Reader “pottereaton” submitted this on 2013/04/01 at 2:28 pm
McIntyre/Tamino Feud brewing:
First McIntyre at DotEarth:
Steve McIntyre
Toronto, Canada
Andy,
The ideas in Tamino’s post purporting to explain the Marcott uptick,http://tamino.wordpress.com/2013/03/22/the-tick/ which you praise as “illuminating”, was shamelessly plagiarized from the Climate Audit post How Marcott Upticks Arise. http://climateaudit.org/2013/03/15/how-marcottian-upticks-arise/
It’s annoying that you (and Real Climate) would link to the plagiarization and not to the original post.
Then Tamino, (at his blog) although his comment may have preceded McIntyre’s:
UPDATE
Dave Burton, purveyor of foolishness and myths, submitted the following comment:
“Grant, I find it just plain bizarre that you wrote all this and never even mentioned Steve McIntyre, who first figured out what Marcott had done wrong, and whose excellent work is the whole reason you wrote this.”
For your information, Davy boy, McIntyre’s contribution to this was limited to his every effort to discredit the entire reconstruction, to discredit Marcott and his collaborators, and of course his usual knee-jerk spasms at the sight of anything remotely resembling a hockey stick, sprinkled literally with thinly veiled sneering.
Also for your information, the original version of this post mentioned McIntyre (and linked to his posts) extensively. But prior to posting I decided to remove that, since McIntyre had already fully explored the “low road.”
=====================================================
IMHO, Foster’s response to Burton seems to be mostly venom, and it seems that his emotions got the better of his ability to do science professionally when he decided to remove the references. Seems like a clear case of spite to me. – Anthony
UPDATE: This is a comment and response from “Tamino” on that thread at “Open Mind”. IMHO Grant Foster might be suffering from social isolation issues (from what I know, he works from home with his cat) that prevent him from seeing a reality unfavorable to him, and so he is substituting his own. This is just sad. – Anthony
Steven Mosher | April 2, 2013 at 5:03 am |
It’s pretty simple Tamino. You wrote that you had acknowledgements in your post. You wrote that you removed them. What you think of Steve Mcintyre is not the issue. What you think of me is not the issue. Your opinion of what constitutes good scholarship is shown by the fact that you originally included the cites. So, what I think about scholarship is not the issue. Your behavior shows that you understood the right thing to do. Include the cites. For some reason you changed your mind. We will never know what that is. But your own behavior shows that when you first wrote it, you did as you were trained.
[Response: I have repeatedly stated the truth — that the only “acknowledgements” were of his mistaken ideas and his insulting tone. For you to claim that these were owed to him for reasons of “scholarship” is either mind-boggling stupidity (which I doubt) or nothing more than a pathetic excuse to denigrate me in a dazzling display of your ethical shortcomings.
Perhaps you and others are so keen to discredit my insights because it is now obvious that McIntyre was so clueless about the Marcott paper. Cite that.]
Nothing like taking other people’s ideas and posting them as if they were their own, then dissing the fellow who posted them in the first place. Sadly, this is exactly the type of behavior I’ve come to expect from these so-called ‘professionals’.
The technique being used by Tamino is called ‘othering’.
http://www.wordnik.com/words/othering
n. The process of perceiving or portraying someone or something as fundamentally different or alien.
““Like related forms of “othering” — racism and its relatives in all their many noxious forms — they serve to bring “us” together — albeit in a misdirected and dangerous way — and make us want to fight the vague but threatening “them.” (ibid)
Once one feels confident the victim is ‘othered’ and is not perceived as necessarily deserving of rights and privileges, stealing from them, citing their works, remaining civil when referring to them is no longer socially required. Genocidal massacres are all accompanied by othering, Rwanda for example.
That explains why RC, Tamino et al do not feel any need to respond to logical analyses pointing out “the Team’s” dodgy science and abuses of scientific procedure – a reputation not projected upon them by the common man, but well-earned and rooted securely in their consistent, anti-scientific behavioural patterns.
I asked Tamino to clarify his view on whether he used McIntyre’s ideas without attribution:
“All I ‘learned’ from McIntyre’s ‘analysis’ is that Marcott et al. had re-calibrated proxy ages, that McIntyre blamed the uptick on the re-dating process, and that he was happy to hint at the possibility of deliberate deception on the part of the authors. It now seems that on the ‘dot earth’ blog he chose to accuse me of having ‘shamelessly plagiarized’ his ideas on why the exaggerated uptick occurs in the Marcott et al. temperature reconstruction. He’s wrong.
I didn’t read all his posts about the paper, for two reasons: first, there are so many, and I find them so full of sneering and thinly veiled innuendo that they’re sickening; second, there’s really very little to be learned from him. In my opinion he’s just not interested in understanding the science, he only wants to kill hockey sticks.
I’m hardly ignorant of the effect of station dropout (in this case, proxy dropout) on averaging temperature data, I’ve known about it since long before Marcott et al. was even published. If Steve McIntyre wants to claim that he identified proxy dropout as the reason for the extreme recent temperature uptick in the Marcott paper before I did, fine. It wouldn’t be the first time two different people had the same idea. I congratulate him on his insight. As for his assuming that I got the idea from him and didn’t credit him, he always seems to assume the worst possible motives in others.
My opinion: perhaps if Steve McIntyre had been more careful in explaining himself, more interested in communicating reality than in demeaning the results, and less indulgent of his own sneering, people might refer to him rather than me when mentioning the impact of proxy droupout, and the “dot earth” blog might be referring to his posts rather than mine as ‘illuminating.’
Also my opinion: if Steve McIntyre were really interested in the science rather than just killing hockey sticks, he might have applied the ‘differencing method’ himself and discovered that the uptick is still there (but reduced in size) when the impact of proxy dropout is dealt with, whether one uses the re-calibrated ages or the original published ones.
But that would require him actually to do some science.
Notice that I not only identified (quite independently) the reason for the exaggerated uptick, I also implemented a method to overcome that problem? Notice how I showed the result and compared it to Marcott’s reconstructions? Notice how I computed the result using both the re-calibrated and the originally published proxy ages? Notice how I did so for the same latitude bands as Marcott, and compared those too? Notice how I even did an area-weighting of those latitudinal results? Science.
Notice also that I disputed the reality of the exaggerated uptick in the Marcott et al. reconstruction without once even hinting that the authors had manipulated the data for nefarious purposes?
I wouldn’t be surprised if McIntyre prefers to accuse me of having ‘shamelessly plagiarized’ the differencing method from whoever invented it.”
Two things: 1. I’ve read McIntyre’s work and I don’t see this putative sneering. I see disagreement, but the tone is what I would consider mild. 2. He seems to think McIntyre’s work was not crucial to his own (he doesn’t address the deletion of attribution). I’d like to hear what Steve has to say regarding that.
Just to clarify, that is Tamino’s response.
And the link, because I’m not thinking properly: http://tamino.wordpress.com/2013/03/22/the-tick/#comment-80544
The technique being employed is known as ‘othering’. Once the outsiders, the ‘others’ are defined as lesser they do not have to be dealt with following civil norms. ‘Climate science’ is replete with examples of this.
http://www.wordnik.com/words/othering
n. The process of perceiving or portraying someone or something as fundamentally different or alien.
“Like related forms of “othering” — racism and its relatives in all their many noxious forms — they serve to bring “us” together — albeit in a misdirected and dangerous way — and make us want to fight the vague but threatening “them.”
atarsinc says:
April 1, 2013 at 5:23 pm
Indeed. From Wikipedia
This differs from copyright violation, to which your reply would have been valid, which does not protect thoughts, ideas, or expressions (unless written down, and then only the text).
Why can’t people like you suck it up and simply consult a reference before making claims regarding things you might not understand? I suppose first it requires admitting you don’t understand something… sigh.
Mark
To my knowledge, Grant Foster is neither tenured nor, for that matter, a professor. From what I can gather, he is educated as a civil engineer and works for GISS (or something similar) doing “time series analysis.”
Mark
It all gets very heated in this field!
Utterly bizarre.
I am innocent of that offence and anyway the victim deserved what I did to him…
@ur momisugly Bill H: The short answer is, Yes. Plagiarism is generally regarded by university administrators and faculty as very serious, and the plagiarist is often punished. However, famous professors, especially if well-connected locally and nationally, may escape. You might be able to think of an example among climatologists.
A great side-benefit of Climategate has been the insights into the furious and somewhat desperate email exchanges to provide PR cover for the errors exposed (Gergis and Marcott for just two of the recent ones). Whilst they probably are now hidden/deleted, the long-standing pattern is known.
Mark T says:
April 1, 2013 at 6:08 pm
I wonder if they fire tenured PROFESSORS FOR UNPROFESSIONAL AND UNETHICAL CONDUCT?
To my knowledge, Grant Foster is neither tenured nor, for that matter, a professor. From what I can gather, he is educated as a civil engineer and works for GISS (or something similar) doing “time series analysis.”
Mark
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Then as a professional, who is in the public trust, he should be fired!
(I fixed my spelling errors in the part you quoted)
Tamino has shown repeatedly that he becomes very emotional which is in stark contrast to McIntyre’s tone in his posts. McIntyre’s tone may have a hint of sarcasm in them, but they are downright robotic when compared to many of Tamino’s emotionally (and often vitriolic) drenched rants.
“Is this a simple case of ‘he’s a dirty no good gosh darned skeptic and therefore screw him?’”
Not scientific behavior. More what one could expect from politics? The “element” and the “site” that
Is not to be mentioned by their names?
Next level will be “the deniers have all accepted our consensus”?
I responded to him: “But you wrote that your original post indeed heavily cited to McIntyre. This presumably was for a reason. When people independently arrive at different conclusions by definition they haven’t been directly influenced by others with the same idea. That’s not to say you couldn’t have come up with the idea independently, but it looks highly dubious to observers not in your mind that you actually did. At the very least the deletion of attribution before posting smacks of impropriety, whether the impropriety is present or not.”
And his response was: “What really smacks of impropriety is your implication that I engaged in some sort of impropriety. That’s seems like a common tactic from those who want to avoid the truth of the science.”
Touchy. Guy needs to look up the definition of impropriety.
Tony, your credibility remains unchanged. Keep up the good work!
Is one to assume that now Pielke Sr has stopped posting on his blog that he’s using his time instead trying to get your “game changing” paper ready for prime time? We must be closer by now, mustn’t we? Looking forward to reading it in Science or Nature.
Thanks, again.
To the moderator. I have no idea why, nor control over, how my username sometimes appears as ‘atarsinc’ and sometimes as ‘john parsons’. The only clue I have is that it somehow began at the time of the switch to wordpress. I always fill out the registration exactly the same way. If you know how I can remedy this situation I woud be very grateful for any suggestions. I’ve been snipped many times because of this problem. Then, when the moderator becomes aware of the glitch, they have been understanding of the problem and allowed my posts. I have no ulterior motives and will, if necessary, point out the problem in each post; but I think that might be even more confusing. I have no idea in advance which name will appear. I would note that I always sign “JP”. If it would meet your goals, I would be happy to sign each post with my full name (my real name). Thanks for your indulgence. JP (John Parsons)
Tamino dude seems to have issues (projection, among others. A simple “I arrived at these ideas independently” would normally suffice. He sounds like the little brat who is doubling down on the lie to his parents.
JP, you have to be logged into the same wordpress blog each time you comment here. WordPress doesn’t track its users by name, it apparently tracks them by email address. Make sure you have unique user data for every wordpress blog you operate. If you use the same eddress for two such blogs, you may not be able to comment here ever again. {sniff}
I think Tamino’s real problem is that SM has a habit of going thru all the original data as much as possible and testing to see if the actual data matches what is claimed. He also figures out what has been done to the data in order to get the figures/graphs that are the mainstay of what was supposed to be a major, attituge and policy changing, CAGW report. SM has a habit of embarrassing these likes of some very famous (infamous?) CAGW researchers/ supporters when he discovers the data doesn’t support the claims being made and he has the data and detailed analysis to prove it. Since they don’t want to argue with him in public because he is right and can prove it, all they can do is ignore him as much as they can and discredit him as much as possible at every opportunity. What a sense of total, pull-your-hair-out, frustration they must be feeling when it comes to anything dealing with SM.
atarsinc says:
April 1, 2013 at 7:06 pm
To the moderator. I have no idea why, nor control over, how my username sometimes appears as ‘atarsinc’ and sometimes as ‘john parsons’. The only clue I have is that it somehow began at the time of the switch to wordpress. I always fill out the registration exactly the same way. If you know how I can remedy this situation I woud be very grateful for any suggestions. I’ve been snipped many times because of this problem. Then, when the moderator becomes aware of the glitch, they have been understanding of the problem and allowed my posts. I have no ulterior motives and will, if necessary, point out the problem in each post; but I think that might be even more confusing. I have no idea in advance which name will appear. I would note that I always sign “JP”. If it would meet your goals, I would be happy to sign each post with my full name (my real name). Thanks for your indulgence. JP (John Parsons)
*
Hi John. I would say it has to do with whether you are logged into your WordPress account at the time you post.
When I am logged into my account, the reply box here automatically fills in my details (A.D. Everard plus link to my blog), and that’s how everyone knows me now, so I leave it. If I am not logged in, this site asks me for my details. Usually what I do is go away, log into my own site, then come back and it fills in the same way as usual. To me that saves mistakes (sometimes I don’t get to log in first time through, which stuffs up my comment). Works for me. 🙂
I don’t know if that helps or not. I hope so. Cheers!
Mark T says: April 1, 2013 at 6:08 pm
“[ … ] From what I can gather, he is educated as a civil engineer [ … ]”
———————————-
That’s an oxymoron … using “civil” and “engineer” together. 😉
Tamino made his own hockey stick indeed, out of the longest real thermometer record of all, so I demolished it by feeding in sample data, in a single glance, here:
http://oi48.tinypic.com/1zocja1.jpg
His blog readers ate it up, enthusiastically, and waved it in my face repeatedly back in the day when I was blanketing news sites with info-graphics.
Mark T says:
April 1, 2013 at 6:08 pm
“I wonder if they fire tenerured PROFESORS FOR UNPROFESION AND UNETHICAL CONDUCT?
To my knowledge, Grant Foster is neither tenured nor, for that matter, a professor. From what I can gather, he is educated as a civil engineer and works for GISS (or something similar) doing “time series analysis.”
No, surely that cannot be right. He’s a purveyor of sunglasses!!