USA Today ventured into investigative journalism in covering plagiarism in the Wegman report, which was commissioned by Texas Republican Joe Barton in 2006 when he was chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The USA story was covered in detail in a diary by Keith Pickering. However, plagiarism is really the tip of the proverbial iceberg in the Wegman report.
Barton and staff brushed off the plagiarism in the Wegman report, claiming the conclusions were valid.
Lisa Miller, a spokeswoman for Barton, reiterated the congressman's support of the Wegman report on Monday, saying it "found significant statistical issues" with climate studies.
False. Absolutely false.
Kudos to Dan Vergano of USA Today
Before getting into why the Wegman report was not worth the paper it was printed on, let me give a huge round of applause to Dan Vergano, author of the USA Today article. Vergano has been the only journalist to cover the Wegman plagiarism story in a large circulation paper. His first story appeared in October when George Mason University (GMU) reluctantly admitted that it was investigating complaints against Edward Wegman filed by Raymond Bradley. In the follow-up, Vergano sent the Wegman report along with the original sources to three academic experts on plagiarism. These experts concluded the evidence of plagiarism by Wegman and his graduate student collaborators was overwhelming.
"It kind of undermines the credibility of your work criticizing others' integrity when you don't conform to the basic rules of scholarship," Virginia Tech plagiarism expert Skip Garner says.
The importance of the Vergano's article cannot be understated because GMU has been slow to investigate the charges of plagiarism. Bradley submitted the materials for a formal inquiry in March and was sent a letter in July indicating that a preliminary investigation found sufficient grounds to refer the matter for a formal inquiry. The letter promised that inquiry would be completed by end of September. Vergano's article keeps the pressure on the university to take action.
It will be interesting to see how the university navigates this minefield. As noted by Vergano, one of the co-authors of the Wegman report claimed that the background information was provided by Barton's staff, allowing for the circular finger-pointing gambit. However, Wegman short-circuited this defense by minimizing the contribution of Barton's staff.
In a 2007 presentation at the university, report co-author Yasmin Said of GMU said that a Barton committee staffer, Peter Spencer, provided the background material for the report. "Although Dr. Said's presentation seemed to imply that we were being coached by the Republicans by being given only their selected materials to look at, this was not true," Wegman said in response to a USA TODAY freedom-of-information act request.
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Plagiarism is merely a symptom of greater incompetence in the Wegman report
The Wegman report was billed as an impartial, independent, and rigorous evaluation of the statistical methods used by Mann, Bradley, and Hughes (MBH) in their 1998 and 1999 publications. It has become the touchstone for climate change denial because it purportedly cast doubt on the "hockey stick" pattern of global temperatures over the past thousand years. The report has also served as a rationale for the harassment of Michael Mann by Republican politicians like Ken Cuccinelli.
To understand the deceptive construction of the Wegman report, you need to understand what it did not do. Mann's work has been criticized for how it handled variance estimation for combining climate proxies. There are established statistical methods to evaluate the possibility that a particular finding was an artifact of analytic method. "Bootstrap" estimation procedures grew out of the work of Brad Efron as a means to evaluate bias in estimating parameters due to sampling factors. Sensitivity can also be evaluated by comparing different estimation methods. There is no evidence Wegman and friends did any of these painstaking evaluations of the data used by Mann. Wegman claimed that Mann's results were biased by the centering method used, but provides no evidence in his report that different centering methods would produce different results.
Even though Wegman did not provide any direct test of bias, climate zombie Joe Barton claimed Wegman had evidence to prove Mann "flat wrong." Here is Barton pontificating.
And according to Dr. Wegman, Dr. Mann made a fundamental error. He decentered the data. Now, to the average person, that doesn't mean squat. What does "decentered the data" mean? What it means apparently is, he moved it off center a little bit by enough that it really makes a difference and then using some statistical techniques that instead of looking at all the variables and in a complex system like climate you are going to have lots of variables, he chose one or two as the principal variables and used those to explain everything else, and Dr. Wegman and his colleagues who as far as I know have got no axe to grind, have said the Mann study is flat wrong.
Others have conducted these sensitivity analyses and found Mann's results to be robust to model specifications, specific proxies included, and principle component extraction methods to combine different proxies into a single metric. One of these formal tests of bias and specification on climate reconstruction was conducted by Wahl and Amman in 2007.
Altogether new reconstructions over 1400–1980 are developed in both the indirect and direct analyses, which demonstrate that the Mann et al. reconstruction is robust against the proxy-based criticisms addressed. In particular, reconstructed hemispheric temperatures are demonstrated to be largely unaffected by the use or non-use of PCs to summarize proxy evidence from the data-rich North American region. When proxy PCs are employed, neither the time period used to “center” the data before PC calculation nor the way the PC calculations are performed significantly affects the results, as long as the full extent of the climate information actually in the proxy data is represented by the PC time series. Clear convergence of the resulting climate reconstructions is a strong indicator for achieving this criterion.
A systematic review of all the published studies in 2006 indicates that proxy data for climate prior to 1400 is sparse, making sample error estimation difficult. That means we have less confidence about the very top of hockey stick's handle, but no reason to be skeptical about the rest.
So what did Wegman and friends do besides plagiarize source material? The crux of their report was based on the regurgitation of the analyses conducted by McIntyre and McKitrick in a 2005 publication. Wegman proudly states that they "replicated and extended" McIntryre and McKitrick.
Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick are not climate scientists. Not even close. Nor are they statisticians. McIntyre is a retired mining engineer with a bachelor's degree in mathematics and best known for running the disinformation site Climate Audit. McKitrick is an economist known for colossal analytic blunders and advocacy as part of the conservative think tank Fraser Institute and the disinformation Global Warming Policy Foundation. Their grand analytic contribution was to conduct a simulation study using randomly generated data. They ran 10,000 simulations and found 100 that produced a pattern similar to the hockey stick pattern. This means that it is possible that the hockey stick observed in the climate data could be noise, but the probability would be extremely small and only found under more extreme assumptions of error structure. Even this demonstration was undermined by their poor choice of error structure.
Wegman "replicated" McIntyre and McKitrick by rerunning their program and cherry-picking the biggest cherries. Wegman even produced the same graphs of the same cherries picked by McIntyre and McKitrick.
Shortly after the Wegman report was presented to Barton's committee, Physicist David Ritson noticed the cherry picking by Wegman along with the replicated blunder of McIntyre and McKitrick. He repeatedly tried to get answers from Wegman but was ignored.
Wegman resorts to accusing his critics of conspiracy theory.
Wegman added, "I will say that there is a lot of speculation and conspiracy theory in John Mashey's analysis which is simply not true. These attacks are unprecendented in my 42 years as an academic and scholar. We are not the bad guys and we have never intended that our Congressional testimony was intended to take intellectual credit for any aspect of paleoclimate reconstruction science or for any original research aspect of social network analysis."
Plagiarism. Incompetence. Ignoring published evidence related to the robustness of paleoclimate reconstructions. Passing off one sloppy paper by two non-statisticians as proof that Mann had "misused" statistics. Failure to respond to substantive criticism and requests to release code while criticizing others for not being transparent.
If the Wegman report were a peer-reviewed publication, these problems would require that it be retracted. Since the Wegman report was produced to discredit the work of a prominent climate scientist for political ammunition, I doubt plagiarism and incompetence will have any adverse consequences. In fact, I am sure Wegman will be rewarded handsomely by Barton and the rest of the climate zombies ready to restart the inquisition of climate scientists.
Meanwhile, in the surreal world, even saving energy using florescent light bulbs is now controversial for climate zombies high on Limbaugh opiates and Koch crack. And God hates climate science because only Satan would attempt to interfere with climate change.
"The most enduring heresy was just saying that climate change was real," he said. "That was the one that was most damaging, I'm convinced."
"For many conservatives, it became the marker that you had crossed to Satan's side -- that you had left God and gone to Satan's side on climate change," he added, "because many evangelical Christians in our district would say that it's up to God to determine the length of Earth, and therefore, you are invading the province of God."
Bob Inglis (R-SC) on losing to a Tea Party climate zombie
God help us. These people are insane.