Mann

New Research on Assessing Climate Change Impact on Extreme Weather

gregladen — Thu, 31 Aug 2017 18:20:42 +0000

New Research on Assessing Climate Change Impact on Extreme Weather

Three statisticians go hunting for rabbit. They see a rabbit. The first statistician fires and misses, her bullet striking the ground below the beast. The second statistician fires and misses, their bullet striking a branch above the lagomorph. The third statistician, a lazy frequentist, says, "We got it!"

OK, that joke was not 1/5th as funny as any of XKCD's excellent jabs at the frequentist-bayesian debate, but hopefully this will warm you up for a somewhat technical discussion on how to decide if observations about the weather are at all explainable with reference to climate change.

[source]

We are having this discussion here and now for two reasons. One is that Hurricane Harvey was (is) a very serious weather event in Texas and Louisiana that may have been made worse by the effects of anthropogenic global warming, and there may be another really nasty hurricane coming (Irma). The other is that Michael Mann, Elisabeth Lloyd and Naomi Oreskes have just published a paper that examines so-called frequentist vs so-called Bayesian statistical approaches to the question of attributing weather observations to climate change.

Mann, Michael, ElisabethLloyd, Naomi Oreskes. 2017. Assessing climate change impacts on extreme weather events; the case for an alternative (Baesian) approach. Climate Change (2017) 144:131-142.

First, I'll give you the abstract of the paper then I'll give you my version of how these approaches are different, and why I'm sure the authors are correct.

The conventional approach to detecting and attributing climate change impacts on
extreme weather events is generally based on frequentist statistical inference wherein a null hypothesis of no influence is assumed, and the alternative hypothesis of an influence is accepted only when the null hypothesis can be rejected at a sufficiently high (e.g., 95% or Bp = 0.05^) level of confidence. Using a simple conceptual model for the occurrence of extreme weather events, we
show that if the objective is to minimize forecast error, an alternative approach wherein likelihoods
of impact are continually updated as data become available is preferable. Using a simple proof-of-concept, we show that such an approach will, under rather general assumptions, yield more
accurate forecasts. We also argue that such an approach will better serve society, in providing a
more effective means to alert decision-makers to potential and unfolding harms and avoid
opportunity costs. In short, a Bayesian approach is preferable, both empirically and ethically.

Frequentist statistics is what you learned in your statistics class, if you are not an actual statistician. I want to know if using Magic Plant Dust on my tomatoes produces more tomatoes. So, I divide my tomato patch in half, and put a certain amount of Magic Plant Dust on one half. I then keep records of how many tomatoes, and of what mass, the plants yield. I can calculate the number of tomatoes and the mass of the tomatoes for each plant, and use the average and variation I observe for each group to get two sets of numbers. My 'null hypothesis' is that adding the magic dust has no effect. Therefore, the resulting tomato yield from the treated plants should be the statistically the same as from the untreated plants. I can pick any of a small number of statistical tools, all of which are doing about the same thing, to come up with a test statistic and a "p-value" that allows me to make some kind of standard statement like "the treated plants produced more tomatoes" and to claim that the result is statistically significant.

If the difference, though, is very small, I might not get a good statistical result. So, maybe I do the same thing for ten years in a row. Then, I have repeated the experiment ten times, so my statistics will be more powerful and I can be more certain of an inference. Over time, I get sufficient sample sizes. Eventually I conclude that Magic Plant Dust might have a small effect on the plants, but not every year, maybe because other factors are more important, like how much water they get or the effects of tomato moth caterpillars.

In an alternative Bayesian universe, prior to collecting any data on plant growth, I do something very non-statistical. I read the product label. The label says, "This product contains no active ingredients. Will not affect tomato plants. This product is only for use as a party favor and has no purpose."

Now, I have what a Bayesian statistician would call a "prior." I have information that could be used, if I am clever, to produce a statistical model of the likely outcome of the planned experiments. In this case, the likely outcome is that there won't be a change.

Part of the Bayesian approach is to employ a statistical technique based on Bayes Theorem to incorporate a priori assumptions or belief and new observations to reach towards a conclusion.

In my view, the Bayesian approach is very useful in situations where we have well understood and hopefully multiple links between one or more systems and the system we are interested in. We may not know all the details that relate observed variation in one system and observed variation in another, but we know that there is a link, that it should be observable, and perhaps we know the directionality or magnitude of the effect.

The relationship between climate change and floods serves as an example. Anthropogenic climate change has resulted in warmer sea surface temperatures and warmer air. It would be very hard to make an argument from the physics of the atmosphere that this does not mean that more water vapor will be carried by the air. If there is more water vapor in the air, there is likely to be more rain. Taken as a Bayesian prior, the heating of the Earth's surface means more of the conditions that would result in floods, even if the details of when, how much, and where are vague at this level.

A less certain but increasingly appreciated effect of climate change is the way trade winds and the jet stream move around the planet. Without going into details, climate change over the last decade or two has probably made it more likely that large storm systems stall. Storms that may have moved quickly through an area are now observed to slow down. If a storm will normally drop one inch of rain on the landscape over which it passes, but now slows down but rains at the same rate, perhaps 3 inches of rain will be dropped (over a shorter distance). What would have been a good watering of all the lawns is now a localized flood.

That is also potentially a Bayesian prior. Of special importance is that these two Bayesian priors imply change in the same direction. Since in this thought experiment we are thinking about floods, we can see that these two prior assumptions together suggest that a post-climate change weather would include more rain falling from the sky in specific areas.

There are other climate change related factors that suggest increased activity of storms. The atmosphere should have more energy, thus more energetic storms. In some places there should more of the kind of wind patterns that spin up certain kinds of storms. It is possible that the relationship between temperature of the air at different altitudes, up through the troposphere and into the lower stratosphere, has changed so that large storms are likely to get larger than they otherwise might.

There is very little about climate change that implies the reverse; Though there may be a few subsets of storm related weather that would be reduced with global warming, most changes are expected to result in more storminess, more storms, more severe storms, or something.

So now we have the question, has climate change caused any kind of increase in storminess?

I'd like to stipulate that there was a kind of turning point in our climate around 1979, before which we had a couple of decades of storminess being at a certain level, and after which, we have a potentially different level. This is also a turning point in measured surface heat. In, say, 1970 plus or minus a decade, it was possible to argue that global warming is likely but given the observations and data at the time, it was hard to point to much change (though we now know, looking back with better data for the previous centuries, that is was actually observable). But, in 2008, plus or minus a decade, it was possible to point to widespread if anecdotal evidence of changes in storm frequency, patterns, effects, as well as other climate change effects, not the least of which was simply heat.

I recently watched the documentary, "An Inconvenient Sequel." This is a fairly misunderstood film. It is not really part two of Al Gore's original "An Inconvenient Truth." The latter was really Al Gore's argument about climate change, essentially presented by him. "An Inconvenient Sequel" was made by independent film makers with no direct input by Gore with respect to contents and production, though it is mostly about him, him talking, him making his point, etc. But I digress. Here is the salient fact associated with these two movies.An Inconvenient Truth came out in May 2006, so it is based mainly on information available in 2005 and before. In it, there are examples of major climate change effects, including Katrina, but it seems like the total range of effects is more or less explicated almost completely. When An Inconvenient Sequell came out a few weeks ago, a solid 10+ years had passed and the list of actual climate effects noted in the movie was a sampling, not anything close to a full explication, of the things that had happened over recent years. Dozens of major flooding, storming, drying, and deadly heat events had occurred of which only a few of each were mentioned, because there was just so much stuff.

My point is that there is a reasonable hypothesis based on anecdotal observation (at least) that many aspects of weather in the current decade, or the last 20 years, or since 1979 as I prefer, are different in frequency and/or severity than before, because of climate change.

A frequentist approach does not care why I think a certain hypothesis is workable. I could say "I hypothesize that flies can spontaneously vanish with a half life of 29 minutes" and I could say "I hypothesis that if a fly lays eggs on a strawberry there will later be an average of 112 maggots." The same statistical tests will be usable, the same philosophy of statistics will be applied.

A Bayesian approach doesn't technically care what I think either, but what I think a priori is actually relevant to the analysis. I might for example know that the average fly lays 11 percent of her body mass in one laying of eggs, and that is enough egg mass to produce about 90-130 maggots (I am totally making this up) so that observational results that are really small (like five maggots) or really large (like 1 million maggots) are very unlikely a priori, and, results between 90 and 130 are a priori very likely.

So, technically, a Bayesian approach is different because it includes something that might be called common sense, but really, is an observationally derived statistical parameter that is taken very seriously by the statistic itself. But, philosophically, it is a little like the pitcher of beer test.

I've mentioned this before but I'll refresh your memory. Consider an observation that makes total sense based on reasonable prior thinking, but the standard frequentist approach fails to reject the null hypothesis. The null hypothesis is that there are more tornadoes from, say, 1970 to the present than there were between 1950 and 1970. This graph suggests this is true...

Annual number of tornadoes for the period 1916-1995; the dashed line connecting solid circles shows the raw data, the red heavy solid line is the result of smoothing. Also shown in the green light solid line is the number of tornado days (i.e., days with one or more tornadoes) per year.

... but because the techniques of observation and measuring tornado frequency have changed over time, nobody believes the graph to be good data. But, it may not be bad data. In other words, the questions about the graph do not inform us of the hypothesis, but the graph is suggestive.

So, I take a half dozen meteorologists who are over 55 years old (so they've seen things, done things) out for a beer. The server is about to take our order, and I interrupt. I ask all the meteorologists to answer the question ... using this graph and whatever else you know, are there more tornadoes in the later time interval or not? Write your answer down on this piece of paper, I say, and don't share your results. But, when we tally them up, if and only if you all have the same exact answer (all "yes" or all "no") then this pitcher of beer is on me.

Those are quasi-Bayesian conditions (given that these potential beer drinkers have priors in their heads already, and that the graph is suggestive if not conclusive), but more importantly, there is free beer at stake.

They will all say "yes" and there will be free beer.

OK, back to the paper.

Following the basic contrast between frequentist and Bayesian approaches, the authors produce competing models, one based on the former, the other on the latter. "In the conventional, frequentist approach to detection and attribution, we adopt a null hypothesis of an equal probability of active and inactive years ... We reject it in favor of the alternative hypothesis of a bias toward more active years ... only when we are able to achieve rejection of H0 at a high... level of confidence"

In the bayesian version, a probability distribution that assumes a positive (one directional) effect on the weather is incorporated, as noted above, using Bayes theorem.

Both methods work to show that there is a link between climate change and effect, in this modeled scenario, eventually, but the frequentist approach is very much more conservative and thus, until the process is loaded up with a lot of data, more likely to be wrong, while the bayesian approach correctly identifies the relationship and does so more efficiently.

The authors argue that the bayesian method is more likely to accurately detect the link between cause and effect, and this is almost certainly correct.

This is what this looks like: Frank Frequency, weather commenter on CNN says, "We can't attribute Hurricane Harvey, or really, any hurricane, to climate change until we have much more data and that may take 100 years because the average number of Atlantic hurricanes to make landfall is only about two per year."

Barbara Bayes, weather commenter on MSNBC, says, "What we know about the physics of the atmosphere tells us to expect increased rainfall, and increased energy in storms, because of global warming, so when we see a hurricane like Harvey it is really impossible to separate out this prior knowledge when we are explaining the storms heavy rainfall and rapid strengthening. The fact that everywhere we can measure possible climate change effects on storms, the storms seem to be acting as expected under climate change, makes this link very likely."

I hasten to add that this paper is not about hurricanes, or severe weather per se, but rather, on what statistical philosophy is better for investigating claims linking climate change and weather. I asked the paper's lead author, Michael Mann (author of The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines, and Dire Predictions, 2nd Edition: Understanding Climate Change), about Hurricane Harvey specifically. He told me, "As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, I’m not particularly fond of the standard detection & attribution approach for an event like Hurricane Harvey for a number of reasons. First of all, the question isn’t whether or not climate change made Harvey happen, but how it modified the impacts of Harvey. For one thing, climate change-related Sea Level Rise was an important factor here, increasing the storm surge by at least half a foot." Mann recalls the approach taken by climate scientist Kevin Trenberth, who "talks about how warmer sea surface temperatures mean more moisture in the atmosphere (about 7% per degree C) and more rainfall. That’s basic physics and thermodynamics we can be quite certain of."

The authors go a step farther, in that they argue that there is an ethical consideration at hand. In a sense, an observer or commenter can decide to become a frequentist, and even one with a penchant for very low p-values, with the purpose of writing off the effects of climate change. (They don't say that but this is a clear implication, to me.) We see this all the time, and it is in fact a common theme in the nefarious politicization of the climate change crisis.

Or, an observer can chose to pay attention to the rather well developed priors, the science that provides several pathways linking climate change and severe weather or other effects, and then, using an appropriate statistical approach ... the one you use when you know stuff ... be more likely to make a reasonable and intelligent evaluation, and to get on to the business of finding out in more detail how, when, where, and how much each of these effects has taken hold or will take hold.

The authors state that one "... might therefore argue that scientists should err on the side of caution and take steps to ensure that we are not underestimating climate risk and/or underestimating the human component of observed changes. Yet, as several workers have shown ...the opposite is the case in prevailing practice. Available evidence shows a tendency among climate scientists to underestimate key parameters of anthropogenic climate change, and thus, implicitly, to understate the risks related to that change"

While I was in contact with Dr. Mann, I asked him another question. His group at Penn State makes an annual prediction of the Atlantic Hurricane Season, and of the several different such annual stabs at this problem, the PSU group tends to do pretty well. So, I asked him how this season seemed to be going, which partly requires reference to the Pacific weather pattern ENSO (El Nino etc). He told me

We are ENSO neutral but have very warm conditions in the main development region of the Tropcs (which is a major reason that Irma is currently intensifying so rapidly). Based on those attributes, we predicted before the start of the season (in May) that there would be between 11 and 20 storms with a best estimate of 15 named storms. We are currently near the half-way point of the Atlantic hurricane season, and with Irma have reached 9 named storms, with another potentially to form in the Gulf over the next several days. So I suspect when
all is said and done, the total will be toward the upper end of our predicted range.

I should point out that Bayesian statistics are not new, just not as standard as one might expect, partly because, historically, this method has been hard to compute. So, frequency based methods have decades of a head start, and statistical methodology tends to evolve slowly.

gregladen Thu, 08/31/2017 - 14:20

Tags

Climate Change

Global Warming

Hurricane

Severe weather

Mann vindicated, yet again

stoat — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 14:29:22 +0000

Mann vindicated, yet again

In not-very-exciting news just in National Science Foundation vindicates Michael Mann. Or you can read Romm's version.

[Well, who would have guessed it? This non-news really riles the denialists and the trolls. To be open, I knew it was troll-bait but couldn't resist. And perhaps it is useful to see just how badly broken the septic talking points are. Can you believe that people are saying "We all know that the Earth's temperature has been increasing steadily since the last ice age (this is obvious..."? But apparently this is the level of disinformation that people are so confident of, they will post to blogs. Ah well; the next post is clearly needed -W]

Refs

* The Climate Scum NSF: It is reasonable to suspect Mann of falsifying data
* TPL has a nice pic
* Who broke the build? (via Paul)
* KK

stoat Mon, 08/22/2011 - 10:29

Tags

climate communication

Mann

Bad Locust --- National Science Foundation not his employer.

[I'm afraid TGL has gone down the troll hole -W]

Oh, it seems Bad Locust was boiled in oil and eaten.

Correct me if I'm wrong but didn't they just look at Penn State's "investigation." [snip]

[You're wrong. And you're trolling. Do you really have nothing else to do? -W]

Oh dear, Bad Locust jumped out of the troll hole.

I guess the trolls didn't care for the taste.

[Seems tasteless to me.]

[There really isn't much to say on this one that hasn't been said many times before -W]

"didn't they just look at Penn State's "investigation."[?]"

Explicitly, no, they said they did no such thing.

http://is.gd/8qp9KV

"We fully examined both the University Inquiry and Investigation Reports. Although the Inquiry Report
dismissed three of the four allegations, we examined each de novo under the NSF Research Misconduct Regulation."

Hope that helps.

I read the NSF report myself and I am essentially correct - by and large they merely looked at Penn state's so-called investigation.

In any case, there are several obvious flaws here and I quote the report:

"The University had been provided an extensive volume of
emails from the Subject and determined that emails had not been deleted."

So basically, Mann sent them some emails and from the evidence provided by the accused they determined that he didn't delete any of the emails they were telling each other to delete in the climategate emails?

You find that to be proper do you? Usually investigators gather their own evidence rather than asking the accused to provide evidence for them - this is especially true when the person is being accused of falsification.

That is just one obvious flaw in the report. I'd list more but you'll no doubt define them as "trolling," delete them and put up your own strawman of my argument to debunk.

TGL@6:

and I am essentially correct

For definitions of 'essentially correct' that include 'absolutely wrong'.

@NJ

Care to comment on whether it is good form to ask the accused to provide the evidence of his innocence like that?

Independent investigators should've taken the emails from the servers themselves. How did Mann provide the emails? Did he print out copies for the investigators? Did he "forward" them to him?

See any flaws in that investigative methodology?

I'm a big fan of James Randi - he is often able to reveal scam artists for what they are even though they are quite good at fooling scientists. I think it is because a lot of scientists simply think about how the methodology can work rather than how it can be abused.

Somebody certainly let the troll out of trollheim; seems to be an exscapee.

Send him back.

"Care to comment on whether it is good form to ask the accused to provide the evidence of his innocence like that?"

Very poor form. The accused shouldn't be allowed to provide evidence that I don't like.

Ah, well I suppose we need to await the conclusions of the Randi commission, and see if somebody manages an independent investigation which comes up with the predetermined "right" results.

But woe betide him if he can't see anything worth writing home about either. If I were him, I'd just stay away, frankly.

Y'all are what, 0 for 7 so far?

Could it be just possible that the only thing going on is that the emails reveal that these guys don't like your bunch very much? Under the circumstances, it's hard to find much fault with that.

Is it really another investigation that you want? Or do you want nothing short of a show trial and a conviction?

The emails show them telling each other to delete emails. The emails show them confirming receipt and understanding of those messages.

The "investigations" vindicate Mann based on emails he provided to them rather than checking the actual servers themselves.

I could care less if there is another investigation. I think there is so much political capital invested in protecting this theory that nobody will do anything to rock the boat.

The temperatures will simply go down, this theory will be discredited and more unfortunately all science will be dragged down with it. And if we have a real emergency in the future then the masses will be far less inclined to believe the experts coming forward.

In the unlikely event that the temperature goes down in response to anthropogenic forcing we will have bigger problems than we already do, as presumably some really major nonlinearity will have kicked in.

But let's not worry about that right now, shall we? This imminent cooling concept certainly isn't playing very well in Texas this summer. I'll tell you that much from personal experience. So if you see some sign of cooling somewhere outside the bunkosphere, do let us know.

As for political capital, I promise you that there is no major politician on earth who does not want this problem to go away. The costs of action are "front-loaded", and the benefits are far away in time, and hard to prove except in the scenario where we don't act. This is not a problem shaped for politics, and that is the main reason that we are handling it so stupidly.

That all said, Jones is dinged with a misdemeanor about compliance with some bizarre bureaucratic screwup whereby university science is considered an arm of government, and Mann is guilty only of bearing bad news.

The world could boil tomorrow and they still wouldn't believe "the experts coming forward" next time if what the experts said isn't what "the future then the masses" wanted to hear. I find my prediction much more likely based on years of past evidence.

@TGL (#14): "I could care less if there is another investigation."

We may be getting to the heart of your inability to understand graphs, and hockey sticks, and science. David Mitchell provides an excellent tutorial here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om7O0MFkmpw

Start about 1 minute in if you are in a rush.

More blather from the pest insect.

They should have never banned widespread use of DDT.

I agree Rattus, but for different reasons - banning DDT caused millions of deaths from malaria.

[You've fallen for yet another denialist hoax. See http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2005/02/ddt3.php and many other posts on Deltoid -W]

"The University had been provided an extensive volume of
emails from the Subject and determined that emails had not been deleted."

So basically, Mann sent them some emails...

No, [expletive deleted], this would come from the system administrators with their comprehensive backups kept in accordance with federal (at least) law.

You can't claim local weather anecdotes of heat in the summer are proof when it is convenient and then go around and claim the MWP and LIA were merely local effects.

Stupidest post I've seen this week, and I don't mean "just here".

Ema Nymton...

Quit insulting the really fucking dumb, they deserve better :)

We all know that the Earth's temperature has been increasing steadily since the last ice age (this is obvious since...

[I can't decide if you're trolling, or just ignorant. But you spent enough time on wiki before being banned that you should have run across http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png or equivalent, so I think you're just trolling.

Really: you've been arguing about GW for years, and yet you can still get something as basic as this wrong? Are you not ashamed? -W]

WMC: can you create an equivalent of The Borehole?

[Not conveniently - mt provides me no easy way to move comments. Though it would be nice -W]

ALL: Firefox+Greasemonkey+Killfile works here.

People might put on their calendar a year from now to revisit this thread and see if you can say to yourself "YES, that was a really good use of my time ..."

[This is a good time to remind people that I will usually remove trolling. There is no need to respond... remember Eternal September -W]

I have some great comments in the Real Climate borehole.

For example, Gavin had a post about sea level rise. He showed a graph of the sea level rise acceleration for the past 100 years. I merely asked him why the graph showed the greatest acceleration from 1940 to 1970, which, according to the surface station data, was a time when the global temperatures were cooling.

I guess he didn't like some of the unstated implications of that such as:

1) The surface station record being worthless
2) The sea level record being worthless
3) The heat/sea level correlation being worthless (least likely)

TGL: "I have some great comments in the Real Climate borehole."

Sure you do. Now, you draw your conclusions from that, and the thinking population will draw the correct conclusions.

/endthread

@Ãystein I suppose I could go ask the good folk at WUWT their opinion on my Real Climate comments.

They are certainly a group of thoughtful people who are mentally capable of engaging in thoughtful and fact-based debate rather than an endless stream of baseless juvenile insults.

For a few minutes I just thought "wow, TGL really is stupid", but now I realise he is a poe. I mean, no one would ever consider the WUWT crowd "thoughtful", "mentally capable", "rational", and "fact-based".

Unless the mice have only blown up itty-bitty parts of the world and replace it with an alternate universe.

"They (the good folk at WUWT) are certainly a group of thoughtful people who are mentally capable of engaging in thoughtful and fact-based debate rather than an endless stream of baseless juvenile insults."

Words fail...

So basically, Mann sent them some emails and from the evidence provided by the accused they determined that he didn't delete any of the emails they were telling each other to delete in the climategate emails?

(Mental image of Mike Mann frantically re-composing deleted emails from memory, time stamps, MIME headers and all)

> I'm sorry, TGL, but I have to disagree with you on this point. The temperature will not be going down any time soon

Yep, mee too. You both vastly underestimate the reach of the Conspiracy. We agreed that measured and reported global temperatures will continue to go up at a clip of 0.17 degrees C per decade for now -- right, William?

[There are various people who will accept bets with anyone prepared to put money on cooling. Though they (and I) would probably require surety from an unknown -W]

@GoRight

You seem to be even more stupid than TGL. At least he knows we are still in an ice age, even if he can't quite grasp the logic of "caring less". I see from your blog that you got banned from Wikipedia and then violated the ban using multiple sock puppets, and are now bleating that you should be allowed back. Quite why you think Wikipedia would benefit from your erudition is a bit of a mystery.

TheGoodLocust have already determined from no evidence that Mann is guilty.

Hence he finds the report to be wrong.

Locust mentions emails about deleting emails. Doesn't he understand that if there was any intention to delete emails, emails discussing the deletion of emails would be the first emails to be deleted.

He could read the above post about misinformation so unbelievable that it kicks in critical thinking. Can insects read?

John McManus

"Can insects read?"

--apes don't read philosophy!
--yes they do, otto. they just don't understand it.

Martin Vermeer said '(Mental image of Mike Mann frantically re-composing deleted emails from memory, time stamps, MIME headers and all)'

If he were to do that everyone knows the emails would all be upside down and the text right-justified rather than properly centered.

I did put some explicit Troll-on / Troll-off tags in that post, forgetting they wouldn't appear.

No, dhogaza, they don't. They deserve abuse, and lots of it. Unfortunately, they tend not to get it.

I'm quietly chuckling at how quickly GoRight's crap gets flushed down the weasel's loo :)

Really: you've been arguing about GW for years, and yet you can still get something as basic as this wrong? Are you not ashamed? -W

Ashamed is too strong a term. Perhaps mildly disappointed in myself for making such a silly comment. I seem to recall you pointing out previously that your wife once dropped her mobile into the toilet which was a stupid thing to do, but that didn't mean that she is stupid. I think the analogous logic applies in my case as well.

Either way, as I pointed out in my comment which you have now deleted, my point remains equally valid despite my error in the technical definition of "ice age". Temperatures have been naturally increasing since the end of the "little ice age"

[This is just denialism. http://www.realclimate.org/wiki/index.php?title=Are_we_just_recovering_…, etc etc. As others have said already, you have no evidence for this -W]

and there is no reason to expect that trend to change any time soon. Warming is not inconsistent with the current trends in natural variation, as you know.

[To the contrary, the current warming is inconsistent with natural variation. Its in the IPCC report, you know - you should try reading it some time -W]

Temperatures have been naturally increasing since the end of the "little ice age" and there is no reason to expect that trend to change any time soon.

That's a little bit less bad, but still not good. The climate isn't like a dog, slowly sniffing its way from tree to tree... when temperatures go up systematically, there is a cause. No such cause is in evidence for the last few decades -- when not only did we have the best observation systems ever, but the increase has been the fastest -- except one cause. You know which.

And no, natural variability doesn't even come close.

Ashamed or not. Hasn't the global temperature been increasing since the second last millenium. The "little ice age was a blip, amusing yes ,but a geograhic and temporal blip only.

Martin Vermeer: ... when temperatures go up systematically, there is a cause. No such cause is in evidence for the last few decades ... And no, natural variability doesn't even come close.

Bah and humbug.

Natural variability has been moving the temperature both up and down systematically and over far wider temperature ranges than we are discussing in the recent warming. It does so from the top of every peak to the bottom of every valley - and back again.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png

The global temperature has been systematically increasing since about 1600AD - and from the look of the graph it has been doing so at an accelerating rate the entire time. Since no one knows how high the current upswing will go you can't say that the current graph is inconsistent with the natural variation which started the warming which ended that most recent minimum.

[That really is weird. You are capable of reffing the picture, but then completely misreading it -W]

Studied statistics much, GoRight?

GoRight:

The global temperature has been systematically increasing since about 1600AD

Except there's bugger-all warming before 1910.

and from the look of the graph it has been doing so at an accelerating rate the entire time.

With bugger-all acceleration until around 1910.

Martin Vermeer: Studied statistics much, GoRight?

What do statistics have to do with reading a plot of temperature vs. time? No statistics required. Math and calculus are all that are required as far as I can see.

Which raises the question, why did you ask?

[That really is weird. You are capable of reffing the picture, but then completely misreading it -W]

Really? Well I am happy to learn. Let me explain my reasoning a bit and then you can correct me so I can learn where I have fallen off the clue bus.

I will set aside any discussion of the relative value of any of these reconstructions and simply accept them as is. For the sake of discussion I'll focus on two of the more recent ones represented by the red and orange lines on the plot.

By simply looking at the reconstructions individually it is a simply matter to mentally smooth out the noise in the plot to discern the overall trend that the plot represents. Then taking the first derivative of that trend line (i.e. by imagining a line tangent to the trend curve at any point in time) you get a general sense of the "rate of temperature change" at that particular point in time.

Generally speaking, from about 1300AD to 1600AD the slope of the tangent was negative (indicating a decreasing temperature trend during that period). At roughly 1600AD the cooling had slowed to nothing and the slope of the tangent would be zero. From 1600AD through the end of the plot the slope of the tangent has turned positive (indicating a warming trend). The warming trend begins with a slope at or near zero and then increases steadily over time until the end of the plot where the slope is a fairly large positive value indicating significant warming.

Given this, it should be obvious that if we were to take the second derivative of the trend line for the period 1600AD through the end of the plot we would discern a non-zero positive value indicating that the rate of temperature increase during that period was not constant, but was in fact accelerating.

These facts are easily visually discernible from the shape of the trend line (sans the noise) with sufficient accuracy for this particular conversation, no?

Is this not obvious to you? How do you interpret the trends represented by the red and orange reconstructions?

[Your claim was "Natural variability has been moving the temperature both up and down systematically and over far wider temperature ranges than we are discussing in the recent warming." and you reffed that pic in support. It doesn't support what you say -W]

[Your claim was "Natural variability has been moving the temperature both up and down systematically and over far wider temperature ranges than we are discussing in the recent warming." and you reffed that pic in support. It doesn't support what you say -W]

Ah, I see. I apologize for being unclear. The plot I provided was intended to be in support of the paragraph following it, not the one preceding. My rationale for why is now explained above.

In support of "Natural variability has been moving the temperature both up and down systematically and over far wider temperature ranges than we are discussing in the recent warming." let me offer up the one you provided earlier:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png

which I had assumed was already entered into evidence and understood by all.

What do statistics have to do with reading a plot of temperature vs. time?

I think it might be because you seem to be unaware of the concept of 'fiducial limits'.

The point is, of course, that the natural temperature of the Earth has varied by at least an order of magnitude (tens of degrees C) more than the level of change we are discussing in recent times (ones of degrees or even tenths of degrees C).

And the relevance of this is . . . ? Remember, the changes probably took place over thousands of years and occurred before there were billions of people dependent on agriculture.

Regarding the lie that "by and large they merely looked at Penn state's so-called investigation" that is being spread by shameless individuals here and elsewhere, here are some relevant quotes from the report:

"We wrote to the University, requesting an extensive amount of documentation related to its investigation, including copies of all documentation the committees used in their assessments, copies of all interview transcripts, and specific transcripts or memorandums about certain conversations to which the report referred. We also asked the University to address several questions ...."

"Based on our review of both University reports and all material we received and reviewed on the matter, we were satisfied that the University adequately addressed its Allegations 3 and 4 (misusing privileged information and serious deviation from accepted practices) identified in the Inquiry Report."

"We next considered the University's second Allegation, related to the emails. We reviewed the emails and concluded that nothing contained in them evidenced research misconduct within the definition in the NSF Research Misconduct Regulation."

"Regarding the University's first Allegation (data falsification), however, we concluded that the University did not adequately review the allegation in either its inquiry or investigation processes. In particular, we were concerned that the University did not interview any of the experts critical of the Subject's research to determine if they had any information that might support the allegation. Therefore, we initiated our own investigation under the NSF Research Misconduct Regulation. Pursuant to that regulation, we did not limit our review to an allegation of data falsification. Rather, we examined the evidence in relation to the definition of research misconduct under the NSF Research Misconduct Regulation."

"As a part of our investigation, we again fully reviewed all the reports and documentation the University provided to us, as well as a substantial amount of publically available documentation concerning both the Subject's research and parallel research conducted by his collaborators and other scientists in that particular field of research."

"As part of our investigation, we attempted to determine if data fabrication or falsification may have occurred and interviewed the subject, critics, and disciplinary experts in coming to our conclusions."

Is goright an economist? because this

"What do statistics have to do with reading a plot of temperature vs. time? No statistics required. Math and calculus are all that are required as far as I can see."

makes him sound as stupid as an economist talking about graphs.

"Which I had assumed already entered into evidence and understood by all."

I'll wait until it's understood by you.

Remember, the changes probably took place over thousands of years and occurred before there were billions of people dependent on agriculture.

More to the point, these changes had causes which are known. Just like the cause of the ongoing change. None of these have anything to do with unforced variability ("weather"), which in decadal global temps is just a tiny ripple, the stats of which are known.

"Which I had assumed already entered into evidence and understood by all."

I'll wait until it's understood by you.

Experts claim 2006 climate report plagiarized

illconsidered — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 12:25:39 +0000

Experts claim 2006 climate report plagiarized

The wheels continue to fall off the Wegman Report.

"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.

Further down:

Allegations under review
"The matter is under investigation," says GMU spokesman Dan Walsch by e-mail. In a phone interview, Wegman said he could not comment at the university's request. In an earlier e-mail Wegman sent to Joseph Kunc of the University of Southern California, however, he called the plagiarism charges "wild conclusions that have nothing to do with reality."

The plagiarism experts queried by USA TODAY disagree after viewing the Wegman report:

â¢ "Actually fairly shocking," says Cornell physicist Paul Ginsparg by e-mail. "My own preliminary appraisal would be 'guilty as charged.' "

â¢"If I was a peer reviewer of this report and I was to observe the paragraphs they have taken, then I would be obligated to report them," says Garner of Virginia Tech, who heads a copying detection effort. "There are a lot of things in the report that rise to the level of inappropriate."

â¢"The plagiarism is fairly obvious when you compare things side-by-side," says Ohio State's Robert Coleman, who chairs OSU's misconduct committee.

But plagarism is not the worst or most relevant problem. Apparently, far from an independent review of the "Hockey Stick", Wegman simply reproduced the critique from McIntyre replete with errors addressed in follow on peer reviewed papers, papers Wegman did not cite.

My take on the Hockeystick wars remains unchanged: probably used suboptimal statistical methods but that was not relevant to the final results. These results have been confirmed by all manner of other studies using all manner of methods and data. Temperatures 1000 years ago are not central to the case for man made climate change today.

illconsidered Tue, 11/23/2010 - 07:25

Tags

I think this whole issue highlights the extreme difference between the science side of the debate, and the denialist side.

There are strong parallels between the Wegman report and the emails stolen from CRU. In both cases, the real issue should have been about what was actually in the documents; ie do they reveal some sort of scientific fraud, etc. But they have become more about the process.

The big difference is how they are being treated. The stolen emails went viral straight away, and became front page news and were held up as supposedly revealing flaws in the science - despite not doing so. And in the aftermath where the scientists involved were completely vindicated of any wrong doing, not one blogger or newspaper has admitted their error. It seems denialists can throw mud and it will stick and can not be washed off.

In the case of the Wegman report, it is only being discussed quietly on the blogosphere, and the mainstream media has not picked it up at all to any degree. And despite the fact that there clearly was fraud involved (well, academic fraud anyway) the authors will still be held up as a bastion of integrity by those with political viewpoints about AGW over-ride their scientific viewpoints.

I think it speaks volumes for the integrity and ethics of the people involved.

The Wegman report just used suboptimal citation methods.

And in the aftermath where the scientists involved were completely vindicated of any wrong doing, not one blogger or newspaper has admitted their error.

They simply claimed that the vindication was also corrupt.

Plagiarism is merely the easiest piece for most people to see and understand. SSWR documented numerous errors, changes of meaning, biases pervading the WR, and pointed out there actually was *no* serious new statistical analysis, i.e., rerunning the code doesn't do it.

DC had already been busy digging in on that, and then discovered the horrific cherry-pick ... sampling from 1% picked to support you. If you wanted to prove human males average 6'6", a good way to do it is to take a sample from those you just happen to find on an NBA basketball court.

BUT, really the plagiarism is just the tip of the iceberg, and people are *way* underestimating what's going on behind the scenes. Also, let us say that I certainly don't know everything on this, but I do know a lot that is not yet published. Some will be ... and there is *worse to come*.

Thanks for popping in, John.

Do you have any intelligence on the extent to which your detailed document of the matter has been the centerpiece or not of the investigation?

I am assuming so but wondering.

Skip:
1) Well, so far, in terms of what's in the press, the centerpiece would be the collection of plagiarism posts from Deep Climate, especially:
a) The ones of Bradley and
b) The SNA section

Despite various confusions of attribution (people have confused me and Deep Climate on occasion), those are what the original complaints were based on in March/April, as we discovered rather later.

2) For the first stories, likely my piece was mentioned because it does integrate everything into one report. Also, DC suffers a bit from being anonymous, whereas I'm not, and even better, Dan Vergano knows people who know me.
Some newspapers have serious difficulties citing blogs and anonymous bloggers, even when the information is excellent. Wikipedia has a similar issue. (In general, given the signal-to-noise ratio, avoiding blogs is generally good, but sourcing checkable information (as opposed to opinion) from them should be easier.)

3) I believe more stories are forthcoming, and in some cases might originate more with my extensions beyond DC's work. Of course Vergano talks to a lot of people and checks things out, so DC's or my pieces are really only starting points anyway/

Climategate: one year later

illconsidered — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 10:16:02 +0000

Climategate: one year later

November 17 marked the one year anniversary of the hacking of CRU mail servers and the release of thousands of emails between climate scientists.

Though irrelevant to the scientific case for anthropogenic climate change, the event was significant in the public relations sphere. I have not found the time to do a proper memorial write up though I think it is important to reassess and reframe the controversy with the benefit of hindsight. But as luck would have it, a young climate blogger named Kate at Climate Sight has written a piece as well laid out and written as I could ever have hoped to do, full of supporting links and intelligent insights.

Please go have a read there!

That important work being done, I am free to pick a shallower approach and quickly talk about a few things the emails did not say! (I have used examples from this page as a quick one-stop shop for the climate conspiracy nut's favorite email quotes.)

Phil Jones said "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline.". He did not say "and I hope no one catches me because Mike and I described fully what we did in the scientific literature, what were we thinking?"

Mann said he will contact BBC's Richard Black to find out why a BBC journalist published a sceptical article. He did not say he was contacting the IPCC's secret service to have the journalist brought in for "questioning" [evil laugh].

Kevin Trenberth says "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't." He did not say "and we better make something up quick or the funding gravy train will come off the rails."

Tom Wigley said "A bunch of us are putting something together on the latest Lindzen and Choi crap." He did not say "A bunch of us are putting some crap together on the latest Lindzen and Choi paper."

Tom Wigley tells Jones "Land warming since 1980 has been twice the ocean warming -- and skeptics might claim that this proves that urban warming is real and important." He did not say "skeptics might realize that this proves that urban warming is real."

Russian scientist Dedkova said "Of course, we are in need of additional money, especially for collecting wood samples at high latitudes and in remote regions. The cost of field works in these areas is increased many times during the last some years[....] Also, it is important for us if you can transfer the ADVANCE money on the personal accounts[...]. Only in this case we can avoid big taxes and use money for our work as much as possible." She did not say "wire it to one of my usual Swiss bank accounts. To hell with the research, it's time for a new private jet!"

Overpeck said "I've also seen the quote about getting rid of the MWP - it would seem to go back many years, maybe even to around the TAR. I've no idea where it came from. I didn't say it!". He did not say "but let's do it, data be damned!"

Phil Jones said about the "FOI person" "Once they became aware of the types of people we were dealing with, everyone at UEA [...] became very supportive." He did not say "too bad everyone likes McIntyre, it will make it harder to resist his FOI requests."

Ben Santer said "If the RMS is going to require authors to make ALL data available - raw data PLUS results from all intermediate calculations - I will not submit any further papers to RMS journals." He did not say "because that would reveal all my fraudulent research. We should eliminate the RMS."

Mike Mann said about the journal GLR "They have published far too many deeply flawed contrarian papers in the past year or so. There is no possible excuse for them publishing all 3 Douglass papers and the Soon et al paper. These were all pure crap." He did not say "These were all good research, but they don't toe the party line"

Mike Mann said "legitimate scientific skepticism is exercised through formal scientific circles, in particular the peer review process. A necessary though not in general sufficient condition for taking a scientific criticism seriously is that it has passed through the legitimate scientific peer review process. those such as McIntyre who operate almost entirely outside of this system are not to be trusted." He did not say "those such as McIntyre who operate almost entirely outside of this system can not be controlled."

Gary Funkhouser said "I pulled every trick out of my sleeve trying to milk something out of [the Kyrgyzstan proxy material]. [...] I don't think it'd be productive to try and juggle the chronology statistics any more than I already have - they just are what they are." He did not say "so I had to fix the data."

Phil Jones said "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow". And yet they did appear in the next IPCC report.

I guess the serious point behind this facetious exercise is that what the emails contained is less revealing than what they did not contain. If the conspiracy theorists are to be believed, somewhere in these thousands of private emails should have been something serious, something incriminating without removing the context or reading between the lines in the most paranoid way possible. The best the denialosphere had was the infamous "hide the decline" comment which only worked when intentionally stripped of all context. There should have been something more than petty, ordinary character flaws. Some candid admission that what they are doing is wrong, or risky. Some confession that the sceptics were right. Some mention of enjoying the ill gotten gains.

But there is no there there, and there never was.

illconsidered Thu, 11/18/2010 - 05:16

Tags

The incident was quite revealing in showing how the denialism meme network works. The selectively quoted emails functioned like a biological dye spreading through a cancer, such that Google could be used as the microscope. The emails also served a different function, in that it highlighted and perhaps strengthened the links between the AGW denialism movement and several other crackpot conspiratorial theories. It got JFK grassy knollers, birthers, tea partiers and 9-11 truthers like Alex Jones involved. The more that anthropogenic climate change denialists become indistinguishable from the likes of Colleen Thomas (See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UAeSsvHhTg) the easier it is for the general public to marginalise them.

A counter-hacker might even be tempted to encourage the process by seeding their meme network with more conspiratorial rubbish. I'm sure that the likes of McIntyre and Watt sees the risk of having too many Alex Jones fans polluting their websites to the point of losing what illusory level of credibility they think they have left.

It will be interesting to watch the news and commentators over the next few days, to see how they react to the Wikileaks publication of the 'hacked / stolen ' foreign cables.

I am sure - for consistancy - that the leakers will be hailed in the right-wing press as heroes for exposing the scams in government and the hypocracy, name-calling and lack of professionalism.

Or maybe not.

For facts on global warming, don't miss this.
www.globalwarmingfacts.com

I guess most of you by now will have heard of the release of the Heartland Institute documents. If not, check this out:

http://www.desmogblog.com/heartland-insider-exposes-institute-s-budget-…

There are other documents out there as well. I wonder how this one will play out in the deniersphere. I'm going to bet that the hypocrisy will be breathtaking.

Obviously, THIS release is from a hacker!!!

A mistake with consequences?

stoat — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 11:23:37 +0000

A mistake with consequences?

There is an interesting new post up at KlimaZweibel about a paper by Smerdon et al.. This is going to be all over everywhere very soon, so I may as well jump in.

The title, of course, is a snark at RC; see the article A Mistake with Repercussions which points out some errors in a Zorita and Von Storch paper (they got their model setup wrong). [I've just snarked them in their comments; it will be intersting to see if it stays]

In this case the problem is rather more arcane, but worth explaining, so let me do that first.

[Update: no, let me first point out that there is a response by Rutherford et al. which appears to say that they fixed all these problems ages ago.]

[And second, let me recommend that instead of reading about yet another minor fuss, you read the lovely post about DLR by SoD.]

Suppose you have created a spiffy new method for reconstructing past climate from proxy data, intended to be used over the past 1000-2000 years or whenever. You can try to test that on real-world data, of course, but you run into an immeadiate problem: you don't know in advance what the right answer is, so you'll never know how good your method is.

The obvious solution to this problem is to use fake data (OMG I've used the word "fake"! Scandal! Pushing it a bit, I could even call this a "Trick" Don't tell the fools). One approach would be to use simple random data, but this then runs into another problem: the statistics of the random data won't look anything like the real-world data. So, a far better solution is to take climate model data and use that as your testbed. In this case, you take a long integration of one or more climate models. This is great: the model looks something like the real world (though it doesn't have to be desperately realistic, and it doesn't have to have tracked the actual yearly or decadal rise and fall of real-world temperatures), and you now do know the Right Answer: viz, the mean annual temperature (or the hemispheric mean, or whatever it is you care about), because since you have the full global model output you can trivially calculate it.

Then, you take the know locations of your proxies (and you can even include the changing number of locations over time, or model the effects of including more or less) and you interpolate the model data to these locations. And you can even add a carefully-calibrated amount of noise to the interpolated value, to mimic the proxy not providing a true temperature. And then you run this data through your method, and you then compare it to the Right Answer.

What Smerdon et al. say is that Mann et al. have made various errors in their handling of the model data used to test the reconstruction methods: they have got the smoothing wrong, or they have switched locations by 180 degrees. That doesn't invalidate the methods (a point I'm sure will get lost in the blogonoise) but (if correct) would invalidate the testing.

Add1: so, the point about the test-method only needing to work on data that has some kind of bearing on the real world is the explanation for

As Smerdon et al. correctly point out, this error does not impact the qualitative conclusions drawn from the results and described in Mann et al., 2007a (cf. Figure 1). The global field was still reasonably sampled, and the pseudoproxy locations, while not correct in longitude, are correct in latitude, and reasonably sample the field. It should also be noted that real proxy locations can vary considerably based on various inclusion/exclusion metrics that accept or reject proxies when building an actual proxy network. In fact, our network "D" in Mann et al., 2007a actually used random pseudoproxy locations.

in the R et al. reply. Even if you get all the locations wrong by 180 degrees longitude, your test of the method is still probably a reasonable test (note: that is, as a test of the method. Remember that is what all this is about) because the climate is moderately symmetrical wrt change of longitude (but isn't wrt change of latitude, obviously).

Add2: there is more that a suggestion that there may be a certain amount of academic point-scoring going on here. Rutherford et al. conclude

In summary, the issues raised by Smerdon et al. (2010), while factual, have no material impact on any of the key conclusions of Mann et al. (2007a). Additionally, they have no impact whatsoever on subsequent studies by us (Mann et al., 2009; Rutherford et al., 2010) where the technical errors they note did not occur, and which reach identical conclusions. In light of these considerations, we are puzzled as to why, given the minor impact the issues raised actually have, the matter wasn't dealt with in the format of a comment/reply. Alternatively, had Smerdon et al. taken the more collegial route of bringing the issue directly to our attention, we would have acknowledged their contribution in a prompt corrigendum. We feel it unfortunate that neither of these two alternative courses of action were taken.

And indeed that last point has some force. If you find something wrong with someone's paper, the polite course of action isn't to rush into print saying "ha ha you're wrong" but to raise it with the original authors. Of course if you do that then you don't get an all-important publication point out of it (and a comment counts for less than an article, too). If you raise it with the authors and they blow you off then off course you can go into print.

Add3: probably more important than this, is to look at fig 5(a) from Smerdon et al. What strikes you there is not the difference between the red and blue lines, but the diffrernece between the red/blue lines and the black line - which is to say, neither the wrongly-sampled nor the correctly sampled reconstruction is doing a good job of reconstructing the variance of the Right Answer. As Rutherford et al say

First, Mann et al., 2005 used the Regularized Expectation Maximization method with Ridge Regression (RegEM-Ridge) as a regularization method. RegEM-Ridge has been shown to suffer from a loss of variance when reconstructing the hemispheric mean (Zwiers and Lee, pers. comm., August 2006; Mann et al., 2007a,b; Smerdon and Kaplan, 2007) which is not the case with RegEM-TTLS (Truncated Total Least Squares). This led Mann et al., 2007 to use the TTLS implementation of RegEM. This being the case, we will confine our comments to Mann et al., 2007a. However, it is important that the reader recognize that Smerdon et al. (2010) used RegEM-Ridge and that their results shown in Figure 5(a) show the expected variance loss of a RegEM-Ridge reconstruction whereas RegEM-TTLS faithfully reconstructs the target series (Figure 1).

And indeed, if you look at their figure 1 you see that the shiny new method does a much better job.

Add4: at KZ, Eduardo said: They also assert that the errors have been corrected in subsequent studies. And yet, Rutherford et al. continue to show the wrong NH mean temperature simulated by the ECHO-G model - compare figure 1a in the manuscript by Rutherford and Figure 5b in Smerdon et al 2010. It is obvious that these error have not be corrected. to which I replied:

Fair point. I asked about this, and the wrong figure was transcribed. Looking, the PDF response has been updated to show the correct figure. Both pix are in fig 1 of the Rutherford et al. reply to Smerdon (http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/Mann/articles/articles.html); it looks like they transcribed the wrong one.

Poissonally I'd prefer it if people kept old versions around to compare to rather than updating; but then again, I don't do that with the blog, cos the software won't let me.

Add5: the transcription error is now confirmed by Mann at an RC comment.

stoat Sat, 07/24/2010 - 07:23

Tags

Mentioned this at RC and Gavin pointed to the response from Rutherford et al:

http://holocene.meteo.psu.edu/shared/articles/RMWAcomment_2010_jclim_sm…

The response looks good ...

You managed to write that many words without giving the term pseudoproxy?

Oh well, this probably will blow up the blogs for a couple months. For the theatrics of it, I actually hope Mann did something unambiguously incorrect here, so people can just say that, have it corrected, and move on.

[Then you will be happy, nearly. http://holocene.meteo.psu.edu/shared/articles/RMWAcomment_2010_jclim_sm… says "Smerdon et al. (2010) describe two technical errors in the model grid data used in Mann et al. (2005, 2007a). They are correct in the discovery of these errors. At the same time, we feel that they have not adequately addressed the fact that both errors did not occur in subsequent publications and that the main conclusions of Mann et al., 2007a, which supercedes Mann et al., 2005, are not impacted." So as near as I can tell the assertion is that yes the error is present but no it doesn't matter any more -W]

Helps to at least skim the paper and comment before commenting.. this ought not be a hullabaloo, it looks like it's been worked out. Good on the authors for finding the errors.

" So as near as I can tell the assertion is that yes the error is present but no it doesn't matter any more

There were other errors, though, hopefully you'll work through it.

Most interesting to me is that apparently they accidently stumbled on a bug in one of the canned analysis routines they used (subsequently, they've worked around it, so this too doesn't matter in any big-picture way).

I wonder why they made the error earlier and then did not make it later? Was it just a natural evolution for other reasons and they did not realize the first error? Or did they fail to correct something they new was wrong (by corrigendum or by some explicit "we are using the 2007 paper to correct a wrong practice of the 2005 paper and this is exactly what it was".

I find Mike to be pretty darn opaque in correcting himself explicitly. Even when he does correct himself, it seems like he does it en passent and without really plainly, clearly doing so (but giving himself something to refer to if challenged...)

I wonder why they made the error earlier and then did not make it later?

Well, if you read their response, it seems clear enough. I don't find it opaque.

1. They published the first paper in 2005, using RegEM-Ridge as a regularization method.

2. They were informed of potential problems using RegEM-Ridge by Zwiers and Lee (via personal communication, i.e. informally) in 2006.

Note the two dates. The answer to your question should be obvious.

"RegEM-Ridge has been shown to suffer from a loss of variance when reconstructing the hemispheric mean"

I take this to mean that the issue wasn't known in 2005, and reading between the lines, it probably took Zwiers and Lee a fair amount of analysis to demonstrate the problem. Obviously it wasn't obvious beforehand, otherwise the obvious mistake would not have been made.

3. So they switched to another form of RegEM implementation, Truncated Total Least Squares, which has been shown not to suffer from the problem discovered with RegEM-Ridge, and published again in 2007.

I assume this is the error you're discussing? There are others listed as well ...

Apparently when all the errors are accounted and corrected (or worked around, in the case of the problem with the canned generic mapping tools - library, presumably- that they were using), there's no significant change to the conclusions of the paper.

If it weren't Mann, and if it weren't The Hockey Stick, I doubt if such a fine-tooth comb would've been applied to the paper.

But it's good that minor errors were found and fixed, because it strengthens the work in the end.

Compare this with McIntyre's efforts ...

Smerdon seems to be a straight shooter, in his publications list he links to Rutherford, Mann et al's reply to an earlier paper of his regarding RegEM (the Smerdon 2008 paper mann refers to in the rebuttal to the current paper being discussed here).

Apparently there's some history here, though, and it's not exactly friendly ...

Mann, from the reply linked earlier:

we are puzzled as to why, given the minor
impact the issues raised actually have, the matter wasn't dealt with in the format of a
comment/reply. Alternatively, had Smerdon et al. taken the more collegial route of
bringing the issue directly to our attention, we would have acknowledged their
contribution in a prompt corrigendum. We feel it unfortunate that neither of these two
alternative courses of action were taken.

So the correction is well behind the times. Science has already been self correcting and moved on. Let us do the same and not make red noise with vague personal remarks.

I think the complaint about being collegial was a bit out of place, in that venue.

[There is probably background here that you aren't seeing -W]

I see WMC has taken note of Science of Doom. A marvelous site, isn't it? Filled a certain niche.

I also enjoy that when I google stoat, the description is now, "Taking science by the throat... climate, rowing, and misc trailing stuff."

[No idea what I meant by "trailing" so I've removed that -W]

I think that McIntyre has spawned a bit of a cottage industry in pointing out non-critical problems in Mann's studies. Maybe it's an easy way to get publication points...

IIRC, the 2005 paper, was comparing the performance of RegEM-Ridge with previous methods (MBH). I agree with the observation that earlier Mann methods did tend to suppress longer term variability, but of course it appears that Mann also agreed with this observation and then improved his methods. Isn't this supposed to be how science works?

The fact that the Smirnoff paper was based on a method no longer used should have been a big hint to the editors and reviewers...

SoD is interesting, ce, although I do detect a bit of a lean toward the septics. Maybe it's just rhetorical, but not long ago that seemed to explain Judy's stance as well, so I wonder. OTOH SoD isn't hesitating to get into the scientific weeds, in sharp contrast to Judy.

Expanding on that last point, on one level Judy's failure to venture into the weeds is due to the material under discussion being entirely outside her specialty, but in that case she seems to be making what amounts to an argument from authority. Of course paleo in particular isn't within Gavin's expertise either, and yet he's managed to become reasoanably conversant with at least the HS-related aspects of it. Judy looks lame by contrast.

> the polite course of action isn't to rush into print
> ... but to raise it with the original authors. Of
> course if you do that then you don't get an
> all-important publication point out of it
>(and a comment counts for less than an article, too)

Ya know, there are a lot of older papers out there that would serve as fodder for a publication-coup-mining operation. Think how fast the computers, statistics, and other technology has changed. There must be hundreds of cases where an ambitious but uncreative publication-hungry chap could go look for a change in methods in a series of papers starting with work published a decade or two ago.

Back a decade or two ago, nobody had the time and tools to reanalyze work -- and everyone knew that later work would be done better in many ways (and the limits on words/pages/cites were far more severe).

Just think of how many little tweaks, tricks, and other improvements must have been quietly made over 20 years by scientists, that didn't get explicitly and verbosely described. Why, new software was coming out at an amazing pace and likely did a better job, whether the researchers even knew what bugs got fixed or not.

Seems like those who can't do new and interesting work will have a decade or two of opportunity to get publications by mining the old work for bits of unexplained improvement that can be reverse-engineered as hidden error and, in this new age of infinite space and time, published or blogged. There ya go, scientific career path.

That's *Smerdon*, RN; more like an early Cretaceous herbivore than a brand of vodka. :)

Putting it as you do, and it looks entirely accurate so far as I can tell, one wonders how this paper ever got published. Is it yet more evidence that the journals (broadly speaking) bend over backwards to publish stuff crtical of the HS?

Hank, looking at his pubs page he doesn't appear all that disreputable (yet, noting that it's early in his career). Also, it looks as if his primary motive is to flog his own method, but if so the focus on Mann's abandoned method is even more strange.

Smirnoff? Party at R. norvegicus's house!

"Pushing it a bit, I could even call this a "Trick" Don't tell the fools)."

I recently found "trick" used to refer to some clever mathematical device in, of all places, a Terry Pratchett novel (Monsterous Regiment, page 252, "I believe I can see a number of other little mathematical, ahem, tricks to make the passage of information even swifter, but I'm sure these have already occurred to you."). No comment to make on the substantive issue of the thread, but it does show, quite nicely, just how foolish it was to make a fuss about the use of the word "trick", given that this usage was even known to authors of (highly correlated) "comic" novels ;o)

Steve,

Smerdon does seem to be flogging his own method. It is interesting that back in 2007 it was pointed out in a comment by Mann on one of his papers, that the flaws he had found, while valid, had since been corrected. Therefore I really find it interesting that he is getting a second bite at the apple by making the same criticism of the same abandoned method. Of course this is actually like his fifth paper mining this vein. I think he's found a way to get cheap publication points.

But he doesn't seem to be too disreputable and actually does seem to be doing actual legitimate research into reconstruction techniques as opposed to McIntyre-esque "auditing".

"[No idea what I meant by "trailing" so I've removed that -W]"

OT: It seems perfectly clear to me that this means outdoor perambulation. Call it hiking, trekking, taking the trail, or going for a tramp (as an Irishman might), it all amounts to the same thing.

[In common parlance yes but it is a phrase I'm certain I would never use. I'm still struggling to think what it might be a typo for -W]

> I assume this is the error you're discussing? There are others listed as well ...

Actually Dhogaza I don't think so -- the Ridge vs. TTLS issue is mentioned in the Comment, but the main issues discussed in the paper are 1) a 180 degree erroneous longitudinal rotation of the model outputs, and 2) the "fuzzing out" of the W. hemisphere by the GMT grid averaging software routine used.

Both errors are somewhat embarrassing; they would have been caught by making the geographical plots Smerdon makes here. Looks to me Rutherford et al. are playing a game of "but you are doing something silly too!".

> Apparently there's some history here, though, and it's not exactly friendly ...

You bet. Dhogaza did you notice that there isn't even the customary "thank you for bringing this to our attention"? Not saints them, Mann and friends. Damn good scientists though.

> I assume this is the error you're discussing? There are others listed as well ...

> Apparently there's some history here, though, and it's not exactly friendly ...

You bet. Dhogaza did you notice that there isn't even the customary "thank you for bringing this to our attention"? Not saints them, Mann and friends. Damn good scientists though.

Actually Dhogaza I don't think so -- the Ridge vs. TTLS issue is mentioned in the Comment, but the main issues discussed in the paper are 1) a 180 degree erroneous longitudinal rotation of the model outputs, and 2) the "fuzzing out" of the W. hemisphere by the GMT grid averaging software routine used.

Instead of guessing I probably should've asked TCO to clearly state which problem he was talking about ...

Dhogaza did you notice that there isn't even the customary "thank you for bringing this to our attention"?

I hadn't, actually, but that's a very good point. The note's definitely ... frosty!

On the whole, in a rational world, having the sort of information that Smerdon provides in the literature would be a good thing, because it would be sure to be picked up by citation data bases such as google scholar and world of science. Anyone looking at the original paper would find the correction and the comment on the correction and have a good idea of what happened, rather than some opaque, we don't do that crap anymore.

Clearly a different kind of journal/comment server is called for, one that would be indexed by the citation databases

No criticism of Dr. Smerdon intended, I was extrapolating from William's comment about the temptation to get a paper rather than a comment, thinking that there's a misopportunity to notice.

Think about the pace of change in the tools scientists have used over the past few decades. (Anyone remember 8" floppies, CP/M, the dot prompt in dBase II, or WordStar's "Fatal Error F-27, Disk Full" message?)

There will be plenty of problems from the old tools and methods that can be found in older work, by comparing newer work and seeing what differs.

You know the argument in industry that improving a product can be risky, because making the thing _better_ can be read as an admission it had a problem in its early iteration? I'm saying, imagine that becoming a concern for scientists who know that progress is part of doing good science, who for a while left the old stuff behind -- on old media, basically not possible to rerun or redo because of the pace of change in the tools.

People who love _doing_ science won't find anything tempting about that as a lifestyle. Boring! People who care about _screwing_with_ science might be tempted to follow in the tracks of the lawyers using that approach.

Mike has a tendancy to use rather complex and new methods for a rather tricky problem. The methods have not been fully explained (worse earlier) and have evolved over time. It's good to be learning and testing new methods, but then there should be more emphasis on the details of the methods and testing them (even with known standards...yes he has done this lately, more), rather than emphasizing the result. I have seen crystallogrophers get into trouble using new mehtods on new structures, especially when the emphasis of the publication was the structure not the method.

> I find Mike to be pretty darn opaque in correcting himself explicitly.

But TCO, as you see here, they will admit to real errors. What more do you expect? And when they don't, have you considered that the reason may be that the "error" actually isn't, or has been adequately considered -- as with the Tiljander or r^2 nonsense?

And how fair do you consider it that Smerdon et al. fail to point out that these errors are limited to papers that have since been superceded? Which they very well knew. A collegially written corrigendum would have had all of that in one place. I would be "not amused" too.

The problem, such as it is, is that Mann is serial skimpy, something that should not be done with new methods. OTOH, he goes where none have gone before, which is better than OK. He needs a statistician to clean up afterwards.

Eli, I am not sure that that is quite fair. I am only a simple geodesist (like old Gauss, and several of your Presidents), but I have no great difficulty following what he (and that al. guy) are doing. E.g., in his 2008 paper (like the two papers at issue here) he uses, pretty much vanilla, a method and code developed by Tapio Schneider and widely used elsewhere... if it is wrong, many more folks are in trouble ;-)

All the errors so far that I have seen (exempting perhaps the 98/99 years) are not due to getting the stats wrong, but to dumb mistakes in the processing chain -- and invariably without much practical consequence, the kind of "luck" that comes with a physics background...

He would need an army of e-bunnies to find these roaches, not the 1.5 grad slave that he has today. And not so much a highly paid statistician either.

Mann cleared, again

stoat — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 15:12:39 +0000

Mann cleared, again

RC has said this already, but perhaps you want to talk about it here. Not great surprise I think; see the press release or the final report.

The Investigatory Committee, after careful review of all available evidence, determined
that there is no substance to the allegation against Dr. Michael E. Mann, Professor, Department of Meteorology, The Pennsylvania State University. More specifically, the Investigatory Committee determined that Dr. Michael E. Mann did not engage in, nor did he participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting, or reporting research, or other scholarly activities. The decision of the Investigatory Committee was unanimous.

Just to prove I've read, or at least skimmed, it: Lindzen's bit is jolly.

[Update: that was a bit of a boring post (JA doesn't manage any better) so how about some more Tiljander? I only mention it because someone manages to say William Connolley's position is too subtle, nuanced, and complex for me to summarize - isn't that just what you'd like *your* position to be? Anyway, I don't think anyone has managed better than me, in this post. AGW Observer has a go, and while I'm happy to quote his "Looking at McIntyre's claims on this and the real situation descibed above shows that McIntyre's claims are false" I didn't read carefully enough to work out what McI's claims might be. Unfortunately Ari seems to have missed a very fundamental point - the sign-invariance one even though I hammered that several times. Oh well. APS also has a post with loadsa comments (I'm sure I left him one too but I see it not, never mind, it was only to point to my post and explain, yet again, why the Tiljander series don't matter much in the reconstruction). Apart from that it looks like cue the go-round-in-circles-again kind of stuff we've come to know and move on these kinds of issues]

stoat Thu, 07/01/2010 - 11:12

Tags

climate communication

climate people

climate politics

Mann

JA's version was funnier than yours.

Mann did get rapped for forwarding unpublished manuscripts without getting explicit permission from the authors. Which is about right, I think. You ought not do that, but it isn't worth any gnashing of teeth.

Anyway, the septics won't care, or rather, they'll have some fun with a couple Lindzen quotes.

Wasn't Lindzen paying attention?

[Remember, to keep L's self-image intact he has to be "above the fray" and indeed *not even interested*. L,I think, knows the real score - he isn't a McI - so he knew this was going to die into nothing, so in order to keep his dignity his reaction has to be something like "hmpf! what these whippersnappers get up to these days! still, who cares" -W]

_All available evidence_?

Sounds like an exagerated claim to me. In the context of the case under review, rather ironic.

It seems like, in the end, the biggest "crime" (and I admit to being duped by the "seriousness" climategate at first) - was that they seemed like dicks in some of their emails. Which is not too shocking in science. Imagine if Newton & Hooke had the ability to email - or heaven forfend, blog!

Carl: Fantastic idea for a series of blog posts! Newton blogging on Liebniz. Darwin on finches, etc and usw. I know it's been done in literature, but in blog format and informality?

Unfortunately Ari seems to have missed a very fundamental point - the sign-invariance one even though I hammered that several times.

That's true. I should have looked what others said about this before publishing that post.

But there's now an interesting situation. If the MEA algorithm really flips the negatively correlating proxies, then it might be that Tiljander proxies are flipped also. At least the relative X-ray density seems to correlate negatively with the recent instrumental temperature series, but I calculated that with a local measurement station data I fetched from GISS so I still have to check that using the same series as MEA did.

Carl C, yep. Not giving assholes the time of day makes you look like a dick -- to those that don't see the assholes for what they are.

More on Lindzen (and Morano): Both call the Mann exoneration a "whitewash". The difference is that Morano is way more over-the-top.

http://deepclimate.org/2010/07/02/morano-and-lindzen-mann-exoneration-a…

Lo and behold, Marc Morano of Climate Depot has come through right on schedule, even comparing Mann to disgraced investment fraudster Bernie Madoff and calling Mann the âposterboy of the corrupt and disgraced climate science echo chamberâ . And, the denialosphereâs star scientist, MIT meteorologist Richard Lindzen, has weighed in right behind him, echoing Moranoâs âwhitewashâ characterization.

Can the rest of the denialosphere be far behind? Oh, the sad - and presumably unintentional â irony of it all.

There - I put the italics on both paragraphs (scienblogs.com is a pain).

WMC,

My remark in Arthur's comments -- William Connolley's position is too subtle, nuanced, and complex for me to summarize -- refers in part to your acceptance of the uses of Tiljander's XRD and lightsum proxies in both Mann08 and Kaufman09.

In "Oh dear oh dear oh dear oh dear," your fielded this question from commenter "Peter" --

Since Kaufman has issued a Corrigendum in which the upside down series is acknowledged, is he wrong or is Mann?

Your response was --

[He is right and Mann is right -W]

In Mann08, a higher value of the XRD proxy causes the reconstruction to report a higher temperature (than would be the case if that proxy had a lower value for that year). In contrast, in (corrected) Kaufman09, a higher value of the XRD proxy causes the reconstruction to report a lower temperature.

The same holds true for lightsum, as for XRD.

In my opinion, these two irreconcilable interpretations arose because the Tiljander proxies are not calibratable to the instrumental record, 1850-1995.

Mann08 failed to recognize that.

The point of the correction to Kaufman09 was for that later paper's authors to take this problem into account. To that end, they re-interpreted the Tiljander proxies, so that (1) they did not use the spurious correlation of the proxies to the 1850-1995 instrumental record, and (2) they altered the orientation of the XRD and lightsum proxies, such that they were consistent with the interpretation in Tiljander03 (i.e. such that higher proxy values correspond to lower temperatures).

I elaborated on the concept of "proxy orientation" in the post The Newly-Discovered Jarvykortta Proxy -- II.

These and related topics are being considered by Arthur Smith (Michael Mann's errors) and by Ari JokimÃ¤ki (Tiljander). I check those threads regularly, and would be willing to follow up at either place (so long as those hosts feel the discussion is on-topic).

I hope that helps clarify things.

Hi William,

I'm a little behind in my reading, but I thought the Lindzen bit was jolly too.

'When told that the first three allegations against Dr. Mann were dismissed at the inquiry stage of the RA-lO process, Dr. Lindzen's response was: "It's thoroughly amazing. I mean these are issues that he explicitly stated in the emails. I'm wondering what's going on?"'

I agree. At one point I started a list of my own of the number of provable acts of dishonesty and unethical conduct revealed plainly and unambiguously in the Climategate emails -- Mike Mann being by far the most consistently guilty party. I don't have the time to dig back through it all again right now, but I have to ask you guys (and I don't mean you personally but in fact all of you bloggers -- Romm, Gavin, Rabett and the rest) where you all think you're going with this?

[It is a shame that you don't make your exciting list available, but rather prefer to continue the innuendo and smears -W]

As politicians, you're must be all very good scientists...

[Sorry, that is incoherent. What are you trying to say? -W]

If you were politicians, you would have adopted a stance of distancing; moving forward; demonstrating lessons learnt; damage control in order to somehow regain the public trust. Instead, you've all joined hands and patted yourselves on the backs, apparently completely oblivious to the fact that these victories you're claiming are completely pyrrhic and serving nothing but to further alienate an already outraged general public.

[You need to get out more and stop reading the right-wing blogs so much, I think. Face it: the "mountain" of emails has turned into a molehill; the people you've relied on have turned out to have grossly exaggerated -W]

I know people from the general public and it's accepted as fact by all that Climategate was a scandal. Witness Jimmy Wales weighing in favour of this position in Wikipedia. Or the comedian Jon Stewart's take. You don't need to be a scientist to see that Mike Mann is a repugantly unethical individual. Phil Jones at least did the right thing, and showed contrition. Mann instead pointed the finger at Jones! Unbelievable.

[By golly! A comedian says we're all guilty? Then is must be true. Please, can *you* at least try to be serious?

But in one area I do agree with you: there was a scandal in this matter: that so many newspapers and blogs were fooled by a few determined septics into believing twaddle; even now that it has been revealed to be all nonsense you are still determined to believe these lies -W]

Climategate happened. Every time you bring it up -- "Mann is cleared again! And again! And again!" -- you simply state to the public that you haven't learnt a thing. The source material is there. Mann's behind the scenes lying is there, indelibly written into the historical record. Historians will come back to this and they'll judge him on the primary source material -- not Penn State whitewashes.

Guys, wake up...

[Ah, whitewash. I was waiting for you to say that. No comment on the affair from the septics is complete without an accusation of whitewash. What you mean is: we know the answer, because divine revelation has revealed it to us. You want people to keep having inquiries until you get one you like. Please, wake up -W]

"an already outraged general public"

Say what?

"Mann's behind the scenes lying is there"

Say what?

Could we have a little less wishful thinking, please?

William, I'm not going back through the Climategate emails again at this point, and I'm not going to clarify my typo, where my meaning was still clear. But I'll recall a single example from the Climategate letters: Mann acknowledges privately the validity of some of M&M's objections in one email and then in a later email to the press (Revkin) he asserts that their research is _completely_ fraudulent. That's called: lying. Don't you think? There were plenty of other examples. But look, who cares what I think? Why not see that so many other scientists -- Judith Curry, Hans von Storch, Eduardo Zorita, Roger Pielke Sr, Richard Lindzen, indeed all panelists from the MIT Climategate debate arrived at the same conclusion of unethical behaviour evidenced in the Climategate emails, so that included Kerry Emmanuel, Ron Prinn, and two social scientists whose names I can't recall. I mean, the list goes on. No one cares whether Mann's technically guilty of academic misconduct. Why continue to applaud what is an obvious lack of ethics? Who are you guys trying to kid? It's yourselves right?

[Alex, this is all a bit pointless: you're just mudflinging. If you actaully care about this you have to provide refs for your statements, not just half-remembered stuff.

As for the climategate debate, I think you're lying. I haven't listened to the video, but http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/climategate-story-1215.html says Kerry Emanuel, the Breene M. Kerr Professor of Meteorology, fears that Climategate was a âpremeditated distraction from the main issuesâ of climate science. Emanuel said heâs concerned with the identity and motives of the hackers, citing the very rich âmachineâ of global warming deniers as a possible culprit. As for the e-mails, he thinks they show nothing more than âhumans â a few with failings. Mostly, it shows scientists hard at work.â

So, do you still maintain your words? Please, next time actually give sources -W]

I also hope you're able to complete that incomplete thought of mine in that stream of consciousness style response that just came out, as well as the previous typo (or let us edit comments after posting). :)

I'm looking forward to seeing you attempt to support your blatantly libelous allegations against Mann, Alex. It had better be good. Facts matter.

While Alex frantically scrambles through stolen emails to find support for his gross libel of Michael Mann, a word from me about the rest of the week.

In December the University of East Anglia commissioned Muir Russell to head an inquiry into allegations of impropriety made by some people who read the stolen emails. The inquiry got going in early spring and received two tranches of public submissions in April. Its scope is to examine the emails and any other data held by the Climatic Research Unit for evidence of any unethical tampering or suppression of evidence, to review procedures for data handling and ensure they comply with best practice, to review compliance with the University's FOIA procedures, and to review and make recommendations on data integrity and security.

I expect the inquiry, which delivers its report on Wednesday, to clarify a lot of subjects on which I and a number of other cautious people have been unable to comment for lack of pertinent information. Let's wait and see.

[I'd forgotten about MR. Will be interesting -W]

On her "Adventures in ethics and science" blog, Janet D. Stemwede provides a an interesting and scholarly summary of the inquiry report released last Thursday, July 1.

It's in three parts, the first two of which she has already posted.

http://scienceblogs.com/ethicsandscience/2010/07/in_search_of_accepted_…

You'll have to fish around for the third parrt, whenever it's published.

The usually yelling and screaching idiots haven't yet found that blog so it's a very sedate affair.

--) Emails:

1107899057.txt:
Date: Fri, 04 Feb 2005 15:54:15 -0500
To: Andy Revkin
From: "Michael E. Mann"
Subject: Re: FW: "hockey stock" methodology misleading
Hi Andy,
The McIntyre and McKitrick paper is pure scientific fraud. I think you'll find this
reinforced by just about any legitimate scientist in our field you discuss this with.

By 4th Feb 2005 Mann knew this statement was false. How do I know?

1108399027.txt, private correspondence between Tom Wigley and Mike Mann, Wigley to Mann:

Re WSJ. They say ...
"Statistician Francis Zwiers of Environment Canada, a government agency,
says he now agrees that Dr. Mann's statistical method "preferentially
produces hockey sticks when there are none in the data."
Dr. Mann, while agreeing that his mathematical method tends to find
hockey-stick shapes, says this doesn't mean its results in this case are
wrong. Indeed, Dr. Mann says he can create the same shape from the
climate data using completely different math techniques."

Note, Dr. mann agrees, 14th Feb 2005 that 'his mathematical method tends to find hockey-stick shapes'. Wigley says it is 'worrying' that 'Statistician Francis Zwiers of Environment Canada' agrees with M&M 'but it seems that you do too.' Mann in his response then directs Wigley to... William Connolley's Wikipedia page, and shrugs this off. He says, 'it clear that the take-home point is robust'.

It is quite clear that Mann knew these statements to Andy Revkin accusing them, libelously Tony Sidaway, of 'pure scientific fraud' were in fact falsehoods.

--) MIT Climategate Debate: watch it.

And yes, my timeline was off (14th Feb is, to be sure, 10 days after 4th Feb, even though the emails appear in a different order in the FOIA.zip due to parts of them being there because others forwarded/replied to them). The email of 14th couldn't, therefore, be held up as evidence in court as 'proof' that he was lying. However, there is overwhelming evidence earlier in the dump that he knew by 4th Feb 2005 that there was slightly more to M&M than 'pure scientific fraud'. No amount of spinning is ever going to remove this. Perhaps I'll dig some more to see what can be deductively 'proved'.

[Errm, so is that it? Your very best evidence is that he might have lied to a journalist? -W]

Like William, I'm unimpressed by this, Alex. Please don't abuse public forums to conduct libelous smear campaigns if you don't want to be seen as an odious twat and treated accordingly.

I will return to the subject matter of William's posting, and to the broader issue, in a couple of days, after the Muir Russell investigation has delivered its report and I have had time to digest it.

For completeness, here is a link to the third in the series of postings by Janet D. Stemwede summarising the content of the July 1, 2010 on ethics charges against Dr. Mann, which completely vindicated him on the charges.

http://scienceblogs.com/ethicsandscience/2010/07/in_search_of_accepted_…

Please see my earlier postings for links to the first two parts.

>Errm, so is that it? Your very best evidence is that he might
>have lied to a journalist? -W

And that is precisely my point. By celebrating Mann's victory you're now dangerously close to suggesting that, amongst many other things, it's okay to lie to journalists. "Who cares, eh, if you lie to a mere journalist occasionally? We're all righteous Greens after all!" Are you happy with that impression?

[I think what you're demonstrating is an inability to read what people write, so it isn't suprising you're confused on these many issues. I didn't say lying was good. We all learn at our mothers knee while she bakes apple pie that lying is bad. We also know full well that we all lie when the occaision suits us, as do our politicians. Attemptnig an absolute moral prohibition on lying is absurd.

What I said, and I'll say it again in the hope that you might understand, is that you really need, after all this time and effort, to have come up with something *better* than that. You need falsifiction of data, etc etc, and you have *none* of that. Your lot - the septic side - has persisently overblown this issue for its own ends.

And before you say "but they aren't my side" please explain why you show such a total lack of interest in the many proven errors in the UAH MSU record - errors which *did* affect the political process badly. Somehow you and all the fake "auditers" care nothing about that -W]

And his page here http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/myths-vs-fact-reg…, still _today_, over five years later, the first ranking page on google if one types in the keywords 'Mann hockey stick', repeats the same lies!

[I'm not aware of any lies on that page. You can, if you wish, quote statements you think are wrong there - that would be better than this constant repetition of the word "lie" in an effort to make mud stick -W]

William,

This discussion has become intriguing.

> I didn't say lying was good. We all learn at
> our mother's knee while she bakes apple pie
> that lying is bad. We also know full well
> that we all lie when the occasion suits us,
> as do our politicians. Attempting an absolute
> moral prohibition on lying is absurd.

You appear to be saying -- i.e. the cynicism suggested in '[w]e all learn at our mother's knee while she bakes apple pie' -- that it's a 'pie in the sky' ideal to aspire not to lie (acknowledging that you *could* mean something else).

But the next bit makes that sympathetic reading harder to accept. 'We also know full well that we all lie when the occasion suits us, as do our politicians'. I would define this as 'opportunistic lying'. We do *not* all do that. Indeed, in my professional experience it's very uncommon. No one is perfect, of course, and I am fallible in many ways, but 'thou shalt not lie' is ingrained more deeply into our collective psyche. I forgive many things, but draw the line at personal dishonesty.

[Nonsense. I lie to my children: I told them that Father Christmas was going to bring them presents. This is commonplace. Or do you not classify that as lying? -W]

You continue, 'Attempting an absolute moral prohibition on lying is absurd.' At this point, is this really what you mean? I'll say nothing further to give you the chance to clarify.

[Yes. See the above -W]

You continue:

> Your lot - the septic side - has persisently
> overblown this issue for its own ends.
>
> And before you say "but they aren't my side"
> please explain why you show such a total lack
> of interest in the many proven errors in the
> UAH MSU record - errors which *did* affect
> the political process badly. Somehow you and
> all the fake "auditers" care nothing about
> that.

You presume a great deal here. The UAH controversy dates to around 2005 right?

[Wrong. It dates back far before then -W]

In the 2004 Australian general election, I was busily being outraged by our then prime minister John Howard's apparently stubborn refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol (amongst many other things he did that angered me). I voted from the Greens in the Senate and for Labor in the lower house -- as I had voted more or less in all elections since 1993, when I first enrolled to vote. Since 2002 I have financially supported the WWF and UNICEF as much as I can comfortably afford. I still do that, despite my global warming skepticism (although I can no longer vote for the Greens).

It wasn't until mid-2006 that my team leader, a retired geophysicist, blurted out one evening over drinks that 'global warming is complete nonsense'. That marks the point at which I became curious about the climate change debate, because I have a background in history and philosophy of science, and scientific controversies fascinate me.

By the end of 2006 I had become deeply skeptical -- largely after reading Lindzen's 2005 paper, 'Understand common climate claims'. I couldn't find any faults in the paper myself, and scientists who I pressed the matter with evaded the questions.

[AFAIK you've never brought this up before. I don't know the paper. Is it exciting? Is it... this one?. If so, Predictions based on these models are greatly in excess of what has been observed. Thus, if predictions based on these models are correct (after all stopped watches are right twice a day), then manâs greenhouse emissions have accounted for about 6 times the observed warming over the past century with some unknown processes canceling the difference is in there and is twaddle. As you well know, the GCMs match reality well -W]

I am not a 'septic', and feel 'skeptic' even is mischaracterising my position. The destruction of our environment deeply upsets me. I have the view that climate change alarm diverts all attention from the non-hypothetical challenges where real action could produce real results, and quickly. Logging of old-growth forests in Australia could be stopped, but the federal government can politically only prioritise a few issues if they are to retain any hope of remaining in power (and of course they can't achieve anything if they don't retain power -- the conservatives would get back in). The koala is nearly extinct in my state of New South Wales. And that's because we've cut down all their trees. The issues they've prioritised are climate change, and fighting the Japanese on scientific whaling. I blame the scientists for this.

[Yeah yeah yeah. But you're confused: your logic is about as convincing as Bellamy's (his is "(1) I don't like wind farms (2) wind farms are there partly to stop GW (3) therefore GW is false". Your logic is "there are problems more important than GW therefore GW is false" (I caricature) -W]

On the UAH controversy, I am not aware of any suggestions that Christy et al. did anything other than make an honest mistake, as is normal in the progress of science -- although I must disclaim that as it was before my time, I'm not fully across the details of the dispute. As far as I know, UAH fully cooperated with the RSS team that was set up to have their datasets independently checked, and they promptly conceded their error when it was uncovered. Thus, they still enjoy a very good professional relationship with the RSS team -- as well as the respect of most scientists. What is it that we should be 'auditing' today? They are regarded by both sides as quite reliable, correct?

[See - you don't care. You obsess over Mann et al. and as for UAH *you just don't care*. What explains this disparity of interest? I think, it is the lies you've been fed. You have the dates wrong. As for the full cooperation: no: for *years* UAH were issuing erroneous data, without any release of their code (as far as I know it still isn't), which was being abused by the Bushy type politicians, and which both S and C were hyping to congress. As for the "regarded as quite reliable" - this too is very clearly indicative of your biases. The early S+C UAH series is trash. No-one usues it. *Unlike* MBH98-99 which is still quite usable. However, you refuse to judge them on the early stuff, only on the corrected version. You don't do the same to MBH -W]

Finally I have to note that you've *silently* edited my last post, and taken what was a careful, considered response, and left the appearance of a frivolous, half-hearted one. That's really disappointing. If you posted at Steve McIntyre's blog, or at Anthony Watts' blog, or at Lucia Liljegren's blog, they would never do that to you.

[WTF are you on about? You previous comment in this thread, July 7, 2010 7:33 PM, is unedited except I've added comments. Your previous comment, as far as I can see, is this. Ditto. Please clarify -W]

Best,
Alex

>WTF are you on about? You previous comment in
>this thread, July 7, 2010 7:33 PM, is unedited
>except I've added comments. Your previous
>comment, as far as I can see, is this. Ditto.
>Please clarify

My humble apologies, I'm over worked presently and completely forgot I wrote separate comments. Guess I'm getting a little paranoid. Anyhow.

>Nonsense [on lying]. I lie to my children: I
>told them that Father Christmas was going to
>bring them presents. This is commonplace. Or
>do you not classify that as lying?

I do not classify it as 'opportunistic lying', I do not regard it as unethical, and neither do you. It is not lying to a journalist about your professional enemies. You know full well this is no comparison.

[Fine: this is as I suspected. You, like everyone else, make a distinction: sometimes when you don't tell the truth it is technically lying but no-one cares. This is why saying "look! look! he was lying. Therefore he was bad" makes no sense. Context is all -W]

>Wrong. [The UAH controversy] dates back far before [2005].

It had resolved itself by around 2005 though right? What I'm trying to say is that this was before my time. I wasn't following the debate at that stage. I simply accepted in those days as a matter of fact that humans were causing global warming. Now, there is no controversy. More on this below.

[Well, that depends who you are. There are plenty of CA readers who would disagree. Prez Bush would disagree. But scientifically, yes -W]

>Yeah yeah yeah. But you're confused: ... Your
>logic is "there are problems more important
>than GW therefore GW is false" (I caricature)

You don't caricature; you presume -- and wrongly.

>See - you don't care. You obsess over Mann et
>al. and as for UAH *you just don't care*. What
>explains this disparity of interest? I think,
>it is the lies you've been fed. You have the
>dates wrong. As for the full cooperation: no:
>for *years* UAH were issuing erroneous data,
>without any release of their code (as far as I
>know it still isn't), which was being abused
>by the Bushy type politicians, and which both
>S and C were hyping to congress. As for the
>"regarded as quite reliable" - this too is
>very clearly indicative of your biases. The
>early S+C UAH series is trash. No-one usues
>it. *Unlike* MBH98-99 which is still quite
>usable. However, you refuse to judge them on
>the early stuff, only on the corrected
>version. You don't do the same to MBH.

You are right that I don't care and I've given already a very good reason why I don't care. I don't care, because this matter is resolved. It is just history now. The matter of Mann et al. -- the matter of their *attitude* -- is not resolved. As I said, S & C are respected by their colleagues at RSS. They made a mistake and this mistake is acknowlegded by all. Even the likes of Monckton! There is simply nothing here to discuss. The Mann vs McIntyre dispute on the other hand is far from resolved. We still have blog warfare damaging the fabric of your science daily. Grenades lobbed from one side to the other without any genuine attempts at engagement. (Well, to be fair, most of the grenades come from McI but his expertise is impressive and his points often deserve answers that we never get.)

[No, you're wrong again. McI etc etc are still obsessing over a 1998 paper. If the S+C error is now uninteresting because too old, so is MBH'98 -W]

Contrast the unedifying RealClimate vs Climate Audit warfare with UAH vs RSS civility. It's chalk and cheese. One shows scientists being professionals, the other reveals scientists appearing to behave like children.

[Err, you've lost me there. UAH admitted, mostly, that RSS was right (they still quibble mind you: the UAH series has a lower trend than RSS). But taht was a disagreement between scientists, in the scientific literature. Comparing that to a discussion on blogs is very odd. I admit you're right: McI is freuently rude and offensive, but I don't see why you blame RC for that. You'r attempted "everyone is being childish" framing is just carelessness on your part: you can't be bothered to work out who is right -W]

*This* is my point.

As for me, the layperson, I just want the truth. But since all of McIntyre's criticism go unanswered, the *impression* will remain that RealClimate are hiding things from us. Thus, my skepticism endures.

[McI's criticism has been answered, multiple times. If you haven't read it yet, what is the point of repeating? -W]

Civil Investigation Demand to Mann - full text

illconsidered — Sat, 01 May 2010 07:07:11 +0000

Civil Investigation Demand to Mann - full text

This really must be read to be believed. IANAL, but surely this is over the top, to use the legal jargon. It is a clearly an impossible demand.

Untitled

Anyone have a link to an unembedded document?

[UPDATE: never mind, it is here[PDF]]

illconsidered Sat, 05/01/2010 - 03:07

Tags

Absolutely ridiculousâ¦ Tell me they're not going to comply with such an invasive orderâ¦

If the emails only go the AG office, they will be able to pick a few that, out of context, might sound suspicious (the use of the word âtrickâ, for example). The University would be better off just to make all the emails public, along, of course, with those of Fred Singer and Patrick Michaels. In the interest of fair play, I'm sure those two would agree!

The CID in plain PDF form is available from Fox News:

http://www.foxnews.com/projects/pdf/Virginia_Attorney_General_Letter.pdf

Oh sure, go ahead and find another link while I'm waiting for the Fox site to download again so I can grab the URL. You're all in on the conspiracy to make me look bad!

I for one am fully in favor of this investigation. Mann must be stopped. He turned me into a newt!

Thanks for the idea Johnny!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fr8DIg3oHFI

When reading this I thought about another blog post about typefonts:
http://scienceblogs.com/drugmonkey/2010/04/i_cant_believe_im_writing_ab…

What is the least legible typefont you can use to print all those mails without being obviously in contempt? Just enough to give the prosecutor and his team a good headache.

Didn't Virginia used to be for lovers? When did it become a haven for morans?

It's pretty common for nasty civil litigation, or antitrust cases.

Lawyers generally know a bit about the topic then. I'm thinking that this CID tends to indicate the Virginia AG has no great clue about how research works at a university, the levels of approval that it must go through, and how unlikely it is that anyone could get away with any serious wrongdoing.

One of the projects was conducted with NOAA, another with NSF. Cuccinelli is poaching on their territory, and frankly, they have bigger sticks with their IGs and the U.S. Justice Department backing them, and felony penalties under federal law.

Witch hunt, indeed.

Mann persecuted by The Man, again

illconsidered — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 09:15:33 +0000

Mann persecuted by The Man, again

I always marvel at the scientist-government conspiracy theories the more wacky members of the climate denial machine toss around so confidently.

How do they fit this into their world view?

In papers sent to UVA April 23, Cuccinelli's office commands the university to produce a sweeping swath of documents relating to Mann's receipt of nearly half a million dollars in state grant-funded climate research conducted while Mann-- now director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State-- was at UVA between 1999 and 2005.
...
Among the documents Cuccinelli demands are any and all emailed or written correspondence between or relating to Mann and more than 40 climate scientists, documents supporting any of five applications for the $484,875 in grants, and evidence of any documents that no longer exist along with proof of why, when, and how they were destroyed or disappeared.

$484,875 over six years. Wow, big money, no wonder he sold his soul. (And shared it with his institution, lab, assistants and collaborators and his equipment suppliers.)

Of course this is not the first instance of government harrassment Mann has endured.

So, seriously, how does that square with the idea of a collusion between government and scientists to manufacture a cash-cow scare story?

illconsidered Fri, 04/30/2010 - 05:15

Tags

There's a fishing expedition if I ever saw one. The AG has no idea what he's looking for, so he'll just ask for every document ever, in case there's something there.

Sounds like the guy has aspirations to higher office, and is feeding some constituent group.

If he has competence, the simplest way to give him proper nightmares is to give him all the data...

Well, what did you expect? They know they can't beat the data, they failed to make the stolen emails work for them, but they have all the money and influence they need. So they go after the scientists' work time now.

Can't make 'em say what you wanna hear? Make 'em shut up by smothering them in legal work.

It is a sad day for science and scientists when honest and decent ones are victimized in this way. All the dishonest ones can say what they want, which is known to be dishonest and fraudulent, but no one censures them.

No wonder intelligent students are choosing not to go into science these days.

This is a time when we need more and better scientists to help solve some of the problems the right wing corporate environmental defilers have caused.

Cuccinelli gets a two-fer with this move. He gets more street cred as the right-wingiest statewide politician in Virginia (no mean feat), and he gets payback from UVa, which he will massively inconvenience, for the humiliation he suffered when our governor reversed Cuccinelli's attempt to remove university policies against anti-gay job discrimination after outcry from the universities and particularly from UVa's president.

carrot eater | April 30, 2010 12:36 PM

It's not just the published/written stuff. Its "things" including handwritten notes:

2. As used herein, the words "document" or "documents" mean the original and any copies of any written, printed, typed, electronic, or graphic matter of any kind or nature, however
produced or reproduced, any book, pamphlet, brochure, periodical, newspaper, letter, correspondence, memoranda, notice, facsimile, e-mail, manual, press release, telegram, report, study, handwritten note, working paper, chart, paper, graph, index, tape, data sheet, data processing
card, or any other written, recorded, transcribed, punched, taped, filmed or graphic matter now in your possession, custody or control.

and remember this applies:

2. If any document requested was, but is no longer in your possession, subject to your control, or in existence, state for each such document:
(a) the type of document;
(b) whether it is missing, lost, has been destroyed, or has been transferred to the possession, custody, or control of other persons;
(c) the circumstances surrounding, and the authorization for, the disposition described in (b) above;
(d) the date or approximate date of the disposition described in (b) above;
(e) the identity of all persons having knowledge of the circumstances described in (c) above; and
(f) the identity of all persons having knowledge of the document's contents.

All those post-it notes and rough pads, paid for out of the grant, were written on - where are they? what is the policy for destroying this evidence? Did x, y and z see the document before you trashed it? who were they? Where ar they now? Were they ever members of the communist party?

Unbelievable, this is not a witch hunt, it is a witch lynching and worse!

Mike

Here is an example of the "base" that Cuccinelli is playing to:
(from http://blogs.dailymail.com/donsurber/archives/13189#comment-71621 )

Russ Walsh says:
May 1, 2010 at 12:55 AM

Mannâs just the beginning. The list needs to include Gore, Suzuki (The Canadian enviro @&^*!!! who said that anyone who didnât believe in manmade global warming should be jailed), members of the media, NASAâs Hanson. The list is too long for this space! These people attacked us, and its time to clean up. Had it not been for Climategate and Lord Christopher Monckton weâd all be enslaved in one world global government thru the Copenhagen Treaty they STILL trying to ram through. Leftists are the most deviant, lying, deceitful, bullying gang of thugs youâll ever meet.

Now, that is some *serious* tinfoil-hat s**t!

Carrot Eater,

They are either a century behind, or just cut and pasted a bunch of boilerplate. Eli has not used punched tape since before Mann was born.

Cuccinelli and the AG office need to be flooded with FOIA requests ...

I would like to email Cuccinelli or the Governor of Virginia about this witch hunt. As a Canadian I amnot too sure which of them is the appropriate official for the purpose.

I would suggest that everyone who is concerned about it should do the same. Posting comments of annoyance will not put an end to this harassment of scientists and I think it is time to let these officious deniers know that they are not going to get away with it.

Can anyone provide the email address?

This appears to be a reincarnation of "MacCarthyism". How much money will be wasted by the AG and the UVA (a public university) in this attack on someone who has been gone for about five years. This seems to be the opposite of tea bag philosophy.

You can look this up for yourself. Google awaits.

http://www.oag.state.va.us/Cuccinelli/AG_Bio.html

The troglodytes over at WTFWT are having a field day over this. I imagine they're giddy with expectation. These are the kinds of folks with the tar and feathers. It's really disturbing to see so many utterly ignorant idiots that are behind this blatant witch-hunt.

It appears that I cannot email - at least from the official site. It accepts only American addresses.

I will just have to practise the forgotten art.

> or any other ... punched ... matter now in your
> possession, custody or control.

They want all the little 'chads' that were punched out of the tapes, and cards, and 3-ring-binder holepunches too, right?

This might actually benefit the univesity; likely they've got several rooms full of old paper they ought to have thrown out years ago and never got around to. Pity the machines for reading the media are long gone.

Clearly Mann should have archived working readers for any and all media his work or work he cited did use or may have used.

What is he hiding??

Posted by Coby:

"Clearly Mann should have archived working readers for any and all media his work or work he cited did use or may have used.

What is he hiding??"

I wonder what we'd find if we had unlimited access to all of Cuccinelli's private emails and letters? What juicy naughtiness is he hiding that the public needs to read about?

Robert, you obviously haven't been paying attention. The dirt on Cuccinelli is that he's got the hots for 200-year-old dominant chicks with bare breasts, and he's been bitten, but bad, by the denial bug.

Climate Research Unit Cracking - play the ball

catdynamics — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 22:48:07 +0000

Climate Research Unit Cracking - play the ball

Penn State has released the preliminary conclusions of its inquiry into the purloined e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

Dr Free-Ride provides an excellent discussion

PSU story on the internal inquiry

Full report (pdf)

In the meantime, the Grauniad reports police questioned a UEA scientist about the original cracking of the CRU e-mail archive

There has been considerable external pressure on PSU on this issue, with protests planned by conservative student groups this friday on campus, weather prermitting...
The Commonwealth Foundation for Public Policy Awareness took out a full page ad in the local student newspaper earlier this week questioning the integrity of the university process, before the outcome was known, and attacking Prof. Mann.

The inquiry was called despite there being no formal allegation of misconduct per University policies, which is unusual.
The preliminary conclusions exonerated Prof. Mann on 3 of the questions posed, and calls for a full inquiry into one remaining issue: whether Mann "engaged in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting or reporting research or other scholarly activities."

See Dr. F-R above.

Across the pond, the Grauniad has turned on the UEA folks, calling for Prof. Jones to resign, and, curiously, the public affairs person at UEA.
Sounds like some people were not happy with the communication process...

As this is still under formal inquiry at PSU, I will not comment personally at this point.
I do not speak in any way for PSU, or any bits of PSU.

catdynamics Thu, 02/04/2010 - 17:48

Tags

I'm very concerned by the Guardian's behaviour this week; they actually ran the "climate scientists covered up" piece as the front page lead, although you had to make it through 7 or 8 pars to find out that the Chinese researcher whose data was supposedly evil had been exonerated. They then went on to lead with "why won't Pachauri resign" (answer: it wasn't his fault), and to have a crack at Michael Mann one day before PSU exonerated him. All of this came with rather odd and unconvincing disclaimers that "of course none of this affects the evidence of climate change".

I've got a 10 link post coming up about this.

I theorise that either there's a major weirdo lobbying effort on, or else people at the paper have some sort of grudge with UEA. Back in the day, i.e. when half their editors were in one extreme-left sect or other, UEA was a very radical leftwing campus, and I wonder if someone's trying to settle a score from the 80s. This sounds farfetched, but it did play a role for a lot of journos about Iraq...

Looking forward to the post.

My sense with the grauniad is that someone, like maybe the esteemed M. Monbiot, was not treated with due deference by the UEA public affairs people, or Prof. Jones hisself.

Or, this is the East Anglia Footites revenge on Benn faction.
I sometimes think certain people read the "History Man" as prescriptive, rather than descriptive.

Grauniad did come up with an interesting point: namely there appears to have been no crack of UEA servers; it was either an inside job, with a crude attempt to re-source the leak to US bloggers via Russian (hah) crackers, or the e-mail were just left unprotected on publicly accessible servers (or both).

There definitely was cracking involved at one end, at least. According to Gavin Schmidt:

"For clarification and to save me going through this again, this is a summary of my knowledge of the topic. At around 6.20am (EST) Nov 17th, somebody hacked into the RC server from an IP address associated with a computer somewhere in Turkey, disabled access from the legitimate users, and uploaded a file FOIA.zip to our server. They then created a draft post that would have been posted announcing the data to the world that was identical in content of the comment posted on The Air Vent later that day. They were intercepted before this could be posted on the blog. This archive appears to be identical to the one posted on the Russian server except for the name change."

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack-cont…
(Comment # 156).

Occam's razor suggests that the cracker who broke into RC got the emails by breaking into UEA.

I have pressed ze button.

More detail at http://it-networks.org/?p=222.