Boris alerted me to the news that George Mason University is investigating allegations that Wegman plagiarized when writing the Wegman report. The story appeared at USA Today, Nature, and was picked up by The Bunny.
As quite a few know, the allegations were first brought up by Deep Climate. Evidently, John Mashey recently wrote up a very long report pdf, which I have glanced over. My first impression is a small portion of that report re-iterates what Deep Climate alleged in 2009. USA today reports that Bradley, who wrote one of the sources Deep Climate alleges Wegman plagiarized complained to GMU, informing readers,
“Bradley says he wrote a letter in April to GMU, noting the possibility of plagiarism and demanding an investigation of both the 2006 report and a subsequent, federally-funded study published by some of Wegman’s students.”
The USA Today report also indicates that, in July, GMU vice-president for research Roger Stoug wrote Bradley telling him the GMU investigation was expected to be completed by the end of September.
It is now October; so they are evidently behind schedule. Maybe we’ll read more soon?
[As a note I would like to point out the shocking(!) similarity between one of my sentences and a sentence in USA Today today, which reads:
GMU vice-president for research Roger Stough said he expected a university committee to complete its investigation of Wegman by the “end of September.”
Here are the quite shocking similarities:
- Both share the 6 word string “GMU vice-president for research Roger Stoug”
- The phrase “investigation was expected to be completed” is shockingly similar to “expected …to complete its investigation
- Both include the five word phrase “by the end of September”.
I hope USA Today doesn’t sue!!! ]
I’m also curious about this tantalizing snippet:
“I’m very well aware of the report, but I have been asked by the university not to comment until all the issues have been settled,” Wegman says, by phone. “Some litigation is underway.”
I wonder who is initiating litigation? I guess we wait and see.
Got the last sentence from the Rabett, did you. Well, feel free.
One might say, the biter bit, but Wegman, Said and co. were bad choices because they did not know enough about the field and the data to write a clean report. The obvious ones, Singer and Michaels and a few others were too tainted and Barton needed a statistician with credentials.
The mistake was to shove extraneous stuff into their report, much of which was probably written (copied?) by third parties (Singer, McKitrick, etc?)
Why in the world Wegman Said and Scott threw the social networking stuff in was beyond Eli. Why anyone took it seriously was even stranger because at the time MBH 98 and 99 were published Mann was just a postdoc. If the Bunny had been on that committee he would have asked Mr. Ed what those maps would have looked like for MM in 1999. What the maps did show was the recognition that MM earned in a short eight year stretch.
We can now engage in Climategate class fun speculation as to who is suing or threatening to sue GMU. There are some serious publishers out there. We can speculate about whether Oklahoma State ran Yasmin Said’s stuff through TurnItIn and withdrew their offer to her. Such fun. Not.
In any case, cut your losses, there are huge chunks of the report and the theses of various Wegman students that are cut and paste out of books and journal articles.
Best
Eli
Maybe that’s why North said he pretty much agreed with everything in Wegman’s report.
No doubt there is some sophisticated statistical criterion which will be able to prove conclusively “plagiarism with intent to convey the impression that the work was original”. I can see huge opportunities for this to be rolled out in textual analysis the world over, especially when defending cutting edge original intellectual property:
http://deepclimate.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/wegman-bradley-tree-rings-v20.pdf
Re: litigation perhaps he is refering to this?:
“The Washington Post has also covered this development, noting that Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinnelli’s legal pursuit of Michael Mann relies heavily on the Wegman Report. That report concludes:
We’ve asked Cuccinelli’s office for reaction to news of the GMU investigation and we’ll bring you any response we receive.”
(The first sentence of this quote appears on DeepClimate’s blog of today’s date but I’m not sure who the author was. The second sentence appears in an article of the Washington Post attributed to Rosalind Helderman. I have not verified them beyond that, if they appear elsewhere, either partially or entirely or paraphrased, I am not aware of that and in no way do I seek to misrepresent the author’s original work. I am supplying them simply as background information to inform the debate).
Eli-
I’m unaware of getting any sentences from Rabett. I skimmed your article on Wegman really quickly and mostly used USA Today for information. (That’s why I link them twice.)
My last sentence is “I guess we wait and see.” I used the search tool in firefox to search your article on Wegman (http://rabett.blogspot.com/2010/10/in-article-appearing-on-line-in-usa.html) for “wait and see” and didn’t find it. I then thought you might mean the 2nd to the last sentence “I wonder who is initiating litigation?” I searched for “initiating litigation” and didn’t find that.
So… which sentence do you think I got from Rabett? (It’s be interested to learn I might type out an exact match for one of your sentences when I was not copying! )
Out of curiosity, I did advanced search to see if I could find at rabett.blogspot.com. Seems google thinks that sentence has never, ever appeared there either.
To be a pedant,
Your last sentence is “Written by Lucia.”, which is not at Rabbett Run either.
If one were to stipulate that there was not an original thought or sentence in the entire report,and I do not, this would change the conclusion how?
.
One does not have anything to do with the other as far as I can tell.
.
Either Mann and crew are correct in their math or their math sucks. A charge of copy and paste in the report for the background material does not change the math.
.
sounds more as the detractors can not fault the message, they have to find fault with the messenger.
.
A very common political solution that.
Ed
Just read John Mashey’s pdf at Deep Climate.
Well Eli admits to being very obscure, but see the first two comment at Stop the Blogs and the very obscure comment in the post below.
On second thought don’t bother, Eli concedes the point.
Ed,
If you have ever done any science, you would recognize that there is useful mathematics/statistics and formally correct mathematics/statistics. They overlap, but they are not identical. There are many procedures which work as long as you don’t have a pathological data set. Use of such procedures upsets mathematicians, but not physicists, engineers, etc. The art of being a scientist is to recognize when such cheats work, and when they do not.
What Mann did in the MBH papers was show a useful way of combining disparate data sets. Since then it has been shown there are ways which are more formally correct HOWEVER, the result is the same.
Lucia:
There weren’t any. Maybe Eli’s version of being funny?
Nathan:
Deep Climate has an axe to grind, and admits as much. Eli obviously has an axe to grind too. That makes neither of them reliable sources of news. The whole thing is 98% concern trolling, and to boot personal attacks on people whose science you disagree with politically.
Petty childish behavior, i.e., typical faire for either blog.
If GMU comes out with a negative finding, I’ll take it seriously.
Eli:
No it’s not. The result is very different. You just make stuff up.
Carrick
Nice! Yes, don’t read it becuase you think they are naughty… Obviously they just made it all up!
It’s good to see your skepticism is working over time…
I don’t like them, they must be wrong… I don’t like them, they must be wrong… Join in the chant!
Don’t be a coward, read the detail.
Carrick
Other people have done much the same thing; combining numerous data sets to get a climate reconstruction. They DO show much the same thing.
I scanned over the Mashey pdf and to me it seems to be mostly opinion. Those cases of purported plagiarism look to be no more than giving descriptions of what Mann or whoever said they did. For the wording to not be similar would be amazing.
This bit below by Mashey may come back to haunt him if it can’t be proven.
Arrghh. Wrong brackets. Trying that quote again.
This bit below by Mashey may come back to haunt him if it can’t be proven.
Nathan,
The Massey report is 250 pages long. Perhaps you could do us a favor and point us to precisely where and how he refutes Wegman’s statistics. I think if you use quotation marks, no one will accuse you of plaigerism.
John M
It’s expained in detail at Deep Climate’s website.
I won’t summarise it for you. You should read it yourself
You can’t site a specific refutation of Wegman’s statistics?
John M
Why don’t you give us a summary of the ‘statistics’ in the Wegman Report…
john M
What I mean to say is that there is very little ‘statistics’ in the Wegman report.
Nathan:
You’re fantasizing now. I could have done as well as MBH 1998 with a synthetic series of noise..
Here’s a comparison of the correlations of various reconstructions over time (if somebody wants to see another one just speak up).
Correlations over time of various reconstructions versus Ljungqvist 2010.
I’m willing to cut the guy a break over being the first to try multiproxy, that was a new thing. But please save the BS for the compost pile. The effort was good, the result, not so much.
It’s all politics folks… nothing to see. Move along, move along.
Nathan:
Typical warmer. Makes accusations then demands that others carry their water and do their leg work for them.
/grumps
Nathan:
Typical warmer scholarship. Make up sh*t then put it in other people’s mouths.
What I said was DeepClimate isn’t a trustworthy source of information for this topic. Neither is Eli, neither are you (you aren’t even a source of information so far, just noise).
And what I said was “I’ll wait for the GMU report.” I think that’s a fair approach to take here.
Anyway most of you guys are just being a**holes here. You don’t like Wegman because of what he said, and you’re taking the opportunity to go after him, fair charges or otherwise.
Carrick
“I could have done as well as MBH 1998 with a synthetic series of noise..”
Yes, one about 1 tenth the size? We all saw how big MM’s version was… Sort of a mini hockey stick.
Carrick, what is so wrong with MBH 98 and 99?? Do they show something that none of the others do? What is so different about them? Not that much…. They all show the recent warming is the greatest in the last few hundred years – and most likely the last 2 thousand years.
The odd one out is Loehle’s reconstruction.
“I’m willing to cut the guy a break over being the first to try multiproxy, that was a new thing. ”
How very gracious of you. Yet they’ve done other’s since then, no? What does it matter that the first attempt wasn’t as good as the others? It’s what you’d expect.
Carrick
“What I said was DeepClimate isn’t a trustworthy source of information for this topic.”
Why? As I said before you don’t like what he says, so you ignore him.
“neither are you (you aren’t even a source of information so far, just noise).”
right back at you.
You have this myth that somehow you are an independent arbiter. No way Jose.
“You don’t like Wegman because of what he said, and you’re taking the opportunity to go after him, fair charges or otherwise.”
Wegman was presented as an independent statstics expert. He was none of those. He wasn’t indepedent, and he wasn’t an expert.
You like him because he’s on your ‘side’.
Remember the Wegman report only ‘discusses’ Mann 98 and 99, and only really uses MM03’s criticisms. It adds nothing new to the discussion that already took place between MM and MBH.
In the grand scheme of things the Wegman Report is an irrelevant document and offers no insight into paleoclimate reconstructions. It’s out of date and largely meaningless.
Carrick
I suggested he summarise the ‘statistics’ in the Wegman Report, becaause there is a big myth that there’s this great statistical analysis in the Wegman Report.
It doesn’t have very much statistics in it. So to claim that John Mashey doesn’t rebute the stats in the Wegman Report isn’t avery interesting claim.
Nathan,
The results presented in Section 4 and the methods described in the Appendix are “very little statistics?”
http://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2007/11/07142006_wegman_report.pdf
Also, was Gereald North hallucinating?
http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=109_house_hearings&docid=f:31362.wais
Nathan:
Nathan:
Can you read? He admits himself he is a biased source on this topic.
Whether I like him in other respects is irrelevant. If you want to hang on his every word, that’s your choice, but don’t be surprised if the rest of us wait for a more neutral source.
Can you point me to where that “big myth” is published? I think you are inventing things now. I’ve never seen anything from a credible source that suggested there was a “great statistical analysis” in it.
I admit I’ve basically ignored it since it came out.
If this is true, why a) are you wasting time and b) advocating that others waste their time on this? Seems like the GMU report will be here soon, we’ll see what they say.
Ahh, once again we are all to bow to the altar of what Nathan “finds interesting”. Wegman is so uninteresting that the entire warmer blogosphere is crawling over itself with glee because of an accusation of wrong-doing.
But back to your “little statistics”
The results presented in Section 4 and the methods related in the Appendix are “very little statistics?”
http://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2007/11/07142006_wegman_report.pdf
Also, was Gereald North hallucinating?
http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=109_house_hearings&docid=f:31362.wais
Nathan “Wegman was presented as an independent statstics expert. He was none of those. He wasn’t indepedent, and he wasn’t an expert. ”
What does one have to do to be an expert Nathan?
Carrick
You criticised me for asking John M to give us a summary of the statistics in the Wegman Report, because he asked if John Mashey rebuted it (the stats). Now you cricise me for my choice of words ‘big myth’? What kind of trivial argument is that.
“I’ve never seen anything from a credible source that suggested there was a “great statistical analysis†in it.”
So what IS in it Carrick? What is in the Wegman Report?
“He admits himself he is a biased source on this topic.”
So what? Everybody is biased. It has no necessary bearing on the quality of information.
“If you see defending Mann as a patriotic struggle.”
Well, no. I don’t see it as important either way. Especially defending MBH 98, who cares about something that is now out of date?
Zeke’s an unbiased observer here. His analysis of Ljundquist seemed fair to me:
“As for vindicating anyone, the person whose result is most in line with Ljungqvist ’10 is Moberg, though Mann’s EIV series is close.”
So, surprise surprise, the most recent work is the most ‘vindicated’.
Carrick
“What does one have to do to be an expert Nathan”
Well, you could start by doing your own work…
Sorry that should be to ‘Curious’ above
This is so funny. Cuccinelli is going on fishing expeditions that brought even SteveMc to Mann’s defence. Yet instead of keeping the high ground on this Bradley dives into the mud with his own attempt at malicious prosecution.
TimG
Bradley is concerned about plagiarism, this not malicious.
Nathan, correlation values such as the figure I showed is the best way of testing “which series agrees with which.”
The way Zeke did the comparison was wrong, as I pointed out in the other threads. What you said about Loehle is wrong too, I was simply pointing out your error.
Let’s see, who care if what you or Eli say about MBH 98 is factually wrong… because it is “now out of date”? Is that your argument?
Regarding Wegman, you can have the floor, this is too dull of a topic for me to be interested in (other than what GMU has to say).
Nathan,
I read through the ‘evidence’. There is not plagiarism by any definition of the word that I know. Bradley would have not said a word if he supported the Wegman report’s conclusions. His motivations are purely malicious.
Eli-
I guess we could speculate about who is suing GMU.
But that wasn’t my first guess based on the snippet. Since Wegman is the one who said “Some litigation is underway.†, I thought Wegman might mean he, GMU or someone he knows well are preparing to sue someone. Maybe one of Wegman’s students is contemplating a suit? Maybe a group of people accused of plagiarism and shoddy scholarship are thinking of joining together to sue Deep Climate and/or John Mashey?
I suspect we’ll read one way or another in a few weeks.
Carrick,
No, John asked for a refutation of the statistics in the Wegman report. It’s very reasonable for Nathan to ask what those statistics are. I’m curious too. As I recall, there was a summary of the general science (with, it seems, a lot of plagiarism), a riff on networks which seemed to be included purely as a prejudicial talking point, some discussion of PC’s and the decentring, and than a long ramble on various papers in the literature, many not Mann’s.
Nick, fair enough.
Nick Stokes – Section 4 has the stats and Appendix A gives background.
Nathan – Lots of people do their own work – does that make them all experts?
Nathan: “Bradley is concerned about plagiarism” – Dream on.
I am really wondering how one can write a compilation and critical report on some original (and strikingly goofy) work about annual growth of tree rings that are measured in boreal forest in order to determine ring density and correlate them with climatic signal without mentioning “annual growth”, “tree rings”, “boreal forest”, “in order”, “ring density”, “climatic signal”, “temperature”, and even without “both”, “however”, “similar”, “variations”, etc?
If Schweingruber et al. (1993) has shown “that maximum density values were strongly correlated with April-August mean temperature in trees across the entire boreal forest, from Alaska to Labrador”, how can you not mention that maximum density values are strongly correlated, and not to mention April to August (not December to March), mean temperatures, in trees across the boreal forest, from Alaska to Labrador (not is Siberia?), and that it was Schweingruber et al. who showed this, and in 1993???
C’mon people, I thought that an assessment report to politicians is never an original work, and Prof Bradley must be proud that his musings were accurately represented in the report.
But all this squirming is good. It shows that warmists have nothing else but grasp at their last straw… frr–frr–frr. Good.
Curious and Tim G
Remember Bradley is one of the co-authors of MBH 98 and other papers (he’s the ‘B’). So if Wegman has plagiarised his (Bradley’s) works and (if you look at what John Mashey writes) misrepresented that work, of course he will be concerned. Wegman is trying to say that Bradley’s work is wrong by plagiarising Bradley (poorly)… Not really good is it?
Typical. The substance of arguments must be avoided, in favor of demonizing the opposition. How droll.
Al Tekhassi
“Prof Bradley must be proud that his musings were accurately represented in the report.”
I think you’ve come to the rub here. What if they were NOT accurately represented? Would you not expect him to be a little annoyed?
Andrew_Fl
“The substance of arguments must be avoided, in favor of demonizing the opposition.”
The funny thing is that most people saying that here, are avoiding looking at the substance…
Nathan, “What if they were NOT accurately represented?”
I think they were represented accurately enough to understand that the temperature signal is heavily convoluted with moisture, nutrients, winds, and position of the particular tree relative to micro-landscape (that has fractal structure). It was presented accurately enough to imply that temperature reconstructions from tree rings is an inverse scattering problem, and as usual, an ill posed problem. It is enough for a professional physicist to recognize that given all that noise, the problem is irreversible, and only audacious ignoramuses may allocate any weight to the tea leave-grade “reconstructions”. The book of Bradley is an excellent example.
Nathan,
RIght. So you admit that Bradley’s charges are purely driven by the fact that he does not like Wegman’s report. I would call that malicious.
Yeah, not really good at all. Four years after a report investigating his work is published he alleges plagiarism based on the work of a blogger and decides to pursue the matter. You’d have thought if a report was written critiquing your work you’d be the first to read it and go through it with a toothcomb and flag up any problems? Did he do his own work? Does he get a “Nathan Expert Award”?
Here is Prof. Wegman’s resume:
http://web.archive.org/web/20060220212732/galaxy.gmu.edu/stats/faculty/wegman.resume2.htm
Looks pretty relevant to statistical issues to me and G North agreed with his findings. Bio here:
http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=11676&page=142
Meanwhile “Dr. Mashey is an easy-to-Google computer scientist.”
http://www.computerhistory.org/trustee/John,Mashey/
An accomplished man in his field but who would you back in a stats test?
Yeah, not good. Not good at all.
Nathan,
Even if Bradley’s argument of misrepresentation has merit its has nothing to do with the trumped up pilagerism charge. In fact, if Wegman did misrepresent Bradley’s work that is prima facia evidence that he did not pilagerize.
Face it, Bradley is doing the same thing that Cuccinelli is and you can either argue that both are wrong or both are justified. Which do you pick?
I made a post at Collide-a-scape (currently in moderation) about this, noticed a link to this blog post, and thought I would repeat myself here. I don’t care to delve into the issue of plagiarism itself, but I don’t mind doing some basic fact checking. Apparently nobody else has noticed this yet, but the USA Today article you link to has a rather massive exaggeration. So as I said at the other place:
“The story you link to claims ‘Mashey says his analysis shows that 35 of the 91 pages in the 2006 Wegman report are plagiarized.’ However, the link given to support this says nothing of the sort. In fact, it seems to say nothing relevant to the claim.
If you check the side-by-side comparisons in the 250 page report, it is clear this number is not correct. A count of the page numbers even mentioned in the section comes up with about 25 pages. Mind you, this is 25 pages in which plagiarized text is (claimed to be) found, not 25 pages of plagiarized text.”
Whatever one thinks about the criticisms of Wegman’s work, it is clear USA Today was sloppy.
Here’s a fair sample of Mr. Mashey’s thoughts on Dr. Wegman, from http://deepclimate.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/strange-scholarship-v1-02-exec.pdf
The Wegman Report is a “key prop of climate anti-science.” Wegman’s “real missions were: #1 claim the “hockey stick†broken and #2 discredit climate science as a whole.”
Hard to believe anyone is taking him seriously.
TimG
“In fact, if Wegman did misrepresent Bradley’s work that is prima facia evidence that he did not pilagerize.”
Funniest comment of the year.
curious #53657
OK, I re-read Sec 4 and Appendix 1. There’s no mathematics set out in Sec 4. The appendix is just elementary undergraduate theory on eogenvalues. The basic Wegman complaint here seems to be that they used eigenanalysis (diagonalisation) of ther covariance matrix instead of the “equivalent and
numerically preferred method of obtaining the principal components by finding the socalled singular-value decomposition (SVD) of the original data matrix”.
This is a really petty complaint. As they say, the methods are equivalent. They give the same answer. SVD might save a few milliseconds of computer time. There’s nothing wrong with the method Mann used.
The other preoccupation is with working out various highly artificial examples of how de-centred PCA might yield a different PC. The examples have nothing to do with dendro. What they don’t do is the obvious – rework the MBH paleo proxy data as Wahl and Amman (2006) did. They just dismissed that paper because Amman had been a student of Mann. But it’s perfectly possible for others to rework the result. Here’s the graph. Same result with centred and decentred PCA.
If Wegman did plagiarize then he deserves his knuckles wrapped, its poor form and would get you a fail on any undergraduate end of semester paper. But it would not alter the fundamental correctness or otherwise of his paper.
It is all rather unedifying.
Nick Stokes #53672:
The Executive Summary is also worth reading as it gives the background and scope for their work. Do you have a page or paragraph reference to their dismissal of WA2006 because Amman had been a student of Mann?
So if Wegman didn’t do statistics, what methodology did North agree with him on?
Re: Brandon Shollenberger ,
On page 3 of Mashey’s report, I find a bullet point that reads:
I haven’t checked whether Mashey’s 35 provided in his summary is consistent with the tally one would get by counting the specific pages he claims contain plagiarism in the body of the report, but USA Today’s numbers 35 and 91 match that bullet point. So, Mashey’s paper support USA’s reporting.
It’s true the bullet point doesn’t use the phrase “plagiarized pages”, and the report doesn’t say whole pages are a word for word copy or other whole pages. But I’m not quite sure how the phrase “a plagiarized page” is interpreted by speakers or readers. USA Today may also have interviewed Mashey; possibly he used the phrase “plagiarized pages” in a phone interview. Newspapers sometimes do that. When they do, there is no “link” to an underlying source.
But USA today’s numbers at least match a bullet point on page 3 of Mashey’s report.
Through the whole dendro history of complaint and attack, it has never risen above the level of petty, because petty is all they have got.
bugs (Comment#53677)
October 9th, 2010 at 6:47 am
Sure bugs, that’s why climate “professionals” wrote hundreds of e-mails to try to figure out how to deal with “petty” complaints, and why now, even sympathetic figures strongly urge a reform of the entire IPCC process.
One of the recommendations of the review was to make sure no more gray literature was used. That means ignoring just about all the output of McIntyre.
John M (Comment#53678) October 9th, 2010 at 7:11 am
How do you deal with petty complaints? Good question. McIntyre has an excellent track record of making a mountain out of a molehill. In fact, he is very proud of his recognition for being such an expert at it.
That is exactly what happened to Michael Mann…and climate science in general with “climategate.”
We shall see what happens with GMU. The plagiarism is obvious and I don’t really see how they have a choice. The punishment might be a slap on the wrist, but the ruling will be against Wegman or GMU will be a laughingstock. The USA Today has the story so there’s no way to sweep this under the rug.
bugs: “One of the recommendations of the review was to make sure no more gray literature was used. That means ignoring just about all the output of McIntyre.”
Just for the record, as we are on a Wegman thread, Wegman was discussing published work.
It is always interesting to note how closly the two ‘sides’ resemble each other.
And making such claims as this
If he had any real points to make, why waste time with such pettiness.
bugs: “If he had any real points to make, why waste time with such pettiness.” Quite, how apposite.
And it drives you guys crazy!
“That is exactly what happened to Michael Mann…and climate science in general with “climategate.—
What is clearly obvious between all the testosterone huffing and puffing is that NONE of the crappy “science” should have been shoved down the public’s throat yet or EVER. Michael Mann could have spoken to Steve McIntyre YEARS ago like a gentleman who was proud of his work and he did not. AND he actually blocked Steve from commenting on the blog “Real Climate”as I recall; furthering many reasonable people’s opinion that something was not quite right about “climate science” and “climate scientists”. REAL professional scientists love to discuss their work; and they absolutely want to know what others think or if they are in ERROR; no matter how small or large it may be. Holy cow, a Congressional hearing had to be arranged just to get these experts together look at/share opinion on the methods of the Hockey Stick; and Mann brought a lawyer with him to that meeting! And then we have those Climategate emails to show us even more something was very very wrong with these men. The IPCC got an F too from an independent panel too. The IPCC is made up of scientists/experts from around the whole world and they still got an F!
This whole thing is DISGUSTING and the “science” should never ever ever have entered the lives of private citizens like it has; indoctrinating our children!
Michael Crichton, may he RIP wrote this piece (I dont’ know when) http://ilfpost.org/?p=47 called “Vanishing Intellectual Diversity”
He was truly a sage. Read the whole thing!!!!
I miss the edit button!
Boris
I don’t think it’s that obvious. In examples I’ve looked at I see Wegman wrote a section called “Summary of paper X”. Then, Deep and Massey discover ‘very similar strings’. Sometimes, these long strings are things like “annual average anomalies relative to the period “1800-1900” were represented by several principle components.
The “blue” are the exact word for word strings. We are told the yellow are different words that mean the same thing. So, for example, “the period” might be a substitute for “the time span”.
But if you notice,
(a) the section is a summary that is supposed to paraphrase what X reports and it says so in the section heading. The information is not supposed to be new “unique” scholarship– it is supposed to tell you what the paper being summarized reports and do so accurately, but possibly with greater brevity.
(b)Much of blue are precise terms of art. Someone doing a summary can’t change “annual average anomalies” into “discrete measurements of absolute values measured every second”. “annual average anomalies” are always relative to something, not giving the baselines results in incomplete information.
(c) Yes, the “yellow” means the same thing. Yes. In a summary, the verbs, nouns and adjective chosen by the person summarizing will mean the same thing as the verbs, nouns and adjectives chosen by the original author.
Note: I made the sentence up as an example of the sort of thing I see in quite a few examples that fall in this class.
Are there some summaries that look like Wegman may not have tried to vary very much? I saw a few— but very few in the copious number of side by side pages. I think my style of summarizing would have varied things more.
But it seems to me I’ve seen similar levels of “variation” in summaries elsewhere, and I’m not entirely sure academics are going to jump on this. Especially not if Wegman gets some software to show this degree of similarity is extremely common in academic papers summarizing other technical papers on very specialized subjects.
I’ve never run such plagiarism software. But if I were Wegman or one of Wegman’s students, I might have purchased some and I might have already done so. If they did, I wouldn’t be especially surprised to find that by Deep and Mashey’s standards, 50% of all ‘literature surveys’ or summaries paraphrasing highly specialized work that uses terms of art or specialists jargon will appear “plagiarized”.
Liza– I’m doing stuff in the background to be able to support these extra functions.
lucia (Comment#53693) October 9th, 2010 at 8:34 am
Thanks lucia. 🙂
Wegman:
(Pre Wegman) Wikipedia:
There’s no real excuse for this. It’s Wikipedia–not even a source that should be summarized in a real piece of scholarship. And the similarities cannot be coincidental. The example is even the same.
Liza–
I set my hosting plan to guarantee 400MB memory. It looks like i do hit that at peaks. So, I’m looking to switch from using Habari software from WordPress. ( Some people suggested other hosting plans. But Dreamhost seems to give the best price for a blog that needs 400MB of memory, and I don’t see how or why running the WP software getting the number of hits and amount of conversation I do would require less memory at another hosting service. I’m pretty sure my blog draws lots of memory both owing to fairly high traffic, my traffic is heavily dominated by repeat visitors but also because I get lots of comments. The heavy number of comments, and need to serve fresh pages to repeat visitors means that caching doesn’t save me as much CPU or memory as it would for most blogs which don’t need to run the WordPress script to create an absolutely fresh page to non-regular visitors or when a comment appears. (Caching permits the blog to serves a “slightly stale” page to many visitors. It doesn’t rerun the script if the page hasn’t changed and the visitor is just a random person coming from google. That person might not see the freshest comment– but … who cares?)
Boris (Comment#53695) October 9th, 2010 at 9:07 am
I googled..those words are on an online encyclopedia
http://en.academic.ru/dic.nsf/enwiki/676664
oh the horror!
“Technical definitions
The color names for these different types of sounds are derived from a loose analogy between the spectrum of frequencies of sound wave present in the sound (as shown in the blue diagrams) and the equivalent spectrum of light wave frequencies. That is, if the sound wave pattern of “blue noise” were translated into light waves, the resulting light would be blue, and so on.”
lucia (Comment#53696) October 9th, 2010 at 9:09 am
Or I could just double check my typing before I hit submit!
Boris
It’s Wikipedia–not even a source that should be summarized in a real piece of scholarship.
So? The fact that Wikipedia might not be a real scholarship doesn’t mean that Wegman can’t accurately discuss color names for sounds.
But those two do sound very similar. It is however, unfortunate, that Deep and Massey fill the page-by-page section with mostly dubious examples.
Maybe you or someone can edit the list of claimed plagiarisms to the ones that look like they might be plagiarism? I just started at the beginning of section 11.1, read a few and… well…. The fraction of clearly not-plagiarized cases is overwhelming.
I figured if I was investigating, my first task would be print them all out, and sort into piles of “clearly not” and “maybe”. Most would be in “clearly not”, and after wards I could focus on the “maybes”.
What’s worse, is the two examples elevated to the body of the report (page 18) appear to be “clearly nots”. In his forward, Massey suggests many people aren’t going to want to read the details. Well… those who don’t will see examples of “plagiarism” that are clearly not plagiarism.
Well, yeah. A lot of websites simply copy and paste Wikipedia content. I’m not sure what your point is.
“…might not be a real scholarship” Yes, isn’t that what the IPCC got part of the “F” for?? Hmmmm.
Liza– The source for your link is Wikipedia.
lucia (Comment#53702) October 9th, 2010 at 9:20 am
Is it? Can we tell who wrote the definition in Wikipedia ?
Boris–
I used my search tool on the Massey PDF. I wanted to find details. Is that example in Massey’s pdf?
I dunno if I am looking at the right thing but it seems to me the definitions on that wiki page come from ” Federal Standard 1037C, which is essentially a dictionary of technical terms promulgated by the United States government”
Boris
Does it matter? Scholars can cite the New York Times. They can cite stories that do not list the author. Citing newspaper articles isn’t even rare.
I don’t know where you dream up with these rules of what academics can or can’t cite. Editing guidelines exist to permit almost anything to be cited in scholarly work. The reason they exist is scholarly work needs a great deal of flexibility to permit a scholar to use his judgement about whose work to draw on. If he draws on it, he then needs to give proper credit.
I think you are confusing self-imposed rules the IPCC has created for their summaries with some sort of academy wide rule for citation. The academy wide rules of scholarship are sufficiently flexible to permit citing nearly anything, and could certainly permit someone to cite Wikipedia or even summarize it.
If your point was that Wegman wrote that, got the text from Wikipedia and did not cite it– then that would be a point. But the notion that,for some reason, a scholar could never read the wikipedia page, notice it happens to have a good summary, and cite wikipedia is wrong. A scholar writing about a well known topic (color names for sounds) can
(a) look for any convenient source and read it.
(b) Using his knowledge of the field, recognize that it is correct.
(c) Summarize from that and cite it.
This is permitted in academic papers and reports to congress. You might not get away with it in an academic paper because a reviewer might whine and suggest you draw from his, or his buddies textbook. Or, they might think you should follow the rule of citing nothing for well known stuff — like the convention for color names. But there is no actual rule against doing a-c.
Oh, and there is no rule (d) that says, you can do a-c “unless the source is wikipedia”.
lucia (Comment#53707) October 9th, 2010 at 9:39 am
Oops lucia, you mixed up my questions with Boris’. I wanted to know where the information on the wiki page came from in the first place because you found that my link quoted wiki as well …looks like maybe an official guide book of definitions from the government is where those words originate??
… and I was thinking about the IPCC who relied heavily on articles and essays written by people who belong to environmental groups..not published papers in “official” science journals; and the IPCC did not make that clear enough “to the public” and the independent review found fault with it.. .but what ever. 🙂 I agree what you said about “scholarly work”…
…all this testosterone is giving me a headache! 😉
There are a number of cases in which strings of 40 or more words are identical:
eg, “It is clear that the primary limitations of large-scale proxy-based reconstruction in past centuries, both temporally and spatially, reside in the increasingly sparse nature of available proxy networks available to provide reliable, past climate information.”
and “post-1850 warming was more dramatic at higher latitudes relative to lower latitudes due to larger positive feedbacks at high latitudes. The annual mean temperature trends at higher latitudes are seen to be greater than the hemispheric trends themselves. In contrast, the tropical band shows less change than the entire Northern Hemisphere series.” (for this one, two parentheticals and the original reference were deleted)
and “a particularly important role. Just as in MBH98, the calibration procedure for these 12 indicators invokes two assumptions: first, that a linear relationship exists between proxy climate indicators and some combination of large-scale temperature patterns and second, that patterns of surface temperature in the past can be suitably described in terms of some linear combinations of the dominant present-day surface temperature patterns. The calibration/verification statistics for reconstructions based on the 12 indicators are somewhat degraded compared to those for the post CE 1400 period”
With quotes this long, there is no excuse to not actually place quotes, or block-quotes. I agree that in this kind of summary piece, you expect a lot of similar text and a number of quotes, but as it stands, I think it would be very hard to argue that it wasn’t plagiarism.
Honestly, though, the plagiarism doesn’t bother me as much as the weight given by the community to what was a fairly ad-hoc and low-quality review and analysis. The plagiarism may be a symptom of that.
Alas, in my opinion the Mashey document could have used a “highlights” document to pull out the 4 or 5 worst examples… as it is, a giant 200 page document full of nitpicks and maybes and stuff that is suggestive but not proof doesn’t look as convincing as a 5 pager which really nails it.
Honestly, though, the plagiarism doesn’t bother me as much as the weight given by the community to what was a fairly ad-hoc and low-quality review and analysis.
.
Which community gave any weight to Wegman?
M.
That would have gone in my “maybe” pile for further consideration.
At a minimum, I’d say that the Wegman report should have been more careful in how they used quoting. It would have been better if they’d followed the practice of writing things like
Mann et al conclude
(Or do whatever it is one does when dropping out a large block of text but inserting a few words to paraphrase the drop out. Legal blogs do it all the time, but I would have to consult look up the convention.)
However, I’m not entirely sure what a committee will judge about the accusation of academic dishonesty when they see that entire block placed in the context of page 73 of the Wegman report, which is the second page of a subsection called “Summary of Global Temperature Patterns in Past Centuries: An Interactive
Presentation by Michael Mann, Ed Gille, Raymond Bradley et al. (2000)”.
As such it is clear the section is not intended to be “original work” by Wegman. The two pages that follow that sub-title heading are quite obviously a summary of the Mann paper. The intended purpose of that section is to inform Congress what that specific Mann paper says; the purpose is not to interpret the Mann paper, add to the Man paper or comment on it’s value.
So, a reader would not expect anything in that section to be Wegman’s evaluation or opinion of the paper. He’s just telling congress what the paper says.
The section as a while quite clearly repeatedly cites Mann–both in the subsection title and the numerous paragraphs. Statements like “Mann et al. also examined…” are repeated sufficiently that I don’t think any reader would be deceived into believing Wegman and co-authors are claiming anything in that section are ideas or thoughts original to themselves.
In the end, I suspect we might get a ruling that is a bit similar to the one described in this article on a 2006 plagiarism investigation ( http://www.studentpress.org/acp/trends/~law1206college.html )
It quite clear that in the example you give, Wegman does not represent Mann’s work as his own. So, using the pre-2005 rules, at least the AHA (American Historical Association) might very well rule the way it did in 2005. That ruling may have been controversial but it was the ruling, and relied on application of their written definition of what plagiarism is.
With respect to the AHA post 2005 ruling, it seems to me the question would be, Did Wegman “borrowing, without sufficient attribution, of another person’s distinctive and significant research findings or interpretations.”
I don’t know what others would think, but with respect to the example you give, I don’t think Wegman borrowed and research findings or interpretations at all. He summarized findings and interpretations while clearly presenting them as Mann’s findings. In doing so, he may have used some pretty sloppy editorial practices — but no one reading that section would be lead to believe hat Wegman is presenting Mann’s findings or interpretations as Wegman’s findings or interpretations.
Oddly, as much as people are looking at word counts, it’s not clear that that is the main issue with plagiarism as defined by academic bodies. (I admit it is often is a cause for concern with student papers and similarity of phrases is often used as evidence of suspected plagiarism. It’s certainly evidence of poor understanding of how to quote and paraphrase.)
So…. in the end, I’m not sure that any plagiarism is, as Boris, claims “clear”. I’m not sure what GMU will conclude.
But if there are historians in the evaluation committee, they may very well tend to apply the standards the way the AHA has in the past– and that looks like “not plagiarism!”
Broberg: Which community gave any weight to Wegman?
I shouldn’t ask questions I can answer myself!
This list of authors seems hauntingly familiar.
Good for an October scare! 😀
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=10506241080024277477&as_sdt=4005&sciodt=4000&hl=en
This is how desperate they are? Plagiarism accustations, mostly covering background information? I thought this story was dead long-ago.
What a bunch of putzes.
I hope they find somebody to do a clearer presentation than Mashey. What a mess.
Peter D. Tillman (Comment#53669) October 8th, 2010 at 11:20 pm
Here’s a fair sample of Mr. Mashey’s thoughts on Dr. Wegman, from http://deepclimate.files.wordp…..2-exec.pdf
The Wegman Report is a “key prop of climate anti-science.†Wegman’s “real missions were: #1 claim the “hockey stick†broken and #2 discredit climate science as a whole.â€
Hard to believe anyone is taking him seriously.
############
ya I pretty much stopped reading him after that.
My experience with wegman.
1. skimmed it.
My reaction. The social network stuff was uninteresting. Just putting numbers on what was already obvious. the existence of a social network does not make the math wrong. it can explain WHY bad math persists, but the real argument is about the math and talk about a social network is irrelevant until the math issue is settled. i didnt read his review of any of the science, what would be the point when I can read the article myself, look at the code, look at the data.
SteveMosher
Yes. It’s a mess.
Oh– I’m curious about something I want to look into, but I want to know the time line. Do you know dates (as in day/month/year) for the following:
1) When was Wegman appointed and given instructions to create a panel.
2) When did work writing the report start?
3) Were copy-editors, graduate students etc. recruited to assist?
4) When were any drafts of the report circulated to anyone (including co-authors, copy-editors, congressman, people working for congressman etc.?)
I know the report itself was published in July 2006.
Any readers know?
dorlomin (Comment#53673) October 9th, 2010 at 4:54 am
If Wegman did plagiarize then he deserves his knuckles wrapped, its poor form and would get you a fail on any undergraduate end of semester paper.
It’s rather more than poor form, it will usually get an undergraduate suspended for a year, second offense expelled! I’ve sat in disciplinary hearings for student plagiarism cases and the Wegman report is full of examples that would get a student kicked out. Charges like those facing Wegman are very serious for a professor when he teaches students who are bound by an Honor Code not to plagiarize. Judging by the theses of Wegman’s grad students it appears that there might have been a culture of sloppy scholarship there and this whole business could cost someone their doctorate. Stephen Ambrose suffered at the end of his career from the result of his plagiarism (basically writing too many books at the height of his fame with sloppy staff work and incredibly inventing interviews with Eisenhower when writing his biography).
Lucia,
Yes, if GMU uses the AHA revised definition of plagiarism, Wegman might be vindicated. However, here is the definition they now have:
Now, GMU could redefine their own definition of plagiarism, but I don’t think they would because it might cause big trouble when their accreditation comes up again.
As for Wikipedia as a source: you do realize that Wikipedia can be changed at any time by anyone with internet access. This means that it cannot be trusted and you must verify every piece of information that you get there. Since you have to verify it, just cite the source that verifies Wiki is correct. Never cite Wikipedia in a scholarly work. I’d be shocked if that wasn’t taught in every Freshman comp class in America.
Of course if Wikipedia is somehow your subject, then it would be appropriate to cite.
Even Wikipedia knows it shouldn’t be cited:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Academic_use
Then again, maybe we shouldn’t trust that 🙂
And what is “proper acknowledgement”? That’s where this particular case become unclear. Of the examples I examined in Mashey’s tome, most clearly ackowledge the source material. In fact, the headings specifically of the sections tell you the sections summarize someone elses material, cite them, and that person is re-cited several times in the section.
Are some of the paragraphs sloppy in form? Yes. I said that. But does that make the material rise to “without proper acknowledgment”? The acknowledgment is sufficient to make it clear that Mann’s work and ideas are Manns, Bradley’s are Bradley’s and so on.
I’m not suggesting GMU might apply a new definition of plagiarism. I’m saying they could be using the exact same definition the American Historical Society applied in a case of Steven Oats. Read the article: http://www.studentpress.org/acp/trends/~law1206college.html .
You are confused on several points:
First: The issue of “scholarly”. Not all work by academics is “scholarly”. Reports to Congress are not necessarily “Scholarly”. The Wegman report is a report to congress. Is it scholarly? Not really. So, even if there was a “rule” about not citing wikipedia in a scholarly work, it wouldn’t apply to Wegman’s report to congress.
Second: You have a very narrow view of “citation”.
As a general rule of thumb, it would be unwise for a Freshman to cite wikipedia as a source of information for something they do not know because it could be incorrect. (For that matter, scholars often try to find multiple sources– but this has nothing to do with the whole wikipedia issue.)
But there is no rule that says a person who recognizes the Navier Stokes equations cannot
a) Read Wikipedia’s page.
b) Notice the page is correct.
c) Cite the wikipedia page in a document the academic prepares for Congress.
An academic is perfectly free to cite wikipedia knowing it is easier for the Congressman to access in the time frame when the report is provided to them. There is no rule that says the academic must pretend the found the equations in a text book cited by Wikipedia and cite that, thereby causing inconvenience to readers who will be required to order that specific book from the library.
In this sense, the purpose of the citation is less to support the expert’s claim that the navier stokes equations have some particular formulation, but the expert’s citation acts as an stamp that indicates that, in this case, in the expert’s opinion, Wikipedia happens to be correct and the reader may go there for further information. This sort of citation appears in text books ( which are sort of scholarly) or information scholars might compile for nonspecialists like the public or well… congress.
Third: Some scholars could, hypothetically, study the phenomena of wikipedia itself, describing the process, the level of accuracy and so on. Clearly, in such a scholarly work, one would be allowed to include passages from Wikipedia and cite them. (Edit– Sorry, I see you admit this. 🙁 Opps!)
So this “rule” of yours, and it’s application to Wegman is silly. If a Freshman doing research relied on Wikipedia only, and cited nothing else, I’d tell him he’s going to get a very bad grade. But that doesn’t mean that there is a “rule” that scholars can “never cite” wikipedia. There isn’t even a “rule” that you can’t cite wikipedia in scholarly work.
This only shows that wikipedia can often be wrong. 🙂
Except, I think you are misinterpreting. Not, what the page you link actually says
“May not” does not mean the same thing as “will not”, nor does the advice in Wikipedia mean that “no one will ever, under any circumstances think wikipedia can be cited.
Note they also say “Remember that any encyclopedia…” So, wikipedia does not differ from other encyclopedias as far as verification goes. Scholars sometimes cite encyclopedias for the same reasons they sometimes cite wikipedia.
Wikipedia also says “Use your judgment. Remember that all sources have to be evaluated.”
The fact is that sometimes you can cite wikipedia. When doing so, you need to understand when you can and can’t cite it. It is highly unlikely a faculty member will accept wikipedia as an authoritative “source” of facts. But this doesn’t mean the same faculty member can not cite wikipedia when, owing to their own specialized knowledge, the know the fact that happens to appear in wikipedia is correct.
George Mason University Honor System and Code
Emphasis mine.
Students’ Honor Code / GMU
http://mason.gmu.edu/~montecin/plagiarism.htm
curious #53674,
The dismissal of Amman was in the written response to questions of Rep Stupak:
here (10Mb). He said:
The Wahl and Ammann paper came to our attention relatively late in our deliberations, but was considered by us. Some immediate thoughts we had on Wahl and Ammann was that Dr. Mann lists himself as a Ph.D. coadvisor to Dr. Ammann on his resume. As I testified in the second hearing, the work of Dr. Ammann can hardly be thought to be an unbiased independent report. It would have been more convincing had this paper been written by a totally independent authority, but alas this is not the case.
Despite this, he does go on to talk more about the paper, but in meta terms. He doesn’t deal with the fact that the W&A paper recalculated the results with the criticisms corrected, and got basically the same answer. He does explain (as I had forgotten) why they did not embark on this obvious course of actions themselves:
“Our report does not include the recalculation of MBH98 and MBH99. We were not asked nor were we funded to do this.”
The Wegman was not a cheap or low-profile exercise. That seems a feeble excuse for not carrying out such an obvious step. And when it was put in front of them, they refused to consider it on its merits in the report.
“We were not asked”! So they only did what Barton’s office asked them to.
Ron, You are not that stupid… your honor code is for students writing papers, not professors writing reports for congress… and if you read the Wegman report, there is an astonishing amount of attribution… quite a different story from what the Deep Climate article and the Bradley complaint claim.
Nick… wasn’t it done pro-bono? Or now that the Deep Climate claims of plagairism are being found to be false accusations, you are changing the subject…
“Nick… wasn’t it done pro-bono?”
Well, I doubt that they wrote it at home in their ‘jamas. It was funded at least by GMU. And congressional hearings aren’t cheap.
But they had time to recalculate the results of McI and McK. And the results of MBH were the supposed topic of the report.
Nick, then it’s proof that you don’t have the first clu of what you’re talking about… you didn’t even read the report… let alone the first paragraph where it states, “This Ad Hoc Committee has
worked pro bono, has received no compensation, and has no financial interest in the outcome of the report.”
No, Mike, the committee may have received no compensation. But Wegman and his students are funded by GMU – that’s not in doubt. And there’s no declaration that no GMu resources were used.
I have no issue with them doing it as GMU statisticians – just with the claim that they were too poor to do a proper analysis.
And do you believe they got no help or staffer time from Barton’s office?
MikeC, I suspect that you are correct in your sentiment. It is likely that Wegman’s report to Congress on a matter of science will be held to a lower ethical standard than the writings of GMU undergraduates for their homework.
ruuuuuuuun forrest ruuuuuuun
Yeah, Nick, we’re all as stoopid as you and the druggies want us to be… no compensation means no compensation… no maaaah-knee…. zilch denero…. natha, nothing, zip… and until you come up with a reciept or a bill, then shove your bogus claims, assumptions and conspiracy theories (along with deep climate’s false accusations) and blow your nose on uncle tamino’s shirt tail.
Don’t twist the subject, Ron… unless you are as ridiculous as Nick and didn’t even read paragraph one of the Wegman report… what the University tells students it must do in class is far different than what a Professor must do when volunteering his time writing a report for Congress… although there is plenty of attribution in the report including listing Bradley at least 9 times in the bio… not to mention that the content of the report is clearly a summary of other people’s work, not Wegman’s.
The purpose of the code for students is to discourage cheating.
MikeC/Ron–
I don’t see how anyone is even suggesting Wegman be held to a different standard from a student.
The difficulties are that a student is very rarely asked to write a summary of a specific paper. If someone assigned this to a student, and the student their summary in the fashion Wegman did, I would expect some significant downgrades for poor formatting, not understanding the best methods of using quotes etc. But I would not expect anyone to summaries done in the fashion we find in Wegman plagiarism. At least for the summaries I read, it’s very clear Wegman credited people for their ideas, and results of research.
There are problems with the formalisms dictating best practice in paraphrasing vs. quoting. But there is no evidence that sources are not attributed. They are attributed.
I don’t think many posters how egregious Wegman’s conduct is in a academic context – I regularly deal with plagiarism by students in a different academic context.
As Ron excerpt indicates, including a source in a bibliography is definitely not regarded as sufficient. The source must be cited where it is used. Absence of the citation isn’t the only problem – shallow rewording of material from a cited source is pretty common, but its still regarded as plagiarism but much less serious.
If shown the text taken from Bradley by a student, I would have told they must cite Bradley and in addition they should either quote Bradley verbatim – the best choice here but perhaps embarrassing for Wegman – or explain what is relevant/important from the source in this context.
And I’d give the same advice when refereeing a paper – not that I ever seen anything like this in a paper I’ve refereed.
Also I saw DC found text in Wegman et al. from a book by de Nooy et al which doesn’t even get included in Wegman et al.’s bibliography and that the same book is plagiarized in a journal article by Said, Wegmen et al.: http://deepclimate.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/said-et-al-social-networks1.pdf
Rest assured that I will fully accept GMUs findings in this matter. If they find the report reasonable cited sources and didn’t engage in any other misbehavior, that’ll be good enough for me as far as that topic goes. Won’t change my opinion of the report much one way or the other.
Ron–
The question of whether it is plagiarized is somewhat orthogonal to whether or not it is “good”.
Admittedly, plagiarism is a factor that makes things “not good”. But, even so, some articles would be “good” if only the author had admitted it was an honest to goodness compilation, attributing properly. Most plagiarized things end up just bad and would remain bad if you spent a little time fixing up the plagiarized bits by inserting proper citing. So, I see the two as somewhat independent of each other.
Lucia #53750
“Most plagiarized things end up just bad and would remain bad if you spent a little time fixing up the plagiarized bits by inserting proper citing.”
That’s pretty much my view of the Wegman report.
We’re pretty much on the same page here, I think.
The plagiarism, if it exists, speaks little about the accuracy/reliability/correctness of the report but speaks much more about the integrity of the author – a subject of great importance to Dr Wegman and his future but of almost no interest to me as an amatuer student of climate science.
It sounds like contrived BS to me. This was not an academic report. Student honor codes do not apply. Your view of what you want in a report to Congress is IRRELEVANT. You did not pay for this report, no one paid for this report… the man did it on a voluntary basis which makes it entirely up to him if he wants to use footnotes, quotes or a simple bio… and given that he did it for free, I am not surprised that he took the path of least resistance in citing his sources.
What is the point of this crusade? Suppression, coercion, intimidation, and revenge.
The only unexpected part of it is that it took so long.
It is exactly like the Red Button.
Ron– Sounds like we see that particular issue the same way.
Nick– Yes. I get that’s your general impression. At the same time, the GMU investigation appears to be into plagiarism and not general quality.
Ron:
If not a series of acts of intended plagiarism, it would then speak the general haste with which the report was slopped together and/or the general lack of care in its composition.
I don’t share Ron’s confidence in GMU’s investigation – they seem very slow to react to prima facie evidence of misconduct – and institutions can be reluctant to act even given convincing evidence, sometimes to their cost later.
One question is whether GMU will just investigate plagiarism from Bradley’s text which in itself probably wouldn’t warrant much action beyond an apology to Bradley, particularly if carelessness by a junior researcher can be blamed. Or if GMU will investigate all the problems that DC found in the report, papers & theses – which should see the people involved at least censured, papers retracted or rewritten, & theses rewritten (or the degree revoked) – and GMU should appoint someone to check other theses/papers in this area/group/school.
What throws more doubt on the credibility of Wegman et al. than the plagiarism , is where DC shown the meaning of Bradley’s text has been deliberately distorted. Judy Curry said Wegman et al was interesting because it was an independent unbiased analysis – the slant add to the Bradley shows this wasn’t the case.
Lucia, his paper actually doesn’t support USA Today’s number. Mashey refers to DeepClimate finding ten pages of plagiarized text, but his report never looks at those pages. While he refers to “35 pages” at least twice that I noticed (the other example being on the first page), he never says those pages are all covered in his analysis. Any time he refers to the pages looked at in his report, he clearly says “25 pages.”
My issue isn’t how USA Today described the text. My issue is they inflated the page count by 40%, apparently due to sloppiness. A quick skim of his report might make someone think it covers 35 pages, but any decent newspaper publication should catch such a basic error. Distinguishing between, “35 pages are plagiarized” and, “I show 35 pages are plagiarized” should not be hard for professional reporters.
Errors like this usually show a lack of effort. I wouldn’t have gotten away with it in high school journalism, so just how much critical thinking do you believe the writers actually exercised?
andrewt
Bradley seems to have complained. I’d hazard a guess that his complaint triggered the investigation. If so, I would imagine they’d be looking into that.
Link? I seem to recall reading all this and being utterly unconvinced by an argument that seemed to claim some text both plagiarized and distorted. But maybe I didn’t read whatever bit you are referring to.
As a follow up, I might be more forgiving of USA Today’s mistake, except for one thing. The sentence containing the mistake had a link in it. This link should have shown the support for what USA Today said. Instead, the link had absolutely nothing to do with the claim.
Making a mistake like USA Today did is bad, but falsely offering irrelevant information as supposed “evidence” is ridiculous.
I keep hearing this fruit-cup phrase of plagiarism being used when there is no evidence of plagiarism. Once again, there is no effort to steal anyone’s work because Wegman was summarizing what others had done. Next, Bradley was mentioned at least 9 times in the bibliography. He cited Bradley in his way, in a report to Congress (not one to academia or in a journal), rather than the more time consuming process of quoting, footnotes etc, and he was not paid for his work on this report. Any suggestion of plagiarism is just another vicious attack against someone who doesn’t agree with you… I guess if you can’t get away with blowing up kids then you have to try something else desperate.
Huh? Academics are expected to follow academic ethical standards no matter what the endeavor (as doctors are expected to abide by ethical standards even if they are volunteering). Frankly this is a bizarre argument that doesn’t even makes sense. And it fails to make contact with reality, where professors have been censured for plagiarizing in op-eds and other non “academic” venues.
http://chronicle.com/article/U-of-New-Hampshire/14107
Borris, The problem with your argument is that you fail to admit that Bradley was cited… 9 TIMES, just not in a way that suits your desperate strategy to make false allegations against Wegman… talk about being in denial.
Lucia here is one link
http://deepclimate.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/wegman-bradley-tree-rings.pdf
but I remember reading more from DC.
Nick Stokes (Comment#53731)
Thanks for the reference. I can’t agree with your characterisation:
“They just dismissed that paper because Amman had been a student of Mann.”
It is clear that they considered the work and formed views on it which they were prepared to articulate.
http://climateaudit.org/2007/11/06/the-wegman-and-north-reports-for-newbies/
Yarmy Rabbit thinks that writing in the third person makes Yarmy appear to be a supercilious twit, and forces Yarmy to tie Yarmyself up in ridiculous linguistic knots causing exasperated readers to give up on an unnecessarily long and insufferably twee paragraph that might have contained a cogent point buried in the pompous verbosity.
#5377, A quick google suggests that the Goudie text was published in 2009, and Bradley in 1999. So it doesn’t look to me like the problem, if there is one, is with Bradley.
curious,
Well, I disagree. If you look at the Wegman answers in the CA link, they are red herrings. Firstly he talks about whether MBH results agree with boreholes and with model results. None of this bears on the correctness of Mann’s analysis, which is what Wegman is supposed to be about. And in any case boreholes have very poor resolution, and his reference to models is just too vague. Then he says that foxtails/bristlecones are unsatisfactory. Why? Because M&M say so.
The rest seems to be related to W&A using more proxies than MBH did. This was a criticism of MBH which they corrected. No-one seems to be suggesting that W&A using 5 proxies is wrong.
So it comes back to the same thing. When W&A repeat the analysis donig things the way Wegman says Mann should have, they get the same result as Mann did. Wegman has no answer to that.
Finally he makes the ex cathedra pronouncement “A cardinal rule of statistical inference is that the method of analysis must be decided before looking at the data.” That just isn’t true. Tukey is a more eminent statistician than Wegman, and his book “Exploratory Data Analysis” is all about how to look at data to find the best way to analyze.
“Finally he makes the ex cathedra pronouncement “A cardinal rule of statistical inference is that the method of analysis must be decided before looking at the data.†That just isn’t true. Tukey is a more eminent statistician than Wegman, and his book “Exploratory Data Analysis†is all about how to look at data to find the best way to analyze.”
There are lies, damn lies and statistics.
And then there is climate science.
A scientist should have some standards! A good scientist with * high standards * states before looking at any data at the beginning of an experiment exactly what sort of result will convince them of this thing they are trying to prove; and that number/parameter/percentage/condition/etc doesn’t change. A bad scientist is one who does not do this; one who has *low standards* and is just basically shifting goal posts around to look correct. Anything and everything can be made to prove that it exists.
should have said: “Anything and everything can be made to prove that AGW exists.”
That doesn’t matter because Wegman lifted chunks of text verbatim and changed other chunks only superficially. Having sloppy in-text citations would likely not be a story at all. When you combine no in-text citations with obvious reuse of prose, it’s a slam dunk. This is all covered in first year composition courses in every college in the USA.
Borris, There you go again. You cannot get away with the false allegations of plagiarism by Deep Climate so you have to play the Johnny Cochran of climate and twist and spin the story further. Your assertions are as ridiculous as Nick “I didn’t read paragraph 1 of the report I’m criticizing” Stokes.
Dude, I realize it’s been a bad year with hide the decline and splattering school children with explosives… now the next step of desperation is creating false controversies… do yourselves a favor… get all those green scientists you have and take away their bongs and crack pipes until they invent a new way of creating energy that is cheaper than burning fossil fuels.
MikeC,
You obviously don’t know what plagiarism is and what scholars are required to do to avoid it. Wegman plagiarized. There’s no question about it in my mind and I even offered to put up $500 that a director of undergraduate writing would agree with me back when we first discussed this issue. No one took me up on the offer.
Boris, There have been numerous links to the definition of plagiarism in the various posts. It is clear that it is simply stealing another’s work and calling it your own. If scholars often bend over backwards to avoid false allegations by desperate, twisted individuals such as those making these allegations, or sue happy lawyers looking to make a buck in a dishonest fashion, then it’s irrelevant. There is no evidence that Wegman stole anyone else’s work and called it his own.
Rabett has a post which sheds some light on the ‘litigation’ mentioned by Dr Wegman. Apparently, Elsevier, which owns Academic Press and is the publisher of Bradley’s Reconstructing Climates of the Quaternary, is pursuing copyright violation issues.
If true, then to some degree, this has already spread beyond the internal investigation/inquiry of GMU. I hope that all is settled amicably. But the tone of Dr Rapp’s reply at USA Today suggests more than a little heat.
http://rabett.blogspot.com/2010/10/auditing-assessing-climate-change.html
Donald Rapp is pretty hilarious. Basically he says “I committed plagiarism 10 or 20 times. Big deal. But I’ll sue you if you claim that I committed plagiarism!”
Boris–
Right now, it looks to me like there is no plagiarism case vis-a-vis Bradley or Mann. In the “Bradley textbook case” there is either barely or no case on copying. In the extensive “evidence” Mashey show in the summary sections– not much there. Citation all around; clearly a summary. Some very sloppy practices on using quotes etc– but not represented as Wegman’s stuff.
The only convincing stuff looks like the Wikipedia social networks copying. I’ll have to look at that more tomorrow/ (I’m going to the ‘brother-in-laws place to watch football and download pant patterns for Jim. When I dieted he lost weight. He’s down to a waist size 28, which means to have any decent choice he either needs a tailor, or I gotta sew ’em. Size 30 isn’t easy to find lots of selection, but 28– well… not for grown men. So… the first set is a practice jeans pattern. I bought the denim. There are online patterns in waist size 28– yippee! 🙂 )
Anyway, one difficulty with these conversations is that Mashey, and DC provided so much “evidence” that looks bogus. Many people in comments are insisting *that* stuff looks “real”, and it just doesn’t. Then, people waste their stuff visiting pages with idiotic sounding theories of what’s plagiarized and never see the (it seems to me ) 2% of the total “evidence” that looks convincing. That’s the social networks stuff. Period. Nothing else. And that’s where– page 200 of Mashey? (I’d check the page, but I gotta go out the door or the husband will howl! 🙂 )
“It is clear that it is simply stealing another’s work and calling it your own.”
Yes, and when you copy and paste without using quotation marks then that is exactly what you are doing. Quotation marks are not optional.
Once again, Lucia, you have no idea what plagiarism is. You can’t use somebody’s words without quotation marks. You can’t even substitute synonyms as you cannot lift the same sentence structure and organization. Add to that no in-text citations and it’s an obvious case of plagiarism.
Here’s DC’s first pdf on the issue:
http://deepclimate.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/wegman-bradley-tree-rings.pdf
Wegman lightly rewrote some of the sentences. It’s clearly plagiarism. As I’ve said before, ask ANY undergraduate writing director in the country if the examples in that pdf are plagiarism. (This would be a good idea for an article if there are any journalists lurking here–send the DC examples out to 3 or 4 undergrad program directors and see what they say).
That’s just Yarmy
-Eli
A summary is when you read something and then write, in your own words, what it was about. You don’t copy and paste paragraphs, and then go about changing a word or two here or there to make it look like you read and understood the material.
I will confess that I wrote a paper in the 7th grade on a topic I had no understanding. I tried my hardest to put it into my own words, and I cited my sources, but at the end of the day I had no idea what I was writing. But I was a 7th grader and these guys are the bad-science-police appointed by Congress.
Phil. (Comment#53724) October 9th, 2010 at 1:32 pm has it right when he says
but we are moving into a very dangerous area for Wegman’s defenders, especially academics and especially academics at places with strong honor codes. By defending obvious plagiarism they are, in fact, breaking honor codes which demand that cheating always be reported. Even where the school does not have an honor code, can you see the farce where a student faces the teacher and says: But Prof., you said that cutting and pasting in a report to Congress was OK, why are you being so mean to me?
Folks, your kids read the INTERNET.
Boris is right regarding plagiarism, as I said before I’ve sat in disciplinary hearings and seen kids kicked out for stuff like this. I give a workshop to freshmen every year showing them what to avoid because like many posters here they don’t know what plagiarism is! Faculty are held to the same standard as their students, as they should be.
Boris [53818]
Does the alleged plagiarism in any way falsify the findings of the Wegman report? Because if- as you and other are more or less explicitely intimating- it does [although I don’t see how it could], then Mann et.al are trully the crooks they are: splicing someone else’s time in your graph up side down so as to bolster the argument. Now that’s plagiarizing alright. I would get off this horse if I were you. It’s got no legs.
Phil dot and other protectors of academic integrity, any comments on the citations McIntyre came up with here?:
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2010/copygate-vs-skepticgate-new-words-coined/
Eli:
This is only about maintaining the highest ethical and academic standards, isn’t it, Eli? I’m completely sure that DeepClimate has gone through the IPCC to look for potential plagiarisms as well, or if not, he and you will completely support anybody who does.
Or is it only ok to smear people who you disagree with politically?
It seems I recall a student of Dr Josh Halpern, Professor of Chemistry at Howard, say that he used to just copy portions of articles from the Internet and pass them out in class. I don’t know if that is plagiarism but it sure is stealing someone’s material for financial gain.
Wahl and Ammann may well end up being the big losers in this. The concepts of Wahl and Ammann 2007 were plagiarized from Mann’s reply to our 2004 Nature submission (and the corresponding realclimate posts.) Unlike Wegman, who cited Bradley six times in five pages, Wahl and Ammann didn’t acknowledge Mann’s priority.
IN addition, a plagiarism finding requires that there was a representation of originality. I haven’t seen anyone argue this element of the allegation yet and it seems to me that it would be hard to show that Wegman purported to be original in his description of proxies. On the other hand, Wahl and Ammann did hold themselves out as being original.
No, plagiarism doesn’t challenge the results of the Wegman report. It’s just embarrassing scholarly work that could cost him his job (especially considering the plagiarism alleged n dissertations he supervised).
Wegman’s report was nonsense on the social networks and didn’t make a difference to the results of the hockey stick papers.
This plagiarism offends me as an academic far more than as a supporter of the AGW consensus.
As I noted in the other thread, Steve, originality was claimed in the language. That’s what you do when you write something.
It’s pretty amazing that so many skeptics have no handle on college freshman stuff. I guess it’s been a while.
No it’s not plagiarism. It’s usually fine, but can be a problem if too much is used or the prof knew well in advance that he/she was going to be using that article. Also, if the article is available in the library or in full text form from an online database that the university subscribes to, there is no issue.
OK, so what do we have here…Wahl and Ammann stole Mann’s work… but they probably will never hear about it because Mann will never file a complaint against his pals… and they probably didn’t refrence Mann since Mann has a huge credibility problem.
Then we have Bradley accusing Wegman of stealing his material because Wegman didn’t cite him in a way that Bradley wanted… not to mention that some of that allegedly stolen material may have actually been stolen by Bradley in the first place.
… this is getting good… I need more popcorn
Boris,
I don’t think “too much” is a good legal term.
Here are Harvard’s guidelines:
http://www.hks.harvard.edu/cmo/facindex.htm
Hard to see how a class handout cannot be “mutiple copies”, and I hope you and other academics follow the Harvard guidelines.
Your “too much” argument once again raises the “a little bit pregnant” issue.
But even worse than stealing and unauthorized copying of someone elses material was Eli’s peverted post directed at a minor child.
John M,
Harvard has a pretty strict copy guideline, which is fine. Fair use does allow for handouts that are copyrighted. And yes, there is a lot of grey area in those guidelines. For instance, the material copied should be brief and not infringe on the marketplace. So you can’t use handouts instead of buying a journal or textbook.
This is OT, but here’s one example of guidelines from MIddlebury College: http://www.middlebury.edu/about/handbook/lis/copyright
Boris,
Had a response that appears to be hung up in moderation.
The crux of the comment was, if I were you, I’d follow Harvard’s guidelines.
They have a better law school.
That’s a fair point :).
The whole Hockey Stick thing is the most tedious example of petty points scoring in the whole climate debate.
This ‘copygate’ adds a grand sum of zero to the persuit of scientific knoweldge.
Got a better reconstruction than the ones out there? Cool show me.
Think the ones out their need big error bars, cool reproduce them with bigger error bars.
dolormin:
I agree of course:
It is completely irrelevant whether or not the temperature was as warm or slighty warmer 1000-years ago. The issue isn’t even the warming that’s happened till today. The issue is what is the impact on climate, ecology and economy from future warming driven by current and future anthropogenic activity.
Nothing in the past is going to help much on this, unless you can find other events driven by CO2 release for which the geological record is well enough known to actually give us some insight into future climate change.
Carrick: “It is completely irrelevant whether or not the temperature was as warm or slighty warmer 1000-years ago. ”
That’s not true. Yes it is relevant. C02 is always being added to the system. And we have C02 data from the geologic record.
The only “impact” caused by “anthropogenic activity” you can claim “current” and that you know for sure in regards to temperature or climate impact, is the UHI and stuff like deforestation, etc.
Don’t go pointing to the ice either.
Ice either melts or grows on this planet.
Re: Boris,
It’s almost never plagiarism to copy things and pass the out in class. To become plagiarism, the person copying would have to claim they were the author. I’ve never seen any faculty member do this (though it could conceivably happen.)
When handing out copies in class, the instructor might be violating copyright which is different.
Plagiarism is purely an ethics issue. Copyright is a legal issue. It’s possible to plagiarize and not violate copyright; it’s possible to violate copyright and not plagiarize. Both things happen all the time.
Liza, I’m referring to CO2 as a forcing rather than a feedback.
Yes CO2 levels change in response to temperature changes, but we’re referring to the unforced release of CO2 into the atmosphere. There’s not many geologically relevant examples of that particular say’-nar-ee-oh.
Lucia:
Deliberate plagiarism is an ethics issue, inadvertent plagiarism (e.g.., sloppy editing) is more of an issue of scholarship…or the lack of it in this case.
Carrick–
Well…if there are sufficient numbers of signs to credit the original source, I tend to count sloppy editing as sloppy editing. I know others may see this differently, but I don’t think sloppy editing deserves the same sorts of sanctions as intentional plagiarism.
Lucia:
I agree with this, and I would say that’s the biggest issue facing the committee at GMU, which is deciding the author’s original intent.
In some cases, like the Ward Churchill case, evidence of malfeasance is over-whelming (copying others paintings, reproducing their writings whole cloth).
In cases like this, even if we agree that plagiarism occurred (and I think there are at least paragraphs in this document that most of us would were plagiarized), it would require a psychic to figure out whether the authors of the document were being deceitful as opposed to just exercising poor authoring skills.
Carrick writes:
Completely irrelevant? That must be hyperbole. If you look back through the history of the ‘consensus’ around a 4-6C warming for a doubling of CO2 due to anthropogenic causes, the proxy reconstructions was the sine qua non of the argument.
This is something that Judith Curry has touched on recently. The climate models have too many parameters. So many that their in-sample performance does not really serve as useful estimate of their out-of-sample (future) accuracy.
So what we had was a pretty weak argument in the form a base-rate neglect, aka the Prosecutors Fallacy. The climate models on their own couldn’t really make a convincing case that the 20th century warming was predominately anthropogenic.
Then come the proxy reconstructions showing that the 20th century warmth was unprecedented in the last 600 or 1000 yrs. That’s a big piece of additional _independent_ information. Now given that the warming is unprecedented and that the climate models show X, what’s the likelihood the warming is predominately anthropogenic?
Its makes (and made) a big difference. More than anything, they are what shifted scientific opinion and presumption.
Lauren:
Why do you suppose that?
If we are discussing radiative forcing by CO2, and the effects of a potential doubling in CO2, then how exactly does natural forcings during the MWP relate to that?
It’s the physics of CO2 radiative forcings that governs the arguments here (and associated water vapor feedback), not instrumental temperature record, and certainly not a highly uncertain paleo-temperature reconstruction.
The “unprecedented” argument OTH is BS regardless of who spouts it. It’s certainly not “unprecedented” in magnitude, or rate of change of temperature or any other measure by which one could make any empirical generalization from.
A further development cropped up (I should have caught it much earlier), so I figured I should post an update here. I discussed it here: http://www.collide-a-scape.com/2010/10/08/skepticgate/comment-page-4/#comment-20627
USA Today printed, “Mashey says his analysis shows that 35 of the 91 pages in the 2006 Wegman report are plagiarized (with some of the text taken from a book, Paleoclimatology: Reconstructing Climates of the Quaternary, by Raymond Bradley of the University of Massachusetts) and contain erroneous citations of data, as well.” As I mentioned earlier, Mashey’s report did not analyze 35 papers. It only analyzed 30 (Mashey corrected me on this number).
What I recently realized is the part of the quote in parenthesis is also wrong. Mashey’s report never claims plagiarism of that book. Given the fact that issue is apparently what has caused the university to launch an investigation, and may be responsible for legal action, this is a huge error. Worse yet, apparently nobody, not even Mashey, noticed it. Not even after having their attention drawn to it. To quote myself:
“This all started because of charges of plagiarism, yet apparently nobody can be bothered to care that credit for work is being falsely attributed. My head hurts.”
Congratulations, Brandon. You are currently holding first place in the grasping-at-straws competition.
Neven, if you disagree with anything I said, feel free to post something meaningful. Your current response makes no sense, and it actually emphasizes the issue I raised.
Brandon,
Neven is right – you are raising a ridiculous technicality. But it fails completely as a technicality.
USAT did not say Mashey’s report analysed 35 pages, it says “his analysis shows that…”. And as John said to you, 30 pages were analysed in the report, and 10 on DC’s website – with overlap making 35.
And on Bradley, USAT did not say Bradley’s book was plagiarized; it said text was taken from it, which it was.
As I mentioned earlier, Mashey’s report did not analyze 35 papers. It only analyzed 30
.
I have a hard time understanding what you are trying to say here. Papers? Of the 91 pages in the Wegman Report, Mashey found 30 containing plagiarisms. DC found 10 pages, of which 5 overlap with the 30 pages Mashey found. In total you have 35 of 91 pages of the WR that contain plagiarized material. That’s my take on it.
.
Brandon, even if what you say is correct it doesn’t mean anything whatsoever for the matter at hand. If you have a nitpicking beef with USAtoday you should take your problem to them.
On topic:
.
Lucia, I’ve read some interesting opinions. The first one by Michael Tobis:
.
“But it has been shown time and again that the statistical flaws with MBH are not crucial to reaching the conclusions. The lack of collaboration between climatologists and statisticians is something that a great deal could and should be written about in the context of the institutional incapacity of American science to support interdisciplinarry collaboration, but this is just a tiny instance. Once better methods were applied, and better data were collected, the same results emerged, showing that the intuitions of the original researchers were sound. Twelve years have passed. A methodological flaw in a single 1998 paper is not a matter for a congressional investigation. This question has not deserved any attention.
(…)
I have not followed the matter in enough detail to vouch for John’s version. But I will with confidence stand up for John Mashey as a sane, intelligent, moderate, perceptive, competent and responsible human being. His accusations carry some considerable weight with me.”
.
The second one is by Eduardo Zorita on Klimazwiebel:
.
“However, from today’s perspective, the Wegman report appears to me as quite insubstantial, focused on unimportant aspects of the Mann-Bradley-Hughes reconstruction method, and – most worryingly, having been written by a statistician – not mentioning the real problems affecting this and other reconstruction methods, and that have been (re)-discovered later, not by statisticians, but by humble climate scientist. In some sense the Wegman report reminds me of the recent manuscript by McShane and Wyner, more focused on politically sensitive issues that on real scientific ones. In essence, the Wegman report, as the first part of the McShane and Wyner paper, indicated that the un-centered principal component analysis applied to some sets of proxies used by MBH was incorrect, and that it could lead to an artificial ‘flattening’ of the reconstructed past temperatures. Although this mistake was correctly pointed out, it bears small relevance for paleoclimate reconstructions. The big problems lie elsewhere: in the tendency of virtually all methods to underestimate past variability. This was completely missed by Wegman at that time.”
Plagiarists are scum.
It’s very interesting that the university has decided to proceed and make everything public.
Plagiarism is theft and those who plagiarise should be made an example of and hung out to dry.
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
First, obviously I said “papers” instead of “pages.” Unfortunately, spell checkers can’t catch all mistakes.
Second, your defense is ridiculous Nick Stokes and Neven. I did not raise the issue of how many pages are said to contain plagiarism. The number 35 has been accepted. The question is whether or not Mashey’s analysis claims to show 35 pages of plagiarism. It does not. That other sources combined with his report allow one to reach 35 pages does not justify attributing the analysis to his report (which is being discussed, specifically). Your defense here would require Mashey be showing five pages of plagiarism in some secret part of his analysis, which by definition cannot show anything.
Third, you are full of it Nick Stokes. When USA Today said, “35 of the 91 pages in the 2006 Wegman report are plagiarized (with some of the text taken from a book),” it obviously is saying the text taken from the book was plagiarized. Moreover, this is completely irrelevant. I said nothing about the validity of the charges. I merely pointed out USA Today is giving credit to Mashey for making them in his report, even though he didn’t do so.
Finally, I am baffled by the notion this issue is just meaningless nitpicking. USA Today says, “Mashey says his analysis shows…” When I pointed the article was wrong, Mashey responded by not repudiating it. This means we are stuck with the possibilities that either USA Today has misrepresented Mashey’s work, or Mashey has misrepresented it. Either way, credit is being given falsely.
Are you seriously saying it doesn’t matter if the person making charges of plagiarism is receiving credit for work he didn’t do?
Brandon, let’s agree that we disagree. I wish you luck in your endeavours to bring justice to the hugely flawed USAtoday article.
.
OK, back to the Wegman Report. Question: Is there anyone here who seriously believes, with everything that is coming to light, that it is an “independent,impartial, expert” report by a team of “eminent” statisticians, like it was repeatedly presented to Congress?
Neven, I will “agree that we disagree” in that I will agree you have implicitly insulted me, falsely acted like you responded to my criticisms, and effectively refused to address the issue. You aren’t obliged to discuss the topic, so it is perfectly acceptable if we leave the situation at that.
For anyone else, I have a question. If this “doesn’t matter,” what does matter? Where do we draw the line?
In that case, Brandon, I will agree that you are acting very silly.
Lucia
As an (now ex-)editor I can say that this:
“Well…if there are sufficient numbers of signs to credit the original source, I tend to count sloppy editing as sloppy editing.”
Is not an accurate description. It’s sloppy authorship. It is the author’s responsibility to ensure things are appropriately referenced. An editor (who isn’t the author) won’t know if something that isn’t referenced, should be.
Looks like Elsevier are getting involved too…
Everything happens for a reason. That’s science. We may always know the reason, but there is always a reason. You talk as if things just happen.
“If you look back through the history of the ‘consensus’ around a 4-6C warming for a doubling of CO2 due to anthropogenic causes…”
The consensus is 2-4.5 degrees C.
“Yes CO2 levels change in response to temperature changes, but we’re referring to the unforced release of CO2 into the atmosphere. There’s not many geologically relevant examples of that particular say’-nar-ee-oh.”
Carrick you are making stuff up again. Stop it! “not many” ? You don’t know anything of the sort what so ever about the past or even right now. Get out of the lab and into the field.
Right now, Mammoth Mountain California, volcanically active; there is so much Co2 just seeping out of the ground that the trees are dying. They call it a “tree kill” area. The ski slopes this year where open until July too because of so much snow.
I just went to the La Brea tar pits, down town Los Angeles, CA and I saw the C02 and methane gas bubbling up out of the tar with my own eyes.
You are painfully trying to support your belief with sweeping assumptions. And don’t get me started about the massive things we don’t know about like the sun and clouds- that warmers just brush it all away as if it’s nothing. I just read this article yesterday:
“Global warming theory in chaos after report finds increased solar activity may COOL the Earth:
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1318425/Global-warming-theory-chaos-Increased-solar-activity-COOL-Earth.html?ITO=1490#ixzz123Em2EJs
I like how the article has to say this is “fuel for the skeptics” and the author of the paper has to say no it isn’t.
‘It may suggest that we don’t know that much about the Sun. It casts no aspersions at all upon the climate models.’
May suggest? LMAO All that at the end about climate models and AGW is just hand waving.
Carrick: “It’s the physics of CO2 radiative forcings that governs the arguments here…” It may govern the argument but you have no evidence it governs the planet and climate like you say it does. All you have computer model of an incomplete Earth…and Sun!! Clouds too…on infinity.
OK, back to the Wegman Report. Question: Is there anyone here who seriously believes, with everything that is coming to light, that it is an “independent,impartial, expert†report by a team of “eminent†statisticians, like it was repeatedly presented to Congress?
Good. So quantify the amount. How does that quantity compare to the amount of CO2 we are putting in the atmosphere? The amount that it is increasing by each year?
bugs (Comment#53914) October 11th, 2010 at 5:47 am
All that from you; who believes hot and cold extreme weather events would occur equally if humans weren’t messing with the atmosphere.
bugs (Comment#53920) October 11th, 2010 at 6:22 am
“Good. So quantify the amount. How does that quantity compare to the amount of CO2 we are putting in the atmosphere? The amount that it is increasing by each year?”
That’s NOT THE POINT. The point is that C02 is always being added to the system whether humans do it or not. The point is you can’t quantify the amount of CO2 at Mammoth mountain or La Brea, or hundreds of other places on Earth, a thousand years ago. He can’t say “There’s not many geologically relevant examples of that particular” he doesn’t know and neither do you. Not to mention the geologic record shows that even when C02 concentrations in the atmosphere were higher then today or equal as today it still got cold.
http://thegwpf.org/ipcc-news.html
IPCC News:
Hal Lewis: My Resignation From The American Physical Society
Friday, 08 October 2010 17:19
“the global warming scam…It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. “
That’s NOT THE POINT. The point is that C02 is always being added to the system whether humans do it or not.
You can count it.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5 etc.
If you want to find out how much is being added then unleash the awesome power of mathematics.
The Co2 that human industry releases into the atmosphere can be counted.
It can be measured.
The amount that volcanoes release every year can be counted.
It can be measured too.
You can compare the two numbers.
We no longer have to stare in awe at a volcanic eruption and go “Ooooh, that looks impressive. That’s a very big thing.”
Scientists can actually measure it.
That’s what they do. They go around measuring things.
All the volcanoes in the world don’t hold a candle to human emissions.
Humans dominate. There’s no contest.
Check out the USGS.
They looked specifically at this very issue.
I think the Warmers have made a PR mistake here.
They are shouting “plagiarism!” when they should continue to shout the “Global Warming” slogan that has worked soooo well.
It was just starting to work really good.
They should be making more and more dramatic squiggly line drawings, from the unverifiable sets of numbers they generate, so people can actually experience the intense Global Warming when they look at pictures.
And please run with that blowing up children video idea. You should have went to it sooner.
Andrew
Re: Neven,
I think this observation by Tobis is both silly and wrong.
The way Congress works is powerful congressman heading committees get to decide what is a “matter for congressional investigation.” Lots of congressional investigations amount to mostly hot air, but congressman know they can get the news media to cover something by having an investigation and getting someone to write a report that is then presented to Congress.
What is true is this: Many matters investigated by congress don’t deserve much public or media attention. That said, the public pays attention to lots of things. So?
I”m not sure why you are posting a Tobis’ comment assuring us that Mashey’s is sane here: No one has suggested Mashey is insane. I also don’t undertsand why you are again bringing up the point that Tobis seems to advocate deciding what is correct based on his liking the person who reported it. Tobis’s method of deciding things are right based on his not informing himself and relying on his “coherence” networks is one of the reasons many people don’t consider Tobis’s evaluation of the quality of evidence even remotely useful.
Certainly, having read Mashey , I’m not going to replace my judgement about matters with Tobis’s judgment particularly as Tobis tells us “I have not followed the matter in enough detail ” and tells us his judgement is pretty much based on the fact that he likes and admires Mashey. I think the Mashey tome is a disorganized mess. I think the tome contains numerous examples of “not plagiarism” represented as “plagiarism”.
As I already said, I think when a motivated reader finally gets to page 118, they will find an example of plagiarism that looks like plagiarism to me.
Do you really want to focus the discussion on some broad defense of Mashey as a person, or whether his report is a disorganized mess? That will only force responses where I spend time pointing out that the few meaningful bits and examples are hidden inside a vast sea of irrelevancies. The reader wishing to find the slightest amount of evidence for the major accusations is force to slog through the body the document which highlights tons of examples of “not plagiarism”. (These examples include the unconvincing argument that Wegman plagiarized Bradley. ) The reader is also required to wade through all sorts of distracting irrelevancies.
If you really want to discuss the quality of the Mashey document as a document… well… I’m willing. It’s a mess.
======
On to the Eduardo quote: I think a lot of eduardo zorita and I think he wrote a splendid article.
But I’m not sure what point you are trying to make by quoting that bit here. The part of eduardo’s post relevant to the accusations of plagiarism or academic dishonesty is contained in bits you omitted from your quote. These are:
To me, Eduardo seems to see the accusation of plagiarism of Bradley’s book the way I do, and the way Carrick seems to. He seems unsympathetic to DC, Mashey’s and Bradley’s complaints of plagiarism of Bradley’s book.
Does this seem different to you? If you like, I could email eduardo and ask him if I’ve misunderstood this point.
But I would also repeat that in my opinion, the fact that a reader of Mashey’s report must slog through unconvincing “evidence” like the Bradley examples is one of the things that makes it a mess. All those unconvincing examples make the full case less convincing overall. (This is not to say someone can’t patiently spend time putting all the examples in a pile and go through and place them in piles of “not plagiarism”, “maybe”. And then later, focus on the “maybe” pile. But it takes a lot of patience. And that means as a case for plagiarism, the Mashey document is a mess.)
“Cedric Katesby (Comment#53924) October 11th, 2010 at 7:08 am”
That has nothing to do with what I said to Carrick about his false statements.
“All the volcanoes in the world don’t hold a candle to human emissions.” So what? You don’t know if they did in the past which was the point ( and all volcanoes on this planet are not being monitored like you think they are and new vents are being found every year..just found some we didn’t know about on the floor of the sea btw! ) or if humans emissions matter like you think they do. In the past it still got cold or warm despite whatever amount of C02 was in the atmosphere-concentrations thousands of times higher.
And you are both just arguing about 100ppm and an alleged fraction of one degree rise of “global average temperature” anyway.
Lucia
It doesn’t matter if Mashey’s report is disorganised or not, the investigation will do their own work. It won’t be based on Mashey’s report.
It’s not clear if it was Mashey’s Report that actually convinced them to do a formal investigation, would it not more likely have been caused by some formal complaint?
Nathan, you are fight to doubt Mashey’s report was the cause for an investigation. After Deepclimate made some posts accusing Wegman of plagiarism, Bradley filed a complaint. The entire thing predated Mashey’s report by quite a while.
Brandon
Yeah, I know. And Deep Climate seemed to accuse Donald Rapp at the same time, but DR threatened legal action (or so I believe) and DC apologised… Over at Rabbet Run it sounds like Donald Rapp is getting drawn into the legal battle again. Also sounds like Elsevier (the publisher of Bradley’s book) are also getting involved.
This is great news. The APS now has one less wacko conspiracy theorist among its membership.
bugs:
Don’t joke.
Liza doesn’t quantify anything. She thinks her hand waving has the same scientific standings as quantitative analyses.
Boris (Comment#53917):
“The consensus is 2-4.5 degrees C.”
Who is in this “consensus”?
And who is not?
Nathan:
Wonder what they think about self-plagiarism and copyright violations on the part of Bradley himself?
Boris (Comment#53931) October 11th, 2010 at 8:14 am
Yes physicists are okay only if they believe what you do (even though I bet their education is way higher then yours) and unless you approve of them. Why don’t you start issuing armbands so you can identify these *certain* wackos faster? Of course the gang you belong to never allows “conspiracy” wackos into it..not!
I bet none of you read the Crichton article I shared earlier!
http://ilfpost.org/?p=47
Boris (Comment#53931):
“This is great news. The APS now has one less wacko conspiracy theorist among its membership.”
or, one could look at the man’s record and CV and think this is a shame that a learned body is losing somebody with skills, knowledge and perspective who , through engagement, could help them develop more informed and fully rounded views. Sort of working towards a consensus I guess.
Re: Andrew_KY ,
I think you are probably wrong. The only way this could be a bad PR move is if GMU’s findings said the accusations were ridiculous. I don’t think they are going to say that. I think a large fraction are clearly “not plagiarism”. I think the Bradley book complaint doesn’t amount to that. I think the Social Network stuff…. very bad.
I don’t see any reason why the GMU committee would ignore the social network stuff, so I anticipate some sort of negative finding. PR wise, that’s great for the people who want to minimize the substantive content of Wegman.
That content is either correct/meaningful/important or not. The alleged (or real) plagiarism is sort of independent of that. But most of the public isn’t going to diving into statistics in any detail. So, as a PR move, the plagiarism complaint is one of the few not-stupid things the group you call “warmers” has done in years.
“This is great news. The APS now has one less wacko conspiracy theorist among its membership”
Boris,
You mean there are more? 😉
Andrew
Carrick (Comment#53932) October 11th, 2010 at 8:19 am
I am not hand waving you are with your sweeping assumptions. If you can’t see that, then your opinion is even less useful then I thought. Go ahead and google the question “how many volcanoes are on earth” and see what answer you get. I’ll tell you what it is: “we don’t know”. The same thing I told you about your false statements.
Nathan (Comment#53928) October 11th, 2010 at 7:48 am
Lucia
It doesn’t matter if Mashey’s report is disorganised or not, the investigation will do their own work. It won’t be based on Mashey’s report.
It’s not clear if it was Mashey’s Report that actually convinced them to do a formal investigation, would it not more likely have been caused by some formal complaint?
Most likely the GMU investigation will start off by running the report through ‘Turnitin’ or similar. Then assemble a report based on that.
“lucia (Comment#53937)
October 11th, 2010 at 8:29 am
Re: Andrew_KY ,
I think the Warmers have made a PR mistake here.
I think you are probably wrong
Oh yeah? Let’s arm-wrestle to see who wins. 😛
Well, I might agree it’s a “not-stupid” PR move, but it’s also prolly quite ineffective if the goal is to create or retain more Global Warming Believers, because no one cares about plagiarism for more than 5 seconds except for the people involved. So in that sense it’s Not-Stupid But Also Not-Effective. Still a mistake.
Andrew
Michael Tobis:
Michael has shown again and again that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. In terms of a scientific result, MBH98 is simply wrong. You can quibble as to why that is, but it has been totally contradicted by any modern temperature reconstruction out there, over that same interval, Mohberg, 05, Lvundqvist’10 and yes even Mann’08 (EIV). Even Mann’s 2008 redo of the CPS method (a variant of which was used in his 1998 paper) was judged by Mann to be inferior to the EIV method.
So we’re left with “Wrong Method + Wrong Correct + Infinite Number of Defenders willing to Shill for Mann = WTF Science”.
LOL, typo in my equation. Try again, softened a bit, since it’s a generic result:
lucia, Andrew – a lot will depend on how GMU write up their decision. Press release journalism is the order of the day and that could be written to give good or bad press to either side regardless of findings.
“or, one could look at the man’s record and CV and think this is a shame that a learned body is losing somebody with skills, knowledge and perspective who , through engagement, could help them develop more informed and fully rounded views. Sort of working towards a consensus I guess.”
If he thinks AGW is a huge fraud, he cannot be of any use. They don’t put truthers on the 9/11 commission.
Nathan
Doesn’t matter in what sense or context. I can think of at least 3 contexts where we can discuss the Massey report.
* Mosher said it was a mess– using a single sentence. I agreed it’s a mess– in a single sentence. Some people seem to dislike the fact that we’ve made this observation and wrote defenses suggesting it’s not a messy– the defenses were more than one sentence. If they want to discuss the fact of it’s messiness… well, that can be discussed. In the context of that conversation, it’s messiness “matters” and will be discussed.
* As a document released on the web and that will be glanced at by memebers of the general public making up their own mind, the “messiness” matters. The fact that an individual looking through has to slog through a bunch of “not plagiarism” examples to find the ones that are evidence, and the fact that the “not plagiarism” ones are highlighted “matters” to the impression people get reading the thing. It also affects arguments that are posted.
In my opinion, the fact that the Mashey document is a mess (as are many of the Deep Climate posts) is part of the reason many of the people advocating that there is plagiarism are posting the bad examples. This is convincing many who aren’t inclined to go through the 250 pages of Mashey-messiness to conclude that there is nothing here, here.
This “matters”.
* With respect to the GMU investigation: If it’s a real investigation, they will go through all Wegman report using formal tools. They may use the messy massey report– or not. Either way, the fact that the Mashey report is a mess won’t matter because the committee members are going to look at evidence themselves and make up their own minds about the accusation.
In this regard, the messiness of the Mashey report doesn’t “matter” because GMU isn’t using it at all. That is to say: The report itself doesn’t matter, so obviously the fact that it’s a mess doesn’t matter.
Out of curiosity: Do you really want to discuss the messiness of the report? ‘Cuz it’s a mess. But you are right: In some sense, it’s messiness doesn’t “matter” because in some sense, the report doesn’t “matter”
Boris (Comment#53946) October 11th, 2010 at 8:44 am
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm
nuff said!
I’m really interested in your conspiracy theories, Liza, please continue. Extra points if you can somehow add in George Soros and the Tides Foundation.
Liza:
I’ve learned long ago you are actually incapable of learning anything knew, but just for the record, my comments are based on hundreds of research papers on radiative science and other associated science.
My comment about the apparent geological uniqueness of the current CO2 release event, which could double the Earth’s CO2 atmospheric concentration over 350-years (counting 1850 to 2100, assuming no amelioration) is I believe valid.
You simply undermine what little credibility you have left by brining up silly counter examples like globally insignificant CO2 releases by volcanos (they account for less than 1% of the annual CO2 emissions).
For an exercise, why don’t you go back and do a back-of-the-envelope calculation on the CO2 release from Mammoth Mountain, CA.
BTW, the tree death is related to CO2 in the soil. This results from the fact that CO2 is heavier than air, and tends to congregate in low-lying areas, where it gets absorbed into the ground. Once there, it interferes with the tree roots ability to absorb O2, resulting in their suffocation.
(The heavier than air nature of CO2 resulted in the tragic deaths near Lake Nyos in Africa when there was a release of CO2 from the lake.)
Boris (Comment#53946):
“If he thinks AGW is a huge fraud, he cannot be of any use.”: Unless he could justify and support his views of course.
…and all volcanoes on this planet are not being monitored like you think they are and new vents are being found every year..just found some we didn’t know about on the floor of the sea btw!…
No.
There are no magic, super-secret volcanoes.
When science finds a volcano, they can count it.
It vents Co2?
They can count that too.
And no, you don’t have to monitor every single volcano to figure out how much volcanic activity is pumping out Co2, any more than you have to monitor every single car or factory.
There are easier ways.
Look it up.
USGS.
Volcanic activity in the past?
Yeah, they can figure that stuff out too.
It’s called science.
We know a lot about how volcanos work.
They are not angry hills.
Re: Andrew_KY ,
Don’t think you’d get the advantage. I’ve been pumping iron. I am now a 5’4″, 135lb woman of steel. . .
Cedric Katesby
They aren’t? I found this blog post with the title isnt-volcano-just-angry-hill
I also found a yahoo answers page:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100503215425AAIHaNy
Cedric Katesby (Comment#53953) October 11th, 2010 at 9:24 am
One more time. That’s not the point! Try to wrap your brain around this. The point was Carrick said the past and whether it was warmer or colder doesn’t matter.That is not true, and ONE reason is because C02 is ALWAYS being added to the system; whether it was a thousands years ago or more or not.
Stop fixating on volcanoes. THAT WAS JUST ONE EXAMPLE. Wild fires on Earth could have burned for months or even years at a time in the past; over vast areas of land all over the world at the same time even, from lightning strikes. Wooly Mammoths can’t call the fire department!
The point is, Carrick can’t say “there’s not many geologically relevant examples of that particular” or say the “past doesn’t matter”. That is just BS. That is arm waving and behaving like a good AGW believer should. Like Dr. Mann said “we’ve got to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period”.
If they burned simultaneously all over the world, wouldn’t they run out of fuel? Prairie fires will generally burn out eventually. Even large ones.
Mammoth Mountain isn’t angry yet. Its all peaceful and people play in the snow and live all around it. It is just sweating C02 quietly through the soil; so much so in some places the trees can’t live.
lucia (Comment#53957) October 11th, 2010 at 9:58 am
Look. Take a fire like the one that just happened in Russia and imagine that happening in several other places on Earth…like the mountain fires we just had in southern California in the last couple of years. Burning for weeks or months at because no one is putting them out being normal!
“Prairie fires will generally burn out eventually. Even large ones.”
Did I imply otherwise? No I didn’t. I just said Mammoths can’t call the fire department. A
Nature bounces back fast. Some species of pine have cones that will only activate when they are touched by fire!
If you guys can’t see/feel or imagine the things nature can do on its own…I give up!
Liza–
If you mean there could be several relatively small (i.e. multi-county area) fires simultaneously in many parts of the world, sure. But your use of the word “vast” read like you were describing entire continents engulfed in fire simultaneously. “Vast” fires — which I would take to mean the area larger than the portion of the lower 48 west of the Mississippi river are engulfed simultaneously– cannot burn for months or years. The fire would run out of fuel and so extinguish itself.
Of course several one-tenth-vast fires that might cover multiple county sized areas in different regions of the earth at any one time. Different areas could burn in different years. I bet this is pretty frequent and quantitative estimates of CO2 from natural sources vs. those from man already account for this relatively common occurrence.
Stop fixating on volcanoes. THAT WAS JUST ONE EXAMPLE.
An example that doesn’t happen to help you at all.
It’s dumb.
It’s just a meme.
We know about volcanos.
They’ve been factored in.
Have been for a long time.
There’s a whole branch of science devoted to it.
It’s called vulcanology.
The USGS employs vulcanologists.
They know about volcanos.
So when science deniers gibber about “But…but what about the volcanoes??” smart people can just go to the USGS directly and find out about how volcanos are measured and accounted for.
No big secret.
Wild fires on Earth could have burned for months or even years at a time in the past…
Yeah, but there’s this thing.
It’s called science.
It’s based upon observations and experiments and counting and measuring things.
Giant wild fires scouring the earth would leave behind evidence that can be detected and measured.
There’s no need to guess or wildly speculate.
Just investigate. Do the work that science demands.
In the past it still got cold or warm…
Yes but scientists know that.
Duh.
It’s not enought to say “It got warm” or “It got cold”.
The idea is to find out why at one time the Earth got cold and by how much.
Same deal for when the Earth gets hot.
If there were two periods that the Earth got hot/cold then you’d want to find out if the mechanism responsible was the same or…different.
That’s what scientists do.
There’s a whole branch of science devoted to it.
It’s called paleoclimatology.
They investigate this stuff.
…despite whatever amount of C02 was in the atmosphere-concentrations thousands of times higher.
No, no, no.
There is no “whatever amount” about it.
You can count Co2. You can measure it.
However many times it was at whatever time in the Earth’s history; you can count it.
There’s no need to guess.
It’s not magic. It’s science.
Scientists have a good understanding of what happened in the Earth’s past. That doesn’t mean that they have stopped researching. Yet it does mean that comparing the past to the present and figuring what made things tick temperature-wise way back when has led all the scientific communities on the planet to one inevitable conclusion: human industry is dramatically changing the climate.
Not sun-spots.
Not volcanoes.
Not clouds.
Not “something else”.
All other possibilites have been patiently and rigorously considered and none of them explain what’s going on now.
The only realistic conclusion is that human activity is responsible this time around.
This is bad.
No other contenders are showing up on the horizion.
We’re the only show in town,
Volcanos are indeed big, huge, awesome things that pump out unbelievably massive amounts of Co2.
Yet put them all together and they still don’t have even a significant fraction of the output that human industry pumps out.
Industry dominates completely.
It’s all about us.
“Giant wild fires scouring the earth would leave behind evidence that can be detected and measured.”
No they would not. Not on such small time scales!
You don’t know what you are talking about; you should be quiet and learn. You and Carrick and the rest of you who play with models need to get out of your head and out in the real world. Take a geology course or four so you stop making false statements.
How many thousands of years and thousands fires did it take for those pine trees to evolve so that their cones only respond to fire? Hmmm? It must have mattered!
liza:
Certainly this must hve been self-referential.
Get back to us when you are putting numbers on paper, and comparing orders of magnitude.
I’ve never seen anybody who is more full of words and less full of facts simultaneously.
Liza, get back on topic… the issue is Bradley falsely accusing someone of stealing the work that he stole from someone else…
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2010/copygate-vs-skepticgate-new-words-coined/#comments
… comment 53771
MikeC (Comment#53968) October 11th, 2010 at 1:09 pm
Liza, get back on topic… the issue is Bradley falsely accusing someone of stealing the work that he stole from someone else…
No you’ve just been fooled by SMcI not dating the work and putting the more recent one first, why would he do that I wonder?
Phil… I see your vague claims, back it up with something please
OK, back to the Wegman Report. Is there anyone here who seriously believes, with everything that is coming to light, that it is an “independent,impartial, expert†report by a team of “eminent†statisticians, like it was repeatedly presented to Congress?
Phil:
One is a plagiarism of the other.
Even if Bradley is author on both, it’s still plagiarism.
Off topic, but hilarious. Watt’s on the APS guy resigning:
“This is an important moment in science history. I would describe it as a letter on the scale of Martin Luther, nailing his 95 theses to the Wittenburg church door. It is worthy of repeating this letter in entirety on every blog that discusses science..”
Two important questions:
1. How is Denial Depot going to parody this? It seems too crazy to parody.
2. Can I look forward to more hilarity from Anthony Watts in the future?
Boris [53976]
The terms “denial” and “dernier” are so, oh so, yesterday. The Bradley “plagiarization” fishing expidition attempting to smear Wegman [I noted your crocodile tears pretending to be concerned about his academic reputation] and the findings that were the beginning of the end of the Hockey Stick, and OT Mann’s monumental moan in the Washington Post, are all manifestations of deep dispair at the realization that the alarmists and their crusading “scientists” lost not just the plot but also the war.
Mann must be a very scared man indeed, and politically AGW/ACC is stone dead.
Carrick (Comment#53964) October 11th, 2010 at 12:18 pm
Your statements way up thread were not true. And I told you exactly why. Get over it.
How many thousands of years and thousands fires did it take for pine trees to evolve so that their cones only respond to fire? I bet you didn’t even know such things. To ignore that question which I asked to make my point and to HELP YOU ; plus not even finding that question interesting; shows me further still what caliper of “scientists” I am conversing with here. Sheesh.
MikeC (Comment#53968) October 11th, 2010 at 1:09 pm
Yessir! 😉
tetris (Comment#53979) October 11th, 2010 at 2:10 pm
Exactly.
Liza, I’ll repeat myself. You have no flipping clue, and you prove it every time you post 1000-word comments with zero actual facts in them. Smary posts may work with your social crowd, but sorry, you’re not fooling anybody here. Certainly not me.
There is a reality, and you’re having trouble finding it with both hands.
And of course I know about certain pine tree cones needing fire in order to germinate (Lodgepole pines being an example). Most other species don’t (Eastern White Pine being one). You didn’t state that, but of course we expect you to sputter that you knew it (probably in all caps) when your error is pointed out to you.
But this is pure silliness to dwell on here, it has absolutely nothing to do with comparable releases of CO2 compared to the current anthropogenic-CO2 release. Absolutely nothing.
Lucia
“In this regard, the messiness of the Mashey report doesn’t “matter†because GMU isn’t using it at all. That is to say: The report itself doesn’t matter, so obviously the fact that it’s a mess doesn’t matter.
Out of curiosity: Do you really want to discuss the messiness of the report? ‘Cuz it’s a mess. But you are right: In some sense, it’s messiness doesn’t “matter†because in some sense, the report doesn’t “matter—
Yes, the report is a mess, looks like a ‘train of thought’ in style.
But it doesn’t matter, because GMU won’t use it. It won’t form the basis of any investigation.
Carrick (Comment#53998) October 11th, 2010 at 5:17 pm
You said it “the past doesn’t matter”. You back up your claims! The whole argument from you is that a warming like never before due to C02 is occurring. But the paleo temperature data shows that in fact it’s been at least this warm before a thousand years ago. And even warmer the further back you go in the record and C02 concentrations were lower and/or comparable to today because we have C02 data. It got warm AND colder under these conditions too
C02 is always being added to the system and taken away too. That is fact. I showed you this and you failed to considered it when making your false statement. You said “nothing compares to today as far as adding to the system”. YOU DO NOT KNOW THIS. I showed you how much you don’t know about volcanoes. I gave you a real example.. How the heck do you know about volcanoes in the past or if they matter or not? You can’t. And you can’t get away with this falsehood by demanding how much they contribute to the system “now” either. You do not know if volcanoes or any other natural source added 100ppm to the system in the recent past and took it away; all the time naturally. You do not know. Your statements are false.
You are only fooling the already convinced.
Liza needs to think about where plants GET CO2 from, and what they do with it…
Nathan (Comment#54003) October 11th, 2010 at 5:41 pm
Liza needs to think about where plants GET CO2 from, and what they do with it…
Now you want to change the subject and talk about the carbon cycle now? Straw man argument!
Liza could learn to honestly quote what other people say too.
The statement “nothing compares to today as far as adding to the system” was made up by you. So it’s irrelevant whether I “KNOW” this and not germane to my original comment.
Which I’m not a mind reader on, but here’s as close as I can come up with:
So I never claimed that there weren’t comparable releases of CO2 (as a rapid forcing). In fact all I said was if you want to compare climate change events, you need to find “other events driven by CO2 release”.
This is a fair and reasonable summary of the science. If Liza wants to show us examples of wildfires that e.g. doubled atmospheric CO2, that would be a great place to start.
Liza
I am sorry. I can’t discuss things with irrational people.
You were talking about all the CO2 produced by fires… But where did the Plants get their carbon from to produce the CO2?
Fires are only a source of large amounts of CO2 when the plants are not replaced. In the ‘olden days’, before agriculture, after the big fires the plants would grow back, absorbing that CO2 back into their bodies to build themselves. It was a cycle, so there was no net gain from fires… Carbon cycle is not a strawman.
Carrick you said ““there’s not many geologically relevant examples of that particular—
Are you taking that back now?
Nathan (Comment#54008) October 11th, 2010 at 6:10 pm
I wasn’t just talking about “all the C02 produced fires”.
“In the ‘olden days’, before agriculture, after the big fires the plants would grow back, absorbing that CO2 back into their bodies to build themselves. It was a cycle, so there was no net gain from fires…”
How long does a full grown pine tree take to grow or be replaced? A whole forest takes how long to return exactly as full and dense as it was before? Is that amount of time comparable to the timescale called the “Industrial Period” you are drooling overw? Wait, or is it just since 1980?? I forget which temperature chart you guys stare at now.
Like I said C02 is always being put into the system. And 20 volcanoes on Earth erupt every single day in the present. And you don’t know how active or how many they were in the past when all those trees were burning. /sarc.
(The carbon cycle has nothing to do with the argument of whether C02 forces the climate to warm; or IGNORING the geological record, the paleo climate data and the C02 data we have for the past. Straw man.)
Liza:
No, since it was in reference to this:
If you want to show us a grass fire where atmospheric CO2 doubled, go for it.
Carrick (Comment#54013) October 11th, 2010 at 7:32 pm
Yeah: “My comment about the apparent geological uniqueness of the current CO2 release event”
That’s what you believe. I have to look at the past and figure it out but you don’t have to. All you have to do is wave your hand and say it doesn’t matter if the Earth got warm or cold before and this century is an outlier. (and we see now you believe C02 had no role in this at all! ) Even though the Earth was already warming from the last Ice Age overall; and warmed again in the very very recent past; The Little Ice Age-the start of your “uniqueness” phase.
But I really don’t have to do all that much work. Hundreds and hundreds and more scientists already have. In fact the Earth is C02 deprived right now according to the geologic record they have built for our understanding of this planet. And funny, without their work you wouldn’t have even known the climate on Earth could change anyway. Sheesh.
And as Tamara said in the earlier Physicist topic when we were arguing all this before:
“The current CO2 levels are not outside the true range of historical variability (even a doubling is not outstanding).”
“Fossil fuels account for only a fraction of the total amount of CO2 (much less greenhouse gases) currently in the atmosphere. Volcanic activity, meteor strikes, fires, methane from de-glaciated peat bogs, increases in atmospheric water vapor all could have contributed to dramatic changes over shorter time frames than what we can see from climate graphs.
Basically, we cannot rule out the possibility that the planet experiences frequent century or millenial scale changes of a few degrees magnitude, without an overall disruption to the climate system. We have a hard enough time getting good proxy reconstructions for the last 1000 years.”
Liza, once again, if you have a specific event where CO2 level changed as a forcing that would be useful.
Pages and pages of rhetoric with no substantiation is just meaningless.
Because Liza seems a bit slow, let me amend this comment: “if you have a specific event where CO2 level changed as a forcing in a comparable way to the current anthropogenic CO2 release event that would be useful”.
“Comparable way” means something on the order of doubling in 350 years.
If you can’t understand why that’s important, you can’t play.
Liza
“How long does a full grown pine tree take to grow or be replaced?”
About 50 years? Most of the CO2 take up is early in a trees life (or planst in general) as they get older they come closer to neutral in terms of CO2 take up.
“A whole forest takes how long to return exactly as full and dense as it was before? ”
Well as I pointed out above it’s early in the llife of the plants that they use up more CO2 than they produce… So not that long.
“Like I said C02 is always being put into the system.”
Just as it is constantly being removed via ocean trenchs (or simply buried on the ocean floor).
I think what you’re missing here is a basic understanding of the carbon cycle. Undeerstanding the carbon cycle would really help you get a handle on the volume of material involved; so in this case the relative proportion of CO2 produced by volcanoes.
By the way, have you looked at the United States Geological Survey web page, because they have an excellent summary of the perspective of geology (as a science) on climate change and the amount of CO2 from volcanoes.
Re: Boris,
Great Boris. Encourage the conspiracy theories! Can people bring in the Koch brother too? Like this quote from Eli’s “Stop the Blogs”
😉
Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence.
I understand plenty and I don’t find the CARTOON planet you base your opinions on Neven and Carrick in any way compelling. You are just piling on with your straw man argument because I nailed your false statements.
You can not even imagine a planet where fires burned easily because all the water was locked in ice causing drought or one where volcanoes were more active; a planet where we can’t even count how many volcanoes there really are; where there were herds and herds of giant beasts roaming the land and lush vegetations; . You can not get out of your computer lab and see the real world. You are taking advantage of the data resolution problem. You know we can’t see timescales that small and at the same time demand I show them to you. We can’t see how long it takes from a peak to a trough so you just ignore them altogether.
Just watched a show on TV this weekend. Two scientists digging around a glacier found blackened, mushy, whole remains of plants that were thousands and thousands of years old. They looked just like the plants in my yard after the last couple of winters we’ve had in So. Cal when the thermometer hit 0C degrees every night and morning. They didn’t grow back!!! They died. All this happened to my garden in your supposed “unique warming period”. Let’s not forget the people and cattle freezing in South America this winter. And the frozen lizards and pelicans in Florida either. So you can’t even imagine weather in the past too! lol
It doesn’t matter if the past was warm or cold? Yeah right.
C02 is always being added and taken away (I SAID THAT BEFORE YOU TWO DID) It still GOT WARM when CO2 concentrations were lower. And it gets cold when CO2 concentrations are your idea of “high” too.
Liza
All the water locked in ice? When I lived in Richland, Wa, the risk of wild fire was greatest during the late summer in wet years. Absent irrigation, in dry years, there was nothing to burn. I do find it difficult to imagine vast continent spanning fires if the earth was a frozen snowball and looked like Antarctica from pole to equator to pole. I also find it difficult to imagine herds of giant beasts roaming the land and feasting on lush vegetation growing on this snowball. Whether the planet is warm or cold, I also have trouble imagining them feasting on lush vegetation on a planet covered by countless constantly erupting volcanoes spilling vegetation killing over most of the surface.
Do you mean something else? Because, yes, I have trouble imagining what you seem to be describing could ever really happen. I might enjoy watching the movie though. . .
Oh please lucia. Are you really trying to be disingenuous? My one and only example of a volcano was Mammoth Mountain. Did I say it was any thing like you describe? And the tar pits -you forgot about them. Both quietly seeping those evil gases into the air all this time and it’s getting under your skin now? LOL North America covered down to the middle in 3 miles high thick ice would not contribute to droughts in places like Africa, South America? I am sure you could imagine it but that Northern Hemisphere bias getting in your way. Holy cow.
Liza
I honestly don’t know what case you are trying to make.
You could try to quantify the possible amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere by situation that are both real and remotely possible.
But you don’t.
Then you criticize people for lack of imagination, and describe a bunch of things that might seem to be made possible by special effects in some science fiction movie.
Of course that mile high ice might contribute to droughts somewhere. Although, we still have liquid water oceans, it’s not quite clear that we wouldn’t see some currently dry areas become moist.
But, you are suggesting that expansion of dry areas must increase fire risk. Even if mile high ice caused drought somewhere, do you think fires could rage very long in a terrain that looked like this:
Can you imagine herds of large animals grazing over vast stretches of that terrain?
To have either, you need some rain that permits vegetation. That’s why the steppe like regions in Washington state are more fire prone in wet years, when grass and tumbleweeds grow as a result of spring and early summer rain. In dry years, there is nothing to burn.
The Sahara was green just 5,000 yrs ago Lucia. And scientists believe it looks like that now because of a shift in the earth’s orbit. And believe it or not the Sahara is large but only one portion of that continent.
http://hol.sagepub.com/content/17/2/183.abstract
This paper/research is just one example of droughts caused by just The Little Ice Age (not the big ice age) that I googled in about two seconds.
Good grief. There is no basis for time and space I can relate to you all to have any kind of discussion. You have a completely different one in your head then I do; and it is very wrong. Play on google earth and get a healthy perspective on size and area and study the geologic record for a good healthy perspective of time!
Liza
Yes. And so what does this say of your theory about wild fires induced by expansion of drought in Africa?
I’m sure we do. I don’t think anyone understands what point you think you are trying to make about wild fires, expansion of drought and how that might relate to anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
Lucia:
She won’t do that because of both a) she can’t (lacks the know-how) and b) realizes that anyway it would undercut her arguments.
Anyway, the issue I was raising above was not whether in theory/i> a particular mechanism could release large quantities of CO2, but for concrete examples where this happened, and for which we had enough comparable temperature data to draw conclusions about the likely outcome of e.g. an doubling in CO2 in say 350 years.
Liza can you provide any examples where this has occurred? (Yes/No)
Please choose yes or no.
I don’t have to provide anything. You people are just insane. You are claiming because it is impossible to have data or “see” such a small time scales in the past so you can number crunch somethings never happened in the past. I think you also have some crazy idea C02 concentrations are “steady” by some exact ppm amount in the atmosphere and did not ever change until humans came along. And all your measurement graphs never have error margins.
I say:”The Sahara was green just 5,000 yrs ago Lucia.”
and lucia says: Yes. And so what does this say of your theory about wild fires induced by expansion of drought in Africa?
Expansion? That’s not my word. And I imagine wild fires possibly happening a lot. All over the world at any given time not just in Africa and no fire departments. Can you see it? Yeah, BTW and all that green that the Sahara used to be- went exactly where?
Here’s a paper about just one tiny little area on this earth called New York that I found googling for about a second.
“Marshes Tell Story of Medieval Drought, Little Ice Age, and European Settlers near New York City”
“From the pollen record found in sediments in Piermont Marsh of the lower Hudson Valley, a Medieval Warm period was evident from 800 to 1300 A.D. Researchers know this from the striking increases in both charcoal, a sign of dry vegetation and fires, and pollen from pine and hickory trees. Prior to this warming spell, there were more oaks, which prefer a wetter climate. ”
Do you see those words “striking increases” right before those words ” charcoal a sign of dry vegetation and fires” ? LOL
Yep; C02 is always being added to the system; in varying amounts all the time! That’s why the past matters and you can’t just brush it away.
Carrick (Comment#53943) October 11th, 2010 at 8:41 am
So what. Isn’t that how science works. Someone comes up with an original piece of research that leads the way. Usually, there will be something ‘wrong’ with it, otherwise we would have stopped all research years ago because we now know all the answers and always get it right first time. McIntyres obsession with 1998 is perverse.
bugs
And if something is “wrong” with it, people show and discuss as part of research. And if we got the wrong answer, people try to show and discuss that. And after people see that a method is wrong, they try to develop another one. And…well there are all sorts of things that might be contributions.
Finding the right method and getting the right answer using the right method usually gains someone more prominence. But pointing out a method gives wrong answers or that an answer was wrong are also always considered contributions. These activities are “good science”.
liza– No one is saying what you think we are saying.
bugs:
I realize how science works, bugs. Probably a lot better than you.
I don’t criticize Mann for not getting it right in 1998, what he tried to do was very ambitious.
What I do criticize are people like Eli and Tobis who pretend there is nothing wrong with old, out-dated research that, yes in fact, is inconsistent with other more recent research.