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Bishop Hill Jun 19, 2010 Climate: CRU Climate: Jones Climate: Mann Another defence of the Nature trick has been published. This time the author is Arthur Smith.
Bishop Hill May 15, 2010 Climate: CRU Climate: Jones Climate: Mann Climate: RP Jnr RP Jnr links to a review of the Climategate story by Der Speigel and has a fascinating discussion with his readers in the comments thread below.
The point at issue is Mike's Nature Trick and the question of whether it amounts to scientific fraud. Der Spiegel describe the trick as follows:
Bishop Hill May 14, 2010 Climate: Mann Climate Realists has an interesting article that looks at the extraordinary rise to prominence of the hockeystickmeister, Michael Mann. This is one of the angles of the hockey stick story that is still something of a mystery - how did such an obscure scientist, one who had just completed his PhD, get to be lead author on the Third Assessment Report of the IPCC?
Bishop Hill May 7, 2010 Climate: Mann Washington radio station, WAMU, is going to be interviewing Virginia Attorney General, Ken Cuccinelli later today. If Cuccinelli's case against Michael Mann is as thin as it looks, this should be quite interesting. The podcast link is here and should be available at approximately 13:30 EST, which is about 18:30 UK time.
Bishop Hill Apr 30, 2010 Climate: Mann
Updated on Apr 30, 2010 by
Bishop Hill
The headline today is the news that the Virginia attorney general has launched an investigation into Michael Mann's time at the University of Virginia.
In papers sent to UVA April 23, Cuccinelli’s office commands the university to produce a sweeping swath of documents relating to Mann’s receipt of nearly half a million dollars in state grant-funded climate research conducted while Mann— now director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State— was at UVA between 1999 and 2005.
Bishop Hill Apr 26, 2010 Climate: Mann Climate: Statistics Shortly after the Climategate emails broke, an guest article was posted at Climate Audit. The article is important, but was rather overlooked by the sceptic community in all the excitement over the emails. “The Hockey Stick and the Milankovitch Cycle” uses some of the Climategate files to solve one of the remaining mysteries of the Hockey Stick.
This is my attempt to put the post into layman's language. It's rather long so you may want a cup of coffee to keep you company.
Read it at the link below.
Bishop Hill Apr 6, 2010 Climate: Mann Fox News is reporting some interesting details of the second investigation into Michael Mann.
It was those e-mails, stolen from British university East Anglia's climate study group, that sparked Penn State's probe into Mann's work. On Feb. 3, he was exonerated on three of four charges, and the investigation of the fourth charge will be concluded by June 3.
But the final say will be in the hands of a skeptical inspector general at the National Science Foundation, the primary funder of the research into global warming. According to published documents obtained by FoxNews.com, the IG must determine whether Penn State's investigation was adequate.
I'm not sure why they refer to him as a skeptical inspector general though.
Bishop Hill Mar 31, 2010 Climate: Jones Climate: Mann Fred Pearce has one of the more interesting responses to the Parliamentary report, picking up on some interesting omissions and contradictions in what our elected representatives had to say.
His points on the "Nature trick" are less informative though. He points to statements by Sarah Palin and Senator Inhofe on the subject and rightly points out that the idea that CRU were trying to hide the "fact" that temperatures are not rising is false.
Of course they weren't.
So. Now we have, yet again, disposed of this canard, can we get on to the real accusation, namely that Jones hid the decline from policymakers so as to make the proxy reconstruction of the Medieval Warm Period look more reliable than it actually is?
Fred?
Bishop Hill Mar 15, 2010 Climate: Curry Climate: Mann An omigosh moment, this. Read Judith Curry's interview with Discover magazine. (Judith is a senior climatologist, from Georgia Tech).
Some choice excerpts:
Where do you come down on the whole subject of uncertainty in the climate science?
I’m very concerned about the way uncertainty is being treated. The IPCC [the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] took a shortcut on the actual scientific uncertainty analysis on a lot of the issues, particularly the temperature records....
Is this a case of politics getting in the way of science?
No. It’s sloppiness. It’s just how our field has evolved. One of the things that McIntyre and McKitrick pointed out was that a lot of the statistical methods used in our field are sloppy. We have trends for which we don’t even give a confidence interval. The IPCC concluded that most of the warming of the latter 20th century was very likely caused by humans. Well, as far as I know, that conclusion was mostly a negotiation, in terms of calling it “likely” or “very likely.”...
Are you saying that the scientific community, through the IPCC, is asking the world to restructure its entire mode of producing and consuming energy and yet hasn’t done a scientific uncertainty analysis?
Yes.
Bishop Hill Mar 1, 2010 Climate: Mann Thanks to reader Kevin for pointing out Chris Mooney's interview of Michael Mann. I haven't had a chance to listen to it yet, but feel free to tell me whether I should invest the time.
Bishop Hill Feb 23, 2010 Climate: Mann James Inhofe, uber-sceptic senator from Oklahoma, has called for an investigation of Michael Mann.
Just prior to a hearing at 10:00 a.m. EST, Senator Inhofe released a minority staff report from the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, of which he is ranking member. Senator Inhofe is asking the Department of Justice to investigate whether there has been research misconduct or criminal actions by the scientists involved, including Dr. Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University and Dr. James Hansen of Columbia University and the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Science.
If this happens it could be quite interesting. Inhofe is pointing at major issues that are not really being touched elsewhere, such as the pressurising of scientific journals. It would be interesting to see if the Senate could get people like Famiglietti and Saiers to explain exactly what went on at Geophysical Research Letters when McIntyre and McKitrick's 2005 paper was submitted.
Bishop Hill Feb 19, 2010 Climate: Mann ...the Benshi being the name of a website. It's mainly about the interaction of media and climatology, with the usual denunciations of the "well-funded" efforts to undermine Mann and his colleagues. Ironic that, given we've just been having a conversation about why we can't seem to afford anyone easier upon the eye than David Henderson and Lord Lawson to put our message over to the masses.
The interview is here. (H/T Doug Keenan in the comments).
Bishop Hill Feb 8, 2010 Climate: Mann Republican representatives in the US Congress have criticised the Penn State investigation into Michael Mann's conduct.
The findings and, more importantly, the focus have set off a wave of criticism accusing the university panel of failing to interview key people, neglecting to conduct more than a cursory review of allegations and structuring the inquiry so that the outcome -- exoneration -- was a foregone conclusion.
On Friday, Rep. Darrell Issa, the ranking Republican on the House Investigations Committee, charged that the Penn State's failure to settle all the charges and called into question professor Mann's work. He is demanding that all grants to the noted scientist be frozen.
As whitewashes go, it has to be said that it was carried off very poorly. The failure to even go through the motions of interviewing aggrieved parties like Steve McIntyre was a mistake by the Penn State authorities. They have brought this unwelcome attention down upon themselves.
Bishop Hill Feb 6, 2010 Climate: HSI Climate: Mann An interesting little development on one of the story lines from The Hockey Stick Illusion. In Chapter 14, I tell the story of one of Michael Mann's later attempts at creating a hockey stick shaped temperature curve - Mann 2008. This paper is not as well-known as the Hockey Stick itself, of course, but has become fairly notorious because of an oddity in Mann's algorithm. Because of the way it works, the algorithm is unable to detect the orientation of the proxy series in a dataset and in the case of Mann 2008, this failing had some unfortunate consequences, namely that some of the series ended up upside-down, with what would normally have been read as declining temperatures flipped over so that they looked like warming.
This error was picked up extremely quickly by Climate Audit readers, and McIntyre included this point in a formal comment on the paper. The correction didn't, however, prevent an identical error being made in a later paper, Kaufman 2009, which was written by some of the same authors as Mann 2008 (although not the HockeyStickMeister himself).
