Thursday, July 01, 2010

Penn State Live - Investigation of climate scientist at Penn State complete

Mann cleared again, again. I'm not even sure what he was cleared of this time. But whatever it was, it didn't happen, it wasn't him anyway, and you can't prove a thing :-)

14 comments:

Carl C said...

I admit to being a little "duped" or disappointed when climategate came out, but the punishments (investigations & embarassments of Jones & Mann et al) didn't really fit the crime. It seemed that at worst they were sort of dicks in their emails, which rather than being a crime in academia, is more of a prerequisite!

Steve Bloom said...

Another few months and all of this will be history, the academies report being the last act AFAIK. Speed the day.

One moderately amusing aspect to this particular report was Dick Lindzen's answer ("it depends") upon being asked if data should always be given up on request.

Hank Roberts said...

This also isn't him, or them.
But the resemblance ....

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4026/4653391338_e0fdb3989b_b.jpg

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/05/30/fanfic-contest/

"cropper" says the word verification AI. Indeed.

Pete Ridley said...

James, when following up on a comment on the blog of another supporter of The (significant human-made global climate change) Hypothesis - Michael Tobis - relating to the need for expert statisticians to be involved in the activities of palaeoclimate researchers I came across a 2005 blog which claimed to be quoting you (Note 1).

Here are sme extracts QUOTE: Steve McIntyre has found a molehill and is doing his best to make a mountain out of it. ..

Although it is only natural that McIntyre should try to talk up the importance of his work, he seems to completely misunderstand the scientific process in his talk of audit trails and replication. .. scientific research is already subject to a far more relevant and stringent test than he advocates. ..
I have no direct knowledge of the IPCC process, but McIntyre's picture of climate research consisting of a cosy coterie of pals all working towards supporting a "consensus" and patting each other on the back certainly doesn't ring true with me. ..
So while I have some sympathy for McIntyre's cause, I disagree with his conclusions. While his molehill should not just be ignored, it must also be kept in perspective. UNQUOTE

If you did indeed say that then considering subsequent work by expert statisiticians Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick as reported in Andrew Montfdord’s excellent book “The Hockey Stick Illusion” (Note 2) are you still of the same opinion?

NOTES:
1) see http://mustelid.blogspot.com/2005/02/trying-to-create-mountains.html
2) see http://www.amazon.co.uk/Illusion-Climategate-Corruption-Science-Independent/dp/1906768358

Best regards, Pete Ridley

James Annan said...

Pete,

I did say that, and I think it's still valid. You didn't quote the bit where I criticised the defensiveness of scientists hiding their mistakes.

Carl, pleased to see you have come round - I recall you being quite critical of Mann et al a few months ago. Not that I'm denying there is some embarrassing and unsavoury stuff in those emails...but nothing that IMO deserves a lynching. Imagine how much fraud would be uncovered with a decade of bankers' emails, or politicians, or any corporate management.

Pete Ridley said...

James, thanks for responding, although it is noticeable that all you really said is that you haven’t changed your mind. I suspect that you haven’t read Andrew Montford’s book, which is full of references to the sources of the facts that he presents.

You still believe that McIntyre QUOTE: .. seems to completely misunderstand the scientific process in his talk of audit trails and replication. .. scientific research is already subject to a far more relevant and stringent test than he advocates. .. UNQUOTE yet Montford seems to have provided strong evidence that this was not the case with regards to Professor Michael Mann’s “Hockey Stick” paper.

With regards to the “hockey team” of reviewers for the IPCC’s “palaeoclimate” chapter, I feel sure that anyone reading Montford’s book with an open mind would conclude that he has provided strong evidence painting a picture of QUOTE: .. climate research consisting of a cosy coterie of pals all working towards supporting a "consensus" and patting each other on the back .. UNQUOTE. Although Montford’s book has not been subjected to the far from perfect style of peer review that is involved when submitting papers to scientific journals it is, like all such books, subjected to careful review before publication.

You might respond that it QUOTE: .. certainly doesn't ring true with me. .. UNQUOTE but if you are still happy to accept plausible arguments, as you seemed to be in your exchanges with McIntyre back in January 2008 (Note 1) then you may change your opinion about those Climategate enquiries. You may be interested in my opinion on them (Note 2).

NOTES:
1) see http://climateaudit.org/2008/01/02/james-annan-on-25-deg-c/
2) see http://globalpoliticalshenanigans.blogspot.com/

Best regards, Pete Ridley

James Annan said...

You're right, I haven't changed my mind, and am unlikely to do so without new evidence that hasn't already been thrashed to death on the blogosphere, which (AIUI) that book does not provide.

Interestingly, the first complaint against Mann was that he abused his position as IPCC to unduly promote his own work above that of others. The emails paint a picture of a well-liked and respected scientist who tried to ensure that his presentation was widely accepted - surely this is exactly what an IPCC author should do. Hence the change of tack by the critics, that they are all colluding, even though they publish competing (and partially conflicting) results.

I read your blog and I would agree that people like Haslett (who I've met a few times) could make a useful contribution. As far as I know, however, he has never done much work on global reconstructions, really focussing much more on a single-site basis. Thus I suspect he is not sufficiently prominent in the relevant community. There certainly are moves afoot to integrate people like him with modelling and data people (hence the meetings we have attended) but these things take time, or more importantly, money properly targetted to enable people to work together.

Pete Ridley said...

James, your QUOTE: .. I haven't changed my mind, and am unlikely to do so without new evidence that hasn't already been thrashed to death on the blogosphere, which (AIUI) that book does not provide. .. UNQUOTE suggests to me that you haven’t read Montford’s book. I seems clear to me that the comments by the two USA and one UK enquiries into Climategate about the need to involve expert statisticians in climate research (and particularly in palaeoclimate) analysis is being ignored by the IPCC.

As Professor Haslett says QUOTE: .. Yet inference on the palaeoclimate is indirect and uncertain. .. UNQUOTE and repeatedly makes reference to these uncertainties. A good example is his recent comment in “PALAEOCLIMATE HISTORIES” (Durham University, Institute of Advanced Studies “Insights”) QUOTE: .. Two sources of complementary information about the palaeoclimate are (a) dynamical models of the Earth climate system and (b) proxy data such as pollen, from which reconstructions may be attempted. Both of these are subject to considerable uncertainty, but of very different types. .. UNQUOTE.

Can you tell me more about the QUOTE: .. moves afoot to integrate people like him with modelling and data people .. UNQUOTE. In your capacity as an executive editor for Geoscientific Model Development (GMD) scientific journal (Note 1) you should have a fair idea of the extent to which that journal involved expert statisticians in the peer review process. Can you give me the names of these or tell me to whom I should address my request.

Also, since you are involved in the modelling side of climate research perhaps you can respond on a question that I put to your associate Michael Tobis. As your area of expertise appears to be in computer engineering and computer science you should be fully familiar with the importance of applying independent professional Verification, Validation and Test (VV&T) procedures to any complex computer systems prior to their use in commerce and industry for operational and policy-making purposes. Perhaps you’d also like to comment on the extent to which such VV&T procedures have been applied to those atmospheric and ocean GCMs which are so relied upon by the IPCC when making its policy-making recommendations to the politicians of the UN.

I’ve been asking this question since reading Dr. Vincent Gray’s “The Greenhouse Delusion” a couple of years ago and talk about it in Section 2 of my article “Politicization of Climate Change & CO2” (Note 2 – updated since the first release in 2008 on the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition blog Note 3). Perhaps you’d like to put this to your associates on the GMD Editorial Board.

As there are also on that board specialists in cryosphere and ice sheets (Ian Rutt, Catherine Ritz, Philippe Huybrechts and Garry Clarke) I would be interested n talking to them about that other hockey stick of past atmospheric CO2 concentration as derived from air “trapped” in ice. I remain to be convinced that these ice core reconstructions are the “gold standard” that Richard Alley believes them to be.

NOTES:
1) see http://www.paleo.bris.ac.uk/~ggwiki/Main/HomePage
2) see http://globalpoliticalshenanigans.blogspot.com/p/sundry-papers.html
3) see http://nzclimatescience.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=374&Itemid=1

Best regards, Pete Ridley

Pete Ridley said...

James, in your 4th July comment you said “ I would agree that (expert statisticians) .. could make a useful contribution .. ” but areyou missing the point here. Involvement of people like John Haslett in analysing and auditing statistical manipulations of raw and processed climate data is essential to giving sceptics confidence in the validity of conclusions drawn.

If “he has never done much work on global reconstructions” and is not “prominent in the relevant community” the more independent he is. This is particularly important for palaeoclimate and even more so the IPCC and the “hockey team”. Independent experts Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick have clearly demonstrated the need for this.

This was recognised almost 4 years ago by expert statisticians Edward Wegner, David Scott and Yasmin H. Said in their peer-reviewed report (Note 1) on the USA enquiry into the “hockey stick” manipulations. They said “As statisticians, we were struck by the isolation of communities such as the paleoclimate community that rely heavily on statistical methods, yet do not seem to be interacting with the mainstream statistical community. The public policy implications of this debate are financially staggering and yet apparently no independent statistical expertise was sought or used .. With clinical trials for drugs .. it is standard practice to include statisticians in the application-for-approval process. We judge this to be a good policy .. when substantial amounts of monies are involved, for example, when there are major policy decisions to be made based on statistical assessments. In such cases, evaluation by statisticians should be standard practice. This evaluation phase should be a mandatory part of all grant applications and funded accordingly .. ”.

The recent UK “Climategate” enquiry commented similarly “We cannot help remarking that it is very surprising that research in an area that depends so heavily on statistical methods has not been carried out in close collaboration with professional statisticians”.

Wegman had words to say relating to your “Hence the change of tack by the critics, that they are all colluding” (Note 2) and about peer review, that “sacred cow” of The (significant human-made global climate change) Hypothesis cult. “I am thoroughly familiar with .. peer review. .. It is precisely in a small specialized discipline that the likelihood of turning up sympathetic referees is highest. .. The referees have a vested interest in seeing that research is published, .. Peer review, while often taken to be a gold standard, is in fact very conservative and radical new ideas are much less likely to be funded or published. Again, because peer review is typically anonymous, I cannot “prove” that there are sympathetic reviewers, but I maintain that my 38 years of experience in scientific publication gives me exceptionally strong intuition and insight into the behaviors of authors and reviewers”. (I had to remove a fair bit of that quotation because of the blog limitatin on characters so please see the reference for the full context).

As you will be fully aware through your involvement with the scientific journal Geoscientific Model Development, the peer review process is anything but perfect.

NOTES:
1) see http://republicans.energycommerce.house.gov/108/home/07142006_Wegman_Report.pdf
2) see http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/StupakResponse.pdf

Best regards, Pete Ridley

James Annan said...

Pete,

You should look up SUPRANET (on statisticians and paleoclimate), Easterbrook (on the quality of climate models) and Deep Climate's exposure of Wegman as an incompetent plagiarising hatchet-job.

James Annan said...

I don't know where the comments are going - must be a blogger problem. Here is my reply, again;

Pete,

You should look up SUPRANET (on statisticians and paleoclimate),
Easterbrook (on the quality of climate models) and Deep Climate's
exposure of Wegman as an incompetent plagiarising hatchet-job.

Pete Ridley said...

James, you appear to have deliberately avoided direct responses to my points. In your 6/7th July comment you said that I “should look up SUPRANET (on statisticians and paleoclimate), Easterbrook (on the quality of climate models) and Deep Climate's exposure of Wegman as an incompetent plagiarising hatchet-job”.

I have searched on SUPRAnet and came across its Web-site (Note 1) and its objectives (Note 2) but no worthwhile report on palaeoclimate uncertainties. Would you be good enough to provide a direct link to anything definitive, if such exists? It is noticeable that this (long overdue?) organisation was set up well after the publication of the IPCC’s AR4. It is to be hoped that following the Climategate and other IPCC-gate revelations since November last year palaeoclimate researchers and politicians who support The (significant human-made global climate change) Hypothesis now recognise that the general public will no longer tolerate being fed propaganda but are waiting for proper scienctific research, analysis and reporting. Expert statisticians who are independent of the “hockey team” and its sponsors must be involved closely in the 5th Assessment Report if any credibility is to be attached to it.

I don’t know which of the several Easterbrooks involved in climate models that you are referring to. Is it Steve, Don? Please would you provide a link to something by your Eaterbrook that you consider to cover the issue of independent and professional VV&T procedures as applied to global climate models. As Steven Richards said on Dr. Roy Spencer’s article “Minority report: 50 year warming due to natural causes” (Note 3) QUOTE: Climate models are not “models” in the scientific sense of the word. Atomic physics is founded on models, it has to be because we can’t see the atoms, but these models are subjected to detailed and persistent scrutiny. They are tested to their “limits” and when they fail, their failures are analysed and the model adjusted ‘mathematically’ and retested again and again. Physical models begin with a mathematical definition, are VV&T’ed, adjusted and VV&T’ed again until they agree PRECISELY with the known limits of reality. No climate model exists, to my knowledge, that has been through this exercise and therefore no climate model, in my opinion, has any useful predictive value UNQUOTE.

Regarding the individual who runs the Deep Climate site, as I said on 5th July at the “There are more than two camps ” (Note 4) thread of your associate Michael Tobis “He chooses to hide behind a false name .. Like James Annan he tries to spin the facts about Climategate .. with his own version of a conspiracy theory”.
I am inclined to be suspicious of the claims of those who hide behind false names, like Deep Climate, whoever that may be. I much prefer the words of those who have the courage of their convictions, like respected academic and “climate scientist” Judith Curry, who, in response to the Deep Climate article, said (Note 5) “.. Wegman is a statistician, .. Deepclimate accuses Wegman of plaigarism. A very serious charge, that would constitute scientific misconduct. So what is the actual accusation? They accuse him of plaigarizing the definition of “social network” from the Wikipedia, and then complain that the word changes that Wegman made pervert the original meaning of the wikipedia definition. Huh? .. a google search of social network definition yields over 18 million hits. .. and they all seem to agree generally with the wikipedia definition. .. ”.

You should look it up.

NOTES:
1) see http://www.caitlin-buck.staff.shef.ac.uk/SUPRAnet/
2) see http://www.caitlin-buck.staff.shef.ac.uk/SUPRAnet/programmesummary.pdf
3) see http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/07/minority-report-50-year-warming-due-to-natural-causes/
1) see http://initforthegold.blogspot.com/2010/06/there-are-more-than-two-camps.html
2) see http://www.collide-a-scape.com/2010/04/23/an-inconvenient-provocateur/#comment-3198

Best regards, Pete Ridley

James Annan said...

Pete,

the pointer to Supranet was a direct response to your request. I'm sorry you didn't find it interesting.

Easterbrook is Steve:
http://www.easterbrook.ca/steve/?p=1679
http://www.easterbrook.ca/steve/?p=974

FWIW I know who Deep Climate is, but it is not relevant to the content of his criticisms. If you follow up the Curry "defence" of Wegman you will see that she soon changed her tune and tried desperately to change the subject when presented with the unequivocal evidence of his plagiarism and shoddy work.

Pete Ridley said...

James, I mistakenly included in a comment on your “Montbiot” thread a response to you last comment here. Thanks for those two links which have been useful. You may be interested in seeing recent exchanges involving Steve Easterbrook, William Connolley and myself on William’s Stoat thread (http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2010/06/engineering_the_software_for_u.php).

Best regards, Pete Ridley