Saturday
Oct092010
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill The nature of the animal
Oct 9, 2010 Climate: Mann Has it struck anyone else as amusing that Nature is straight into the groove of reporting the Copygate story (as I'm told we must call the allegations against Wegman)? I mean, they didn't think the original Wegman report was worth mentioning.
Just saying...
Reader Comments (21)
Hi Bish,
Your link "wegman hockey stick site:nature.com" to Google isn't coming up with anything. Is this a problem with replication between Google servers or something else?
"Copygate" isn't the half of it.
But as someone succinctly said at Anthony's, good attempt at damage limitation.
The adopted name is already 'skepticgate'.
Although if it had been up to me, it would've been 'phoneyskeptic gate' or 'easily led skeptic gate'.
Huub, that's the point.. nothing turns up. No mention at Nature of Wegman's original report, anywhere on the Nature site. ("site:nature.com" in the query limits the Google search to content found on that domain)
Yes Bish. Why has it taken until now for this question to arise?
Did MBH not read the report half a decade ago? Was William Connolley asleep at his post? Gavin Schmidt not keeping up with his reading?
Just how is it that nobody noticed anything until now?
Baffling.
This is another tactical error from the CAGW crowd: the atmosphere has changed sufficiently to mean that a wider and more influential group of people will make the effort to read and understand the criticisms of core methodology in the original report.
It's will be a phyrric victory at best.
After 4 years of trying to deny the very existence of the Wegman report, they now make a big capital case out of some citation style problems in the report. The result is that people are now going to read Wegman. The saying in the PR world is -- 'there's no such thing as bad publicity'. I think this is going to backfire on the Team. I wonder if they are no longer using Fenton Communications and are instead concocting their own PR strategy?
Natures editorial policy seems to be one of slow protracted suicide. They could learn a lot by employing a Ms Franny Armstrong, who has recently exploded onto the blogosphere, and may soon be able to offer her services to a lucky new employer. Nature will have to be quick, as she has friends at the Guardian too, who would also benefit from her understanding of winning over public opinion to a lost cause. She is pure dynamite.
They're attacking Wegman now because Cuccinelli draws on him a lot, apparently.
Looks like another possible Own Goal since this too will push up HSI sales.
Nature's blog post on this is astonishingly biased, suggesting that the claims of plagiarism *counter* the claims of bad science.
As you rightly point out in the previous post, even if claims of plagiarism are true (far from proven yet), it doesn't make Wegman's report wrong; it just means some attributions are missing, at worst. His analysis is still solid.
I can understand advocates - Deep Climate, RealClimate, Tamino, etc.,etc., making such an outrageously biased and illogical claim: they have a horse in the race and will spin it this way. It is utterly disgraceful that Nature should exhibit this advocacy.
That said, whilst unimpressed, I'm certainly not surprised. Scientific integrity hasn't been terribly important to Nature for a long time. Not since 1998 in fact...
Some more names (er, mine):
Teacupgate
Scapegoatgate
Nitpickgate
Heck, Wegman re-renders Bradley in better English in order to lay the foundations of science needed for his examination, so the science can be understood. Cites Bradley in general but cannot put "quote" because he's made it comprehensible.
Mashey, reprehensible.
Great news . . an own goal.
Meaning the Wegman Report, which was buried by the Warmistas, will now get a ton of free publicity.
Just excellent news.
A (very) brief look at various Bradley papers showed that his text has a tendency to show up in other published works.
see e.g.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/10/09/wordsmithing/#comment-503743
and
http://www.geo.umass.edu/climate/papers2/mann2008.pdf
http://faculty.washington.edu/mkuettel/docs/Luterbacheretal_Springer_2010.pdf
I am quite sure that Gavin or Pachauri would happily explain how all this is entirely normal climate science research practice.
However, it seems to me that climatological research standards are a little lower than I had appreciated - and I was not expecting much.
Depressing.
An own goal from the warm team.
The warm team and the cool team that read these kind of details are each about 1% of the public.
High-profile scrapping and bitching about technicalities just helps the 98% uninterested to tune out and assume the whole subject is seedy.
You know a scandal is seroius when the ownership of the "gate" prefix is being argued over :-)
I've long observed that large numbers of people don't mind being hypocritical, the just mind it being pointed out ... so Wegman is ignored as "not a climate scientist" until another possible line of attack is gruntled up
Ho hum ...
Do you have a URL for the Nature comment, please?
[BH adds: http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2010/10/old_claims_of_bad_climate_scie.html]
"Yes Bish. Why has it taken until now for this question to arise?"
It's because The Hockey Stick Illusion is the number 1 bestseller in the Climatology category on Amazon.
Bob Carter is 2nd and Sussmam 3rd. They're going nuts about this, and there is an election coming up.
I suggest there is a method to their madness relating to arguments that cast the conventional CAGW wisdom in doubt: (1) in public, dismiss it, ridicule it or ignore it while (2) in private, you watch how much impact it has and discuss how to attack it until (3) you do attack it if it doesn't go away, and when you think you have a good counter-argument (or when you're desperate).
Examples:
- on the relevance of the MWP/LIA question: dismissed as of little importance in public, while in private it was "we have to get rid of the MWP" until finally the "weapon" of Mann's hockey stick graph is ready to be fired;
- on McIntyre and McKitrick's criticisms of the hockey stick:publicly ignored, then dismissed as minor annoyances while M&M themselves were dismissed as amateurs whom "real climate scientists" did not take seriously - while, all the time, as the Climategate emails prove, Mann et all were totally obsessed by McIntyre's efforts and desperately trying to put together anything, however pathetic, that would counter-argue them;
- Wegman: same thing. So far there has not been one single substantial rebuttal of his findings - only dismissals of his competence, or false allegations that the NAS findings rebutted his, etc. Since it wouldn't go away - possibly also in the context of Andrew's and even Pearce's books - so now finally another way has been found to attack it - again, targeting not Wegman's arguments, but (supposedly) his credibility.
The list goes on and on. Just because there is no public discussion going on, that does not mean that there is not a lot of intense private discussion behind the scenes.
Deep Climate has been pushing the red button in his head on Wegman for months. Long enough for Mashey to pile up the remains high and deep.
==================
HSI becomes all time best seller on Amazon
Huge groundswell of opinion in USA for The Bishop to run for president
The Bishop wins by a landslide!
USA recolonised (hehe that wasnt in the manifesto)
Creating climate graphs shaped like hockey sticks becomes a capital offence.
Famous US climatologist is hung, drawn and quartered, electrocuted and then given a lethal injection (just to make sure).
Climate debate ends and CO2 is voted the worlds favourite gas!
Dung,
Why are they let off so lightly?