A Dummies Guide to Strange Scholarship in the Wegman Report: The Shorter Version

For those bunnies with neither the time or inclimatation to read Eli's Dummies Guide to Strange Scholarship in the Wegman Report (pay attention, you know who you are) Rabett Labs offers the shorter version, together with a few notes on why this is not going away despite the furious spittle projection coming from the direction of Stephen McIntyre and Anthony Watts.

Plagiarizing

• Evidence of extensive plagiarism in at least two sections of the Wegman Report, that describing proxy methods (plagiarized from Ray Bradley's book, see point 1 below for confirmation) and that describing social network analysis.
  

Misleading

(See Strange Scholarship in the Wegman Report, the complete handbook, by John Mashey)

• Multiple use of references to support claims that the references contradict. In such cases, while one can disagree with the source, the disagreement must be noted to inform the reader

• The Wegman Panel restricted the social network of climate scientists to Michael Mann's coauthors forcing him to the center of the network. They then mislead the reader by claiming this as evidence of collusive and poor peer review. Incompetence or design?

• Use of a figure from the 1990 IPCC Report altered to support the conclusion of the Wegman Panel, coupled with an unwillingness to consult the original source, even though it was available in multiple places in the Washington area including GMU, as well as from Amazon.
  

One can list more questionable items, but this is a shorter list. Eli can also provide a short list indicating why this is a serious matter.

1. We have from the Weg hisself, on his Facebook page, that he was effectively forbidden to supervise graduate students in late AUGUST. For the hard of learning, Wegman has been academically emasculated with a sharp knife.

2. We have from Donald Rapp's letter that Elsevier is complaining to GMU that Wegman plagiarized Bradley's book. Elsevier has some pretty sharp intellectual property lawyers and would not expose itself to any counterclaim without believing the evidence is clear and convincing.

3. We know from Dan Vergano's report in USA Today and Deep Climate's follow up that George Mason University has concluded that the complaints it has received contain enough evidence to move from the less serious inquiry phase to a formal investigation of research misconduct against Edward Wegman and his group.

These three points alone are strong evidence, but the chickens fleeing the hen house behavior of Steve McIntyre and Anthony Watts are what clinches the case. McIntyre is following his usual mode of operation, throwing everything against the wall he can find in the hope that something sticks. For those into this stuff a useful watchword would be "Remember Yamal", McIntyre's attempt to smear Keith Briffa. There was nothing there, actually, it was McIntyre who behaved badly, loudly demanding in public records that he already had and claiming that his not getting them from Briffa was evidence of Briffa's misconduct. Oh yeah, his analysis was also dicey but it wasted everyone's time and penetrated much more deeply into the media than the refutation.

Watts, well, he was busy nailing Hal Lewis on Martin Luther's door. Look over there Lucia.
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NOAA Reports on Arctic Ice

Not optimistic, but simple enough for anyone. This is an interesting new direction of for reporting from government science agencies to the public on a nontechnical level. OK, they could have used someone who knows how to speak in something more varied than a monotone, but that would raise the debt. Mom and Dad need to see this but you can read the details on the web.
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Kerry Emanuel Nails Hal Lewis

Well, not quite, because Emanuel summed it up well before Lewis went off half cocked. Emanuel, for those who don't know is a Professor in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT, and pretty far to the right politically. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, an eminent scholar, but also a member of the National Association of Scholars, a group that believes that universities are dens of nasty socialists. In July of 2010, Emanuel published a comment on the state of climate science on the National Association of Scholars web site. Everyone should read it. RIGHT NOW, that means you.

He clearly understood what was happening

But it turns out that there are not enough mavericks in climate science to meet the media’s and blogosphere’s insatiable appetite for conflict. Thus into the arena steps a whole host of charlatans posing as climate scientists. These are a toxic brew of retired physicists, TV weather forecasters, political junkies, media hacks, and anyone else willing to tell an interviewer that he/she is a climate scientist. Typically, they have examined some of the more easily digestible evidence and, like good trial lawyers, cherry-pick that which suits their agendas while attacking or ignoring the rest. Often, they are a good deal more articulate than actual scientists, who usually prefer doing research to honing rhetorical technique. Intelligent readers/viewers should demand to know the actual scientific backgrounds of these posers and recognize that someone with a background in particle physics or botany may in fact know very little about climate science. Does he/she have a background in atmospheric physics? Can they answer elementary questions about radiative and convective heat transfer, or about the circulation of the ocean and atmosphere? More precisely, does their expertise actually bear on the particular points they are making? It may sound elitist these days, but there is a point to credentials.

Eli added a comment

I would like to thank Prof. Emanuel for his contribution. I grew up scientifically with many who are now well known atmospheric chemists. Our politics were all over the map. Scientific matters were vigorously debated, politics were not terra incognita, but, for issues such as ozone depletion and climate change, the science provided the boundary condition. It is a failure of our politics, better written, public policy, that many believe their policy preferences should set the boundary conditions for science.

To me, and I suspect Prof. Emanuel, the truly worrying thing about humans changing the climate by inadvertance and ignorance is that when the consequences strike, survival will require sacrificing many freedoms.

Others should think about this.
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The American Physical Society Calls Tony Watts a Clown

Anthony Watts got his Hal Lewis is Martin Luther Appeal into the Christian Science Monitor. Some of the bunnies joined the fun in the comments (caerbannog, greenfyre, Eli, Mike Roddy, Scott Mandia), but the major explosion was a post from the press secretary of the American Physical Society, Tawanda Johnson

Mr. Watts,

The American Physical Society (APS), a leading organization of physicists, takes great umbrage to your analogy likening Dr. Harold Lewis’ resignation from APS to that of the plight of Christian theologian Martin Luther. Global climate change concerns science, not religion, and Dr. Lewis’ resignation bears no likeness to the Great Reformation. Furthermore, on the matter of global climate change, APS notes that virtually all reputable scientists agree with the following observations:

• Carbon dioxide is increasing in the atmosphere due to human activity;
• Carbon dioxide is an excellent infrared absorber, and therefore, its increasing presence in the atmosphere contributes to global warming; and
• The dwell time of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is hundreds of years.

APS continues to recognize that climate models are far from adequate, and the extent of global warming and climatic disruptions produced by sustained increases in atmospheric carbon loading remain uncertain. In light of the significant settled aspects of the science, APS totally rejects Dr. Lewis’ claim that global warming is a “scam” and a “pseudoscientific fraud.”

Read the official APS response to Dr. Harold Lewis’ resignation: http://www.aps.org/about/pressreleases/haroldlewis.cfm.

they ain't gonna take this nonsense anymore. Tony and Hal did the denial crowd a great service by stirring up the APS.
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Andy Dessler Smokes Richard Lindzen

As Andy says at the beginning,

it all fits together, its this coherence of data, and even if any one of these data set is wrong, it really would not affect your confidence because we have so much other data which suggests it's warming and because of this the IPCC calls this unequivocal, which means essentially beyond doubt. . . . The key thing to look at is look for coherence, look for lots of evidence supporting a point and you will clearly see why scientists are convinced that the mainstream view of climate science is right

The bottom line being

The real question I want to address here is this question of how much does carbon dioxide warm the climate. This is really the key question. It's not a question of does carbon dioxide warm the climate. I think that Prof. Lindzen and I will agree it does. It's a question of magnitude, a question of how much it warms the climate. What we are going to talk about here is this question of climate sensitivity. That's often referred to as climate sensitivity. We are going to use a standard measure which is how much warming would occur if we doubled carbon dioxide, so we are going to go through the math and do a very simple calculation that indicates that we might be screwed

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Gerald North dishes

UPDATE: MT points to a letter in today's (10/18/10) Washington Post from Gerald North which essentially tells Joe Barton to take and insert. BTW, yes, Eli is playing blog pong, but MT started it:)

One of the delights of commenting and posting is the delicious moment comes that shows that you are right and someone else is, well, not. This is a bit unfair, as Eli has been engaging with AMac on Our Changing Climate in a useful interchange. Eli has already posted part of this as his Perils of Wisdom, and, to be honest, AMac has held up his part of the interchange with honor and intelligence, you can read it at Bart's, but for the record, Eli had a few other things to say (this is his blog after all), including

The NRC report pretty much agrees with what Eli has been saying, that useful math can be formally incorrect, or better put, not optimal, and can be improved on, but still remain useful. As the data (which contrary to TimG’s bald assertion) has grown and better methods of analysis have been applied, the results confirm the broad outlines of the 1998 and 1999 papers.

and

Increasingly climate disruption is being subject to a four corners offense, playing out the clock. This is a pretty old strategy perfected by Singer for delaying any action on the acid rain problem and it works, except, given the nature of climate disruption, procrastination penalties are very very high. Conclusion 4 is exactly that ploy.

The rest of the conclusions were simply argumentative bleats based on an ignorance of paleoclimate but a sharp understanding of politics with the possible exception of the data and code sharing issue, which is not a slam dunk. There is, for example, a lot of weather forecasting code which is not disclosed for commercial and intellectual property reasons. For enough carotts, Eli will argue either side of that one.

To quote from the North NAS panel

“Despite these limitations, the committee finds that efforts to reconstruct temperature histories for broad geographic regions using multiproxy methods are an important contribution to climate research and that these large-scale surface temperature reconstructions contain meaningful climatic signals. The individual proxy series used to create these reconstructions generally exhibit strong correlations with local environmental conditions, and in most cases there is a physical, chemical, or physiological reason why the proxy reflects local temperature variations. Our confidence in the results of these reconstructions becomes stronger when multiple independent lines of evidence point to the same general result, as in the case of the Little Ice Age cooling and the 20th century warming.”

Contrast this with the Wegman Report’s conclusions. The first conclusion that academic work has been politicized ranks right up there with patricide claiming mercy because she is an orphan. It goes downhill from there.

One of the ongoing ideas propagated by the denial crowd is that the Gerald North, Chair of the NAS Committee which looked into the same issues, agreed with the Wegman Panel. They should read Prof. North's written response to the question of what he thought of the Wegman Report.

8. At the hearing you were asked if you disputed the conclusions or the methodology of Dr. Wegman's report, and you stated that you did not. Were you referring solely to Dr. Wegman's criticism of the statistical approach of Dr. Mann, or were you also referring to Dr. Wegman's social network analysis and conclusions?

ANSWER: Dr. Wegman's criticisms of the statistical methodology in the papers by Mann et al were consistent with our findings. Our committee did not consider any social network analyses and we did not have access to Dr. Wegman's report during our deliberations so we did not have an opportunity to discuss his conclusions. Personally, I was not impressed by the social network analysis in the Wegman report, nor did I agree with most of the report's conclusions on this subject. As I stated in my testimony, one might erroneously conclude, based on a social network analysis analogous to the one performed on Dr. Mann, that a very active and charismatic scientist is somehow guilty of conspiring or being inside a closed community or 'mutual admiration society'. I would expect that a social network analysis of Enrico Fermi or any of the other scientists involved with the development of modern physics would yield a similar pattern of connections, yet there is no reason to believe that theoretical physics has suffered from being a tight-knit community. Moreover, as far as I can tell the only data that went into Dr. Wegman's analysis was a list of individuals that Dr. Mann has co-authored papers with. It is difficult to see how this data has any bearing on the peer-review process, the need to include statisticians on every team that engages in climate research (which in my view is a particularly unrealistic and unnecessary recommendation), or any of the other findings and recommendations in Dr. Wegman's report. I was also somewhat taken aback by the tone of the Wegman Report, which seems overly accusatory towards Dr. Mann and his colleagues, rather than being a neutral, impartial assessment of the techniques used in his research. In my opinion, while the techniques used in the original Mann et al papers may have been slightly flawed, the work was the first of its kind and deserves considerable credit for moving the field of paleoclimate research forward. It is also important to note that the main conclusions of the Mann et al studies have been supported by subsequent research. Finally, while our committee would agree with Dr. Wegman that access to research data could and should be improved, as discussed on page 23 of the prepublication version of our report, we also acknowledge the complicated nature of such mandates, especially in areas such as computer code where intellectual property rights need to be considered.

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A Dummy's Guide to Strange Scholarship in the Wegman Report II

A further example of research misconduct is the inclusion of a doctored version of a graphic that appeared in the 1990 IPCC assessment report (see page 137 of Strange Scholarship). Many have misinterpreted this as being a data based global record, but at least in his testimony, Prof. Wegman initially stated that it that it was a cartoon of European temperatures reflecting what was believed in 1990. What raises this from lunacy to misconduct is the distortion of the original drawing and the bootstrapping in the text. See below for Wegman's stretched figure and the original. First the WR displays their distorted graph saying

"Figure 4.5: Here we have digitized the temperature profile as presented in the IPCC Assessment Report 1990. The early period between 1100 to about 1400 of above average temperatures is known as the Medieval Warm Period and the period from about 1500 to 1900 is known as the Little Ice Age."

Then in the next paragraph they stretch it to represent a global temperature record

"Discussion: In Figure 4.5, we have digitized the temperature profile as presented in the IPCC Assessment Report 1990. The early period between 1100 to about 1400 of above average temperatures is known as the Medieval Warm Period and the period from about 1500 to 1900 is known as the Little Ice Age. The 1990 report was not predicated on a global warming scenario. It is clear that at least in 1990, the Medieval Warm Period was thought to have temperatures considerably warmer than the present era."

And finally, in the conclusions they bootstrap it to attack Mann Bradley and Hughes

"The cycle of Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age thatwas widely recognized in 1990 has disappeared from the MBH98/99 analyses, thus making possible the hottest decade/hottest year claim."

The interchange between Rep. Stupak and Wegman in the Congressional Hearing on this point is one for the ages. It's a bit long, but Eli promises that it will entertain. Under questioning Wegman admits that he did not read the 1990 IPCC report

MR. STUPAK. I think you have it in front of you, your 52-page summary there, you have a figure that you say is a digitized version of the temperature profile in the IPCC assessment report of 1990. I take it you read the 1990 IPCC report?

Some byplay about what page of the Wegman Report this was on followed by

MR. STUPAK. Well, then you must have at least discussed this temperature profile.
DR. WEGMAN. The temperature profile that was published in 1990 I believe was related to the European temperatures and was a cartoon--essentially a cartoon. The point of our discussion here was not that we were trying to say that this was what happened in 1990. The point of our discussion was that you could reproduce this shape from the CPF, CFP and the climate plus--whatever--CPS methodology so we are not endorsing that this was the temperature that was thought of in 1990. We are simply using this as an example.

Wegman says that the chart was a) a cartoon and b) based on European temperatures. Next, watch Prof. Wegman pull out the Sgt. Schultz defense.

MR. STUPAK. Were you endorsing 1300 as being a real high temperature time? Were you endorsing it in your report?
DR. WEGMAN. No, we have not said that.
MR. STUPAK. What was the 1990 IPCC temperature profile based on? Basically what was this based on? You are a statistician.
DR. WEGMAN. This--
MR. STUPAK. Was this based on data?
DR. WEGMAN. As I just said moments ago, this was a cartoon I believe that was supposed to be representing a consensus opinion of what global temperature was like in 1990 as published by the IPCC.
MR. STUPAK. Well, is this cartoon then--again, I am on page 34, I am reading now from your report, discussion you have underneath this cartoon. Last line: "The 1990 report was not predicated on global warming scenario. It is clear at least in 1990 the medieval warm period was thought to have temperatures considerably warmer than the present era." Is that your discussion?
DR. WEGMAN. Yes.
MR. STUPAK. So we should not believe that statement then?
DR. WEGMAN. No, I said--I didn't say I believed it was. I said they believed it was. The IPCC gave that report in 1990.
MR. STUPAK. All right. This chart--
DR. WEGMAN. I didn't--
MR. STUPAK. This is in your executive summary, right, page
DR. WEGMAN. The cartoon is IPCC's cartoon, not mine.

But Bart Stupak has been well briefed.

MR. STUPAK. You relied upon it though in your executive summary. So I am looking at the cartoon. There is no data, is there, to say that around 1300 it warmer than it is in the latter half of--
DR. WEGMAN. I think that is an inaccurate statement. I think there is data. I think the data--
MR. STUPAK. Do you have any of it? Can you show us where any of that is?
DR. WEGMAN. No, I don't have it. I take no responsibility for what IPCC did in 1990. There is no way I could do that. Their data is not available to me. In fact, the reason it was digitized was that I had to go back and construct it from their picture. That doesn't mean no data exist. And in fact, as far as I know, it was based on European and Asian temperature profiles that were available in the 1990s.
MR. STUPAK. Sure, and in that, it was thought--it was still not clear that all the fluctuations indicated were truly global. In fact, I think some of the testimony earlier said that parts of western Europe, China, Japan, and eastern U.S.A. were a few degrees warmer in July than other parts of the world. Parts of Australia, Chile, and I think Greenland were actually cooler, they said, and China was actually cold

Which is interesting because earlier Prof. Wegman said that he did not have the IPCC report which would have had the data or a citation AND the original figure. The question occurs, who gave Prof. Wegman the figure and at what stage was it distorted. This is one of the things that the GMU investigation should get at.

The Wegman Report should be withdrawn.
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A Dummy's Guide to Strange Scholarship in the Wegman Report

John Mashey has published a very long analysis of Scholarship in the Wegman Report, but some dummies including the editorial writer at the Richmond Times Dispatch need a Dummies Guide. Ms. Rabett and Eli enjoy short attention span sports and this looks to be one of them, with John's two pounder leaving many overloaded. Eli, always eager to please provides some help, but because dummy's are slow, the bunny is splitting this into a bunch of parts.

Even Dummies realize that Mashey is analyzing the scholarship, better put the lack of same in the Wegman Report, and GMU is looking for research misconduct based on multiple complaints, so here Eli will pick out those sections of the Wegman Report which constitute probable (really probable) research misconduct, the sort of thing that gets the NIH Office of Research Integrity on a university's butt.

Deep Climate uncovered strong evidence that two sections of the WR were plagiarized, one involving sections from Ray Bradley's book, Paleoclimatology: Reconstructing Climates of the Quaternary (Bradley) section 10.2, and the other from a number of sources on social network analysis. The two links are side by side comparisons of the text in the Wegman Report and the plagiarized sources. The amount of direct copying with minimal if any changes leaves no doubt that this constitutes plagiarism. Even when a citation is provided, word for word copying without indication that is is a direct quote, is plagiarism, and this is also the case if the grammar or spelling is improved a bit, or a word here and there are changed.

Anyone doubting that this was a serious matter should please explain why the publishers of Bradley's books have complained to GMU about the plagiarism. Stay tuned tho, there may be more.

Further, John Mashey (pp 189 in Strange Scholarship) points out that the Wegman Report Appendix purporting to paraphrase important paleoclimate papers also meets the definition of plagiarism, cutting and pasting sections of text from the source without indication. As an alternative the report could have given the full text of the abstracts (saying that this was being done) with a paragraph or more of their own added at the end, but what was done was plagiarism. Nope, pass the library glue.

For anyone still entertaining doubts that this conduct is plagiarism, allow Eli to quote from the NIH Office of Research Integrity Policy on Plagiarism

ORI Policy on Plagiarism

Although there is widespread agreement in the scientific community on including plagiarism as a major element of the PHS definition of scientific misconduct, there is some uncertainty about how the definition of plagiarism itself is applied in ORI cases.

As a general working definition, ORI considers plagiarism to include both the theft or misappropriation of intellectual property and the substantial unattributed textual copying of another's work. It does not include authorship or credit disputes.

The theft or misappropriation of intellectual property includes the unauthorized use of ideas or unique methods obtained by a privileged communication, such as a grant or manuscript review.

Substantial unattributed textual copying of another's work means the unattributed verbatim or nearly verbatim copying of sentences and paragraphs which materially mislead the ordinary reader regarding the contributions of the author. ORI generally does not pursue the limited use of identical or nearly-identical phrases which describe a commonly-used methodology or previous research because ORI does not consider such use as substantially misleading to the reader or of great significance.

The Wegman report should be withdrawn.


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Uncle Buck

Saturday night. Read more!

Perils of wisdom from the bunny

From a comment by Eli at Our Changing Climate, two thoughts about the Wegman Report, which pretty much capture the Rabett's POV

"The absolute disqualifying thing about the Wegman report is how it wandered into areas where none of the authors had a clue and worse, into areas which had nothing at all to do with their charge. In particular the presence of the social network analysis sections were, to be nice about it, strange absent crude ax grinding. To be not nice about it the rampant plagiarism in those sections showed that Wegman and Said were not to be trusted (Scott played little role in that area).

Another issue which is not much discussed is that silly claim that “bad math” invalidates good data. Tell it to Feynman. QED with its subtractions of infinities is on very shaky mathematical grounds. The Dirac delta function is another example of a mathematical trick introduced on practical grounds to solve a set of physical problems but with shaky formal underpinnings.

We can find numerous examples of useful mathematics and statistics which were not bulletproof, but were useful for non-pathological data sets.

Wegman was a partisan on a mission. Said appears to have been a willing henchgirl, and not a very clever one at that."

Wegman? Wegman is the little guy sweeping up behind the elephant.

(Images from the US Forest Service and the Republican Party of the US)
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The APS Rips Hal Lewis Theses Down

The American Physical Society has responded to Hal (Not Martin Luther) Lewis' Theses down.

There is no truth to Dr. Lewis’ assertion that APS policy statements are driven by financial gain. To the contrary, as a membership organization of more than 48,000 physicists, APS adheres to rigorous ethical standards in developing its statements. The Society is open to review of its statements if members petition the APS Council – the Society’s democratically elected governing body – to do so.

Dr. Lewis’ specific charge that APS as an organization is benefitting financially from climate change funding is equally false. Neither the operating officers nor the elected leaders of the Society have a monetary stake in such funding. Moreover, relatively few APS members conduct climate change research, and therefore the vast majority of the Society’s members derive no personal benefit from such research support.

On the matter of global climate change, APS notes that virtually all reputable scientists agree with the following observations:

• Carbon dioxide is increasing in the atmosphere due to human activity;
• Carbon dioxide is an excellent infrared absorber, and therefore, its increasing presence in the atmosphere contributes to global warming; and
• The dwell time of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is hundreds of years.

On these matters, APS judges the science to be quite clear. However, APS continues to recognize that climate models are far from adequate, and the extent of global warming and climatic disruptions produced by sustained increases in atmospheric carbon loading remain uncertain. In light of the significant settled aspects of the science, APS totally rejects Dr. Lewis’ claim that global warming is a “scam” and a “pseudoscientific fraud.”

Additionally, APS notes that it has taken extraordinary steps to solicit opinions from its membership on climate change. After receiving significant commentary from APS members, the Society’s Panel on Public Affairs finalized an addendum to the APS climate change statement reaffirming the significance of the issue. The APS Council overwhelmingly endorsed the reaffirmation.

Lastly, in response to widespread interest expressed by its members, the APS is in the process of organizing a Topical Group to feature forefront research and to encourage exchange of information on the physics of climate.

and they ain't gonna take it no more.

Anthony Watts doesn't exactly have the reputation of being the brightest bulb in the chandelier, but his recent pushing of Hal Lewis' resignation letter to the APS was several levels below weak, especially his trying to liken Lewis' sophomoronic bleat to Martin Luther's 95 Theses. The repost was an obvious futile attempt to distract his little lamps attention away from the furor about Wegman and Rapp's copy and paste skills. The APS response to Lewis shows that the milk of human kindness has dried up there in the light of this year's denialist follies.

Arthur Smith put it well, Lewis is incontrovertibly emeritus. Still, Eli has a rep to uphold, and Lewis' letter is a delight of folly. Let us parse gentle bunnies, let this too parse.

Dear Curt:

When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago).

Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. . . .

How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

Well of course it's different, Lewis, should know, having plunged the money hose into his mouth, ears, nose and places where no one wants to go, especially when he was chair at Santa Barbara. Lewis is another patricide claiming mercy as an orphan. Indeed, this sort of accusation is very prominent from the senior denialists, mostly because that is what they have done and they expect that everyone on the other side is doing just what they did. Afterall, they did it and they are the smartest nuts on the tree.

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