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.]
BA says:
April 2, 2013 at 3:39 pm
…
“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. The references to McIntyre in my original version were to his insulting tone regarding this work, but I finally decided it was better to ignore that and comment on the science.”
——-
This is not consistent with his original explanation, nor is it particularly consistent with the behavior Grant Foster generally exhibits on his blog. In other words, this subsequent explanation is questionable, to use no stronger word. That he needed to offer a subsequent explanation at all is suggestive. I suggest that he realized he damned himself with his initial admission and started trying to dig himself out.
Never wrestle with a pig. You get dirty and the pig enjoys it.
The funny thing is how old that aphorism is. The really funny thing is that everyone knows it, and everyone does it anyway.
BA says:
See quote from the authors above, in which they explain that, due to “the small number of records that cover this interval” [1890 to 1950] the steep warming is “probably not robust.” Much later, McIntyre (also Pielke Jr) treated repetitions of this “not robust” statement from the Marcott paper as if they were dramatic new confessions. But they are new only to people who have not read the paper.
—————–
Why publish the paper then, if major parts of it were not robust? You seem to think that this disclosure in the “fine print” somehow makes up for the fact that the graph they presented was completely misleading.
John Parsons AKA atarsinc
A.D. Everard, Many thanks, I’m sure you are correct. JP
bmcburney says:
“3. BA’s quote from Marcott et al. does not contain any reference to the dropout problem. It merely reports that the difference between two methods of data analysis is not “robust.””
Read it again, that quote refers directly to the dropout problem:
“Without filling data gaps, our Standard5x5 reconstruction (Fig. 1A) exhibits 0.6 C greater warming over the past ~60 yr B.P. (1890 to 1950 CE) than our equivalent infilled 5×5 area-weighted mean stack (Fig. 1, C and D). *However, considering the temporal resolution
of our data set and the small number of records that cover this interval (Fig. 1G), this difference is probably not robust.*”
No reading between the lines needed. Marcott et al. state that the steep recent warming under one method (Standard5x5) is not robust because of “the temporal resolution of our data set and the small number of records that cover this interval (Fig 1G)…”
And what’s in Fig 1G? Well, that’s a graph of
“Number of records used to construct the Holocene global temperature stack through time.”
It shows this number of records as an orange line that drops steeply toward zero in the last decades of their reconstruction. It *is* a graph of the dropout problem, and it’s the reason Marcott et al. say in their article that the final uptick (in Standard5x5) is not robust.
Just read the update.
:>
applauds Steven Mosher enthusiastically
Reg Nelson says:
“Why publish the paper then, if major parts of it were not robust? You seem to think that this disclosure in the “fine print” somehow makes up for the fact that the graph they presented was completely misleading.”
The final uptick is not a major part of the paper. It’s a very minor part that the authors (accurately) themselves caution against trusting. The belief that it’s a major part is a proxy for not having read the paper.
Marcott et al. comparisons of modern with older temperatures are not based on the proxy uptick. Rather, as they state clearly in the paper, their comparison involves the more robustly estimated holocene temperatures contrasted with (also robustly estimated) modern instrumental temperatures.
knr,
He nowhere says he ‘should have mentioned McIntyre, and says he removed the references because he was talking about McIntyre’s tone and chose instead to focus on the science. You’re making things up.
It’s telling that virtually no one has attempted to point out where the plagiarism exists, and the only person that has atttempted it has done so after prompting. I doubt many here have even read the two articles in question.
bmcburney,
Plagiarism is the lifting of text or ideas wholesale. Here is McIntyre on plagiarism:
““Plagiarism” is not an issue that arises in business situations. “Boilerplate” is regularly recycled in securities offerings. Lawyers prefer to use proven language rather than take risks with irrelevant paraphrasing. See here for a discussion of the peculiarly academic nature of “plagiarism”. The concern of academics over plagiarism appears to arise primarily out of a desire to stake out a sort of property right, as opposed to protection of the public.”
By Steve’s own measure, Tamino has not come remotely close to plagiarism. The text is not remotely similar. The methods are not the same, and the conclusions are not exactly the same either. Consider:
Steve: “Marcottian upticks arise because of proxy inconsistency: one (or two) proxies have inherent signs or quantities than the larger population, but continue one step longer… In principle, downticks can also occur – a matter that will be covered in my next post which will probably be on the relationship between Marcottian re-dating and upticks. ”
Tamino: “That, I believe, is the reason for such a large “uptick” at the end of the Marcott et al. standard reconstruction. The dropout of “cooler” proxies introduces an artificial warming into the result.”
Proxy (and station) dropout is “boilerplate” knowledge, and has been discussed extensively, beyond and previous to this snaffle. Even the authors of the originating paper imply it. Steve can’t possibly claim authorship of this notion.
Nothing is plagiarised. Steve’s complaint is that dotearth cited Tamino and not him. He says so, but then throws a wild accusation of plagiarism into the mix, which obviously is going to set off a sector of the blogosphere.
richardscourtney,
Tamino introduces a differencing method to address the problem. Steve doesn’t do this. Tamino has other posts on the paper that are also his own work.
Put your ridiculous conspiracy theory down. No one is prompting me to do my own work. All I did was read all the posts McIntyre and Tamino wrote on the matter and paid sepcial attention to the two posts McIntyre indicated. The case for plagiarism is very shakey.
BA says:
What McIntyre revealed is that he had not yet read the paper. See quote from the authors above, in which they explain that, due to “the small number of records that cover this interval” [1890 to 1950] the steep warming is “probably not robust.” Much later, McIntyre (also Pielke Jr) treated repetitions of this “not robust” statement from the Marcott paper as if they were dramatic new confessions. But they are new only to people who have not read the paper.
It’s too bad Tamino didn’t realize this.
‘Cause then, instead of taking a week after Steve McIntyre’s post on Marcott et al. to come up with ways of excusing their practices and shielding them from McIntyre’s criticisms, Mr. Foster could have just written, “McIntyre has posted on Marcott et al. What he says is largely worthless, because he obviously hasn’t read Marcott et al. He proceeds as though Marcott et al. never wrote this, this, or this [each point devastatingly illustrated with a pithy excerpt].” QED
Is the intended lesson that Tamino should be letting BA write his posts for him?
BA also says:
The final uptick is not a major part of the paper. It’s a very minor part that the authors (accurately) themselves caution against trusting. The belief that it’s a major part is a proxy for not having read the paper.
It’s a pity that Marcott et al. didn’t tell their press agents all of this.
It’s a pity that a couple of the authors didn’t even tell themselves this.
I suppose we could conclude that the authors didn’t read their own paper.
BA says:
April 2, 2013 at 5:04 pm
Reg Nelson says:
“Why publish the paper then, if major parts of it were not robust? You seem to think that this disclosure in the “fine print” somehow makes up for the fact that the graph they presented was completely misleading.”
The final uptick is not a major part of the paper. It’s a very minor part that the authors (accurately) themselves caution against trusting. The belief that it’s a major part is a proxy for not having read the paper.
——–
If that’s so, why is it that the thesis version of Marcott et al did not exhibit the final uptick where the Science version did?
Once again, you are being disingenious. The final uptick helped the paper get press and generate headlines – it is despicable precisely because the authors know perfectly well and state openly that it is not robust.
Mark Bofill says:
“If that’s so, why is it that the thesis version of Marcott et al did not exhibit the final uptick where the Science version did?”
Most obvious reason seems to be that proxies drop out in a different order when you use simple averaging (thesis) vs. weighted averaging (Science paper). There may be other differences but the newer paper used methods the authors thought better, overall. That’s what scientists try to do. Marcott et al. clearly state in their Science piece that the most recent proxy results can’t be trusted, and they draw a graph to show why: Unlike the Mann et al. 2008 reconstruction which has more proxies as you approach the present and gets less reliable farther back, the Marcott et al. reconstruction has many fewer proxies as you approach the present, and is more reliable farther back.
An original contribution by Tamino was to replicate the Marcott reconstruction using a third statistical method (method of differences), which seems to give more robust last-few-decades results (less uptick) while also confirming the robustness of the main reconstruction.
“Once again, you are being disingenious. The final uptick helped the paper get press and generate headlines – it is despicable precisely because the authors know perfectly well and state openly that it is not robust.”
No, I’m not being “disingenious” or disingenuous either. And no, the proxy uptick was not the basis for headlines. It’s the comparison between the long-term proxy record and the modern instrumental record (which has a quite robust uptick) that generated the headlines. Again, this focus on the proxy uptick is itself a proxy for not having read the paper.
There are two kinds of plagiarism, as I stated upthread.
One is using someone else’s words, often at length, while passing them off as your own.
The second is using ideas, points, arguments, evidence, or findings from a source—this may, and often does, include ideas, points, arguments, evidence, or findings that you object to—and not citing or crediting the source.
In making this claim:
By Steve’s own measure, Tamino has not come remotely close to plagiarism. The text is not remotely similar. The methods are not the same, and the conclusions are not exactly the same either.
barry is effectively pretending that deliberate failure to cite sources is not plagiarism.
“Therefore,” since Tamino didn’t reproduce a bunch of Steve McIntyre’s text without putting quotes around it, barry feels we must conclude that no plagiarism could have been taking place.
No one’s charged Tamino with cutting and pasting a bunch of Mr. McIntyre’s text without putting quotes around it.
So barry is being disingenuous.
Something all three B’s frequently are.
For what it’s worth, Tamino has gotten one climate-related article published (with co-author Stefan Rahmstorf):
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/6/4/044022
Hey Grant. Your blog’s entire existence depends on McIntyre and Anthony’s excellent and award-winning blogs. If you didn’t hang on their shirttails acting asinine you wouldn’t get any attention. You’re like the kid in Grade 9 who compensates for his low grades by making scatalogical jokes, leering at the girls and sneering at the teacher. Anthony and Steve show real class, and more generosity than you deserve, by actually noticing you and linking to your screeds.
BA says:
April 2, 2013 at 5:04 pm
Reg Nelson says:
“Why publish the paper then, if major parts of it were not robust? You seem to think that this disclosure in the “fine print” somehow makes up for the fact that the graph they presented was completely misleading.”
The final uptick is not a major part of the paper. It’s a very minor part that the authors (accurately) themselves caution against trusting. The belief that it’s a major part is a proxy for not having read the paper.
—–
Well, it’s a major part of the graph and the press release. Name one MSM article that says, “It’s a very minor part that the authors (accurately) themselves caution against trusting.”
You can’t.
If you truly believe what you claim, press the major media outlets to retract their inflammatory, unsubstantiated “non robust” articles.
Like you BA, I seek the truth. We seem to be in agreement here that that the uptick is “garbage” AKA “non-robust”.
Truth will set you free.
Reg Nelson says:
“If you truly believe what you claim, press the major media outlets to retract their inflammatory, unsubstantiated “non robust” articles.”
I believe you haven’t managed to read what I wrote, let alone Marcott et al.
The headline conclusion came from the robust holocene proxy record compared with the robust modern temperature record. It was never based on that uptick in the proxies, which the authors clearly discount. In the interviews I’ve seen as well as the paper itself, the authors remain clear about this.
BA: You can’t compare the “robust” proxy record and the “robust” instrumental record since the former is so coarse grained that it corresponds to a 300-year smoothing of the instrumental record. I have no idea what your credentials are, but Mann and other climate researchers who repeat this over and over again on their twitter feeds these days, should know enough math to refrain from such nonsense. So they’re either lying, not qualified for the work they do, or so blinded by their “cause” that they behave self-deceptive like sect members. I’m leaning to the latter.
Friends:
It is a new dawn and a new day. I have risen to review what has happened in this thread, and I observe the following.
But their campaign has become progressively more ridiculous through the night.
There is no doubt of the following because the evidence is clear and irrefutable.
1.
Tamino plagiarised Steve McIntyre.
2.
Tamino is the screen name of Grant Foster.
3.
Grant Foster (like some others; e.g. Eli Rabbett) uses a screen name so he can avoid culpability by asserting there is doubt as to whether he personally wrote some falsehood posted on his blog under his screen name.
4.
In this case, Grant Foster’s own words demonstrate that it was he – operating under his screen name of Tamino – who plagiarised McIntyre.
Points 1 to 4 have been demonstrated beyond any doubt including in this thread.
Additionally, it seems that one of the AGW-activist organisations has mobilised its ‘attack squad’ of anonymous internet trolls in a hopeless attempt to pretend that Grant Foster did not plagiarise McIntyre.
Richard
The hockey stick sagas have never captured my interest, nor do I expect they ever will.
My general impression of Tamino is that he is one of the 2 darkest-among-darkest of climate discussion dark agents of ignorance &/or deception.
JunkPsychology,
That works only under the assumption that there was something wrong with their ‘practises’. Marcott et al states in the paper that the proxy-derived uptick is not robust. McIntyre laboured under the illusion that they, instead of the decisions of news media editors, thought otherwise.
Tamino echoes the author’s criticism of the proxy-derived uptick in two posts:
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2013/03/22/global-temperature-change-the-big-picture/
Tamino is referencing the authors’ comments, by the way, not McIntyre’s. Tamino read the paper.
Mark Bofill,
The proxy-dierived uptick was not the issue that drove news commenjtary. It was the relation to the instrumental record. But even if it was, do you imagine that the authors have power over the editors of the news media? Your concern should be aimed at the news media. You would find me agreeing with you if you said the press fail to deliver the intricacies and uncertainies in science properly. And you’d find agreement from the mainstream climate community, too.
JunkPsychology,
The charge of plagiarism would not pass muster in any forum. it is absolutely pretentious. Cite one similar example that would corrobarate this claim. there isn’t any! Steve barely discusses proxy dropout, and he doesn’t analyse it in the post he himself cites.
Let’s be precise. Steve calims plagiarism. There isn’t a case for it under any recognized formula. The notions explored are standard iseas. Steve did not invent the notion of data dropout. He has no claim to authorship on it. None of his notions or methods are original. Plagiarism is, effectively, impossible in this case.
Did Tamino get the well-known idea of looking at data dropout as a cause of spurious results from reading mcIntyre’s blog? I have no idea, and neither does anybody else. This an assumption being made here. But even if he did, it’s not plagiarism. It happens all the time on blogs and in academia. Tamino is no more required to ‘cite’ McIntyre than Anthomy Watts needs to cite anyone for working with anomalies rather than actual temps. This is “boilerplate” stuff, to use McIntyre’s own wards on what does and doesn’t need citing.
Unless someone can access the deleted parts of Tamino’s edited post, track which McIntyre posts Tamino read, or can read Tamino’s mind, the accusation is based on assumption.
richardscourtney says:
April 3, 2013 at 1:33 am
I replied to you here:
But as there is no possible way I can prove this, feel at liberty to retain this specious fantasy if it feels good to do so.
BA says:
April 2, 2013 at 6:54 pm
Mark Bofill says:
“If that’s so, why is it that the thesis version of Marcott et al did not exhibit the final uptick where the Science version did?”
Most obvious reason seems to be that proxies drop out in a different order when you use simple averaging (thesis) vs. weighted averaging (Science paper). There may be other differences but the newer paper used methods the authors thought better, overall. That’s what scientists try to do.
————
BA, I’m sorry. I can’t pretend I think you really believe this. You suggest that the uptick is explained by the authors using a method they thought better which just so happens to produce a hockey stick blade which they admit is not statistically robust. Then you go on to blame the media; the climate scientists had no idea how this would be received and what the media would make of it. Please.
Maybe you aren’t being disingenuous, maybe you really are a babe in the woods. I can’t cite off the top of my head my source, and I don’t really care enough to go looking for it (work intrudes), but if you look you can find plenty of evidence that climate science doesn’t work this way; that there is pretty good communication and coordination between important climate papers and the press.
Barry:
You and your compatriots are achieving nothing true by iterating already refuted points.
It seems you are trying the ‘Big Lie’ propaganda tactic; i.e.
keep repeating a blatant falsehood and ignore all statements of the truth with the purpose of repetition hammering the falsehood into the minds of onlookers.
For example, you conclude your post at April 3, 2013 at 5:28 am saying
There is no “assumption”.
You have pretended the facts are other than they are and – in this case – they are as I stated in my post addressed to ‘BA’ at April 2, 2013 at 4:12 pm. To save others needing to scroll up, I copy the pertinent part of that post here. I wrote
Also, you assert that Tamino having copied McIntyre’s work without attribution was not plagiarism because Tamino did it on a blog. That assertion is untrue, is risible, and is contemptible.
Richard
Espen says:
“BA: You can’t compare the “robust” proxy record and the “robust” instrumental record since the former is so coarse grained that it corresponds to a 300-year smoothing of the instrumental record. I have no idea what your credentials are, but Mann and other climate researchers who repeat this over and over again on their twitter feeds these days, should know enough math to refrain from such nonsense. So they’re either lying, not qualified for the work they do, or so blinded by their “cause” that they behave self-deceptive like sect members. I’m leaning to the latter.”
How and why you can compare these things is discussed in the paper, especially in connection with the analyses in their Fig 3. It’s discussed again in Marcott’s FAQs. It’s been elaborated further on the science blogs, where people have worked out more explicitly what would be required for high-frequency, large-magnitude, and rapidly-reversed global up-down (can’t be down-up, that would have the opposite effect) variations unseen by either smoothed or high-resolution proxies, and unexplained by physical theory, to substantially alter this conclusion.
But let’s focus on the source, Fig 3. In your own words, what does it show, and how do you “know” it’s a lie?