Guest post by John Mashey
Strange Scholarship in the Wegman Report (SSWR)
A Facade for the Climate Anti-Science PR Campaign
This report offers a detailed study of the “Wegman Report”: Edward J. Wegman, David W. Scott, Yasmin H. Said, “AD HOC COMMITTEE REPORT ON THE ‘HOCKEY STICK’ GLOBAL CLIMATE RECONSTRUCTION”(2006).
It has been key prop of climate anti-science ever since. It was promoted to Congress by Representatives Joe Barton and Ed Whitfield as “independent, impartial, expert” work by a team of “eminent statisticians.” It was none of those.
A Barton staffer provided much of the source material to the Wegman team. The report itself contains numerous cases of obvious bias, as do process, testimony and follow-on actions. Of 91 pages, 35 are mostly plagiarized text, but often injected with errors, bias and changes of meaning. Its Bibliography is mostly padding, 50% of the references uncited in the text. Many references are irrelevant or dubious. The team relied heavily on a long-obsolete sketch and very likely on various uncredited sources. Much of the work was done by Said (then less than 1 year post-PhD) and by students several years pre-PhD. The (distinguished) 2nd author Scott wrote only a 3-page standard mathematical Appendix. Some commenters were surprised to be later named as serious “reviewers.” Comments were often ignored anyway. People were misused.
The Wegman Report claimed two missions: #1 evaluate statistical issues of the “hockey stick” temperature graph, and #2 assess potential peer review issues in climate science. For #1, the team might have been able to do a peer-review-grade statistical analysis, but in 91 pages managed not to do so. For #2, a credible assessment needed a senior, multidisciplinary panel, not a statistics professor and his students, demonstrably unfamiliar with the science and as a team, unqualified for that task. Instead, they made an odd excursion into “social network analysis,” a discipline in which they lacked experience, but used poorly to make baseless claims of potential wrongdoing.
In retrospect, the real missions were: #1 claim the “hockey stick” broken and #2 discredit climate science as a whole. All this was a facade for a PR campaign well-honed by Washington, DC “think tanks” and allies, underway for years.
Most people can just read the 25-page main discussion, but 200+ pages of backup text are included to provide the necessary documentation, as some issues are potentially quite serious.
For a quick download, read the Executive Summary (first six pages). Then, here is the complete report, including the main discussion and 200+ pages of appendices.
Oops, slight mis-communication, the URLs are right, but this should read:
Most people can just read the 25-page main discussion, but 200+ pages of backup text are included to provide the necessary documentation, as some issues are potentially quite serious.
Two PDFs are provided. One is the first 6-pages, including the Table of Contents and Executive Summary, reasonably standalone.
The second is the full 249-page report.
The ~25-page main discussion is part of that, but has numerous cross references to the 200+ pages of backup.
The post has been updated to properly describe the two PDFs (which have also been updated with John’s fixes).
John,
You and DC both deserve medals.
Unlike McIntyre, Wegman and their cohorts, history is going to shine very favourably on your contributions.
Thank you so very much for all your hard work. I cannot imagine how many person hours it must have taken to put together this investigative masterpiece.
Now what?
QFT!
This will be a reference work for people in the future who really want to know just how the denialist machine was able to cast doubt and postpone action for so long. They will be surprised, perhaps even disgusted, by the appallingly low standards that have sufficed for climate change “scepticism”.
Having looked at Wegman’s CV several times, it seems to me that he was involved in weapons research to some extent. I suspect he may have been known to people at GMI as a result.
Yes, he was involved ion Star Wars computing early on, and I mention that as a possible connection. However, that was 20 years earlier, there was no evidence of any close connection as of mid-2005, and there is circumstantial evidence otherwise. Specifically, had he been close with GMI, I don’t think it would have taken 6 weeks before Wegman was contacted by Coffey. It seems very unlikely that GMI,CEI were not scrambling around to help.
So, this is certainly plausible, but on balance , seems low probability.
On this kind of study, there are a huge number of possible relationships and connections, but it is like debugging complex computer systems. One has to keep in mind the various possible causes of a problem, and not prematurely fasten on one idea. In this case, there were many early ideas that ended up falling by the wayside as data accumulated.
Erratum: the second table in section 4 got lost, will fix.
The HTML in the above post looks broken… arbitrary line breaks. Apparently cutted and pasted 😉
[DC: Should be fixed now. ]
John Mashey:
I’ve been trying to expand my maze of twisty little think-tanks with material from your research (specifically your Crescendo Climategate Cacophony opus), but I found it to be rather intimidating and inscrutable. Any suggestions on where I can start and how I should proceed? Thanks in advance!
— frank
John: It is an incredibly detailed document and I can only imagine how much time it took you (and DC) to develop. Are you open to receiving minor typographical errors?
In my opinion, this (along with Scott Church’s look at Satellite temperature trends) is what real citizen research / science looks like.
Thanks for taking the time to dig into this important topic.
regards,
John
If people are wondering about weird fonts …
1) The PDFs I sent to DC use Times New Roman for almost everything, and Bold.
but when displayed in browser, or even downloaded, some of that comes out out in a different font and not Bold.
For example, the title in the original PDF is 18-pt, Bold, Times New Roman.
2) It’s also putting boxes around URLs.
I will try to figure out what’s wrong … going from Word to a PDF … well, one never knows.
3) Both PDFs have noticeably-different file sizes from the originals – the Exec Summary is about half the size of he original, teh full version is 10% larger.
It might be interesting – and provocative – to produce a remix of the Wegman report with the errors and their corollaries corrected, irrelevant references excised, and so on. (Actually, leaving the unsupported corollaries in might be more instructive. And removing plagiarism might be difficult – the result could be rather difficult to comprehend in many places.)
Or it might be a rather silly and distracting exercise.
Favourite line from the summary – “That may be a coincidence.” Very dry commentary 😉
Close runner up – “All 80 WR references are listed in W.8.2, although some are vague or do not actually exist.” Ouch!
It looks like this is a work in progress but should we be writing to the members of the ethics committee to see if an investigation of Barton is justified?
This pretty much sums up the situation nicely:
“It [the Wegman report] was promoted to Congress by Representatives Joe Barton and Ed Whitfield as “independent, impartial, expert” work by a team of “eminent statisticians.” It was none of those.”
I hope that copies have been sent to the relevant authorities and contacts at GMU and the US Congress. Hopefully someone has also sent a copy to the major players Wegman, Barton and Whitfield.
And if McIntyre wishes to redeem whatever little credibility he has left, he should no longer link to or discuss the Wegman report. Because, if he does, he is endorsing plagiarism, poor scholarship and poor statistical methods.
How did all these failures and blatant wrong-doings in the Wegman report go unnoticed by the so-called “Auditor” (i.e., McIntyre)? I have a hypothesis, but I’ll leave it there….
Staggeringly great.
Can John Mashey top himself? Amazingly enough, yes.
First and most obviously, let me stand and give John the applause and cheers he deserves for undertaking this task and producing such a report.
Second, and without having read John’s work yet, I think it’s painfully clear from the comments above just how utterly bankrupt the deniers’ case truly is. If they have to pay for stuff like the Wegman report, and even then only get something of such questionable value (to be exceedingly kind), and then parade it around as if it’s a sterling example of scientific writing, is quite revealing. It seems to be on a level with Monckton’s presentations, but without the weird factor.
1) DC has fixed the font issues, I think.
IF you’re seeing the title in some non-bold sans-serif font,and rectangles around URLS, or other pervasive font weirdness, let me know, with versions of OS & PDF reader.
2) John Cross: sure, let me know @ the email in the PDF.
For various reasons, this may well get updates, as I will naturally fix any substantive errors, incorporate new information that appears. I will tend to accumulate typos and such and include fixes.
3) Frank: CCC slices and dices its data different ways, and you’re doing yet another different view on some of the same people. {This it blind men & elephant turf.) For your purposes, I’d suggest:
Figure 2.1 for context.
A.2 Funders,
A.3 Advocacy organizations, and A.6 Maps of funders , organizations and people.
All this stuff is inherently complicated, because:
a) There is indeed a twisty little maze of people and organizations, some of which come and go over time, and which is logically highly distributed, even if many are physically co-located in/around Washington, DC.
b) This stuff is *obscure* on purpose.
4) Lotharsson: feel free to try :-), I’ve had more than enough of this to last me forever.
But let me summarize what’s left if you do that, here’s an approximation, i.e., Missions #1and #2.
a) Due to decentered PCA on one small fraction of the data, throw out paleoclimate reconstructions as wrong. Bigt MWP forever.
b) Paleoclimate researchers know each other, so they are bad.
5) Scrooge:
I have no desire to incite FOIA-blizzard hassles of people… but Section 4 has a menu. If people know the right people to write to, it can’t hurt.
Even if you don’t know the right person, maybe people know people in the various relevant organizations, and you might ask them if they know about this.
[I will pursue a few of these, but I’m at a GCEP meeting next few days, and have catchup on numerous deferred tasks, so any help is appreciated.]
John Mashey: Thanks for your tips! When I have more time than I have right now I really need to look closer at the maps. And the “Virginia Watchdog” stuff (argh!).
Indeed this stuff is obfuscated… if only there were a quicker way to decode it all… 😐
— frank
s/bad hyperlink/good hyperlink/
jre:
Thanks for the kind words.
Lou: likewise, but:
“It seems to be on a level with Monckton’s presentations, but without the weird factor.”
Actually, I would disagree. Besides the weirdness of the whole Wegman effort, even Monckton has a hard time beating this for weirdness:
Valentine, Tom (1987) “Magnetics may hold key to ozone layer problems,” Magnets, 2 (1) 18-26.
This uncited reference alone raises a serious question of basic scholarly competence . It is utterly bizarre, especially in a report criticizing the quality of review elsewhere. I could not find an online copy, but a 1987 ozone article is at best irrelevant bibliography-padding.
“MAGNETS In Your Future” was an obscure fringe-science magazine, for which Valentine wrote articles and later served as Editor. He had a long history of writing on fuel-less engines, psychic surgery (books, see Amazon) and conspiracy theories, for a tabloid, The National Tattler. His Bio states of that work:
“ (Miracle editor—had to come up with a miracle a week!)”
(and there is more, but don’t look if weird hurts your brain.)
I don’t think this horse is entirely dead. I imagine you could prove cherry-picking to limit the social network of the climate scientists involved. Remember, the claim was not just that one (1) paper (!) had a limited social network, but that modern climate science that showed AGW was broken because it was limited to a small, close-knit group.
Also, as with the so-called scandal of the CRU emails and FOI requests, no allowance is made for the facts that (a) climate science isn’t getting adequate funding, reducing the number of scientists who can afford to do it full time and not work on other projects and (b) involvement in the IPCC is on a volunteer basis, so it’s extra, unpaid work that not even every working full-time climate scientist can afford.
In the FOI attacks on CRU, the people pretending to want freedom of information were allies of the people wanting to cut funding for climate science, which is the main reason the Hadley CRU had a hard time dealing with the FOI requests. Even people like Mosher who might not be fans of Official Secrets, even when it involves terrorism, are still crying crocodile tears over “freedom of information” when their real goal is pure anti-science.
Not only defund science, but enslave the remaining scientists to bureaucratic harrassment – and further weaken freedom of information in the eyes of information producers.
And of course, Barton’s records are private, as are all the records of all the corporations pulling strings behind the scenes.
There’s a name for this – it’s Lysenkoism. Pure and simple. And it’s in the service of radical capitalism, to boot.
“Even people like Mosher who might not be fans of Official Secrets, even when it involves terrorism, are still crying crocodile tears over “freedom of information” when their real goal is pure anti-science.”
And don’t forget he submitted a FOIA request deliberately designed to fail, which we know because he volunteered the story at Keith Kloor’s blog. How many others were similarly submitted by other individuals?
I think sourcewatch should give this the onceover, as well, Frank.
John Mashey:
Re Magnets: That’s sort of a “crank tell” right there. Ian Plimer had the “iron sun.” Velikovsky had the Earth and sun with an EV potential of 10^19 volts, which Australian astronomer V.A. Bailey had to discover multidimensional spontaneous creating of electrons to explain. If I were a religious man, I’d say the gods inflict that on moderate ideological cranks as a “fatal flaw.” It’s probably part back-scratching – I’ll include your nonsense tucked away in my book or report if you’ll support and promulgate my more acceptable nonsense.
Well, this doesn’t sound at all like someone who made up their mind beforehand and then went looking for data to support a predetermined theory (only to be disappointed a few times):
<>
We won’t be finding other reports written about this, will we?
Previous comment should have included this quote between the brackets:
In this case, there were many early ideas that ended up falling by the wayside as data accumulated.
When I “Googled” John Mashey, one of the results said that he is a “venture capitalist”. Is this a different person from the one writing in Deep Climate” and does the Deep-Climate author recommend investing in Carbon Credits?
When I “Googled” John Mashey…
A Hail Mary pass. If that’s all you’ve got I guess that’s what’s chalked.
I noticed this thread at the denier front,
http://judithcurry.com/2010/09/25/climate-book-shelf/#comment-2106
Some of them claim that this work by Mashey is ‘nonsense’, and that the Wengman Report stands as it is. That claims for plagiarism where ‘ridiculed’ from the start, etc.
Others (Mosher, that is) are already burning and burying the Wengman Report. 🙂
[DC: I don’t think it’s fair to call Judith Curry a “denier”, although she appears to have a following in that camp. I think she herself accepted the “lukewarmer” label, IIRC. ]
What does that change. Morley?
The evidence is either true or false.
@DC: Point taken. I think that the people that inhabit her blog are predominantly deniers, and is the same group of people that visit WUWT.
OK, it took me ten minutes to establish this fact, though I doubt that reading more comments would change the fact.
Pingback: An update on the plight of the Thompsons « Wott's Up With That?
Well, there is only one of me, but I am not a VC, don’t do public investment advice, and none of this is relevant to the topic here. I once trried a startup VC firm that didn’t make it, years ago. I am a limited partner (i.e., investor) in one big VC fund, have done a lot of due diligence for VCs, have worked for 3 VC-funded companies, have been an officer of one such before and after IPO, have helped a few get funded (and am an alongside investor in one such), advise startups, sometimes give talks on entrepreneurialism and how Silicon Valley works and talk to VCs a lot, since I live in the middle of VC-land, a few miles from Sand Hill Rd. I.e., this is what semi-retired Chief Scientist/CTO-types do around here when they get tired of 60+ hour weeks. Anyway, irrelevant so no more.
John
On Word to PDF are you using some built in facility from Word?
Back in the day when XP was newish I used something called PDF995 to create PDFs of a 28 page booklet, with imposition, that had complex page layouts with illustrations, tables and web links from the then current version of Word without difficulty.
[DC: Adobe Acrobat Pro includes MS Office to PDF conversion, as well as a virtual “printer” driver that can be used to create PDFs from the print dialog of any Windows program. ]
PDF issues:
1) This seems to be fine on Windows & (I think) on Macs, with Acrobat Reader.
2) A friend says:
“Adobe reader makes font trouble… see attached. xpdf and gv work fine, as does okular. This is on Ubuntu, Adobe version 9.3.4 08/01/2010.”
The attachment was the first page, but looking like a riot in a font factory.
John, the solution for Ubuntu is to install the package ttf-mscorefonts-installer… apparently you’re using TrueType fonts.
😉
The proper thing to do when generating a PDF, is to embed the fonts in the document. This way it should look fine on any system.
You can Google for PDFCreator, which is an open-source PDF printer for Windows. Ubuntu has a built-in PDF printer. Also, OpenOffice has built-in PDF export.
Strange Weather never liked the Strange Wegman scholarship.
My favorite blunder of theirs was to call the CPS method “Climate-Plus-Scale”, whereas a 1st year PhD student in paleoclimatology can tell you it’s “Composite-Plus-Scale”. The rest, sadly, flies at the same level.
Before conducting an “independent” review of climate science, it might have been useful for them to read some…
Their only substantive argument concerns the admittedly unorthodox way in which Principal Components are calculated in MBH98. For this they invoked the McIntyre and McKitrick paper and spend most of their report hammering that they find it “convincing”. So far so good, except that it was shown then by Huybers, and later by others, that in the end it makes almost no difference.
In my view, the only interesting contribution of the Wegman report is to have turned the attention of professional statisticians to the paleoclimate reconstruction problem. I’m working with some of them now, which would have been unimaginable 5 years ago, when they would have dismissed such studies as “undergraduate problems”.
El Nino:
Say some more about the *Wegman Report*’s effect. Do they identify that as the reason? (If so, in fact, it is the only useful contribution.)
The reason that I ask is that in chasing this, I found that some pretty good statisticians were certainly interested in climate (and sometimes paleoclimate) issues. I especially recommend the “Wegman at NCAR, 2007” section, and especially the comments by statistician Jim Berger (p.67).
The other reason is that it’s clear from various other comments that people’s experiences (legitimately) vary, and it’s not so easy to generalize.
Pingback: Wegman-gate: Alert Congress & the Media « Global Warming: Man or Myth?
Scott Mandia has some nice comments, and offers an extremely useful set of email contacts for media and government.
John:
You say the report plagiarizes other sources. Can you provide an example or is it just shoddiness if at all.
Plagiarizing doesn’t mean the strength of the report is wrong.
[DC: Edited – you accuse a prominent climate scientist of dishonesty and even say this presumption, without any evidence whatsoever, is “reasonable”. Please avoid ad hominem attacks and stick to the actual evidence. Thanks!
Speaking of which … I have documented clear instances of unattributed material from other sources in the background sections of the Wegman report, spanning 10 pages in all. John found another 25 pages in the “summaries” of important papers, which were not summaries at all, but rather thinly edited excerpts.
This post includes an overview of the background sections and their various unattributed sources. There are links there to side-by-side comparisons which leave no doubt as to the situation.
Plagiarism is a serious matter. In this case, it bespeaks an utter lack of understanding of the material, which can be seen in the numerous instances of errors, distortions and biases, wherever Wegman and Said introduced changes. ]
Pingback: Wegman Report’s “abysmal scholarship” revealed
J: “Plagiarizing doesn’t mean the strength of the report is wrong.”
Plagiarizing is a very strong indicator that the report is weak and that factual mistakes are present. If you read John Mashey’s report, you will notice that apart from plagiarism, the research in the Wegman Report is very weak.
People like Mosher are now trying to distance themselves away from the Wegman Report. They would rather see it burn and buried. However, for a long time it was cited as the definite source of arguments for the contrarians. Now, the Wegman Report has become a liability. You can read documents by Monckton that praises the Wegman Report and you can see through their incompetence.
“People like Mosher are now trying to distance themselves away from the Wegman Report.”
Not that I dispute what you said, but do you know where he is on the record saying that? Now when will McIntyre et al. do the same? 😉
I posted the URL earlier.
Here is the direct URL to Mosher burning the Wegman report,
http://judithcurry.com/2010/09/25/climate-book-shelf/#comment-2221
Sorry Trev, didn’t realise I had to go up thread for the link. I’ll pay better attention next time. Thanks for the link.
I made the mistake of reading the comments there…oh dear….
Yeah, Mosher is not dumb, he knows a toxic asset when he sees one. For McIntyre it will we a wee bit harder to disentangle himself from the Wegman Report, given how he and his tribe of merry auditors have been hyping it from day one, as the vindication of their auditorial mission, the death of the Hockey Stick etc. And that includes some professional statisticians who ought to have known better.
The Auditors — not just any contrarians, but the Auditors! — all these years failing to properly audit a climate science document that to them is almost foundational, having referred to it and basing their narratives on it year upon year — the irony, it burns.
Doug Bostrom, you blind FOOL! Not ONLY are people like Gore and Mashey trying to END capitalism and put us all under a one-world, Stalinist government, but they’re also evil capitalists seeking to exploit us – for cash!
It makes more sense if you’ve just watched a 10-hour Glen Beck marathon, admittedly.
For the record, not just Stalinist capitalists, but Islamic fundamentalists too. Ask Osama…
I suggest you contact Dr. Alan G. Merten, the President of George Mason University, directly, with your complaints of possible academic fraud and plagiarism and the apparent coverup. As many of you probably well know, Walter E. Williams has also used his professorship at GMU to publish many lies about global warming, something that he appears to know little about.
Pingback: Wegman Report Revealed as Fraudulent Academic Plagiarism - The Blob
T L E: thanks.
1) As you may notice from section 4, there is a big menu of issues to pursue.
2) Williams I haven’t run into before … but in general, there’s not much one can do about formally about Econ professors making stuff up about climate, as it’s done often. In general, free speech people can anything … EXCEPT there are certain cases where being misleading yields problems that have consequences. Plagiarism/fabrication in academe, if proven (and plagiarism, if clear, is really, really clear.) Universities who get Federal funding tend to pay attention to folks like NIH ORI, who are not amused. That makes a good starting point.
I have no idea, yet, what this movie “The Social Network” is about.
I just heard about it through an online audio/music site.
But the clip is compelling: http://www.nullco.com/TSN/
HR: it’s about the creation of Facebook.
Social networks, but not the same kind.
Freely musing, if Wegman, or his counsel, try to wiggle out of this, I foresee two lines of argument:
1) the Report is actually not really a scientific but a political document; another standard of truthfulness applies. Nobody expects politicians to tell the truth anyway 😉
2) Wegman’s only failing is a lack of oversight; i.e. make somebody else (i.e., apparently Said) take the fall… will be interesting to see if she will talk when on the hot seat 😉
Note that 2) still implies a serious violation of ASA ethics rules, in addition to the obvious implications of laziness, incompetence, or both.
Hmm.
GP:
1) Of course it *was* a political document, but is was always presented otherwise.
see p.24, as to how Barton described this.
I especially liked:
‘We are going to put it up there, let everybody who wants to, take a shot at it. Now, my guess is that since Dr. Wegman came into this with no political axe to grind, that it is going to stand up pretty well. …”
They did everything possible to (vaguely) promote a NAS/NRC connection.
For propagation of the meme, see Judith Curry’s comment on p.62:
“He was asked to chair this effort by the NRC since he was Chair of NRCs Committee on Applied Statistics. ”
2) For various reasons, that will be fairly hard to do.
a) p.75 lists Wegman coauthors.
Said is listed 19 times between 2006 and 2010, 3rd behind Solka and Martinez, whose joint papers were spread over many years, and that doesn’t count the other joint activities.
b) … well, there are more. I sometimes know things that I don’t or can’t write down.
c) Of course, in light of some of this, Said’s credibility as a witness msut ve carefully evaluated.
3) One person I’d really like to hear from would be the unknown 4th person, who later dropped out.
4) In my rummagins, i did run across thefollowing.
At least as of 2001, they were having problems with academic integrity, and possibly these have not yet been resolved:
GMU Provost, 2001:
“The major conclusion of the Task Force was that large segments of both students and faculty ignore the Code’s provisions. We need to remedy this.”
The report linked there includes:
Search that document for “plagiarism.” It mentions importance of making sure foreign students are familiar with American view of plagiarism.
> Said is listed 19 times between 2006 and 2010,
Hmm. Stupid question probably 🙂 , but have you scanned those joint papers for ‘strange scholarship’? And the ones she wrote without Wegman? That could bring up useful patterns.
Pingback: Wegman Scandal: Attack on climate scientists based on shoddy scholarship « Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub
GP: nope.
Someone else is welcome to. This stuff is mind-numbing, and in any case,and I already thought there was more than enough.
First of all, I must admit that I haven’t studied your report yet, Mashey. But as I often end up in debates with anti-AGW people, I like to have counter arguments against popular sources like Monckton, McIntyre and such. Both of these are liars, and it is easy to document. Although I wont go into this in this thread, however, in fear of derail.
When you said this:
“Most people can just read the 25-page main discussion, but 200+ pages of backup text are included to provide the necessary documentation, as some issues are potentially quite serious.”
Which issues do you think are the most serious? What I’m asking for here, is if there is a mistake the report that I can point to that is undefendable and easily ruins any confidence in the report?
Often I find the simple and clear arguments the most effective.
I apologize if it is a weird or difficult thing to ask for, and you may dismiss the question if you want.
AGWeird:
1) 35 pages of plagiarism, in normal academe = end of career.
2) 40 of 80 references not mentioned – bibliography-pad, bad.
3) Referencing 1987 ozone article in fringe-tech magazine by college dropout tabloid writer of pseudoscience.
4) using a 1990 sketch when half their own summaries told them it was wrong.
Anyway, some of the obvious awful things are in the Exec Summary.
Cuccinelli’s latest references the Wegman Report 6 times.
It seems to rely on McKitrick APEC talk (McK05 in SSWR), although mis-cited as 2003. I guess citing MM05x, the talk at GMI in 2005, would have been too obvious.
Are UVa aware of the work of yourself and Deep Climate regarding the shoddy scholarship of the Wegman report? If not, they should be!
— frank
Just what does Cucinnelli’s Appendix B have to do with anything? What a blatantly political steaming heap o’ dung. But it does hit most of the denialist memes, so it is a good catalog of those.
I agree with Frank.
Oh the irony of Cuccinelli using dubious scholarship (some might even go so far as to say fraud) by contrarians to make a case of alleged “fraud” against Mann et al. Completely ludicrous and backwards.
Has McIntyre distanced himself form this latest witch hunt? Time for McIntyre and McKitrick to unequivocally demonstrate to everyone that they are men of honor and principle. Maybe, being a men of honor and all, McIntyre and McKitrick will request to have reference to their work removed from Cuccinelli’s subpoena.
Why am I not hearing anything about Wegman and M&M in the news media? Something is incredibly wrong with the world.
MapleLeaf, McIntyre has condemned Cuccinelli in no uncertain terms.
He does hang on to Wegman et al., and McShane & Wyner, for now. Wonder how long still. At least these are not nuts 😉
MapleLeaf …
keep blood pressure down, the MSM takes a while.
Everybody: you’ve been following DC for a while…
sometimes “Ugh, this is awful” may well be true, but the *interesting* questions are:
1) Where did this come from?
2) Who *really* wrote this?
Right Said S Fred is a fan of the Kooch, openly supports Kooch’s action, hung out at GMU until 2000, and still hangs out at U.Va I believe.
Hi John,
Yes, Om….I’ll try.
Sorry, but to what are your questions referring to? Cuccinelli? If so, I would hazard to guess that he had help from certain folks at or connected to GMU and perhaps even CA….
“1) Where did this come from?
2) Who *really* wrote this?”
Is the clue in “post normal”?
J Bowers
You might read more of my earlier CCC on S. Fred.
1) He is long gone (~20 years)from U VA, often lists himself there, forgetting the Emeritus. Unfortunately, Emeritus = forever.
2) As you note, he was connected with GMU’s Institute for Humane Studies, funded by the usual folks. He goes much further back with GMU to early 1990s, at least cohosting thing there.
Thanks again, John.
FWIW, the position of Director of the Office of Research Integrity at the NIH has been posted. Salary range $120-180K.
http://jobview.usajobs.gov/GetJob.aspx?JobID=90951359
This just out from George Mason University :
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/sciencefair/post/2010/10/wegman-plagiarism-investigation-/1
Pingback: USA Today: Wegman is Being Investigated « Global Warming: Man or Myth?
Pingback: Wegman plagiarism scandal heating up | The Way Things Break
Looks as though Wegman may have been “hulled” as they say in the navy:
“University investigating prominent climate science critic”
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/sciencefair/post/2010/10/wegman-plagiarism-investigation-/1
HT Eli Rabett
Congrats on getting the attention of the MSM, JM and DC!
http://rabett.blogspot.com/2010/10/in-article-appearing-on-line-in-usa.html
Pingback: The Climate Change Debate Thread - Page 288
Congratulations ! I just read the good news over at the Rabbit run. John; this was too much work for one person but thank you it is invaluable. DC thanks for hosting.
Go get im. There is an ideal scenario. Wegman goes down taking a few Questionable PHD’s and barton. McIntyre goes down with his phony ” bad science ” . Cuchinelli goes down; he based too much of his Kilgour Trout Memorial Expedition on Wegman. Watts goes down as an idiot.
Thanks again.
University investigating prominent climate science critic – USA Today
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/sciencefair/post/2010/10/wegman-plagiarism-investigation-/1
Wait, we were assured that he had no opinion! My faith is destroyed. 😦
News of the investigation is up on Nature.com:
http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2010/10/old_claims_of_bad_climate_scie.html
Pingback: Armi di distruzione di Mann – VIII » Ocasapiens - Blog - Repubblica.it
Ferdinand Englebeen Defends Wegman over at New Statesman (and gets it badly wrong), see comment date stamped 08 October 2010 at 23:31
http://www.newstatesman.com/global-issues/2010/09/climate-mcintyre-keeper#reader-comments
John and DC, this is remarkable stuff. In discussing the shady ethics that the GMU may have participated in, I hope that the important point about misrepresentation of science is not lost.
Pingback: GMUniversity investigating Wegman : A Few Things Ill Considered
Deech56
thanks … but don’t worry:
1) read the main discussion.
2) then skim the first part of each Appendix
3) and just for fun, pick out a few of the side-by-sides in W.11.8, then look at the summaries of that in W.11.4.
Read W.4.1, with its graphs.
The plagiarism may be the most obvious thing, but some people seem to fasten on it without reading the rest of it.
I cannot WAIT for the Va. Attorney General’s office to issue C.I.D.’s for all Wegman’s correspondence at GMU….
Appears to be way more “fraud” that needs investigating there than at UVa.
Pingback: Sciblogs – Wegman investigated for plagiarism, “skepticgate” looms « Kickingcrow's Weblog
You don’t appear to understand that Wegman was asked to look into the statistical significance of MBH 1998, and like all other statisticians found it to be woeful.
Otherwise this thread looks like a white supremicist blog.
Well, geronimo, you convinced me….not.
Wegman is an academic, he knows the rules. He has broken them.
Wegman’s mandate was, shall we say, somewhat unclear and was never formally written. However it seems it was not about MBH 1998/1999 per se, but rather “an independent verification of the critiques of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) by McIntyre and McKitrick (2003, 2005a, 2005b) as well as the related implications in the assessment.”
The M&M “critiques” went well beyond statistical issues (resulting in Wegman’s flawed social network analysis and so on). Yet Wegman et al failed to fully explore the actual statistical issues, and even seemed to go out of their way to avoid certain issues, such as the overall effect on the final reconstruction of a conventional PCA used with proper PC retention rules.
The report is full of errors concerning paleoclimatology, starting with the title of the report, with its howler reference to the “‘hockey stick’ global climate reconstruction”.
A Holocaust denier sympathizer among Wegman report references?
http://warming101.blogspot.com/2010/10/holocaust-denier-sympathizer-among.html
“Some of Valentine’s guests have declared that the Holocaust, the systematic extermination of Jews under Hitler. was a myth or a hoax. Valentine says those guests “make a very convincing case”.”
[DC: Interesting, if not particularly relevant … The question is still how did such a nutty reference (Valentine on magnetism) get into
Wegman’sPeter Spencer’s list of references. ]As Mashey pointed out some time ago — and I got a chuckle out of it — the paper is in a real black helicopter class rag. I guess we shouldn’t be surprised.
I changed the title & permalink to be more apropos –
A “Holocaust skeptic” among Wegman report references?
http://warming101.blogspot.com/2010/10/holocaust-skeptic-among-wegman-report.html
It is ironic, in light of the above contrarian’s complaint that “this thread looks like a white supremicist(sic) blog” .
DC, as for your “how did such a nutty reference (Valentine on magnetism) get into …Peter Spencer’s list of references”
That is indeed the $64k Q.
Well all I can say is your work maintains the standard of the Teams work and should be consigned to a cylindrical object with a lid.
Climate gate revealed all we knew about junkett science and it is now clear that we are winning and you are whining.
Dr Mashey its over, we won you lost, so I suggest you and your people seek help and obtain advice in respect of your superman complexes. The planet does not need saving it is the poor souls who have swallowed the alarmist nonsense who need saving and we need to save ourselves from the freeloaders on the green gravy train.
Your mates at UNRealclimate are well unreal ie fakes.
Pingback: Skeptic-gate, Wegman-gate, Copy-gate, Everything-gate-gate-gate « My view on climate change
Stacey, I am not entirely sure you are real. But what an excellent POE! The level of incoherence is very effective.
I’ll add it to my collection.
Pingback: — Irregular Climate
Pingback: The Fake Scandal of Climategate « Planet James
Pingback: Wegman responds to USA Today « Wott's Up With That?
A complete train wreck as ever, from the first line – a REPORT is not the same as a WORK OF SCHOLARSHIP. And when commissioned to REPORT on somebody’s scholarly work, outlining that person’s work is NOT and CANNOT be PLAGIARISM.
Thanks for that novel and highly amusing defence. It is undoubtedly a great addition for John Mashey’s burgeoning collection of plagiarism excuses.
Tim (trccurtin),
“Plagiarism is plagiarism is plagiarism.” Sorry that you have a problem understanding this concept, among many others. I suppose the dog ate your homework, too. I’d be curious if you’d read any of Mashey’s report before disgorging your opinion of it, but having read enough of your postings elsewhere, it does not matter enough to ask. Apparently, since you’ve been banned from several other reality-based blogs, you’re trolling for new venues from which to demonstrate your complete proof of Dunning-Kruger.
You claim that Wegman’s report was not a “work of scholarship,” despite the fact that Wegman, Barton, and others (e.g., Judith Curry) repeatedly tried to pass off the WR as a peer-reviewed and refereed effort. See, for example, Wegman’s misleading testimony that “The review process we went through was similar to that employed by the National Research Council” and his false promise that validations of the WR would soon be published in rigorously peer-reviewed journals (SSWR, pp. 50-54); also see Judith Curry’s characterization of the WR as “his 2006 NRC Report” and her imaginative claim that “He was asked to chair this effort by the NRC since he was Chair of NRC’s Committee on Applied Statistics” (SSWR, p. 62). The extreme irony of these claims is that Wegman was actually selected through a highly unusual, back-door process after Congressman Joe Barton explicitly rejected the idea of requesting the NRC to review MBH’s paleoclimate reconstructions (SSWR, Executive Summary, p. 3). Even if no such claims were made for Wegman’s work, and aside from the fact that his “analysis” didn’t support his conclusions, the plagiarism would still be as obvious and egregious. It’s quite absurd that anyone would defend WR as a serious refutation of MBH’s paleoclimate reconstructions, and at the same time claim it is not a work of scholarship, as poor an example of such that it is.
You and others may be interested in my upcoming post:
Was the Wegman report “independent” and “peer-reviewed”? No
I’ll be covering all of the above and more, including new info on Barton staffer Peter Spencer’s list of “important” papers.
I do think that plagiarism in a review section or a methods section is less galling than, say discussion. For instance, in a chemical synthesis, while exploring a topic, element to element, it may be worthwhile to self-plagiarize some aspects of the background and methods. (Yes, you could consider referencing back to your earlier papers, but even this is really not the most efficient thing at times.) So, sure, wrong is wrong. But “how much plagiarism” is actually a relevant comment and shows the issue of these struggles.
I think Wegman could have covered himself, wrt, the Bradley kerfuffle by just a few comments, like “this discussion borrows heavily from Bradly”, before he went into the paraphrasing exercise. So, why didn’t they? Was it a lack of honesty, a lack of care, just a general lack of sophisticatoion? I don’t know the exact problem, but it shows poorly on them.
Also, given that any singular episode of plagiarism can be debated, or perhaps (sorry all or nothingers) excused, what matters is the PATTERN. If DC and Mashey were just “going after their opponent” by fastening in on one single sin and drumbeating it, I would tune out. But there’s a lot more than that here. There’s a huge pattern of the plagiarism. It happens in many passages and many sections. It even happens elsewhere in peer reviewed articles and dissertations and the like. When you see that amount, it stops being something to debate or give benefit of the doubt.
And then a big issue is that it’s not mostly self-plagiarism. And I’m not excusing self-repetition per se, but it’s a different sort of a sin, to pad your publications, or to copy stuff you feel is boilerplate as to what WEgman did. They’re looking at a strange field and reporting on it. But they haven’t done enough work to have their own synthesized view of it. They just cut and paste and paraphrase. that’s the act of a B student. An overambitious one. Not a thoughtful analyst. HEck, even that they considered that they were helping theire report OUT by filling it with half-baked intro stuff, rather than digging into the debate of “how red should your proxies be”. It shows a real lack of even knowing what is interesting to talk about. And makes me worry that they won’t contribute the one thing they were supposed to bring…that stats-jock view.
When you put the whole Wegman thing together, you just come up with an exercise that IMNSHO was “shoddy”. That to me is much MORE the sin than conservatives hanging out together. They
*wrote paraphrased methods section
*didn’t really run the Mann or McI algorithms to the extent of understanding all the options.
*didn’t well survey the stats literature (in the method of say a Jolliffe)
*didn’t give thoughtful considerations of how similar (maybe not exactly same, but still placed to look for insight) problems in other fields such as econ or medicine have been addressed.
*had a half-baked social network analysis (which personally I think is a fascinating method and even useful wrt MBH, but still what they did was not adequately caveated or developed or followed up…it just showed the same trashy B student lack of sophistication).
*didn’t really follow up on the field. It’s been four years, now. They were forced to learn some background and methods, why no work of their own pushing the field further? the one tiny bone I will throw is that one of them followed up and did more social networks methods in different areas. And that work has issues, but at least its…work! Within the whole proxy versus algorithm world, there has been nothing from these guys. McI for all that I don’t trust him and his meandering posts at least seems to go down the road a pace. And of course there all kinds of people like Huybers, Li, Tingley, Zorita, Burger, heck even MnW working on this stuff. But from our gold medal statisticians? Zip! that just doesn’t feel right.
I probably left out a few:
*rushed their report
*formed a team without enough different perspectives, and only one heavy hitter
*didn’t have it peer reviewed. Which is not an extreme sin in my world, very beautiful works of forensice engineering detection may not be peer reviewed. But the bigger sin was to get deer in the headlights and try to claim that it was, or do a last minute awful job of it. (I mean if the thing were stunning scholarship and just had not been reviewed and someone else did a shoddy job AND had it reviewed, I would always give the nod tothe good work, not the reviewed work. But that said, given how shoddy the W report was, perhaps a review was exactly what they needed to call this to their attention and get them to “up their game”.
The problem here is that the peer-review claim was part of the political process to prop it up as a credible alternative to the very well researched NRC report. That’s the sin, not that it wasn’t peer reviewed per se.
And the authors haven’t exactly tried to go out and correct those who have been pushing it as “the NRC report” …
Poly,
The problem with the WR isn’t only that it was so bad it can’t be credited with being shoddy. The problem is that the entire effort was intentionally deceptive, and it was designed this way from conception through execution to achieve certain results, not to be a fair evaluation of paleoclimate reconstructions. Wegman didn’t even do any analysis per se, he just took M&M’s code and ran it on his computer, without apparently even knowing what it does (cherry-pick a 1% subset of proxy simulations that happen to have the M&M-desired hockey-stick characteristics, and claim they refute what MBH did). I don’t think one can argue that the WR came out the way it did by sloppiness, inattention, or by accident, and I find it hard to understand how anyone could view it from such a benign perspective after reading Mashey’s and DC’s analyses of it. And to characterize this whole carefully constructed PR edifice of deception and misrepresentation as just “conservatives hanging out together” is really a bit of understatement, don’t you think? This entire exercise was a sham designed to mislead not only Congress, but to undermine the credibility of reputable scientists and serve a very specific agenda. Your catalog of sloppiness is only the greasy exterior of the WR, and when you look deeper, it gets far worse.
You can beleive whatever you want or suspect whatever you want. But I think you should not underestimate stupidity or lapses. It is easy to be shoddy and easy to gloss over something when you think it helps you.
Minor incindent: Look at when Tamino years ago ditd the long ppost and analysis on Jollife backing up short-centering. He took a slide out of powerpoint (not something in a book or a journal with text and quality control) misconstrued some typical “bullet style” remarks and messed up a definitinoal issue. and I even warned him of the concern (and he did not blink or even consider my comment). Then he ended up months later having to backtrack when Jolliffe saw it and called him on it.
And do I think Tamino was “devious”, NO. I think he did a quick analysis and baked too much cake with not enough flour and not enough checking (even when called out the concern on the defenition). Was this devious, NO. It was just human nature and a mistake.
And people make mistakes in the direction they want to see things, ALL the time. Heck, I’ve had to spend years telling Moshpit to take back some of his Bayesian priors. At least he did though. Lots of the web-based hoi polloi will never think about issues. they just natter. That’s why I like CCE and guys like that. 🙂
I’m certainly no expert, but I think short-centering was a mistake and defending it as a valid methodological step was also a mistake. However, the impact was minimal, except as a red herring used to attack climate science.
Still, Tamino’s track record is infintely better than the contrarian bloggers, for a number of reasons. For one thing, he makes *way* fewer mistakes. For another, he has the big picture right.
Sure we all have blind spots. But you simply can’t compare the two “sides” as if they were equivalent. They aren’t.
Bringing it back to the discussion at hand (which I will insist on from here on) the various contrarian defences of Wegman et al from McIntyre, Curry etc. are simply ludicrous. That’s a much more compelling case of people just “believing what they want to believe”.
Even you said that you thought the Wegman Report copied sections could be “fixed” with blanket attributions in front of certain sections. That’s preposterous. There isn’t one single page that does not contain highly problematic material, except maybe the appendix on PCA.
Poly,
If I were to be as charitable as possible towards Wegman et al., perhaps the best case one can make on their behalf is that they were willing dupes who were misled by professional disinformation propagandists (Barton, Spencer, et al.). But then you need to conveniently forget several things: a) Wegman represented himself and his team as “statistical experts” and completely impartial arbiters with no horse in the race and the cold hard science of statistics to back them up;
b) they failed to actually do the analysis they claimed to have done–they simply ran M&M’s code without apparently understanding it;
c) Wegman’s false testimony that the report went through rigorous peer-review “similar to that employed by the National Research Council;”
d) Wegman’s failure to follow through on any of his promised peer-reviewed publications, answer simple questions about his methodology, or release his code and data;
e) he has failed to correct any errors in the report and has continued to defend his indefensible work through comments to the press, while allowing misperceptions to persist that this was an NRC-sanctioned effort.
That’s a looong list of items we’re supposed to forgive in order to give Wegman’s team the benefit of doubt, and it’s not even exhaustive.
Well, it’s rare that I disagree with DC, but in the interest of accuracy, I must correct this error:
“There isn’t one single page that does not contain highly problematic material, except maybe the appendix on PCA.”
A few others might be arguable, but SSWR section 2.7, Page tally was perfectly clear:
P.60, i.e., the one that says “APPENDIX,” should probably say “APPENDICES”, but “highly problematical” seems unfair for that page.
Perhaps DC was including that with Appendix A, but I think it applied to all the appendices.
I stand corrected.
Very well said, DC. I certainly acknowledge that I have mine, and hope I’m not “piling on” Poly, who I think understands the technical issues in far more depth than I do. I think Poly contributes thoughtfully to this and many other discussions, and pointing out my blind spots is a welcome interchange. I come here to learn, and I admit to having expressed opinions I can’t always back up with complete knowledge of all the facts, nor have I contributed anything much in the way of new knowledge (not that I’m retracting anything specifically, I’m just acknowledging that I rely very much on others who I trust). When Poly says
that’s something I agree with and will admit to having been guilty of at times. Thanks, Poly, for not avoiding the issues. I’ll continue to listen with great interest, while I may disagree. This will have to serve, for now, as my New Year’s mea culpa, insufficient though it may be. Here’s to better understanding in the future.
Well, maybe TCO understands that this is exactly what many modern Republicans do when they’re hanging out together …
Not just to reputable scientists, either …
Taylor B 31st December said: “I’d be curious if you’d read any of Mashey’s report before disgorging your opinion of it, but having read enough of your postings elsewhere, it does not matter enough to ask. Apparently, since you’ve been banned from several other reality-based blogs, you’re trolling for new venues from which to demonstrate your complete proof of Dunning-Kruger.”
Dear Dr Taylor, Do go to Judith Curry’s Blog of the same date for her listing of No Noes on Blogs, you exemplify all of them.
I have read John Mashey’s monumental attack on the Wegman Report, and impressive though it is, it no more than the WR is a “work of scholarship”. WR was commissioned by a House Committee dominated by members of a certain political party, and has never been submitted to any academic journal for its peer review processes.
Rightly or wrongly the Wegman team was commissioned to the Committee to REVIEW the work of Mann Bradley and Hughes and their associates, on one hand, and of the two Mcs. on the other. The Wegman Report’s review of the two schools of thought on the hockey stick issue naturally summarises the work of both MBH and the Macks, and Mashey could only validly complain if its summaries were inaccurate and misleading. Since Mashey accuses of MR of plagiarising MBH, that is prima facie, nay, conclusive, evidence that the WR summaries are accurate.
Not only that, Mashey and Dr Taylor have never explained why WR would seek to pass off the work of MBH et al as its own, since clearly the WR does not believe in or accept the conclusions of MBH. If Mashey thinks that the WR sought both to endorse the MBH claims and pass them off as its own, while rejecting the work of the two Macks, that is real and justiciable evidence that Dunning-Kruger applies to Mashey & Taylor.
[DC: I’ll allow this, but you are yourself in violation of two policies here, i.e. excessive repetition and discussion of comment policy. On past form, I make no guarantees about your future comments, especially since the annoyance factor is beginning to outweigh the amusement. Thanks! ]
The Wegman Report was claimed to be peer reviewed in a similar manner to the NRC report, by both lead author Wegnman and the report’s Republican sponsors. This is indisputably false, and those perpetrating that falsehood should be held accountable. At the same time, since the claim was made, the standards of scholarship certainly apply. And, anyway, the idea that reports to Congress should be held to a lower standard than articles in obscure journals is simply absurd.
As Mashey shows convincingly, the summaries of MBH, M&M and other papers were apparently plagiarized (i.e. cut-and-paste of identical or very similar wording, passed off as original summary or paraphrase). And as I previously showed, other sections were copied from Wikipedia, social network text books and Bradley’s paleoclimatology text.
But in all these cases, slight changes and additions introduced serious errors and even distortions, amply demonstrating the Wegman panel’s extreme incompetence and bias.
Q.E.D.
Dear John Mashey
[DC: John Mashey wrote this one guest post, but he is not the moderator of the blog; I am. DC = Deep Climate, in case you haven’t figured that out.]
I am most impressed that you allowed my last to appear, sincere thanks.
[DC: You’re thanking the wrong person. ]
Now I hope I may be allowed to point out that the term “peer review” needs to be used very carefully, and I speak as one who had a reasonably successful career in both academe and as a consultant or economic adviser. Peer review in academia usually means anonymous 3rd party review of submitted papers on behalf of journal editors. In consultancy peer review of a report prior to submission to the client means no more than that a peer of the authors, not being one of them, has reviewed the proposed report at the authors’ request. I have had experience of both processes both as an author and as peer reviewer for both journals (anonymous) and consultants (invited by them).
I think it would be helpful to keep these distinctions in mind.
[DC: Your invocation of peer reviewers selected by consultants is novel and highly creative, but completely off the topic at hand. Let’s keep in mind how the term was actually used by Wegman and representatives Barton and Whitfield. All three implied (or stated in the case of Wegman) that the Wegman report’s peer review was similar to that of the NRC. That was a blatant falsehood, as I will enumerate in detail soon enough. ]
As for the WR, clearly it had nothing to gain by “plagiarising” MBH. Wegman would need to have published his summary of MBH in some journal under his own name for that charge to stick. Moreover Bradley has been shown to have plagiarised very large chunks of his own textbook with little to no acknowedgment of the original author in its successive editions.
[DC: You seem to understand even less about plagiarism than Steve McIntyre does. Repetition of these dubious assertions does not lend them any more credibility, although I am getting to exercise extreme forbearance and patience. However, enough is enough. Thanks!]
Even Curtin ought to be able to understand that you can’t plagiarize yourself?
Plagiarism:
to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own
to use (another’s production) without crediting the source
to commit literary theft
…
In other words, plagiarism is an act of fraud. It involves both stealing someone else’s work and lying about it afterward.
That from plagiarism.org …
Perhaps, though, I’m misunderstanding Curtin’s somewhat ambiguous post.
“Plagiarizing his own textbook” sounds like a claim of “self plagiarism”, but perhaps that’s not what he meant.
Curtin appears to be referring to the McIntyre’s absurd “Bradley copies Fritts”, parts 1 and 2.
Here is some discussion of this nonsense by Coby Beck.
Believe it or not, the original accusations were based on supposed misattribution of charts to Fritts to the wrong Fritts publication (similar charts were given in a paper by Fritts and a subsequent text book). I discussed this in comments here.
Then, McIntyre claimed that the accompanying running text describing the charts was also plagiarized. In fact, Bradley was clearly describing the charts *in his own words*.
Thanks, I don’t follow Climate Audit so was unaware of this …
Just as the Daily Mail has had trouble with Australian geography, Tim Curtin appears to have trouble with North American. The sole proprietor of this blog, DC, is clearly Canadian and kind enough to have offered me a guest post, oddly while he was running about Australia.
I live in California, which is part of the US, more-or-less. I am trivially placeable in Silicon Valley, which is located in California, facts that can be discovered in a minute or two simply my typing “mashey” into Google and looking at first few hits.
Although I frequently ski at Australian-owned ski resorts in Canada, that does not make me either Australian or Canadian. Canada is not part of the US, contrary to the views of the geographically-challenged.
Mashey: since Deep Climate is almost totally deicated to you, I thought you were one and the same. Anonymous blog sites are almos as bad as plagiarism.
[DC: (Deep Sigh). The above post is the one and only guest post from John Mashey.
The rest of the blog – about 90 or so posts in all – consists of my own writing and research. And if you had actually read Mashey’s report, as you claimed, you could hardly miss the fact that he was inspired to research the summaries and references in the Wegman Report, by my prior discovery of cut-and-paste scholarship in the 10 pages of background sections, as well as in Said et al 2008. ]
Meantime, Deep Climate if real says “In fact, Bradley was clearly describing the [Fritt] charts *in his own words*.”. In fact that is what Wegman did with Bradley (cited 6 times in just a few pages.
[DC: No. It wan’t Wegman’s “own words” – it was mainly Bradley’s, cut and paste and slightly changed, with some illogical asides and distortions introduced. And on top of that there was no attribution to Bradley for those passages, making it doubly wrong. (There was attribution for the tables on preceding pages, but that’s irrelevant despite what McIntyre thinks in his fanciful interpretation of scholarly standards).
This is not a difficult concept. If you want to use someone else’s words, you must use quote marks (for a short phrase) or a block quote (for longer passages) *and* attribute it properly.
Well, it’s been good fun, but we’ve now had more than enough amusement for the archives. So I’m calling an end to this exchange. Thanks! ]
Pingback: George Mason University “Climate Change Communicator of the Year” – where only one viewpoint is allowed « Wott's Up With That?
[DC: This comment has been redirected to Open Thread #10].
Pingback: Le Monde on E. Wegman « Xi'an's Og
Pingback: The Post-Normal Times , Archive » More reasons to read The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars