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:
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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.
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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?quality=83)
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.
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
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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.
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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
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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”
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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.
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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.