Guest essay by Peter D. Tillman
Got your attention, didn’t it? But they are actually the good guys — two working scientists who, behind the scenes, have had striking success in bringing on retractions by publicly calling out questionable data. Their work was written up in Science Magazine in a freely-available article, here.
Once a problematic paper has been identified, it’s seldom straightforward getting it fixed. Nick Brown and James Heathers have had unusual numbers of successes, perhaps because they start out low-key, but don’t hesitate to go public if they get no response. Other would-be whistle-blowers have had less success, as the Science article describes in some detail. One whistle-blower’s efforts attracted legal threats — another scenario WUWT readers will recall, with a few progressing to actual lawsuits. The litigious Dr. Michael Mann comes to mind.
Heathers & Brown hope their efforts will lead to better peer review.
“In short, peer review misses all the hard stuff, and a worrying amount of the easy stuff.” —James Heathers, Northeastern University, one of the self-described “data thugs”.
Longtime readers here, and participants in the Climate Wars, will recall the remarkable LACK of success in getting questionable data and papers retracted or corrected in Climate Science. Instead, they remains in the scientific record, and are regularly used to buttress such arguments as that 97% of climate scientists support the CAGW consensus.
Readers who are scientists have been taken aback at this lack of success — Steve McIntryre tried for years to get the statistical follies in (for example) the Hockey Stick interpretation by Michael Mann, corrected. He largely failed, despite impeccable statistical work on his part. He did have some (partial) successes, especially in getting data properly archived.
So I recommend you carefully read the Science article, which is free online, and think about how this might be applied to Climate Science, where there is a great mass of poorly-done research awaiting proper review. It won’t be an easy process. As Upton Sinclair once observed, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.”
Science does self-correct, and eventually the failed predictions of climate catastrophe will be recognized as signs that the underlying science is badly flawed. But climate change moves slowly, and the bad advice these folks are giving to policy-makers is already doing a lot of damage, and wasting billions or trillions of dollars. It would be great to speed up the self-correction!
Heathers believes their auditing efforts can be formalized and taught to anyone. Eventually, he would like to produce an online course to spread the methods. “Then things get really interesting,” he predicts.
Peter D. Tillman is a retired geologist who has been interested in paleoclimates since student days, and got interested in the misuses of the tree ring climate proxies from Steve McIntyre’s work at Climate Audit. He earned a bachelor’s degree in geology and chemistry from Rice University in Houston, and a Master’s in Geochemistry from UNC in Chapel Hill. He’s also a longtime WUWT reader.
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In point of fact, their were something like 15 articles a volume in the “The Annals of Applied Statistics” which specifically addressed some of McIntyre’s main arguments and included an article by Mann & Schmidt as well. For the most part the articles were far from impressed with Mann’s Paleo reconstruction. So at least professionally, McIntyre and McKitrick were well received. Makes an interesting read and should have gotten much wider circulation. One can only wonder why it didn’t. https://projecteuclid.org/euclid.aoas/1300715166#toc
” should have gotten much wider circulation. One can only wonder why it didn’t.”
Oh, I don’t think you need to wonder at all. Sadly.
One has to admire the alarmiss political ‘scientists’ of Climate “Science”. They have succeeded in making the science almost irrelevant to the public debate, and in world politics. Witness the foolish & absurd German “Energiewende”(sp?) which succeeded only in raising German electric costs, increasing brown coal (lignite) burning & damaging the German economy. Massive Solar Energy projects on the North German plain! Yet the German Greens appear undaunted.
I do sense that more people in power are starting to wonder about the priority of Climate Change “mitigation”, as it becomes more obvious that not much (if any) actual damage has happened, and the alarmists’ cries become shriller & even less credible. Perhaps there’s hope that sanity will return?
From McShayne & Wyner, https://projecteuclid.org/download/pdfview_1/euclid.aoas/1300715170
“In this paper, we assess the reliability of such reconstructions and their
statistical significance against various null models. We find that the proxies
do not predict temperature significantly better than random series generated
independently of temperature. Furthermore, various model specifications that
perform similarly at predicting temperature produce extremely different historical backcasts. Finally, the proxies seem unable to forecast the high levelsof and sharp run-up in temperature in the 1990s either in-sample or fromcontiguous holdout blocks, thus casting doubt on their ability to predict such phenomena if in fact they occurred several hundred years ago.”
Pretty damning, and pretty much what McIntrye & McKittrick were saying all along. The tree ring “proxies” don’t measure temperature, and the “statistical interpretations” by Mann & Co. were naive, incompetently done & worthless. Garbage in, Garbage out.
To put this into even plainer language. Tree rings are excellent for dating, but are substantially worthless for determining paleotemperatures. The tree-ring paleotemperature guys have been wasting there time, and the taxpayers dollar, for many years now. They are vanishingly unlikely to ever acknowledge this. The field will have to move on without them.
Dr. Judith Curry has wondered, in print, how Michael E. Mann was selected as a lead author in whatever IPCC report first came up with the alarmist language. He was a postdoc then, and she wonders whether he was picked so that he would give the answer the UN politicians wanted. Is there any wonder why Mann has so virulently attacked Curry over the years? Or why he is so deeply invested in the politics of climate alarmism?
“Pretty damning, and pretty much what McIntrye & McKittrick were saying all along. The tree ring “proxies” don’t measure temperature, and the “statistical interpretations” by Mann & Co. were naive, incompetently done & worthless. Garbage in, Garbage out.”
I don’t think Mann was incompetent, I think he knew exactly what he was doing.
“Longtime readers here, and participants in the Climate Wars, will recall the remarkable LACK of success in getting questionable data and papers retracted or corrected in Climate Science”
And yet the very same people will cite the retraction of a particular case study about autism as evidence it was “debunked”, whatever that is…