This is a scathing and revealing comment from another scientist regarding the Marcott et al affair. The context of it all has an odor of hydrogen sulfide about it.
There are a few bad eggs, with the Real Climate mafia being among them, who are exploiting climate science for personal and political gain. Makes the whole effort look bad.
-Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. in a comment (#6) on his blog
The larger posting is also quite interesting where Dr. Pielke suggests that “misconduct” might be an applicable term.
Dr. Pielke writes:
=============================================================
In 1991 the National Research Council proposed what has come to be a widely accepted definition of misconduct in science:
Misconduct in science is defined as fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism, in proposing, performing, or reporting research. Misconduct in science does not include errors of judgment; errors in the recording, selection, or analysis of data; differences in opinions involving the interpretation of data; or misconduct unrelated to the research process.
Arguments over data and methods are the lifeblood of science, and are not instances of misconduct.
However, here I document the gross misrepresentation of the findings of a recent scientific paper via press release which appears to skirt awfully close to crossing the line into research misconduct, as defined by the NRC. I recommend steps to fix this mess, saving face for all involved, and a chance for this small part of the climate community to take a step back toward unambiguous scientific integrity.
The paper I refer to is by Marcott et al. 2013, published recently in Science. A press release issued by the National Science Foundation, which funded the research, explains the core methodology and key conclusion of the paper as follows (emphasis added):
Peter Clark, an OSU paleoclimatologist and co-author of the Science paper, says that many previous temperature reconstructions were regional and not placed in a global context.
“When you just look at one part of the world, temperature history can be affected by regional climate processes like El Niño or monsoon variations,” says Clark.
“But when you combine data from sites around the world, you can average out those regional anomalies and get a clear sense of the Earth’s global temperature history.”
What that history shows, the researchers say, is that during the last 5,000 years, the Earth on average cooled about 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit–until the last 100 years, when it warmed about 1.3 degrees F.
The press release clearly explains that the paper (a) combines data from many sites around the world to create a “temperature reconstruction” which gives a “sense of the Earth’s temperature history,” and (b) “that history shows” a cooling over the past 5000 years, until the last 100 years when all of that cooling was reversed.
The conclusions of the press release were faithfully reported by a wide range of media outlets, and below I survey several of them to illustrate that the content of the press release was accurately reflected in media coverage and, at times, amplified by scientists both involved and not involved with the study.
…
Let me be perfectly clear — I am accusing no one of scientific misconduct. The errors documented here could have been the product of group dynamics, institutional dysfunction, miscommunication, sloppiness or laziness (do note that misconduct can result absent explicit intent). However, what matters most now is how the relevant parties respond to the identification of a clear misrepresentation of a scientific paper by those who should not make such errors.
That response will say a lot about how this small but visible part of the climate community views the importance of scientific integrity.
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Read his entire essay here: http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2013/03/fixing-marcott-mess-in-climate-science.html
Given this concession in the recent Marcott et al FAQs:
20th century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes, and therefore is not the basis of any of our conclusions.
It seems there is a lot of walkback to do not only for the people who did the study and pushed the press release, but those who reported on it as if that uptick was valid, when clearly if has been demonstrated to be nothing more than an artifact of statistical methods and data manipulations.
It seems a clear case of noble cause corruption by “the team” for “the cause”. Will the NSF do anything about it? I doubt it, as their herd circling has already begun over at Real Climate. Being institutionalized science, they’ll worry more about how to spin it up and down the climate food chain than to come clean about the issue in my opinion.
Perhaps the best way for regular folks like us to counter the damage done is that anytime Marcott et al is mentioned, to always refer to the Marcott et al graph as this version below, along with the quote from their FAQs since the uptick “is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes”:
![marcott2[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/marcott21.jpg?resize=640%2C403)
I have to wonder, given the fact that Marcott’s thesis paper didn’t contain such an uptick, and then after being welcomed into the “climate syndicate” (or as Pielke Jr. calls them, “Real Climate mafia”) with all of the features, upgrades, and connections that membership provides, maybe this is simply a case of them making young Mr. Marcott an offer he couldn’t refuse.
That’s one scary graph.
“…is not statistically robust”. That translates as: “is a complete load of bollocks” in my language.
Somebody should note it’s 2013 so “last 100 years”=”20th century”.
On the basis of the RC post, the original press release is not scientifically sound or honest.
The warmists just can’t stay out of their own way.
Which version of the graph do you think is more likely to end up in the IPCC report?
Ps Marcott’s abstract explicitly mentions “the last decade”. This contradicts the RC statement about “not the basis of any of our conclusions” and suggests the limits of scientific fraud have been breached.
Note how the Science editor in a comment displayed at the moment above the Abstract and visible to all talks about the “now” as what makes Marcott et al very interesting. Either the editor wasn’t told by Marcott about the lack of robustness (=fraud) or went along misleading the readers (=fraud).
Does not matter what they say or what graph they show…. the cold is coming and so is the food shortages
in the faq they…conclude: “we conclude that global temperature has risen from near the coldest to the warmest levels of the Holocene in the past century”.
This again contradicts the statement about “20th century portion…is not the basis of any of our conclusions”
Global climate meltdown is in the movies like bellbottom pants were in the 70’s and will look just as odd to future movie watchers. Similarly, research articles with such conclusion artifacts will be embarrassing to future researchers. Sometimes it is hard to laugh while bearing a grimace. Maybe someone should make these guys put on a polyester suit as an award…
Reblogged this on pdx transport.
That graph shown, shows the entry point into a new ice age, that is not global warming, some one should tell them it is not happening. Some one should also tell them to stop doing politics and start doing science.
Got into a climate debate about Exit glacier and it’s moraine markers located in Seward AK with my liberal cousin for Easter. Found this great park service paper on it’s advance and retreat. It was completed in 1997 and has zero bias that i could detect and really interesting findings that bear repeated mentioning…
“In the years between 1914 and 1917, Exit Glacier experienced its most rapid retreat. In just 3 years, the glacier retreated 908 ft. Park Service personnel recently discovered evidence of a buried forest dating back to at least 1170 AD high in the Forelands near the current glacier’s edge. Exit Glacier advanced from the Harding Icefield during the Little Ice Age, burying this existing forest and advancing to a maximum marked by the terminal moraine dated to 1815.”
http://www.nps.gov/kefj/naturescience/upload/The%20Retreat%20of%20Exit%20Glacier.pdf
omnologos says: March 31, 2013 at 11:04 pm
“Ps Marcott’s abstract explicitly mentions “the last decade”. This contradicts the RC statement about “not the basis of any of our conclusions” and suggests the limits of scientific fraud have been breached.”
Yes, it does mention that. And yet the paper claims no proxy results post 2000 anywhere. Not in text, graphs, numbers. How could this be?
In the conclusion:
“Our results indicate that global mean temperature for the decade 2000–2009 (34) has not yet exceeded the warmest temperatures of the early Holocene (5000 to 10,000 yr B.P.).”
And (34) is Brohan et al – ie HADCRUT.
That’s explicit in the caption to Fig 3, which they are referring to:
“instrumental means for 1900–1909 and 2000–2009 CE (vertical black lines),”
We know about the last century temperatures primarily from thermometers, not Marcott’s proxies. And that is usually what he is referring to.
“a case of them making young Mr. Marcott an offer he couldn’t refuse.”
He found a polar bear’s head in his bed?
Well, it’s his reputation. He has to live with that now. If you sleep with dogs, then you have to deal with the fleas.
Quite the admission from an author who claimed to have affirmed that 20th century temperature increase is extraordinary:
Sounds like he’s admitting he lied.
Watching Jeremy Shakun interviewed, he must inhabit a parallel science universe.
The future anthropocene (or something) is ‘settled science’.
It’s sad even tragic.
Either that or he’s making a complete monkey out of Rivkin which wouldn’t be hard.
The more I read and follow the information and at the same time trying to “smooth” it all out, as a lay- man I am way more worried about Global Cooling than I ever was about Global Warming. To me cooling is more drastic than warming , shorter growing seasons (cooling) especially would be a lot harder on any form of agriculture than longer ones. (and as a former grape grower I do have a bit of experience).
I don’t get what the fuss is about.
Marcott said: “20th century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust,”
He also said: ““What we found is that temperatures increased in the last hundred years as much as they had cooled in the last six or seven thousand,”
There is no contradiction.
The last hundred years temperature was not taken from his paleotemperature stack, but from modern thermometer measuring.
He compares the proxy-reconstructed temps from his paper up to 1900, with modern measured temps after 1900.
You can reject the validity of such comparison, but can’t claim fraud or misconduct.
Mr Marcott, if you run with wolves, you will learn how to howl.
Pielke Jr. hits one out of the park. In simple, straightforward words, supported by direct quotes, and a large does of common sense, he shows the authors and supporters – including the NSF – for what they are.
A baseless attempt at a smear by Pielke. He gives a definition of misconduct but later says he is not accusing the authors of misconduct. He clearly does not wish to have the living daylights sued out of him, but knows how to cover a smear.
The conclusions of the paper outlined by Pielke himself are correct. The statistical inaccuracy of the proxy record due to a shortage of data for the recent past is acknowledged and results in an upward spike. This artifact is not a problem because the recent past is covered by direct temperature measurements, which when combined with the reliable proxy data give a continuous temperature record dating back 11,000 years.
There is nothing fraudulent or even misleading about the results of the paper. Earlier demands and predictions by “skeptics” for withdrawel of the paper from Science and action be taken against Marcott, his supervisors, the University of Oregon, thesis examiners, referees, and the lady who empties the waste paper baskets have failed because there has been nothing whatsoever of substance produced to justify that nonsense. I suppose this is the best that the “skeptics” are left with so they have to make the most of it.
More on the statistical problems for the recent proxy data here.
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2013/03/22/global-temperature-change-the-big-picture/
Pardon me . meant to add this further exploration of the tick to my previous post.
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2013/03/22/the-tick/
Alec Rawls, for the reasons I gave above, you cannot say Marcott lied. He does not rely on the statistical artifact since 1940 for the statement that the recent rise is more rapid than the past. The recent rise is known from instrumental temperature records.
REPLY: No, he can say it, though you may not agree with it, much like I don’t agree with your fawning defense of this fiasco, but I allow you to say it. – Anthony
Chris, that’s a very revealing Skype interview of Shakun, but I disagree about Andy Revkin. Note how closely he questions Shakun, with input from Rohde. Note Revkin at the very end, sort of grinning to himself.
The kicker? He’s placed that interview, with Shakun confessing his idiocy or knavery, at the end of his most recent column. He says it’s for ‘convenience’. Heh.
I think Andy’s more than a little upset.
==============
The problem with the 1991 definition of scientific misconduct is the second sentence:
“Misconduct in science does not include errors of judgment; errors in the recording, selection, or analysis of data; differences in opinions involving the interpretation of data; or misconduct unrelated to the research process.”
As soon as scientists are no longer primarily interested in finding out what really is going on and instead become primarily interested in practicing politics to get more grant money, or influencing public policy, or getting a promotion, or helping out a friend, or getting a favorable mention in the media — and on and on — then what is being practiced is no longer science but rather advocacy in one form or another. Smart advocates will only attempt to get poorly informed individuals to agree with them and will always arrange matters so that they can claim to have suffered “errors in judgement, etc., etc.”
It is the corruption of motives that destroys science, and making up, withholding, or lying about the data is only a symptom of the corrupted motives. For example, smart advocates know that withholding data or lying about it can often be passed off as errors in judgement because they can say that the awkward bits of information were thought to be not representative, poorly recorded, etc. — the list of potential excuses is endless. As we have seen, even outright making up of data can be described as “adjustment” for supposed biases or the output of “sophisticated algorithms” for interpolating between or extrapolating from known data points. And of course no one expects to examine every little detail of what goes on inside the computer model — even the people who put together the model can’t know everything (You mean the subroutine package we got from our colleagues does not really do what we thought it did? Gee, I guess we should have tested it more. Sorry about that.)
Unless some group is making a ton of money using a new scientific discovery on the open market — grants and government mandates do not count — it’s hard to be sure that a true advance has occurred. There is always, of course, the test of time — but for this to work requires the scientists who have promoted or bought into the mistaken “discovery” to pass on or lose their influence, and that can take decades. Look how long it took for Piltdown man to be exposed.
Nick writes “We know about the last century temperatures primarily from thermometers, not Marcott’s proxies. And that is usually what he is referring to.”
Its quite a simple argument Nick, but utterly undeniable. If the proxies cant/dont reproduce today’s temperatures then they cant reproduce similar temperature variations over similar timeframes in the past either. And hence it cannot be said today’s warming is unprecedented or anything of that nature.
From the video… For Shakun, it is all about “the boom”. That’s the bit he’d impress Obama with: the bit that is obviously total “climate bollocks”.
Negligence can become culpable when an unintentional misreprepresentation becomes an intentional cover-up.
But the climate change priesthood consists of both Gaians and Gnostics.
I have read the details and explanations on realclimate, there is only one explanation. In England right now it is mid-day of April first. Wait for the gale of laughter.
“You took that seriously. How dumb are you?”
The team cannot afford to let this paper be withdrawn, retracted they would lose everything Revkin ect, probably all mainstream media, the show would be over and they know it.
I mean look at what they did.A complicated scenario that resulted in a series that was the term by term average of 73 proxy series, plus each term also includes the average of 73000 random “perturbations” that should average to zero. Similarly 73000 random time “perturbations”
Then they “mean-adjust” (is that a technical term?) the lot until it agrees with Mann’s results.
Then they carefully tell you what they have done, Then say parts are not robust.
Oh My God, I have just realised who is the butt of the joke…. BRILLIANT. SUPERB….UNPARALELLED
Philip Shehan says: Blah blah blah…
————————————————
Without even getting into the dating of proxy issues, the proxy graph does not begin to have a resolution that can detect a decades long trend. The made an invalid comparision, they have retracted that comparision, and they screwed up the proxy report anyway.
D. Cohen,
If the authors had wished to “withhold data”, they would not have included the problematic post mid 20th century proxy data that gives rise to the clearly incorrect uptick for that data when compared to the instrumental record.
Jacob and Philip Shehan:
Please keep your posts coming because I am enjoying your expressions of desperation. Indeed, Philip Shehan, observing the number and frequency of your posts is like watching the flailing arms of a drowning man.
The issue is clear.
1.
Marcott provided a thesis which showed declining global temperature through the Holocene with recent global temperature being the lowest for about ten thousand years. However, fluctuations in the global temperature show recent periods of warming and cooling which coincide with the Minoan, Roman and Medieval warm periods and generate the Little Ice Age (see the diagram in the above article).
2.
This was a refutation of the assertions of the ‘Hockey Team’ – and especially of the Hockey Stick graph of Mann, Bradley and Hughes (MBH) – which say recent global temperature is higher than for thousands of years and global temperature rise accelerated in the twentieth century.
3.
Marcott was encouraged to amend his graph by various improper statistical tricks which provided a sharp up-tick in the twentieth century. Also, the recent thermometer-derived data were added to the graph to increase the misleading implication of recent and unprecedented temperature rise in the twentieth century.
4.
The misleading and improper version of the graph was submitted to Science by Marcott, Shakun, Clark, and Mix, and it was accepted for publication.
5.
The paper which presented the misleading and improper version of the graph was trumpeted to the media as being an indication of recent unprecedented global warming.
6.
Investigations, notably by McIntyre, revealed the misleading version of the graph was a construct of improper statistical procedures.
7.
Had the graph not been exposed as being misleading and generated by improper statistical procedures then Marcott would certainly have obtained the same career benefits as Mann obtained from the MBH ‘Hockey Stick’ graph.
8.
Providing improper and misleading information for personal gain is commonly thought to be fr@ud but – as Pielke points out – in this case it does not fulfil certain definitions of scientific fr@ud.
9.
The ‘Hockey Team’ are attempting damage limitation by pretending that the ‘up-tick’ at the end of the misleading and improper graph is not important. But this is patently false because the ‘up-tick’ was the message trumpeted about the graph.
So, Jacob and Philip Shehan, please keep your posts coming. They cannot obscure the facts of the issue but they provide great laughs.
Richard
to the people trying to cover up the truth read this, http://climateaudit.org/2013/03/31/the-marcott-filibuster/
Philip Shehan, did someone step on your ideology? Facts are facts and Marcott is not entitled to his own. Go back to where all the Gorebots go and help them work on the mess this paper has created for climate science!
Philip Shehan sorry but Marcott went pimping this ‘research’ [as] proof [of] recent events when in reality is was not such thing , if he had not be caught, and why he was not in ‘peer review ‘ is a good question, would he or the other authors have made it the problem public ?
Well given the whoring they done for ‘the cause ‘ on the very thing they now claim does no matter , we can suggest it would be highly unlikely.
“because the ‘up-tick’ was the message trumpeted about the graph”
Correct.
But the up-tick came from splicing the instrumental record (not from proxies).
I think that this splicing can’t be done, it’s false, and missleading.
But Mrcott stated up-front, correctly, what he was doing. He didn’t cheat.
I dissagree with Marcott’s conclusion, but don’t see how one can accuse him of missconduct.
I tried to leave this on Roger Jr.’s blog but don’t understand how to register there.
Roger:
I note one of the paleo temp measures was made using “ratio of magnesium and calcium ions in the shells of microscopic creatures that had died and dropped to the ocean floor;…”
This illustrates a serious problem of the kind that can arise with multidisciplinary sciences.
Any geologist is familiar with the process of ‘dolomitization’in which previously deposited calcite can be subsequently altered in the presence of Mg ions in the water.
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/168366/dolomitization
The shells should be studied for the mineralogical signature of this process (coarser particles of dolomite in the calcite, often somewhat euhedral (showing crystal faces).
Thanks Christopher,
Christopher Hanley says:
April 1, 2013 at 12:36 am
That video is just what the Dr. ordered.
Mr. Watts, this video alone is deserving of its own titled post.
There seems to be remarks of the “sauve qui peut” type (at the end of a defeat in a War, the French phrase is a last official utterance: save what you can. Fellows such as the two noted, appeal to the uptick being shown by the instrumental record.
Philip Shehan says:
April 1, 2013 at 1:55 am
Nick Stokes says:
April 1, 2013 at 12:11 am
I don’t know whether Philip S. has any clues whatsoever, but Nick Stokes should know better. If the curve over the holocene is essentially a 300yr smoothing plus error bars, it does not show what spikes upward over decadal, or multidecadal time frames there most certainly were, most probably with as much relief as we see in the instrumental record with the 60 yr cycles. One can’t use a 300yr smoothing to compare with an annual smoothing of the instrumental record. The lost spikes most certainly assure that we are well below any Holocene highs. Let us take the average of the last 150 years, at least to get an approximate comparison with the rest of the data – the spike simply disappears, like the ones that disappeared over the 13,000yr trace.
The uptick is well established – as far as the NSF is concerned – in earlier published works. The press release says:
“”We already knew that on a global scale, Earth is warmer today than it was over much of the past 2,000 years,” Marcott says. “Now we know that it is warmer than most of the past 11,300 years.””
The next is:
“”The last century stands out as the anomaly in this record of global temperature since the end of the last ice age,” says Candace Major, program director in the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Division of Ocean Sciences.”
That could have been phrased more clearly, but in the context of the author’s statement it is not misleading unless you want to be mislead.
Determination of scientific misconduct should have a high threshold. It’s easy to extrapolate beyond the data without having malicious intent. That’s just a failure of self-knowledge and caution. However, it’s journalistic malfeasance that needs to be condemned at the slightest whiff of untruth. Those who publicize scientific research are getting away with pushing an agenda. Doesn’t matter if they’re press release writers, regular reporters, or even the scientists themselves talking about their work through the public media. Hyping is deliberate lying, even if one believes the science at the core is accurate.
‘Christopher Hanley on April 1, 2013 at 12:36 am
Watching Jeremy Shakun interviewed, he must inhabit a parallel science universe.’
Aside from noticing his interesting, revealing eye brow tick (How does he do that?), I also noticed how positively buoyant he was over the dream of being with Obama on an elevator. Of course, that elevator could be (and probably is) plunging down into an abyss of debt. But that’s besides the point. What is important, I think, is his absolute failure to choose to realize that Obama doesn’t pay for his research. We do. Repeat; we do. And once the sticky spider web, woven by these theories, has succeeded in entrapping and ready to feast on every function of the economy, well guess what Mr. Shakun, Obama ain’t gonna’ be able to pay you with our money any more. We won’t have any. And, don’t for a second, Obama’s gonna’ pay you with his money. That came from us too, I’m sad to say.
jacobress:
Your post at April 1, 2013 at 5:21 am quotes me (without attribution) having said
Your post continues saying in total
Well, if you “don’t see” then it must be because you are using a ‘Nelsonian eye’. Please read all of my post at April 1, 2013 at 4:35 am from which you have quoted. And note this
Furthermore, in an FAQ Marcott et al. say:
Assuming the splicing were the only error which created the up-tick (it was not) then such a conclusion is invalid on the basis of the difference between two different data sets with very different temporal resolutions. And it is hard to accept that they did not know this following the MBH ‘hockey stick’ debacle.
If it was not malpractice then it was gross incompetence of such magnitude that it is incredible in light of the MBH saga.
As point of interest, I objected to MBH98 within a week of its publication precisely because of such splicing and I did not then know about ‘hide the decline’.
Richard
Would this not be the expected modus operandi for someone ostensibly (apparently or purportedly, but perhaps not actually) in the pay of ‘big climate science’ (as skeptics are often assumed of being in the revenue stream of ‘big CO2’)?
Verily, the behavior of someone dedicated to the (or a) cause (as in dedicated to the survival of the organization vs what the organization may do), rather than dedication to the pursuit of the science and objective ‘trvth’ (hence, we arrive at the very heart of the source of “noble cause corruption”)?
.
The most damning thing about adding the instrumental uptick is that there’s no way to detect any equivalent historical upticks from the proxy data.
It’s like using a focused telescope to discover Saturn but a very unfocused telescope to look for Jupiter. Of course the conclusion would be there’s only one large planet, but such methodology stinks of desperation and drawing ANY conclusion is fraudulent.
It’s an interesting sleight of hand, however, and displays motive above all else. Such is the sorry state of “climate science” from The Team.
And so are the bad grammar.
Philip Shehan says…
“There is nothing fraudulent or even misleading about the results of the paper.”
It seems it would be a mistake for anyone to trust you with their wallet.
It would be interesting to know the revision history through the peer review process. How did this paper evolve from the paper of his PhD Thesis to it current state? It sure looks like a paper whose original focus was paleo-temps was modified to become a vehicle for rehabilitating the hockey stick just prior to AR5.
No surprise that Time overlooked Mann’s Hockey Stick & CAGW in general, the biggest scientific fraud conspiracy, at least since Lysenko, & most costly in lives & treasure:
http://healthland.time.com/2012/01/13/great-science-frauds/
@Gary Young P
Quite right. It is one thing to combine (entirely) different data sets but to apply different smoothing is nonsensical. Note that the smoothing hides something rather important: It stops after 1940 placing the 1930’s ‘on the other side’ of the line, with annual temps ‘on the near side’.
This avoids the rather obvious problem of having the 1930’s being hotter than the noughties. Smooth, you could say!
This point seems to have escaped notice so far. The reason the proxy stopped in 1940 was not only to make the ‘real temps’ look as if they are rising fast, it hides a recent warmer period by smoothing backwards 300 years. Am I recalling correctly that someone else did this about 3 years ago?
The conclusions of the chart must be made together with notes explaining to this effect – to salvage anything at all. It is a blunt paper with crude conclusions that are probably untrue, and the graph is just as misleading. If that is not fraud (which is possible) the only alternative is scholastic incompetence. If it was a first year paper it would get an E for effort.
Andy Revkin interview of Jeremy Shakun, going hyper-drive from the Anthropocene to the Idiocrocene in ten minutes flat.
Jacob says:
April 1, 2013 at 1:09 am
He published the graph with the uptick. That graph is one of his conclusions. Yet nothing in the paper supports the uptick. He knew that. Putting it together, he published a conclusion that he knew was not supported by his paper. At best, it is lying in the Mann-Jones degree. At worst, it is fraud.
Placing a disclaimer in the fine print does not absolve him from publishing the uptick. The graph with the uptick must be retracted and replaced. Marcott must make the rounds of the media outlets that broadcast his statements and correct those statements.
Jacob
April 1, 2013 at 1:09 am
###
Sorry, but that dog don’t hunt.
It is fraud, because Marcott did NO work on instruments. His work does not show a warming whatsoever in recent times and what he did for his graph in simple terms was basically splice the instrument record onto his reconstruction and call it done. (it does not matter what method he used, because frankly any torture of data/statistics will reproduce a hockey stick if that is what you torture/change the data to.) I think people are hung up about calling a spade a spade, but this man is a liar. And this is what we can expect in the future of climate science if you don’t nip this in the butt. This is a brand new PHD who has an entire carear ahead of him in flat-out lying if we do not stop this now. The paper needs to be rewritten to what his actual disertation was and it needs to be fixed so that scientists actually do get punished for stating misleading claims and out-right contradictions from their actual research.
He purposely lied for the press (his 15 minutes) and he is claiming that the lying is ok because he put a disclaimer on page 24 in small letters stating that the data for the warming in the last 100 years is not good. (not robust). Sorry, at the very least he is deceiving people and that does rise to the level of academic misconduct. If you can simply contradict yourself and get away with it, there will be no more science. I could flat-out state that “I proved the existance of God in my abstract in big bold letters” and then state on page 24 like Marcott that “the data is inconclusive” and thusly we have born science which is no longer science but rather an exercise in lying the best and hiding the actual data as much as we can.
This is why we are in trouble folks. If you can call this acceptable, then you can justify anything.
Then we have the famous hockey stick graph of Marcotts. That graph is fraud because it is not labeled properly how he came up with it. (In science you label and document everything so that anyone who is familiar with the subject material could duplicate it). It is also a lie because he flat-out states that his proxies can not resolve 100 years worth of warming, and yet he is claiming current warming is “unprecedented” in his own words. Normally in science we prove assertions we state in the abstract and he flat-out contradicts himself by stating that it is impossible for his proxies to find recent warming.
Yes, that is lying and that can be called fraud if he did it deliberatly. If not, the university AND the journal are in trouble for accepting this level of science in the first place. And they should be in trouble. Anyone who defends this behavior is defending lying for you cause as much as you want as long as you put a disclaimer in small letters. Sorry, that just does not fly. You either tell the entire truth or you get out of science.
The tedious thing is that I can confidently predict that 5 years from now Marcott et al (2013) will still be trotted out as proof positive of impending disaster, and used by venal and incompetent politicians to justify spending more Billions on things that obviously don’t work.
Another head scratcher is the fact that, if this ‘scythe’ chart has even a scintilla of science in it (which is highly dubious), it is indicating that global average temperatures (OK, not the most obviously sensible metric, anyway) have been within 1ºC for 10,000 years.
Does that look much like an inherently unstable system, much prone to disastrous ‘tipping points’?
Christopher Hanley says:
April 1, 2013 at 12:36 am
Watching Jeremy Shakun interviewed, he must inhabit a parallel science universe.
=====
It’s called “Eugene, Oregon”.
Philip Shehan says:
April 1, 2013 at 1:55 am
Alec Rawls, for the reasons I gave above, you cannot say Marcott lied. He does not rely on the statistical artifact since 1940 for the statement that the recent rise is more rapid than the past. The recent rise is known from instrumental temperature records.
Yes you can say Marcott lied! In his own FAQ, Marcott admitted that his “global temperature reconstructions spanning the past ~11,300 years” have “a resolution >300 yr.” That means he knows that any rapid rise in temperature matching the past decade (or the last hundred years) would not show up in his reconstruction. So he cannot say that the recent rise is more rapid than any time in the past because his data does not have the resolution to make such a statement. It’s very possible there were rapid rises in past temperatures that exceeded the modern rise but don’t show up in Marcott’s reconstruction because they lasted less than 300 years. Marcott knows it, has admitted it, and yet makes the false claim anyway. That’s lying.
Louis,
That is correct. People who lie tend to rationalize lying by themselves and others.
Obviously the media purveying Marcott’s prevarications are illiterate by choice with respect to science, economics, and moral standards. Let’s not forget that they are among the profiteers making big bucks from going along with the coming next Holocaust. They will be just as guilty of mass murder as the alarmists.
The New York Times is today’s version of the Nazi Voelkischer Beobachter – an odious propaganda rag that has the effrontery to call itself a “newspaper.”
This paper is yet another example of how pathological this entire field of science has become. I have no idea how to fix it, but Steve McIntyre probably does.
Instead of pouring money into further deliberately flawed and misleading research, perhaps a better solution would be to put him in charge of making decisions for NSF grants for the field 5 years or so?
Just heard that Marcott and Gleick apologized over at another website.
R. Shearer says:
April 1, 2013 at 11:46 am
April Fools.
I thank this site for the common sense approach to this horrific scam, IF this warmth was unprecedented then the warmist crowd would not have to falsify and try to obscure old records and the Viking fields and farms would be backing in this warmth, just like they are not! As for those here who try and support this tosh shame on you! its people like the author of this post and others in the skeptical arena who are keeping real science alive! Thank all of you!
Crispin in Waterloo but actually in Yogyakarta says:
April 1, 2013 at 7:31 am
==================================
Excelllent comment. They not only smoothed to 300 year resolution, then spliced on a only decades long instrument record. changed the dates of proxies beyond 300 years without explanation, but they also cherry picked the warmest instrument period before the cooling from about then to to about 1976. So they blended that 1940s warmth into the little ice age, then tacked on the instrument warmth, also cherry picked. Steve M may be to Canadian to call it what it is, but it looks like fraud to me.
Contrast the standards of the founders of the United States in the Declaration of Independence:
How terrible will be the consequences of corrupting a young scientist and destroying his reputation as an objective credible author, when those person stand before that Supreme Judge of the world on the last day.
Robert Rohde, the chief data analyst behind the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project observed:
A number of replies to my comment miss the point. Nowhere in his article does Pielke complain about the lack of time resolution in the paleo data. If you wish to have a debate on that, fine, but it has nothing to do with Pielke’s accusations here.
Here is Pielke’s complaint from his linked article:
‘There is a big problem with the media reporting of the new paper. It contains a fundamental error which (apparently) originates in the NSF press release and which was furthered by public comments by scientists…
[Marcott says:] “. . . the 20th century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes . . .”
What that means is that this paper actually has nothing to do with a “hockey stick” as it does not have the ability to reproduce 20th century temperatures in a manner that is “statistically robust.” The new “hockey stick” is no such thing as Marcott et al. has no blade. (To be absolutely clear, I am not making a point about temperatures of the 20th century, but what can be concluded from the paper about temperatures of the 20th century.)’
As Nick Stokes and Jacob and I point out, Marcott is not claiming that the paleodata says anything about the 20th century. It does not have to. We have extremely “robust” instrumental data for that.
Marcott et al are clearly not trying to pass of the artefact as real. Not only do they explain it is not reliable, they actually show it is not reliable by directly comparing the artefact spike (purple) to the instrumental record spike (gray) here showing that the proxy artefact occurs over 50 years before the instrumental spike and therefore cannot be real.
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/marcott-a-10001.jpg
( Note that by convention “the present” or 0 years is taken to be 1950).
This is an odd way to mislead people. Had they wished to make life easier for themselves, they would have done precisely what Pielke says they should have done – simply chopped the unreliable 20th century proxy data as he demonstrates here:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-USBwfGhd5oM/UVjxNw-cO0I/AAAAAAAACk4/xUGDLM2V5Aw/s1600/marcott2.jpg
But then of course they would have been accused of “hiding the incline”.
In Summary. The authors do not rely on proxy data for their conclusions regarding the 20th century. They state that they are using instrumental data for that.
Again, if you want to have an argument as to whether you can add instrumental data onto proxy data, go ahead, but that as with the resolution question, it has nothing to do with Pielke’s complaint which is what I am critiquing.
So yes, Alec Rawls can accuse Marcott of lying, but it would indicate that Mr Rawls has limited skills in reading comprehension.
Philip Shehan;
What that means is that this paper actually has nothing to do with a “hockey stick”
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
You mean other than the rather large graph of a hockey stick prominently displayed in the published paper that was inserted after the thesis was written (which didn’t have it) and based on data that the authors insist is not representative of the graphic it was used to make? You mean other than THAT hockey stick? Where is this hockey stick that the paper has nothing to do with?
Loius: Here is Rawls comment:
“[The] 20th century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes, and therefore is not the basis of any of our conclusions.”
Quite the admission from an author who claimed to have affirmed that 20th century temperature increase is extraordinary:
“What we found is that temperatures increased in the last hundred years as much as they had cooled in the last six or seven thousand,” he [Marcott] said. “In other words, the rate of change is much greater than anything we’ve seen in the whole Holocene,” referring to the current geologic time period, which began around 11,500 years ago.
Sounds like he’s admitting he lied.”
Rawls’ accusation of lying is not based on the question of resolution. It is based on the assumption that Marcott is using the non- robust paleodata mentioned in the first quote to make a statement about the temperatures for the last hundred years. That statement refers to instrumental data.
Much thanks to Philip Sheehan et al. for the laughs as you tried to defend Marcott’s obvious piece of chicanery. Thinking back to my grad school days when many of the most interesting papers were circulated as proofs or as draft manuscripts (this was back before the Internet) since a certain entrenched crowd controlled the peer review of relevant journals, I would wager a modest sum that the offending uptick was added during peer review with the ounderstanding that publication would require orthodoxy in climate religion. It’s rather sad for those of us who admire science.
davidmhoffer:
Marcott is damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t.
The thesis does have the blade of the Hockey stick. It has it in 4.3 b,e and f and Fig 4.2 a,b,c and d. It does not have it in Figure 4.3 a.
Philip Shehan says:
April 1, 2013 at 4:22 pm
davidmhoffer:
Marcott is damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t.
The thesis does have the blade of the Hockey stick. It has it in 4.3 b,e and f and Fig 4.2 a,b,c and d. It does not have it in Figure 4.3 a.
>>>>>>>>>>
Really? So you are saying that despite knowing that the hockey stick was not supported by the data, and despite stating for record that the paper had nothing to do with hockey stick, he included it in both the thesis and the published version?
I guess having gotten away with an absurd representation of the data in the thesis, he decided to make the hockey stick (that had nothing to do with his paper) an even bigger part of the published version than it was in the thesis?
Perhaps you could publish links to those figures? [4.3 b,e,f] and 4.2 a.b,c,d? That would be what? SEVEN graphs of a hockey stick? Is that not a remarkable number of hockey stick graphs to put in a paper that supposedly has no data to support a hockey stick and has nothing to do with a hockey stick in the first place? SEVEN? LOL.
mods ~ oops, that should have been 4.3 b,e,f above. Not 4.3 a,b,e
noloctd, Why did the conspiritors make huge blunder in having the paleodata uptick occur decades before the instrumental data? That surely this just creates problems for themselves? Why not do as Pielke suggests? Chop off the paleodata which does not fit the “orthodoxy”. A very odd piece of chicanery.
Following the Philip Shehan new rules for science ethics now scientists can just put in their papers rubbish that is “not statistically robust”, ” cannot be considered representative ” ” and therefore is not the basis of any of our conclusions.” at the same time trumpeting precisely that in the media.
davidmhoffer. I am not at my own computer now and do not have the link handy but it is a pdf file of Marcott’s thesis. You can try and find it yourself.
Seven figures is not a lot for a 200 plus page thesis. There are in fact more than seven in chapter 4. You are not restricted for space in a thesis as you are in a published paper which is why Marcott could present the data with and without the instrumental data in his thesis but combined them in the paper.
People have picked on one panel of figure 4.3 from the thesis and pointing out that it is different to the paper (well yes, for the reasons just given) without acknowledging the presence of the tick in the other panels. I guess most of them did not bother to check themselves but are just parroting what they have read. Just one example of the critics getting it wrong.
AlexS is talking rubbish. An artefact covering a few decades at the end of 11,000 years of data which does not matter as reliable instrumental data exists for that period does not invalidate the rest of the data in any way.. I tend to agree with Pielke that they could have easily discarded those data points as statistical outliers due to limited paleo data, but then you lot would have been screaming about them “hiding the incline.”
Philip Shehan;
People have picked on one panel of figure 4.3 from the thesis and pointing out that it is different to the paper (well yes, for the reasons just given) without acknowledging the presence of the tick in the other panels.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Uhm….no. They’ve picked the prominent figure from the publication and shown that it doesn’t match the corresponding figure in the thesis. Marcott et al have since admitted that the figure published figure isn’t supported by the data, and have asserted that it doesn’t have anything to do with the paper.
But keep spinning… I’m sure you’ll come up with something that doesn’t make me LOL at some point.
davidmhoffer:
Here is the link to Marcott’s thesis:
http://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1957/21129/MarcottShaunA2011.pdf?sequence=2
With regard to your Uhm…no; Uhm…no
They’ve picked a prominent figure from the publication because that’s the one McIntyre presented to them, and one of eight figures from Chapter 4 of Marcott’s thesis, the one without the tick due to the statistical artifact from limited data in the 20th century, because that’s the only one McIntyre presented to them, and they could not be bothered checking for themselves to see what the real story was. Actually McIntyre himself was just following the lead of a reader, “Jean S”.
http://climateaudit.org/2013/03/14/no-uptick-in-marcott-thesis/
Here is what McIntyre says:
“The differences will be evident to readers. In addition to the difference in closing uptick, important reconstruction versions were at negative values in the closing portion of the thesis graphic, while they were at positive values in the closing portion of the Science graphic.”
The reason for the differences is clear with a cursory examination of the graphs. The figure in Science includes all the data including the artefact and “the positive values in the closing portion of the Science Graphic.”
In Marcott’s thesis he did what Pielke said he should have done, removed the artefact and the later data leaving “the negative portion of the thesis graphic”.
There is no inconsistency whatsoever. One simply covers a few extra decades of data. People have just been lazy in the examination of the two graphs.
Whereas Marcott is the sole author of his thesis, with input from his supervisor, he is only one of the authors of the Science article.
Whether because of the input of his coauthors or at the request of the journal referees the journal referees, or for some other reason not apparent to me as I do not have the full text of the Science article, the article included the later paleodata artefact and all.
There is no requirement whatsoever that figures in a journal article have to exactly represent a figure that appeared in one of the authors thesis. I speak from experience.
Figure 4.2 a-d in Marcott’s thesis contains the uptick from the instrumental data because it compares the paleo data with it.
From the thesis:
“In order to compare our globally stacked record directly with modern climatology, we mean shift our temperature record to a common period of overlap with a reconstruction for the past 2000 years (Mann et al., 2008) (Figure 4.2), which is itself reported as an anomaly from the A.D. 1961-1990 period and is cross validated with the Climate Research Unit (University of East Anglia) instrumental surface-air temperature dataset (Brohan et al., 2006).
Figure 4.2. Time series of globally stacked temperature anomalies.
a, Mean of globally stacked temperature anomalies for arithmetic mean calculation (purple) with 1error (blue band) and Mann et al.’s (2008) global CRU-EIV composite mean temperature (dark gray) with error (light gray) for last two millennia…”
Fig 4.3a serves a different purpose:
“To test the reproducibility of our two methods for reconstructing the temperature stack, we experimented with various ways of calculating the globally stacked temperature anomalies (Figure 4.3 a,e).”
Ah jeez Shehan, give it up, the Marcott study is toast and your focus minutiae is a waste of everyone’s time . Stop defending the indefensible and get your head out of your posterior so you can see the mess they created. Start by reading Ross McKitrick’s essay on the main page.
omnologos says: March 31, 2013 at 11:04 pm
“Ps Marcott’s abstract explicitly mentions “the last decade”.
=========
Gavin at RC says that Marcott ends at 1940. However, if Marcott does end at 1940 as Gavin claims, why all the press buzz from the authors over modern temperatures?
The world was a much different place prior to 1940. Before 1940 there is little CO2 based warming due to human activity because human fossil fuel use prior to WWII was minimal. So if the Marcott spike is showing us anything it is that we should expect warming spikes to occur naturally if we increase the resolution of the proxies.
Philip Shehan says:
April 1, 2013 at 3:45 pm
…The new “hockey stick” is no such thing as Marcott et al. has no blade.
============
hockey pucks. The spike on the right was most certainly intended to duplicate the blade and give the rest of us the shaft.
Philip Shehan says:
April 1, 2013 at 11:17 pm
“To test the reproducibility of our two methods for reconstructing the temperature stack, we experimented with various ways of calculating the globally stacked temperature anomalies (Figure 4.3 a,e).”
=================
and cherry picked the ones that showed the result we wanted to achieve. and then declared to the world that our results were proof positive. Only after we were caught with our hands in the cookie jar did we confess that our results were not robust. (in other words, the results disappear if you use different methods of calculation)
So, Mr Shehan, let’s cut to the chase. Does Marcott et al. tell us anything about the rarity of the speed and scale of 20th Century warming?
I’d say that it can’t, because the resolution of the paleo reconstruction obscures any such historical warmings/coolings. What is there in the paper of validity that suggests otherwise?
Marcott is playing with a ringette stick. He knows he looks like a girly-man doing so so he tapes on a flimsy plastic blade and calls it a hockey stick. Looks like the real thing to those who know nothing about hockey but he can’t shoot with it.
In real hockey he would receive a penalty for playing with a broken stick.
In a just world, he would be mocked out of the scientific community and forced to look for a more honest line of work.
Is it time to sue the IPCC and the lying green groups yet?
Mrt Watts. Well pardon me for focussing on “minutae”. So much easier to make a general smear without examining the “minutae” The accusations against Marcott were based on the “minutae”, and I have examined them. That’s what scientists do. That’s what science is about. If you can’t hack having the claims in your articles examined, don’t put them up.
REPLY: Oh I can hack it, I just find your hacks tiresome and pointless- Anthony
How would you ever compare proxy anomalies with modern temperature anomalies and perform a splice? Maybe I’m missing something here.
Anomalies are each relative but relative to what, they cannot be relative to the same base simply can they? If so how?
Sure seems somewhere there has to exist absolute temperature scales for each to even splice on that uptick and I, as I am sure many others, would sure like to see those absolute temperature bases for each. And if they do in fact have such temperature bases values, where did those originate? Or, have they just matched wiggles with assumptions?
Mr Watts, This section contains complaints by Pielke and commentators of some specific points Marcott’s thesis and the Science article he coauthored. These complaints and alleged inconsistencies are used to claim that Marcott and others is guilty of fraud, misconduct deceit lying etc etc.
I recognize that there are many commentators who think that comments should be confined to unexamined cheering agreement, mutual backslapping and rounds of “Boo Hiss Marcott Sucks and Shehan too LOL.”
I take the attitude that on what is billed as The World’s best Science Blog”, there are actually some here who have the interest, scientific understanding and or intellectual ability to actually examine these claims in a scientific manner.
I know from experience that if I don’t go into “minutae” I have to keep coming back to correct misinterpretation or plain pigheaded stupidity and explain things in further detail.
For example. I pointed out that contrary to the rumour started by one of McIntyre’s readers and accepted without examination and repeated everywhere as established fact, Marcott’s thesis contains seven graphs with an uptick. I also pointed out that McIntyre’s puzzlement at the differences in the two graphs is in plain sight for anyone who wished to spend more than a few seconds looking at it.
I then get asked for a link. I provide it, but knowing people will still not read it before hitting the keyboard, nor after (ferd berple take note), I briefly quote from the thesis to explain what the graphs are showing. This is not pointless, but for those who are to stupid , lazy or ignorant to engage in a truly scientific debate and who do not want their prejudices challenged it may well be tiresome.
If people wish to critically examine my assessment of the evidence, they are welcome to do so with a clear reasoned argument with enough “minutae” to establish their case. Politely. That is how real scientific discussion is supposed to work
Wayne: If I may be so bold. The baselines chosen by different investigators from which the anomolies are measured are somewhat arbitrary. Some make an efffort to use the same ones, sometimes a former baseline is updated to a new one. The global average temperature from 1969 to 1990 is one such commonly uused baseline.
It does not really matter as long as everyone knows what the baseline is and can convert from one to the other. Like giving a temperature in the Celsius or Kelvin (absolute) scale.
When splicing one type of temperature measurement onto another the important thing is to have an overlap of temperature measurements from both sets to establish a common baseline.
Sorry that should have been 1961 to 1990
Philip Shehan:
I write to thank you.
Some days ago, at April 1, 2013 at 4:35 am, I wrote a post in this thread which began saying
I then ‘itemised the facts of the ‘Marcott paper issue’ before concluding saying
Jacob ‘dropped out’, but you have fulfilled my request more than I could have imagined possible.
Nothing has amended or altered the facts I listed, but you have continued to provide the laughs with increasingly desperate ‘arm waving’. Indeed, when Anthony Watts pointed out that your cause had already drowned you continued in your failed attempts to ‘tread water’ in a manner which kicks your cause deeper under.
Now, whenever I need a break I call up WUWT and read this thread to see what you have recently posted. I always put down my coffee first because some of the laughs you have provided are side-splitting.
Many, many thanks. Please continue because I have reached the stage of valuing the laughs you are providing.
Richard
Shehan says:
“I know from experience that if I don’t go into ‘minutae’ I have to keep coming back to correct misinterpretation or plain pigheaded stupidity and explain things in further detail.”
Pure projection. Shehan is crying like a baby as usual, because other commenters disagree with his pseudo-scientific nonsense. Shehan’s own pigheaded stupidity is the problem, not the fact that other readers disagree with him. And referring to Anthony as ‘pigheaded’ does not help Shehan’s case. What other blog would allow a despicable character like Shehan to insult his host like that?
Shehan labels readers as “to stupid, lazy or ignorant to engage in a truly scientific debate” with him. But Shehan is so blinkered himself that he wouldn’t know a scientific debate from his repeatedly falsified, assertion-based alarmist propaganda.
There is no evidence whatever that anything either unusual or unprecedented is happening with the planetary climate. What we observe now has happened repeatedly before — and to a much greater degree. Only propagandists like Shehan falsely assert otherwise. But skeptics have solid scientific evidence showing that nothing unprecedented or unusual is occurring. Thus, catastrophic AGW is falsified, and nothing Shehan falsely asserts can change that.
The fact that Shehan routinely disregardes all scientific evidence that falsifies his belief system is obvious to anyone who reads his cherry-picked nonsense. Whether he is a blinkered fool, or whether he is simply lying about the scientific evidence, depends upon whether Shehan is personally benefitting from the “carbon” scare. If he is not benefitting, then he is of course a blinkered fool on a pointless mission. But if he benefits from dispensing his anti-science cherry-picking, then he is lying for personal gain. Readers can decide for themselves which is more likely; Shehan gets no say in the readers’ judgement. It appears that no other commenter agrees with Shehan, so his response, as usual, is to cry about it.
Thank you Richard Courtney for verifying what I wrote. Yours is precisely the kind of comment I had in mind when I wrote about those who post comments which make no attempt whatsoever to argue the points under discussion but simply make comments along the lines of “Boo Hiss Marcott Sucks and Shehan too LOL.” But you took 226 words to say absolutely nothing of substance.
Then there is DB Stealey. He tops Courtney with 336 words with not a single one debating the science. And as usual he can’t even get the facts right: “referring to Anthony as ‘pigheaded’ does not help Shehan’s case.” I made no such reference to Mr Watts. The remark clearly referred to people who submit comments, not Mr Watts. People like DB Stealey.
Now I know that up until this point I have not commented on the science either. But that is because Courtney and Stealey made a highly personal attack on me including the usual lies and misrepresentations which required a response. If there had been a single comment on the science I would have responded to that, but there was not one. Not one in their entire combined diatribe.
So I issue this challenge to both of them which is the point I made in my comment.
“If people wish to critically examine my assessment of the evidence, they are welcome to do so with a clear reasoned argument with enough “minutae” to establish their case. Politely. That is how real scientific discussion is supposed to work.”
Courtney and Stealey: Put up or shut up.
Shehan says:
“I made no such reference to Mr Watts.”
That’s not how I read it. As Anthony told him: “Ah jeez Shehan, give it up”.
Shehan appeals to non-existent ‘evidence’, saying, “Courtney and Stealey: Put up or shut up.”
While Shehan is scurrying around counting words, I will point out that per the Scientific Method, the entire onus to ‘put up or shut up’ is laid at the feet of those making their runaway global warming claims. Those making their claims carry the onus of proof — not scientific skeptics, who are only saying, in effect: “Put up or shut up.” The one thing Shehan is really good at is his psychological projection when he’s trying to reverse the Scientific Method.
And as I noted above, no one here has agreed with Shehan. Alarmists are always claiming a [non-existent] ‘consensus’ on CAGW. But here, we see an actual consensus: no one agrees with Shehan. He is unable to produce verifiable measurements showing any effect from AGW. None at all. There simply are no such testable measurements, therefore Shehan is forced to resort to his usual bluster. As they say in the great state of Texas: he’s all hat and no cattle.
Unsurprisingly, Mr Stealey has just failed to put up but won’t shut up.
This section is about complaints by Pielke and others about specific details of Chapter 4 of Marcott’s thesis and the Science article he co-authored and alleged inconsistencies therein. “Minutiae” if you will. I have examined those claims, also in detail, with evidence to back up my analysis of those claims. Thus, I have most certainly “put up”.
It is in the context of that discussion only that I have challenged Stealey to ‘critically examine my assessment of the evidence … with a clear reasoned argument with enough “minutae” to establish their case. Politely.’
He has not made any attempt to do so. He simply makes general comments about “runaway global warming claims” etc etc which he produces repeatedly, cut and paste wise in almost every section on this blog, which I have not discussed.
I am analysing the complaints and criticisms made by Pielke and others of the specifics of Marcott’s work which is the point under discussion.
His idea of “per Scientific method” shows an ignorance of that method when he discusses “the onus of proof” ( there is no such onus in science) and reaches ludicrous levels when he resorts to his argument from authority – the authority being a few characters on a skeptical blog who disagree with me – “But here, we see an actual consensus: no one agrees with Shehan.” Again an utterly unscientific cut and paste argument he produces with monotonous regularity.
I will give Stealey another chance: go back at the specific points I have made in this section, about this section (Pielke’s and others comments) and mount a couterargument, ‘per the Scientific Method’;
‘Critically examine my assessment of the evidence … with a clear reasoned argument with enough “minutae” to establish [your] case. Politely.’
REPLY: Well, he’s right, nobody DOES agree with you here, including me. As I said before, this argument of yours is becoming tiring. – Anthony
And another thing. Regarding Stealey’s excuse for a blatant misrepresentation of my statement which clearly referred to [some] pig headed comment writers ( and again I affirm my belief that there are skeptics here who “have the interest, scientific understanding and/or intellectual ability to actually examine these claims in a scientific manner.”)
The fact that Mr Watts was terse with me does not justify the assumption in any way that I would refer to him in those terms, and the reading of my post offers no evidence that I did. Stealey’s stock in trade is personal abuse of everyone he disagrees with, and he so assumes it must be mine.
I will add that I do appreciate that Mr Watts allowed the posting of my two ‘robust’ responses to his criticisms in full. ( Although to paraphrase Churchill: “Mind you, it would have been reprehensible if he hadn’t.”)
Scott Basinger says:
“This paper is yet another example of how pathological this entire field of science has become.”
That is a good point, and worth pursuing. Nobel Laureate [when that really meant something] Dr Irving Langmuir gave a series of colloquia on Pathological Science, which parallels the current AGW narrative [note that I have never said that AGW does not exist, but only that any putative effect from AGW is too small to measure]. AGW is always just below the limit of detectability. The claims of its existence require assumptions. They are inferred, because there are no direct measurements of AGW that are attributable to human CO2 emissions, and not to some other cause.
Langmuir’s Symptoms of Pathological Science are as follows:
1. The maximum effect that is observed is produced by a causative agent [think: CO2] of barely detectable intensity, and the magnitude of the effect [think: AGW] is substantially independent of the intensity of the cause.
2. The effect is of a magnitude that remains close to the limit of detectability; or, many measurements are necessary because of the very low statistical significance of the results.
3. Claims of great accuracy.
4. Fantastic theories contrary to experience.
5. Criticisms are met by ad hoc excuses thought up on the spur of the moment.
6. Ratio of supporters to critics rises up to somewhere near 50% and then falls gradually to oblivion.
Experimental evidence seems at first to support these Pathological Sciences, but upon later testing, the experiments could not be faithfully replicated.
N-Rays, Mitogenetic Rays, the Davis-Bacon Effect, the Allison Effect, E.S.P., and flying saucers all exhibit the same failure of detection, of testability, and lack of replicability as AGW. They all have one thing in common: they are near — but just under — the threshold of detectability.
This is not to say that AGW does not exist; that would be tantamount to proving a negative. But AGW has never been confirmed, either. That would require testable, replicable measurements that unambiguously identify AGW as a major cause of global warming. But there are no such AGW measurements.
There is no generally agreed climate sensitivity number for 2xCO2, either. That confirms that AGW has never been measured; if AGW had been measured, we would have the exact sensitivity number. Also, AGW has been intensely discussed and studied for more than twenty years now. With the pace of scientific progress so rapid, it is questionable why there still has been no AGW measurement. One of Langmuir’s concerns was over the fact that none of his examples of Pathological Science were ever able to be measured.
Readers can learn more about Langmuir’s Pathological Science here [check out the links at the bottom of the page, especially what R.W. Wood did to Blondlot re: N-Rays].
From everything that Dr Langmuir said, it is clear that AGW is no different from the other ‘sciences’ that are just beyond detectability. Again, AGW may well exist. But without verifiable, testable measurements, AGW is not really science, is it?
…
All such comments by anyone should be ruthlessly snipped.
Reply: OK, your wish is my command [snip] – Anthony
Philip, allow me to be the one to set you straight.
You’re the drunk guy at the wedding dinner speaking in tongues. Your bafflegab is so confusing that no one cares to speak to you. In fact, it’s so confusing that you even confuse yourself.
Your arguments are mental masturbation.
You are irrelevant here.
Go home. Tell your granny. She’ll pat you on the head, and pretend she believes what a great scientist you are.
Which comments were they Anthony? You are what we call down here a complete wanker. You allow people like Stealey free rein to abuse others because he has a privelidged position at WUWT, probably bent over a desk as your preferred bum boy. You campaign among your sycophants for the title of Worlds best Science blog, then berate people who have the temerity to disagree with you in a soundly scintific manner. You are a gutless fraud.
[Reply: Mr Philip Shehan, you have worn out your welcome. Your status is now persona non grata here at Anthony’s home on the internet. — mod
[jeez, what a maroon . . totally . . mod]
REPLY: All you had to do was take the hint and give it a rest. The point is that it was becoming tiresome. But, no sense of humor or of honor with this one, a trademark of AGW folks it seems. When you resort to name calling you’ve lost the argument. When you engage in abusive sexual slurs such as you have done above, it becomes a policy violation, and thus it has earned you a ban from WUWT. Congratulations on your self-escalation. – Anthony
[snip.] …I am not banned. [As a matter of fact, you are, for your previous comment. — mod.]
(Snip. Persona non grata. ~mod)
[snip. This is a classy site. Your final post was so over the top that you need to find another posting venue. Maybe SkS will take your comments. — mod.]
He’s probably used to getting booted out of treehouses, too.
Does failure to employ “due diligence” mean nothing? It is an offence every professional is well aware of, and at pains to avoid.