Posted on 08/23/2007 9:03:46 AM PDT by .cnI redruM
In the late 1990s, Enron Corporation was seen as a leading progressive among business corporations and a refreshing antidote to the depredations of Big Oil™. In 1997, President Bill Clinton had Enron CEO Ken Lay over to the White House to discuss whether or not he should sign the Kyoto Agreement. But even as early as the late 1990s, Enron had only Enron’s interests in mind, and internal corporate documents described the Kyoto Treaty as follows.
"precisely what [Enron has] been lobbying for": "This agreement will be good for Enron stock!!"
Enron fooled and lied to far more people than just Bill Clinton and Al Gore. The level of fraud and deceit they practiced eventually led to their bankruptcy in 2001. Enron tried to protest their innocence. They claimed that the accounting firm of Arthur Anderson rigorously audited all of the corporate books. This held great credibility in many people’s minds. The founders of The Arthur Anderson Firm were famous for demanding the highest standards of accuracy and honesty. Arthur Anderson held great standing in the accounting industry – prior to their collusion with Enron to help lie about Enron’s financial health on mandatory SEC filings.
Eventually, the whole edifice of deceit came crashing down. Enron’s thieves, churls and wag-halters were no longer considered the smartest guys in the room. Their bankruptcy proceedings can be accessed on line by the morbidly curious. Arthur Anderson was destroyed as well, and for a time, no one believed that American Corporations were receiving properly rigorous audits.
A controversial, but necessary, act of legislation was passed through Congress to address the issue. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 established the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board to backstop the accounting firms auditing public companies. The law has caused the negative externality of making the compliance activities of corporations more bothersome and expensive, but it has also prevented any major repetitions of the dishonesty displayed by Enron, Global Crossings or WorldCom.
The realm of government funded scientific research has developed a problem with the truth that mirrors the attitudes displayed by Enron in two ways. First, scientists have famously distorted data to make their results more impressive. Secondly, they are self-regulating, through the auspices of peer review, and face a moral hazard problem similar to the problem faced by Arthur Anderson when Enron made it very lucrative for the auditors to ignore existing facts and compose a few facts of their own.
In the case of the infamous Utah University cold fusion experiments, peer-review worked well. Dr. B. Stanley Pons and Dr. Martin Fleischmann made the claim that they had achieved nuclear fusion, in a jar of water, standing at room temperature. The American and European physics community attempted to replicate this in every way imaginable. Upon failing, they challenged the assertion, and debunked the claim. This yeoman’s work saved the United States taxpayers $25 Mil that would otherwise have been appropriated by Congress to continue their research.
In the field of Climate Science, the peer review process has not produced similar success. In 2001, The United Nations IPCC released a study on the state of the Earth’s climate. The study claimed with a high degree of certainty that the Earth was warming at a rate that was significantly greater than the previous historical trends. This study was bolstered by a paper written by Climatologist Michael Mann. This paper contained a graph that was described as “The Hockey Stick Curve.” Relying heavily on Dr. Mann’s work, the IPCC made the public pronouncement “that the 1990s has been the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year of the millennium”
Mann’s work underwent peer review by eight different climate scientists. The IPCC stood by it as genuine and honest work. However, the veracity of the so-called “Hockey Stick Curve” came under assault from a number of people.
David Deming preceded Dr. Mann as a proponent of using physical proxies as a methodology to pursue estimates of previous climate history. He authored a study that tracked the most recent 150 years of North American climate that attracted the attention of the climate modeling community. He then received the following in an email.
A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.”
In other words, this was a leading climate modeler claiming that the data, as it stood, had to be altered substantially to make the case that global warming was actually happening the way its believers wanted to tell the story. This was raw advocacy, not science.
This interesting perspective on the truth was not restricted to David Deming’s anonymous emailer. Nature magazine describes the attitude of Stanford University Climatologist Stephen Schneider.
In a 1989 Discover magazine article, Schneider discussed the dilemma facing scientists who wanted to draw attention to climate change while remaining true to current scientific knowledge of the subject. “We need to capture the public’s imagination, ”he noted. “That entails getting loads of media coverage, so we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified and dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts we might have.”
This works well in sales and public relations, but doesn’t work so well in the pursuit of actual truth. Mann was severely debunked. It was discovered that feeding randomly generated data sets into Mann’s algorithms would produce the same hockey stick curve that Mann got with his Bristlecone Pine data. Primary debunkers McKitrick and McIntyre describe the mathematical process Mann used to microwave his data.
A conventional PC algorithm centers the data by subtracting the column means of the underlying series. For the AD1400 step highlighted here, this would be the full 1400-1980 interval. Instead, MBH98 Fortran code (ftp://holocene.evsc.edu/pub/MBH98/TREE/ITRDB/NOAMER/pca-noamer) contains an unusual data transformation prior to PC calculation that has never been reported in print.
Each 4 tree ring series was transformed by subtracting the 1902-1980 mean, then dividing by the 1902-1980 standard deviation and dividing again by the standard deviation of the residuals from fitting a linear trend in the 1902-1980 period. The PCs were then computed using singular value decomposition on the transformed data. (The effects reported here would have been partly mitigated if PCs had been calculated using the covariance or correlation matrix.)
Quite literally, when it became time to fit the temperature curve, 502 years of data got made to disappear. Amazingly, eight different reviewers, all of whom have earned PhDs in mathematically dense subject matters, failed to note the modification of the traditionally accepted axis transformation in Mann’s algorithmic methodology. Even if Mann did something benign and acceptable under the norms of statistical practice, he still should have been required to vouch for its methodological validity and demonstrate its absence of bias.
In the real world inhabited by people not geeky enough to care about esoteric uses of linear algebra to calculate convoluted statistical models, readers scratch their heads and ask why care? So what if a bunch of science wonks blatantly cheat? It won’t cost me any money, will it?
Actually, it just might begin to. Mississippi attorney Gerald Maples has recently filed a class-action lawsuit against twenty-six oil companies. He claims that their CO2 emissions caused anthropogenic global warming, which in turn caused Hurricane Katrina to tear up lots of homes in Southern Mississippi. Maples explains the gravaman of his case.
Maples says he has scientific proof that's been ignored by Congress. The attorney will argue in court that oil companies and their impact on global warming are partly to blame for the excessive pounding south Mississippi absorbed during Katrina.
I, for one, believe Congress needs to stop ignoring all of this brilliant science. They need to exercise oversight on what gets published, because if Michael Mann can redefine what a Principal Components Analysis is to suit his ideological agenda, and then have his work indirectly used to support an utter junk law suit, science needs to be much more carefully regulated.
Dr. Mann would defend himself by accurately stating he has no association with the oleaginous pursuer of emergency medical conveyances in question. He would state further that none of his work has involved any directed statement of moral culpability of any particular sector of the current US economy. In other words, he’d say associating his work with this lawsuit was bogus.
Yet, had Dr. Mann’s work been properly vetted prior to it’s inclusion in IPCC III, Maples would perhaps be peeing the wrong way in a wind tunnel with his lawsuit. Had Dr. Mann and others been in the actual business of rigorous science, rather than in the disingenuous pursuit of “offer(ing) up scary scenarios, make simplified and dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts we might have”, Maples would possibly have to look elsewhere for a set of deep pockets to fleece on behalf of his clientele.
Anthropogenic Global Warming may really be occurring as we speak. The science on climate change stands far from settled and still provokes vigorous argument and debate. That debate needs to be refereed so that it stays measured and honorable. Like America’s public corporations, this potentially involves trillions of dollars and our future as a nation.
All science, not just climate science, needs to receive more rigorous oversight before it receives one dime of taxpayer funding or is allowed to be published, in the public domain, with any type of official seal of approval. American scientific research needs the equivalent of a Sarbanes-Oxley. The stakes on this are too high to just let our scientists go around believing that they owe no accountability to anyone because they are the smartest guys in the room.
Kyoto’s “Cap and Trade” scheme would have been VERY good for Enron. Estimates put the total sums to be traded at around two TRILLION dollars.
And Enron had the global trading connections necessary to get a large chunk of that.
It can be thanks to the legal device of the expert witness, but its methods are also much more rigorous than law or gov't. Or history of/or sociology, which is where this article comes from.
It can take quite a while for a debunking. In fact, it usually takes the retirement of the old generation for the new stuff to start getting traction. Wegener’s tectonics wasn’t accepted for half a century, an example often cited. One prerequisite for a debunking is a hungry grad student and an advisory board who has no ox in the fight. This is the ugly (political) side of science as an industry.
Forty years later, perhaps after the scientist is dead, someone says “Oh, maybe this wasn’t so brilliant after all.” By then, we could have Kyoto down our throats and our economy under severe duress.
The peer review process as you describe it does not work efficiently enough to protect our society from the negative externalities of bad politicized science.
Nonsense. After this sentence the article begins to list the work of other scientists who have debunked the GW junk.
Science is in the process of policing itself. SarBox has already been declared a disaster for American businesses, and there is serious talk of amending it, or overturning it. Science doesn't need the same restrictions.
As a general thing I don’t approve of politicians taking some recent results from the science institutions and running off to write public policy and international treaties. Seems there has been a lot of that: if we go back a century to the origin of the eugenics programs that became astonishingly popular and not just in Germany. That is a more immediate and extreme impact on people than outlawing tobacco or taxing woodstoves and gov’t should be doing none of that. I have noted that nearly every newscast has some kind of health item lately, and often it is a recommendation concerning a medical product. This is way out of line and is exactly what went on pre-WW II. It’s a growing trend though and won’t be stopped this time.
Well, if it works in the science world like it works everywhere else, they’ll find the most useless person with the least to do, and assign them to coordinate all SOX activity. Said person will rush around babbling about ‘due diligence’, worry endlessly about the arrival of auditors, and generally drag down productivity in the whole company.
My point is that Mann has been debunked in toto, but the main thrust of his work still drives policy and litigation. In other words, Mann took public money and lied for the purpose of advocacy. Now that we have caught him in his lies, his advocacy still succeeds.
Until people like Mann receive condign public humiliation for their intentional falsification of scientific truth, no one can trust anything a modern scientist publishes.
A bigger lie has never been told. SOX was not necessary, not useful, and has been an utter waste of time and money. SOX also would have done NOTHING to prevent or expose the frauds perpetrated by people at Enron, GC or Worldcom.
SOX should be overturned.
Perhaps it should be greatly improved, but if the average stock owner has no belief in the average set of corporate reports, that individual has no reason to believe the typical stock in that average company is worth any money. That could lead to unpleasant consequences. Something, maybe not SarBox specifically, had to be done about that problem.
I agree. But SarBox was a kneejerk reaction that has done more damage than good. A parallel version for science would do the same.
Most people think Hydrogen comes from water, but Ken Lay knew the REAL source for Hydrogen in the US is from Natural Gas (followed by Oil and Coal, with only 4% from water electrolysis which probably uses a coal power plant to provide the electricity).
“I, for one, believe Congress needs to stop ignoring all of this brilliant science. They need to exercise oversight on what gets published, ....”
Talk about a cure worse than the disease!
bttt
Mann is now a tenured professor. Even though McKittrick has been widely published and has thoroughly rebuked him. What penalty currently exists to prevent other scientists from publishing lies like Mann did? If none exists, how can scientific research be still be trusted?
BMFLR
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