The CRU hack ("climatologists" respond)

RealClimate ^ | 11/20/2009

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Here is a decent place to get info on Steve Macintyre and his work:

Ross McKitrick sums up the Yamal tree ring affair in the Financial Post

**********************************EXCERPT*******************************

For those who don’t know, Ross McKitrick of the University of Guelph co-authored the first paper with Steve McIntyre debunking Michael Mann’s first Hockey Stick paper, MBH98. Ross wrote this essay in today’s Financial Post, excerpts are below. Please visit the story in that context here and patronize their advertisers. – Anthony

Flawed climate data

Only by playing with data can scientists come up with the infamous ‘hockey stick’ graph of global warming

Ross McKitrick,  Financial Post

Friday, October 2, 2009

Beginning in 2003, I worked with Stephen McIntyre to replicate a famous result in paleoclimatology known as the Hockey Stick graph. Developed by a U.S. climatologist named Michael Mann, it was a statistical compilation of tree ring data supposedly proving that air temperatures had been stable for 900 years, then soared off the charts in the 20th century. Prior to the publication of the Hockey Stick, scientists had held that the medieval-era was warmer than the present, making the scale of 20th century global warming seem relatively unimportant. The dramatic revision to this view occasioned by the Hockey Stick’s publication made it the poster child of the global warming movement. It was featured prominently in a 2001 report of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as well as government websites and countless review reports.

Steve and I showed that the mathematics behind the Mann Hockey Stick were badly flawed, such that its shape was determined by suspect bristlecone tree ring data. Controversies quickly piled up: Two expert panels involving the U.S. National Academy of Sciences were asked to investigate, the U.S. Congress held a hearing, and the media followed the story around the world.

The expert reports upheld all of our criticisms of the Mann Hockey Stick, both of the mathematics and of its reliance on flawed bristlecone pine data.

…

Most of the proxy data does not show anything unusual about the 20th century. But two data series have reappeared over and over that do have a hockey stick shape. One was the flawed bristlecone data that the National Academy of Sciences panel said should not be used, so the studies using it can be set aside. The second was a tree ring curve from the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia, compiled by UK scientist Keith Briffa.

…

But an even more disquieting discovery soon came to light. Steve searched a paleoclimate data archive to see if there were other tree ring cores from at or near the Yamal site that could have been used to increase the sample size. He quickly found a large set of 34 up-to-date core samples, taken from living trees in Yamal by none other than Schweingruber himself!Had these been added to Briffa’s small group the 20th century would simply be flat. It would appear completely unexceptional compared to the rest of the millennium.

[Amityschild]

The comments at Climate Audit are priceless. And they are digging through the content of what was discovered. It’s mind boggling. See comment #25, NY Times columnist Andrew Revkin to Michael Mann and responses re: McIntyre destroying the Yamal Tree Ring support of AGW.

http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=7806#comment-366040

[Dr. Bogus Pachysandra]

From an article posted on Drudge;

“The revelations did not alter the huge body of evidence from a variety of scientific fields that supports the conclusion that modern climate change is caused largely by human activity, Ward said. The emails refer largely to work on so-called paleoclimate data - reconstructing past climate scenarios using data such as ice cores and tree rings. “Climate change is based on several lines of evidence, not just paleoclimate data,” he said. “At the heart of this is basic physics.”

Ward pointed out that the individuals named in the alleged emails had numerous publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals. “It would be very surprising if after all this time, suddenly they were found out doing something as wrong as that.”

“Prof Bob Watson, the chief scientific advisor at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said, “Evidence for climate change is irrefutable. The world’s leading scientists overwhelmingly agree what we’re experiencing is not down to natural variation.”

“With this overwhelming scientific body of evidence failing to take action to tackle climate change would be the wrong thing to do – the impacts here in Britain and across the world will worsen and the economic consequences will be catastrophic.”

[Marine_Uncle]

"There is a threat to the free flow of funds...."
Things really are starting to come apart for the whole movement. I wonder how Senator Inhofe (R-OK) who has been championing the cause to stop the global warming side from influencing the judgment of the US Senators on global warming issues will use this new found info when he attends the Copenhagen Conference.
I earnestly hope he has some very smart advisers at this point to help guide him in what he will talk about. Done in a wrong way, his efforts could appear to be simply political motivated which would be bad.

[HarleyD]

For instance, we are sure it comes as no shock to know that many scientists do not hold Steve McIntyre in high regard. Nor that a large group of them thought that the Soon and Baliunas (2003), Douglass et al (2008) or McClean et al (2009) papers were not very good (to say the least) and should not have been published.

Are they denouncing the publications or retracting them? Are they saying they are publishing junk? Seeing how there were multiple bad articles over multiple years, that raises the question what exactly are people getting for the price of their subscription?

I believe one of the emails stated that hopefully no one will do a FOIA on them. Perhaps one should.

[spodefly]

Instead, there is a peek into how scientists actually interact and the conflicts show that the community is a far cry from the monolith that is sometimes imagined. People working constructively to improve joint publications; scientists who are friendly and agree on many of the big picture issues, disagreeing at times about details and engaging in ‘robust’ discussions; Scientists expressing frustration at the misrepresentation of their work in politicized arenas and complaining when media reports get it wrong; Scientists resenting the time they have to take out of their research to deal with over-hyped nonsense. None of this should be shocking.

If it's "settled science" as we are told by the media and Gore-bots, then what's to discuss but how to spin it to the sheep so they swallow the GE/Pelosi/Gore green investments and carbon cap and tax.

[danielmryan]

"Analysts often refer to a high-flying speculative Internet stock, or any stock that's speculative in nature, as a 'pos' in order to stay true to their Benjamin Graham roots. Equity analysis is a high-pressure job, necessitating analysts to let off steam in private E-mails that obviously do not have the same status as public pronouncements."

Did Henry Blodget, et. al., try that "trick"?

[danielmryan]

Someone should tell those people that the standards have been ratcheted up, in some areas, regarding f-r-a-u-d.

From Business Week Online, July 29th, 2002:

Commentary: No Excuses for Enron's Board

On Feb. 7, 1999, the audit committee of Enron Corp.'s board of directors gathered in London to hear some rather startling news. The company's auditors described Enron's accounting practices as "high-risk." David B. Duncan, who headed up the Arthur Andersen LLP team at the company, informed the committee that Enron's accounting was "pushing limits" and was "at the edge" of acceptable practice.

None of the directors, including Robert K. Jaedicke, a one-time Stanford University accounting professor who had been chairman of the audit committee for more than 10 years, objected to the procedures described by the auditors, requested a second opinion, or demanded a more prudent approach, according to the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations after a six-month probe of the Enron board's oversight duties.

In fact, the subcommittee found that similar briefings by Andersen officials occurred once or twice each year from 1999 through 2001 with the same result: The auditors told board members that Enron was following high-risk accounting and no one drilled deep enough to learn the details or object. And despite his long tenure as chairman of the audit committee, Jaedicke rarely if ever had any contact with Andersen outside of official committee or board meetings, as governance experts recommend.

Even worse, Enron's board members knew about and could have prevented many of the risky accounting practices, conflicts of interest, and hiding of debt that led to the company's implosion simply by asking some obvious questions....

[Excerpt; the rest here].

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Some may think I'm now going mealy-mouthed, but accusations of fraud are serious. There's a valid analogy between peer review and board-of-directors oversight, particularly if the directors are fellow CEOs. [An all-CEO board is, clearly, CEO peer review.] However, it's only an analogy. Legally, at least as of now, peer reviewers do not have any fiduciary duties attached to their role. They can't be hauled into court, in the same way a director can, if they're delinquent with regard to a duty of independence. The law won't reach on this point.

From what little I know of the law, and from the damning E-mails posted, there's no smoking gun in the legal sense. There is, however, enough indirect evidence to merit an outside audit.

Starting with the asking of some obvious questions...

[danielmryan]

Regarding the Blodget analogy, I'd better add that a security analyst is bound to certain legal duties that a scientist isn't. "Citation circles," reviewer-stuffing and work-related hypocrisy aren't criminal, and it's unlikely that they're actionable at the civil level even if funds went to waste as a result.

If anyone wonders why I'm backtracking on the rhetoric, here's why: If the heat gets hot enough, the AGW crew might come out swinging with defamation lawsuits. I'm a Canadian, and those kind of suits are easy to win in Canada.

[DrDavid]

From what little I know of the law, and from the damning E-mails posted, there's no smoking gun in the legal sense. There is, however, enough indirect evidence to merit an outside audit.

From the few emails I've read, it looks like the climate journals peer review process has been controlled. As typical in science, the editors of the journal pick the reviewer(s). If you only pick pro-AGW reviewers, any paper or letter that is critical will never get published. Then you can run around saying, "He hasn't published in a peer reviewed journal, therefore his work isn't any good." Mostly, likely the reviewer who spiked the paper was on your team.

Another thing that seems odd about these is how emotional and secretive they are about the data. There Jones & Mann seem to have lost objectivity and are more focused on finding any sign of warming instead of looking at the data objectively. This kind of reminds me of the stories about Watson and Crick and the Nobel for DNA. I was going to say that this line of research couldn't lead to a Nobel Prize, but they have given them out for less in the past.

When I worked at a research lab in England, we always shared everything. When others reproduced our work, we knew we were doing it right. Sometimes it takes time, but science in the end is decided based on the facts, not opinions or consensus. Science certainly doesn't follow Robert's Rules of Order and you can't "call the question."

[rfp1234]

posting private correspondence without permission is unethical.

Deceiving the public with junk science to the tune of several trillions of $ is unethical AND criminal.

[rfp1234]

Scientists often use the term “turning a trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem whore themselves out for grant money”.

[danielmryan]

I believe you: you specified what I was referring to by the phrase "work-related hypocrisy." Saying that the peer review is all the skepticism one needs, while privately attempting to deck-stack the process, is disingenuous and calls out for the word "deplorable." I was just saying that there aren't any legal repercussions that I can see.

Fact is, the science world is similar to the securities industry in the 1920s. Miscreants there are, but there's no legal remedy unless civil or criminal fraud can be established - in the ordinary way. The only kind of smoking gun that would do so, would be an admission that: a) the data for a certain paper was salted, and b)it was necessary to do so in order to secure further funding. Even that double admisssion may only be good for a civil action.

[Erik Latranyi]

I don’t recall Einstein, Newton or Sagan using a scientific “trick” in formulating their theories!!!