Sunday
Oct102010
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Media coverage of Wegman
Oct 10, 2010 Climate: Mann Media |
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On the Wegman report |
On the Wegman plagiarism allegations |
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WaPo |
GMU investigating climate change skeptic cited by Cuccinelli |
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USA Today |
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Nature |
Rien |
Old claims of bad climate science countered by new claims of plagiarism
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Reader Comments (30)
I think they are slowly digging their own graves. Both alarmist acitivsts, and the helpful media themselves. The activists will survive, and just jump on to the next scare/gravy train. PC-media will dwindle when sifficiently many jump ship, then advertisers will do too. It is already happening.
Also the elites, who support them and today are helpful, will abandon them at the same moment when MSM cannot deliver the crowd vote or -support for their causes any longer.
Many people like to get their prejudices (re)confirmed, very few of them like to be knowingly mislead.
All this is is the Alarmista (©) sending out a message and that message is: "No matter who you are, no matter how long it takes, we will destroy your reputation if you act against us"
It doesn't matter whether Wegman is exonerated, the Alarmiista have achieved their goal in that these claims will follow Wegman wherever he goes and whenever the report is mentioned.
Maybe so BUT they are also undermining the skeptics position by replaying this...even if it is baseless, which is what it looks.
If the alarmists can destroy Wegmans credibility...not I say HIS credibility, then his report will be ignored, once again because it was ignored the first time round anyway by the MFM.
Mailman
This must be a main stream media plot to make the Guardian look good.
Nothing could make the Guardian look good.
Newton’s Third Law
“To every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction”
Post Normal
To every inaction there is always an unequal and inappropriate reaction
There are quite a few comments on bkogs about this all being a distraction from something else. I wonder what tho'.
Any guesses?
Er.. Blogs, not bkogs, tho' that could be the Swedish Hungarian Slovak translation.
Whilst Mann must be greatful for this support from his peer review pals, and Wegman is going to have a rough few months, I don't think the battered Hockey Stick is going to be restored to "as new" condition, and may in fact sustain further and even fatal damage as a result.
The good Bishop's header for this piece may then prove to be a list of publications heading down the pan, as their involvement in the whole scam unfolds.
Although the plagiarism accusation seems to have been around a while, revving it up right now may help occlude proper notice and consideration of the Hal Lewis letter?
I looked into this some months ago and found that the claims were that he'd plagiarised passages from textbooks without citation. Now I don't know about you chaps, but my entire education was about taking information from text books and regurgitating it at appropriate moments. I always assumed that people wrote text books to make money and were more than happy for others less well endowed with the requisite information to use them to educate themselve. It seems Prof Bradbury (a weak man who has allowed himself to be manipulated by another, less able, scientist who has gained some noteriety from a graph that he was able to get out of an algorithm that would give the the same graph if you put the numbers from your weekly Tesco bill into) has complained about plagiarism some 6 or 7 years after the report came out. During the time I've been interested in the global warming debate I've learned that the climate scientists in the warmist camp aren't necessarily the sharpest knives in the cutlery draw (sharpest knaves, yes, but knives no) but Prof Bradbury has managed to lower my expectations even further by complaining about a 90 page document publishes 6 or 7 years ago plagiarising him. Surely he hasn't taken all this time to read the paper?
This could be Pandora's Christmas box for the lawyers, if a cut/paste googly war breaks out. Do academic/political/media authors really want that? Are they all so pure as the driven snow? Or does the wicked wit of Tallulah Bankshead lurk?
I think Wegman's just been subjected to the "smear review" process.
OT:
Over at The Guardian/Observer, there's a gaping lack of mention of it being 10:10's big day on the front page. There's a modest mention in the Environment section of the 350.org activities but nothing about their erstwhile partners. O dear!
\\http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/oct/04/10-10-campaign-events
I wonder whether New Scientist will have anything to say on this.
Things happen in threes. Mann has had his day at WaPo, Bradley has opened the Copygate. Will Hughes be next or is he sharp enough to distance himself from the blunter knives?
Josh
'Something else' is the collapse of their Berlin Wall. The last stand is in the sewers.
In order to protect the discredited Hockey Stick the alarmists are now reduced to attempts at smearing people who they call sceptics, which in this case is not actually a sceptic.
The alarmists are behaving in a way they regularily accuse sceptics of.
Shooting the messenger when they don't like the message is what I call a success.
Lest we forget
From: Phil Jones <p.jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
To: ray bradley <rbradley@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>,mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx, mhughes@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@xxxxxxxxx.xxx,t.osborn@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim's got a diagram here we'll send that either later today or
first thing tomorrow.
I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps
to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from
1961 for Keith's to hide the decline. Mike's series got the annual
land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land
N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999
for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with
data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.
Thanks for the comments, Ray.
Cheers
Phil
Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) 1603 592090
School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) 1603 507784
University of East Anglia
It would appear that the Team initially regarded the Wegman report as a partisan political document, see email below, and as such it should not be given any credence. So it seems very strange that 3 years later one of the Team, Ray Bradbury, is now accusing Wegman of scientific plagiarism.
From: "Michael E. Mann" <mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
To: Phil Jones <p.jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
Subject: Re: EGU
Date: Mon, 15 Jan 2007 12:45:46 -0500
Reply-to: mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Cc: raymond s bradley <rbradley@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
thanks Phil,
not suggestion you not cite Wegman report, just suggesting you make sure the citation makes
clear what the report is...
mike
p.s. where/when did Tom Crowley use it?
Phil Jones wrote:
Mike,
Thanks.
2) I agree Wegman isn't a formal publication.
Cheers
Phil
At 14:10 15/01/2007, Michael E. Mann wrote:
Phil,
2. I would not reference Wegman report as if it is a publication, i.e. a legitimate
piece of scientific literature. Its a piece of something else! It should be cited in
such a way as to indicate it is not a formal publication, wasn't peer-reviewed, i.e.
could be references as a "criticism commissoned by Joe Barton (R, Exxon).
mike
It would appear that the Team initially regarded the Wegman report as a partisan political document, see email below, and as such it should not be given any credence. So it seems very strange that 3 years later one of the Team, Ray Bradley, is now accusing Wegman of scientific plagiarism.
From: "Michael E. Mann" <mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
To: Phil Jones <p.jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
Subject: Re: EGU
Date: Mon, 15 Jan 2007 12:45:46 -0500
Reply-to: mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Cc: raymond s bradley <rbradley@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
thanks Phil,
not suggestion you not cite Wegman report, just suggesting you make sure the citation makes
clear what the report is...
mike
p.s. where/when did Tom Crowley use it?
Phil Jones wrote:
Mike,
Thanks.
2) I agree Wegman isn't a formal publication.
Cheers
Phil
At 14:10 15/01/2007, Michael E. Mann wrote:
Phil,
2. I would not reference Wegman report as if it is a publication, i.e. a legitimate
piece of scientific literature. Its a piece of something else! It should be cited in
such a way as to indicate it is not a formal publication, wasn't peer-reviewed, i.e.
could be references as a "criticism commissoned by Joe Barton (R, Exxon).
mike
I'll just point out the similarity between these two papers (again):
http://www.geo.umass.edu/climate/papers2/mann2008.pdf
('by' Michael E. Mann, Zhihua Zhang, Malcolm K. Hughes, Raymond S. Bradley, Sonya K. Miller, Scott Rutherford, and Fenbiao Ni)
and
http://books.google.com/books?id=AK6gWFaURMsC&lpg=PR1&pg=PA3#v=onepage&q&f=false
('by' Jürg Luterbacher, Elena Xoplaki, Marcel Küttel, Eduardo Zorita, Jesus Fidel González-Rouco, Phil D. Jones, Marco Stössel, This Rutishauser, Heinz Wanner, Joanna Wibig, and Rajmund Przybylak)
Check the first paragraphs of each piece of text - it is clear that they are strongly correlated (no PCA required). Yet the papers have no authors in common.
Given the length of time (apparently) taken to produce and publish a paper it is probably difficult to say which piece of text came first - or if indeed they have a common ancestor.
Interestingly the Mann et al paper declares: "R.S.B. wrote the paper. The authors declare no conflict of interest." (among other things.) I presume that this means that R.S.B. also wrote at least part of the Luterbacher et al paper. Wonder why he was not listed as an author of that paper?)
Perhaps society is rewarding climatologists to cut and paste scare story text into the scientific literature(?) That would seem to be the simple explanation.
Personally - I'm not too bothered if this is how the climatology community wants to spend its time. However, cut-and-paste publications are the stuff of cargo-cults, not science.
Admit it guys. You're beaten. Not your fault that you are still clinging onto the past, desperately applying logic and knowledge to justify your arguments.
Forget it. The age of reason is dead. Defunct.
Wegman and co, made the same mistake too. Don't feel bad about it. You had a good innings, gave us lots of good things that some would think brought benefit. Science, medicine, longevity, freedom but all of that is unwelcome to the Brave New World that we are on the threshold of emerging into.
Your problem was with believing that humans were, at heart, swayed by cold facts rather than hot and emotive diatribes.
In the past year, since ClimateGate, we've been subjected to a barrage of issues that have weakened the certainties that Man is f***ing up the climate. What have we achieved? The faithful have dutifully deflected our assaults with appeals to authority, construction of gigantic strawmen, venomous ad hominen barrages and hold the high ground that matters. The MSM, the governments, the
Educational establishments and most of the X-Factor generation.
We can't beat the mindless mantras of the supermarkets that thank us for "saving the planet".
Truly, we have entered the Age of Stupid.
10:10, good buddy!
All we've got to look forward to is that least satisfactory of phrases.
"Told you!"
The Age of Stupidity will be subsumed into the practical realization by politicians the CO2 ruse no longer has legs (praise be to patchy) and some other bogeyman must be invoked to insure voter compliance. (China, religions, India, asteroids, flu, the need to build pyramids, manned trips to mars, people from the next village, Penta water, etc).
Climatologists are going to have to look for another 'descriptive' "science" occupation - Feng Shui, for example.
Nobody knows what Bob, George, and Franny will wind up doing. Is there an militant form of Feng Shui?
Does seem to me that Wegman could have saved himself a lot of trouble by the use of a couple of quotation marks? Given the contentiousness of the issue he was addressing, can anyone suggest why he didn't?
John Mashey seems to have some difficulty understanding in what constitutes plagiarism. In common parlance plagiarism involves using other’s work as if it is one’s own, and a necessary condition for this to be true is that the plagiariser does not acknowledge the source of materials he uses under his/her own name.
Mashey has published a 250-page attack on the Wegman Report (W, 2006) that critiqued the “hockey-stick” graph claiming the Medieval Warm Period (c1000-1300) was no warmer than the Little Ice Age (c.1400-1720) and was featured on the cover of the IPCC’s TAR (2001).
A certain Bradley, one of the co-authors of the first hockey stick paper (Mann Bradley Hughes 1998), has joined Mashey in accusing WR of “plagiarism”.
But in Wegman p.10 we read: “Table 1 based on Bradley (1999) illustrates the wide variety of these natural phenomena that may be used as proxies. Some proxies measure very low frequency (slowly varying) climatic variables and thus are not useful for measuring average annual temperature changes. Table 2 found in Bradley (1999), which was reproduced from Bradley and Eddy (1991)…”.
Then in Mashey (Section 2.6) we read “W.2.1 introduces serious Biases in plagiarizing Bradley (1999) on tree rings” . However in Wegman 2.1 we find on p.11 “Table 1: Principal Sources of Proxy Data for Paleoclimatic Reconstructions After Bradley (1999)”.
In Wegman p.12 Table 2 we find “After Bradley and Eddy (1991)”.
Wegman pp.13-14 has a discussion of use of tree ring proxies to determine historical temperature trends which Deep Climate (aka Mashey?) shows to be quite close but not identical to material in Bradley 1999, but in Wegman p.14 at the end of the para. in question we find Wegman saying “See Bradley (1999) for a discussion of the fitting and calibration process for dendritic-based temperature reconstruction...”
In Mashey p.34 we find him still claiming Bradley was plagiarised in Wegman Section 2.1: “Bradley (1999), plagiarism W.2.1” despite no fewer than SIX citations of Bradley by Wegman in section 2.1.
The last 50 pages of Mashey still claim plagiarisms by Wegman in its summaries of the key hockey stick papers including those with Bradley as co-author. Each page of the Wegman summaries cites the paper being summarised. If that is plagiarism, what would not be?
Mashed potato, yes, Mashey does not seem to know what plagiarism is.
In addition to all your points, remember that the Wegman report is not intended to be an original piece of scientific research anyway.
By the way chaps, why am I the only sceptic to have commented at the Nature great beyond blog?
Another example of climatological copying…
Bradley, 1999 – as quoted by Mashey “Many natural systems are dependent on climate; where evidence of such systems in the past still exists, it may be possible to derive paleoclimatic information from them.”
The Chen, Xing, 2008 “Many natural systems are dependent on climate; where evidence of such systems in the past still exists, it may be possible to derive paleoclimatic information from them.”
(i.e. this is a complete direct copy)
http://books.google.com/books?id=SEO_RyNDJ0gC&lpg=PR1&pg=PA50#v=onepage&q&f=false
Seems to me that copying is rife in climatology, but only some copying is considered bad.
The emails alone mean nothing. It's the CODE that's the smoking gun.
At Keith Kloor's blog: http://www.collide-a-scape.com/2010/10/08/skepticgate/comment-page-5/#comment-20814 there is a discussion of Triviagate. At 1:00 a.m. on 10/11, (Post #160) I asked Mashey to give his three worst examples of the fabrication that he claims occurred. He has yet to do so. In post #163 Kloor asked him how the "plagiarism" affected Wegman's basic statistical analysis. Mashey has yet to respond.
So now it is time to sift through the trillions of words AGW promoters have written and look for the unattributed cut-n-pastes.
My bet is this is being done even as I type, and I further bet we will be entertained by the interesting freedoms the AGW promoters have taken with other people's work.
The AGW apologists are only attacking Wegman because they failed in their attacks on McIntyre.