt persecuted, and now wants to play the elder sage, dispensing advice. But then, the criticism he took over that episode was over the top, and mostly unfounded.
___________________________________
HE LIED. He KNEW he lied and when he was called on it he attacked Steve McIntyre. One e-mail shows this. Science has no place for liars. Better for M. Mann to become a politician where lying is the norm. (I refuse to call him Dr. because he does not deserve it.)
This is not how a true scientist reacts to criticism of his work.
Climategate e-mail

date: Wed, 29 Aug 2007 12:03:05 -0400
from: “Michael E. Mann”
subject: Re: Something not to pass on
to: Phil Jones
Phil,
I would not respond to this. They will misrepresent and take out of
context anything you give them. This is a set up. They will certainly
publish this, and will ignore any evidence to the contrary that you provide. s They are going after Wei-Chyung because he’s U.S. and there is a higher threshold for establishing libel. Nonetheless, he should consider filing a defamation lawsuit, perhaps you too.
I have been talking w/ folks in the states about finding an investigative journalist to investigate and expose McIntyre, and his thus far unexplored connections with fossil fuel interests. Perhaps the same needs to be done w/ this Keenan guy.
I believe that the only way to stop these people is by exposing them and discrediting them.
Do you mind if I send this on to Gavin Schmidt (w/ a request to respect the confidentiality with which you have provided it) for his additional advice/thoughts? He usually has thoughtful insights wiith respect to such matters,
mike

What the heck does it matter to SCIENCE who the person works for if he is correct? Hey Mikey, ” the only way to stop these people ” is to start doing legitimate science.

Mann is a wheedling, whining child, caught with his hand in the cookie jar & blaming the people that caught him!
DaveE.

Instapundit links to this article and I think it applies to Mann and his ilk.
STATIST THUGS AND THE ROCKS THEY CRAWL OUT FROM UNDER:
“Regardless of the age, the culture, or the social conditions, there is ALWAYS a percentage of the general populace that embraces the totalitarian dynamic. There is always someone in our neighborhood, in our workplace, and within our family that finds vindication or advantage in supporting the state, even if the state has turned viciously criminal. They are not only useful idiots; they are conscious participants in the process of pacification and enslavement of their own society. They understand their role perfectly, and they enjoy what they do.”

zefal says:
November 22, 2012 at 9:30 pm
Nice article. I’d say that’s Mikey boy to a tee.
DaveE.

James Allison, David A. Evans, Mooloo, Gail Combs, and knr:
First off, you all had some interesting points on interesting topics—stats, hiding the MWP, the ongoing love-fest between Mann and McIntyre. I’d like to discuss these sometime, perhaps soon if we keep at it.
Quickly, James Allison: I’d say the central issue in climate science is how the climate works, and lately, whether we’re changing it, and perhaps, whether we want to adjust our behavior. Observations, records, theories and models all come into play, each one needing validation and interpretation. Paleoclimate records are part of this, but far from being central, except at times for PR.
Now for the Climate Research episode…
Actually, the criticism I was calling “over the top” concerns the scientific journal “Climate Research,” which published a truly wretched paper by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas in 2003. You’ve all brought up some interesting topics, and I look forward to discussing these sometime soon. But this one topic takes a good bit just to get at the basics, so I think that it’s best to stick to that one topic for now.
This paper purported to show evidence supporting the existence of a worldwide Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age. In the Climategate emails, you can see Mann, and the Team, discussing what to do about it. In the end, they published a statement outlining the paper’s errors, but the paper ended up being waved about by a lot of people as though it were a legitimate scientific challenge to Mann’s work. There were also discussions about whether they could push for changes at the journal itself. The story gets more complicated, but after they published their statement, there were mass resignations at the journal “Climate Science.” This was partly in reaction to the paper, but also over the way the journal dealt with it.
This looked like Mann and others were suppressing opposing viewpoints. It would be different, however, if the Soon and Baliunas’s paper had actually been fraudulent, with faked data or something. Science can never tolerate that, and it would justify really strong measures.
But the paper didn’t really seem to be fraudulent, it was just astonishingly bad, and so it would take some explaining to show how their behavior could be justified. So, let’s look at the paper. We’ll start with a simple analogy:
A boy sits at a table, with a plate before him. His mother calls from the other room, “remember, no M&Ms until you finish your peas.” The boy looks at his plate, and begins counting peas. After a while, his mother calls out, “Did you eat your peas before you opened your M&Ms?”
The boy replies, “I counted all my peas, and I counted my French Fries, and I counted my chicken nuggets. I had 55. Then later, I counted my M&Ms, and my French Fries, and my chicken nuggets, and I had 47.”
Mother, perplexed, asks, “what does that mean?” The boy replies, “well, before, I had peas, ‘cause I had 55. Later, I had M&Ms, ‘cause I had 47.”
Mother asks, “you mean had 55 French fries, and chicken nuggets and peas, and that is supposed to be your peas? And then you counted 47 French fries, and chicken nuggets along with your M&Ms, and that is supposed to be your M&Ms?” “Yes, Mommy.” Did you have M&Ms on your plate before you finished your peas?” “I dunno, Mommy.” “Did you finish your peas before you had your M&Ms? “I dunno, Mommy.” “Well, when you counted your peas, did you count the M&Ms to see how many there were?” “No, Mommy.” When you counted your M&Ms, did you count the peas, too?” “No, Mommy.” “Then how do you know you had more peas at the beginning, and more M&Ms at the end?
Why did the little boy that this way of counting made any sense? Well, he applied the methods of Soon and Baliunas, as published in Climate Research, 2003. You can apply the following substitutions to see what happened in the paper:
peas: warm places
French fries: places with wet weather
Chicken nuggets: places with dry weather
M&Ms: cold places
Earlier time, when the boy should be eating peas: Medieval Warm Period (MWP)
Later time, when he’s allowed to have his M&Ms: Little Ice Age (LIA)
Here’s a link to the paper:
http://www.int-res.com/articles/cr2003/23/c023p089.pdf
Now, to follow this, you can take a look at page 90. On the second paragraph,
“The proxies used to study climatic change over the last 1000 yr are addressed individually and therefore locally…” So, they’re looking at lots of individual locations. In the next section, they define three questions, of which the first two are: (1) can they find an climatic anomaly in the MWP? And, (2) can they find an anomaly in the LIA? They state the time periods they use for MWP and LIA. (Question 3 we can set aside for later.)
Again, on the lower left (last paragraph in the left-hand column). They lay out how they choose their anomalies:
For the MWP: periods of warmth, wetness or dryness for more than 50 years
For the LIA: periods of cold, wetness, or dryness for more than 50 years.
So, they look for these at locations around the world, as given by the various studies they referenced.
On the next page, p. 91, after lots of verbiage, we see what was actually done with these anomalies. In the lower left, below the heading “3. Approach” they describe how they scored whether or not an anomaly was present during the MWP or the LIA. These are then tabulated to show that there are a lot of anomalies, world wide, for both the MWP and the LIA.
But the tables they don’t tell us what kind of anomaly each one is. An anomaly in the MWP might be warm, or wet, or dry. Or, it might be warm and wet, or warm and dry, but we don’t know whether it was warm or not from the way they present the data. Similarly, anomalies for the LIA might be cold, or they might be merely wet or dry.
So, let’s pick a location, say, Panama. If we found some evidence that Panama was unusually dry in the past, what would it mean? If that evidence dated to the MWP, it would mean that it was warm, since it would be taken to support the MWP. If it occurred during the LIA, it would mean that it was cold, and support the LIA. However, if you’re using the MWP to classify it as warm, then you can’t use it to support the existence of the MWP. That’s circular reasoning. You can’t use the MWP as evidence that there was an MWP. Similarly, you can’t classify something as part of the LIA when you’re trying to establish that there actually was a LIA, since that’s also circular reasoning. In fact, for this part, you could start with the idea that there was a Medieval Ice Age, and a Later Warm Period, and support these ideas with the same wet and dry places you used to support the MWP and the LIA. Because it’s circular reasoning, you can support whatever you want.
Now the paper did actually look at warm and cold places. Again, these got mixed up with wet and dry, so we can’t really tell anything from the data presented. But in addition, warm and cold were never compared to each other in the same time period. They looked for warmth in the MWP, but not for cold. So if they found a bunch of warm places, did these outweigh cold places, or were there an equal number of warm and cold places? There might even have been more cold places than warm ones for the MWP. We don’t know, and Soon and Baliunas don’t know either. Or, if they do, they’re not telling us. They also gave the impression of having more cold places in the LIA, when they never even looked at warm places during that time to compare.
Here’s a quick example to illustrate how badly we’ve gotten mixed up by now. Let’s invent some data, to see the method works. We’ll how many places we found, worldwide, of each type of anomaly:
MWP: warm places: 25 (cold places: 25) wet places: 25 dry places: 25
LIA: (warm places: 25) cold places: 25 wet places: 25 dry places: 25
The ones in parentheses are there, but we don’t count them, according to the method in the paper.
Of course, it’s the same data for each place, and the same data for the MWP and the LIA. This just makes it easier to see what’s going on; a randomly selected set of numbers would work too. For the MWP, we add up 75 anomalies, around the world. If you don’t see the trick, you could think that this gave strong support to the existence of the MWP. When we add up data for the LIA, we would also see 75 anomalies, and could think that this showed that there was a LIA. But you could just as easily show a Medieval Ice Age and a Later Warm Period, because it’s the same data. In other words, you can switch the warm and cold periods, and get the same results! You find exactly what you are looking for, because your definitions force you to. Circular reasoning here leads directly to confirmation bias, seeing exactly what you expect to see.
Now it’s also true that we didn’t look at anomalies that were both warm and wet, or cold and dry, etc. If we had any of these, we might be counting them twice. We can’t look at that in the paper because temperature is already mixed up with precipitation by the time we see it. Perhaps if the evidence for warming was weak, wetness or dryness might support the temperature trend, or not, depending perhaps on location. You’d have to be careful about this, but it could happen. But that’s not what Soon and Baliunas did. Each “anomaly” might be warmth, wet, or dry for the MWP. For the boy, each object counted might be a pea, a chicken nugget, or a French fry. The fact that there are combinations (well for the climate indicators, anyway) doesn’t change the fact that the logic is irreparably broken.
Anything that the paper says about the existence of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice age is just pure gibberish, completely unsupported by the anaylis. It doesn’t show that there’s a MWP and a LIA at all, and it also doesn’t show that there isn’t—because it can’t show anything. Circular reasoning, failure to consider opposing evidence, jumping to conclusions—this paper, despite its erudite appearance, isn’t just wrong. It’s not even coherent enough to be wrong. A lot of people have failed to see this, probably because the language is a little confusing and, also, you would never imagine that a published scientific paper would actually be this bad.
And this is about one third of what’s logically wrong with it. Unbelievably, it actually gets worse. But this is enough for one post. None of this means that there is not a MWP or a LIA. That’s a broader topic, and an interesting one. Climate scientists (including Mann & buddies) have been willing to entertain these at least as possibilities. But Soon and Baliunas’s paper was not capable of saying anything at all on the subject.
In the aftermath: this paper was used to try and discredit a lot of climate science, but specifically, Mann and his hockey stick, and the IPCC’s use of it. Any such efforts were completely wrong because the paper doesn’t mean anything. But it reached the level of the US Senate, with Senator Inhofe using this to support his idea that climate change was all a hoax.
If this were just a case of a scientific paper with an opposing view, then a few letters to the editor, and perhaps some more studies would have followed, as is usual in the scientific debate. But this paper, which wrongly claimed to contradict the work of Mann and others, was starting to cause some damage. Not because it opposed somebody’s view, but because it poisoned the scientific debate, by pretending to be science when it wasn’t. In this way, it was sort of like fraud, though without evidence of actual faked data or the like. It was deeply flawed, and people still believed it even though it was senseless. I don’t even know of a word for that, but I’m tempted to use the word “flawed-ulent.” Yes, it was a “flawed-ulent” paper.
So, there followed an e-mail discussion about the paper, and the journal it was published in. In these, Mann comes across as a bit of a hothead, but he went along with other scientists, and cooler heads seem to have prevailed. He, and others, had some problems with the journal, and were worried about how the peer-review process had broken down to let an article this bad get published. In the end, a dozen of scientists published a 5-page rebuttal in a scientific newsletter with wide distribution among scientists. In the editorial staff at Climate Science, some editors were appalled to see what had shown up in the journal, and how peer review had just not done its job. They tried some reorganizing at the journal, but in the end, their chief editor and several others became discouraged and resigned.
When the climategate e-mails came out, the discussions leading up to this rebuttal were all laid out. People accused Mann, and others, of colluding to discredit anyone who disagreed with them. The story involves more than this paper, but their discussions about how to deal with the are prominent in that story. Now, colluding to discredit and bury opposing scientific viewpoints would be unethical. But this paper is not a scientific viewpoint. It’s not a scientific anything, except a parody. There’s no evidence that it was actually fraudulent. A couple of Harvard astrophysicists could have blown it this badly. But it was so bad, so clearly useless, that once it gained some traction, it deserved the same strong response as a fraudulent article. “Direct action at Harvard…” clearly indicated for fraudulence, but still, arguably justified for “flawed-ulence” as well.
The criticism that Mann and company got, and from his reaction to it, was unwarranted, and over the top. A later version, published again (!) in “Energy and the Environment,” had criticisms—unfounded—of Mann that were more pointed than the earlier version.
The whole team was presented, partly on the basis of this paper, as attempting to smear anyone who disagreed with them. That criticism was also over the top, and unfounded.

richardscourtney says:
November 24, 2012 at 10:34 am
Your long post at November 23, 2012at 4:18 pmattempts to refute the excellent Soon&Baliunas (2003) paper
The paper refutes itself, by its own broken logic. When this is laid bare, anyone can read the paper itself and see that it cannot support its conclusions, or any other conclusions, about the MWP and the LIA. All such information is lost before it is analyzed.

Soon&Balisunas (2003) finds evidence of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and the Little Ice Age (LIA)from around the globe

And then, essentially, throw this evidence into a blender, in a way that ensures that the resulting puree cannot be used to conclude anything.
Richard, you make a number of other points, but none of them really seem to be relevant. You have not addressed the main point, which lies in their definition of “anomaly”:
Soon and Baliunas reviewed a number of papers, and searched for “anomalies,” using the following definitions (p. 90, lower left corner—the paper is linked in my previous post):

“Anomaly is simply defined as a period of more than 50 yr [years] of sustained warmth, wetness, or dryness, within the stipulated interval of the Medieval Warm Period, or a 50 yr or longer period of cold, dryness, or wetness within the stipulated Little Ice Age.” [emphasis added]

This is the central fallacy of the paper. “Anomalies,” as defined above, in one or more proxy records cannot be used to show warmth during the MWP or cold during the LIA. 50 “anomalies” in the MWP might be 50 warm places, or it might be 25 wet places and 25 dry places, with no warm ones at all. The same problem applies with using these “anomalies” in the LIA to show cold during the LIA: just because you can count some “anomalies” in the LIA doesn’t mean that any of them are actually cold. They might just be wet or dry.
They then count up anomalies in the MIA and the LIA, but the anomalies themselves do not tell us anything about warmth or cold. The paper has already failed.
Again: it is circular reasoning to classify wet or dry conditions during the MWP time frame as MWP anomalies supporting the MWP. The same is true for wet or dry conditions during the LIA time frame. Furthermore, the definitions given above do not account for coldness in the MWP time frame or warmth during the LIA. If a place is seen to be cold in the MWP, that does not somehow balance a warm place, or anything like it. A place that is wet during the MWP time frame could even be cold, but still count as anomaly supporting the MWP.
I had said, earlier:

They looked for warmth in the MWP, but not for cold. So if they found a bunch of warm places, did these outweigh cold places, or were there an equal number of warm and cold places? There might even have been more cold places than warm ones for the MWP. We don’t know, and Soon and Baliunas don’t know either. Or, if they do, they’re not telling us. They also gave the impression of having more cold places in the LIA, when they never even looked at warm places during that time to compare.

You responded:

OK. You claim, “They looked for warmth in the MWP, but not for cold”. Really? They did not look for “cold” places? That is strange when they were searching for anomalies indicative of the MWPand the LIA.

Yes, Really. They looked for warmth but not for cold during the MWP, as noted in their own definitions above. They looked for cold, but not warmth, during the LIA, again, as noted in their own definitions.
They list their results in their Table 1, stating for each proxy whether they found a MWP anomaly (warm, wet, OR dry) during the MWP time frame, and also whether they found a LIA anomaly (cold, wet, OR dry) during the LIA time frame. (They also give answers to another question intended to compare 20th century temperatures to earlier ones. The logic for this question is also hopelessly broken, but we are not addressing this point yet.)

It seems you have assumed this means they considered any anomaly – be it warm or cold – was taken as indicating the same thing.

No, I have assumed no such thing. They do allow for warm, wet, and dry anomalies to count for the same thing in the MWP. They also allow for cold, wet, and dry anomalies to count for the same thing in the LIA. This is by their own definitions, given above. When they list a proxy as showing an anomaly, they have no way to see whether they have more warm anomalies than cold ones, at either time, because they never count both warm and cold at the same time.
Anyone can read the definitions, both above and in the paper. Anyone can look at table 1, and figures 1 and 2 in the paper, and see that Soon and Baliunas found many anomalies, all over the world. But just presenting proxies as anomalous cannot support a MWP or LIA. We don’t even know how many of them, if any, involved temperature; they could all have been merely wet or dry.
And, if we had a crystal ball, or Soon and Baliunas’s data, and knew which proxies showed warmth in the MWP, we still wouldn’t know whether it was balanced by coldness elsewhere, because, by their own definition, they ignore coldness in the MWP, and they ignore warmth in the LIA.
Sure, there could have been a worldwide MWP, and a worldwide LIA. And it would be interesting to see that established. But it was not established by this paper, because, by this paper, by its own methods, it could not have established a warm trend on its own second page, even if the paper itself were on fire.
You quote the paper’s Section 3, “Approach”:

…However, in the traditionally data rich areas of Western Europe or the Northern Atlantic including Iceland and Greenland, both the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm Period do exist as distinct climate anomalies (Pfister et al. 1998, Grove 2001a, Ogilvie & Jónsson 2001). No objective proof discredits the existence of those phenomena in other regions.
[emphasis added: RSC]
It would not be possible for Soon&Baliunas (2003) to have made the statement which I have bolded if your assumption were true.

The assumption that you state is not mine, you misread my post. Regardless, it would not challenge the possibility of a worldwide MWP and LIA. Your statement is a non sequitur.

Indeed, a note to GRL

The paper was published in Climate Research, not GRL

would have required withdrawal of the paper containing that statement if your assumption were true. But Mann, Trenberth, Briffa, et al. have not presented such a note.

The note that they sent, at least the important one, went EOS, to a scientific newsletter. When it came out, the editors at Climate Research realized what an incoherent, senseless paper they had published. This led to attempts at reform, and ultimately, resignations.

And, importantly, the paper says

No, it’s not important. What they did with the data after this is important.

…. We rely on individual researchers for their best judgments in interpreting climatic signals. The 3 questions are addressed in the context of local or regional sensitivity of the proxies to relevant climatic variables, including air temperature, sea surface temperature, precipitation, and any combination of large-scale patterns of pressure, wind and oceanic circulation.

Sure. They seem to have done a nice job of going through their references, and extracting data, as appropriate, regarding wetness, dryness, warmth (but only during the MWP) and coldness (but only during LIA). They then took this data, well-sourced but fatally incomplete for temperature, and threw it in a blender, mixing up temperature and precipitation so that you could no longer tell whether there was any temperature data for any given proxy.

Therefore, your assumption is an assertion that Soon&Baliunas (2003) misrepresented at least some of the studies which their meta-study reported.

You misrepresented my statements to get the “assumption,” as noted above. What I stated (not assumed) came from their own definitions of “anomalies.”

Soon&Baliunas (2003) reported findings of hundreds of studies (including studies by Mann). None – not one – of the authors of those studies has claimed that Soon&Baliunas (2003) has misrepresented their findings.

You can’t be serious.

Soon&Baliunas (2003) shows the MWPand LIA were global events

Maybe they were, but you can’t prove that with proxies that might be for temperature or else they might be for precipitation—as per Soon and Baliunas’s definitions, given in their paper and quoted above.

The “criticism that Mann and company got” was very mild; they deserved much worse than what they “got”. They DID attempt to smear anybody who criticised them, they arranged replacement of the Editor of GRL,

Climate Research, not GRL. And the implosion of the editorial staff at that journal was set in motion when they saw for themselves what nonsense they had actually published.

In conclusion, your post is a misrepresentation of reality.

My post is a a straightforward reading of the definitions of “anomaly,” as printed in Soon and Baliunas (2003) and quoted in this post. Anyone can read the paper, linked in my first post, and verify this, and see how proxies were classified with MWP anomalies and LIA anomalies. Anyone can see what results when the results are used to examine the MWP and the LIA: utter gibberish.