Steve McIntyre uncovers another hockey stick trick – where are the academic cops?
Posted on March 24, 2011 by John A
NOTE: since this is clearly an important finding with far reaching implications, this will be a “top post” at WUWT for the next couple of days. I urge other bloggers to spread the word. – Anthony
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Just when you think the bottom of the Hockey Stick rabbit hole has been reached, Steve McIntyre finds yet more evidence of misconduct by the Team.
The research was from Briffa and Osborn (1999) published in Science magazine and purported to show the consistency of the reconstruction of past climate using tree rings with other reconstructions including the Mann Hockey Stick. But the trick was exposed in the Climategate dossier, which also included code segments and datasets.
In the next picture, Steve shows what Briffa and Osborn did – not only did they truncate their reconstruction to hide a steep decline in the late 20th Century but also a substantial early segment from 1402-1550:
As I’ve written elsewhere, this sort of truncation can be characterized as research misconduct – specifically falsification. But where are the academic cops? Any comment from Science magazine?
Steve also discusses the code underlying the plot and you can see how the truncation is a clear deliberate choice – not something that falls out of poorly understood analysis or poor programming.
In the comments, Kip Hansen posts the following:
In reference to Mann’s Trick….obliquely, yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling on Zicam (a homeopathic nasal spray) ruled in part:
nytimes.com
The Supreme Court has said that companies may be sued under the securities law for making statements that omit material information, and it has defined material information as the sort of thing that reasonable investors would believe significantly alters the ‘total mix’ of available information.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for the court on Tuesday, roundly rejected Matrixx’s proposal that information can be material only if it meets standards of statistical significance.
‘Given that medical professionals and regulators act on the basis of evidence of causation that is not statistically significant,’ she wrote, ‘it stands to reason that in certain cases reasonable investors would as well.’
Thus, hiding or omitting information, even if one feels it is ‘erroneous’ or ‘outlying’ (or whatever they claim) is still possibly fraudulent ( or in this case, scientifically improper) if it would ‘add to the total mix of available information’. Statistical significance is not to be the deciding factor.
In the case of Briffa and Osborn, no statistical fig leaf was applied that justified the truncation of data, so far as I can see.
wattsupwiththat.com
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MarkW says:
March 24, 2011 at 8:58 am
Let me see if I have this right. According to the team, trees are good proxies for temperatures, except when they aren’t.
And how do you determine when they are and when they aren’t? Apparently, when the proxy shows what you want to see, they are valid. When they don’t, they aren’t.
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Eric Anderson says:
March 24, 2011 at 9:03 am
As Steve has often said, these are the kinds of activities that would land a stock promoter in jail. Of course, it’s just all in a day’s work for the Team . . .
It is hard to know whether they were intentionally deceptive or just so caught up in the “rightness” of their cause that they literally couldn’t see the discrepancies or couldn’t understand the implications. Amazing that at some point one of them didn’t wake up one night thinking, “Wait a minute, this is wrong.”
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Dan Lee says:
March 24, 2011 at 9:26 am
@Jenn Oates,
Just remind your students that they are witnessing history being made. Suggest they keep their science articles in a box somewhere, so that when their grandkids ask about what -they’ll- be learning a few decades from now, about the worst scandal in science history (most widespread in all of history?) they can pull out those articles and show them that this stuff really was being taken seriously by scientists back in 2011.
Jack says:
March 24, 2011 at 9:29 am
They’ve been lying all along and they continue to lie. It’s time that all of us started to speak plainly about this. It wasn’t a mistake, it wasn’t omitting outliers or anomalous data, or the valid use of a statistical technique or analysis. AGW just had to be true, for a lot of reasons, so they lied, those utter bastards.
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Bernie says:
March 24, 2011 at 9:38 am
greg2213
Statistical significance is not the issue. This is another example of not presenting information that is at odds with the main story that you are trying to tell. The pink line diverges from other proxy constructions to a remarkable degree. Truncating the information eliminates the need to explain this divergence. Bottom line it raises more questions as to the suitability of using certain sets of tree rings, if not all tree rings, as temperature proxies. That it appears to have been a conscious choice on the part of Briffa et al compounds the problem.
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Sam Parsons says:
March 24, 2011 at 10:01 am
There is no question that this is scientific misconduct. There is no question that “hiding the decline” is scientific misconduct. The people who did these things and everyone in the publication process who wasn’t deceived are guilty of serious moral error.
Dr. Muller in his Youtube video says that “hiding the decline” was deception but not morally wrong. Puhleeese Dr. Muller, if we accept that point then we accept the point that scientific publications can contain deliberate deception regarding the main point of the article but the authors have done no moral wrong.
Get real, people! Lock up Mann, Jones, Briffa, and everyone who knew about it and every investigator who white washed it. These people have committed major moral wrongs that might still cost the public trillions in wasted energy investments.
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UnfrozenCavemanMD says:
March 24, 2011 at 10:47 am
If these kinds of shenanigans were perpetrated in the presentation of data from a clinical trial of a new drug, people would be going to jail, and tens of millions of dollars in fines would be charged.
Carbon taxes and similar measures are like toxic chemotherapy that cripple the economy, instead of inducing vomiting, hair loss, diarrhea, anemia, and immune suppression. The purveyors of carbon mitigation remedies are paying the pathologists (climate scientists), who have taken biopsies of trees, mud and ice, to adjust their diagnosis in order to justify the pre-ordained use of the treatment. Did I mention that it is an astoundingly expensive and unproven treatment?
These folks are either corrupt to the core, or so blinded by their belief in their “noble cause” that no depth of conduct appears too low if it serves their agenda.
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