Leading climate scientists do not, as a rule, debate with climate deniers, for the same reason that Richard Dawkins does not debate with Creationists – the mere fact of appearing on the same platform elevates the creationists, and debases the science.
In this case, Dr. Michael Mann was invited on a BBC broadcast without the explicit understanding that climate denier Marc Morano would be on the same broadcast on a separate line.
You can listen to this 6 minute segment, and hear Morano’s well practiced Gish Galloping bluster, while Mann listens quietly until the host has to silence Morano.
Then listen for the Mike to quietly, methodically, open a can of calm, laser-focused whupass.
For another approach, see my own interview with Morano at the 2012 Heartland conference below.
Peter, The first video is missing.
Neil
Morano gone AWOL?
Try this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4XQEXa0ScY
is that it Peter?
Thank you for posting that, anotheralionel. It certainly demonstrates how incredibly vicious and dishonest Michael Mann is.
Care to cite precisely what quote you consider “vicious”?
He’s under attack. Naah. He’s a wuss. Quotes like “vicious and dishonest Michael Mann is” are love notes. Right dumb Dave Burton?
Morano is a despicable knob – still citing the laughable plagiarist Wegman and avoiding North’s conclusion.
“Having been investigated by almost one dozen bodies due to accusations of fraud, and none of those investigations having found Plaintiff’s [Mann’s] work to be fraudulent, it must be concluded that the accusations are provably false. Reference to Plaintiff, as a fraud is a misstatement of fact.”
— DC Superior Court ruling Mann’s defamation suit against National Review and CEI, July 2013
Seriously? Did you listen to it??
Yep. Did you?
Can you answer my question?
What exactly did you think was vicious, and why?
Keep in mind, in talking about Morano, we’re talking about a guy who has said of climate scientists, “I seriously believe we should kick them while they’re down. They deserve to be publicly flogged.”
0:14 BBC: “Many [scientists who believe that global warming is man-made] are tiring of the personal abuse and harassment they’re suffering from those who disagree with them, and as a result [are] withdrawing from the public debate”
The BBC just made up that nonsense.
Fact: most climate activists are considerably more abusive than are most climate skeptics, whom they consistently compare with Holocaust Deniers.
Fact: the Climate Movement alarmists aren’t “withdrawing from the public debate.” One cannot withdraw from something he’s never been engaged in. They’re refusing to engage in debate, in the first place, supposedly because they don’t want to dignify the skeptics, but really because they know their case is weak.
0:22 BBC: “Morano… has got it in for climate scientists”
Fact: Morano hasn’t “got it in for” climate scientists in general, just those who lie, or substitute political science for geophysical science.
1:00 Mann: “We have been subject to attacks by those looking to discredit the science… because they find the implications inconvenient.”
Fact: Skeptical scientists are not skeptical “because they find the implications inconvenient,” but because they find the scientific evidence inconsistent with the alarmists’ claims.
Fact: Mann is notoriously abusive toward those who disagree with him. For an example, see how he treated the only living founder of Greenpeace the other day:
Michael E. Mann @MichaelEMann [Jan 23]
So Patrick Moore (aka “EcoSenseNow”) is no more than a garden variety troll w/ nothing serious to offer. Who knew! #JokersPosingAsThinkers
And here’s Patrick Moore’s gentle response:
Patrick Moore @EcoSenseNow [Jan 23]
@tan123 @MichaelEMann Mann leaves my address out of Tweet calling me “garden variety troll” so I can’t reply directly to him.
2:18 BBC: “Mr. Morano, are you putting people up to [making threats against Mann & his family]?”
2:20 Morano: “No!” [Morano lists death threats he’s gotten] “…Hansen accusing skeptics of quote ‘crimes against humanity,’ raising the specter of Nuremberg-style trials”
4:22 Mann: “…dishonesty… antagonism… so hurtful to the public discourse… literally everything he said was untrue. He spreads malicious lies about scientists, paints us as enemies of the people, then uses language that makes it sound like we should be subject to death threats, that we should be literally harmed or killed”
Fact: Mann’s claim that “literally everything [Morano] said was untrue” is a flagrant and vicious lie. Every single word Morano said was true. In fact, Grist even explicitly called for Nuremberg-style trials for climate skeptics.
(At least Talking Points Memo’s climate blogger subsequently retracted his call for jailing and execution of “global warming deniers.”
Mann’s claim that Morano’s language, which was much more restrained than Mann’s own, actually puts his (Mann’s) safety at risk, is an outrageous lie.
The truth is the opposite of Mann’s depiction. Prominent climate alarmists have repeatedly talked about visiting violence upon skeptics. E.g., Joe Romm says his remark about strangling skeptics in their beds was “not a threat, but a prediction.” But prominent skeptics don’t behave that way.
5:55 Mann: “Mr. Morano… is a hired assassin… paid… to distort our work… bogus allegations…”
“Hired assassin” — you don’t call that vicious?
Reality check: Morano told the simple truth, and Mann didn’t like it, so he got mad, and when he gets mad his lies get even more vicious.
well, for one thing, he lied about winning a nobel prize. then he lied about the nas investigation “clearing” him.
as for vicious, he calls people he disagrees with insults like “denier” and “anti-science”. he is obviously a low-class, insecure, mean little fraud.
Sproing is back at Crock on his weekly troll circuit. Deja vu all over again.
First he throws out a “double dig lie” that is totally irrelevant to the ongoing investigation of what daveburton thinks is “vicious” about Mann (which investigation seems to be going nowhere because Burton has apparently invoked the 5th. Amendment or been washed out to sea by the non-rising cocean ).
Then Rick says that it is a “vicious” insult when Mann speaks the obvious truth that someone is a “denier” and is “anti-science”, and closes his little swing through Crock-Land by calling Mann an “obviously low-class, insecure, mean little fraud”.
BWA-HA-HA-HA-HA! Rick is a truly funny guy.
May I remind all of something that Rick said on another blog as an example of something that I consider WAY more “vicious” then “denier” or “anti-science”? Perhaps not as vicious as “obviously low-class, insecure, mean little fraud”, but close.
The Equation (UCS blog) Rick Spung says: October 12, 2012 at 9:10 am
“are you seriously going to suggest sea levels rose EIGHT inches during the twentieth century??? that’s insane. delusional. laughable. pathetic.”
Nobody thinks globally averaged sea level rose eight inches in the 20th century. Even the high-end, PGR-adjusted numbers used by climate alarmists max out at only about seven inches. Without PGR adjustment, it’s between four and six inches.
(Of course, in some places, where the land is sinking, local sea level rose much more than that, but that’s not actually a product of the ocean rising.)
We appear to have a nice little troll tag team forming on Crock—Burton and Sprang. Dave says in support of Rick, “Nobody thinks globally averaged sea level rose eight inches in the 20th century”. Let’s look at the answer that was made by UCS’s Alden Meyer to Ricks “vicious” statement about those who thought sea level rose 8 inches—-Rick termed them “insane, delusional, laughable, and pathetic”
‘Rick: Thanks for your question. The following statement was made on page 18 of the 2009 publication Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States (Thomas R. Karl, Jerry M. Melillo, and Thomas C. Peterson, editors, Cambridge University Press), put out by the US Global Change Research Program that represents 13 federal agencies: “After at least 2,000 years of little change, sea level rose by roughly 8 inches over the past century”.
“This rate of global sea level rise over the last century is consistent with the record according to Florida tidal gauges. There’s a link to the NOAA Key West tidal gauge in endnote #1 in the Florida sea level rise experts’ letter, at http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?stnid=8724580%20Key%20West,%25 Here?s the bottom line: “The mean sea level trend is 2.24 millimeters/year with a 95% confidence interval of +/- 0.16 mm/yr based on monthly mean sea level data from
1913 to 2006 which is equivalent to a change of 0.73 feet in 100 years.”
(THAT’S 8.76 INCHES, DAVE AND RICK—do the math)
“As Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, “everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts” To me, what’s truly insane and delusional is the continued call by some that we not respond urgently to the overwhelming weight of the scientific evidence on this issue, both by taking measures to cope with the climate impacts we are already experiencing and by limiting emissions of the heat-trapping gases that scientists tell us are driving even greater impacts in the future.
Old Guy, did you fail to read my last sentence, or are you being deliberately obtuse? I wrote:
“Of course, in some places, where the land is sinking, local sea level rose much more than that, but that’s not actually a product of the ocean rising.”
The U.S. East Coast is sinking. Peltier’s estimates for the four GLOSS-LTT gauges in Florida are 0.360, 0.632, 0.640, and 0.732 mm/yr. That’s an average of 0.59 mm/yr (2.3″/century) of “sea level rise” that’s really land subsidence.
The highest estimate I’ve seen anywhere for average 20th century sea level rise is 1.8 mm/yr, and at least 0.3 mm/yr of that is PGR adjustment (i.e., it’s not really sea-level rise). A straightforward average of the sea-level trends at NOAA’s list of 285 long-term tide gauges yields an average of less than 1.3 mm/year.
None of those numbers reaches 8 inches per century.
Give it up, Dave. You keep beating that tiny little drum of cherry picked and distorted data while the rest of the world is drowning you out with truth.
I think Dave is coming up with a new Crock of the Week –
Dave sayzzzz “That’s not the sea coming up, it’s the land going down!”
Where would the world be without clowns?
stephengn1 says, “Dave sayzzzz ‘That’s not the sea coming up, it’s the land going down!’
Where would the world be without clowns?”
stephengn1, the earth is not solid. Its relatively thin crust floats on a layer of viscus molten magma, and it is slowly sloshing. That’s why the continents “drift,” and why in some places the surface of the earth is rising, and in other places the surface of the earth is falling (usually slowly, but not always).
If you want to learn more about it, google for things like GIA, PGR and Peltier VM2. (There are definitions in the glossary, in the Resources section of my site.)
Lord love a duck, Dave!—-whatever the heck are you talking about when you say something in the interior of the earth is “sloshing”?
While still wearing his big red nose and big floppy shoes, Dave tries to make himself look professorial.
“stephengn1, the earth is not solid. Its relatively thin crust floats on a layer of viscus molten magma, and it is slowly sloshing.”
He says slowly and as though he has a degree in geology and is teaching those that don’t.
“That’s why the continents “drift,” and why in some places the surface of the earth is rising, and in other places the surface of the earth is falling (usually slowly, but not always).”
He continues, saying nothing about the time scales involved with continental drift and referencing a meteorological site about sea rise rather than a site about geology
“If you want to learn more about it,” he concludes, attempting to puff himself up so that he appears important, “google for things like GIA, PGR and Peltier VM2. (There are definitions in the glossary, in the Resources section of my site.)”
Dave the clown then wonders why no one visits his site. It’s sometimes sad being a clown.
When the FBI has to examine your mail for possible Anthrax or Ricin powder, and investigate threats to your family, please come back and complain about it here, so we can call YOU ‘incredibly vicious and dishonest’. Since that is all you are purchasing with your Doubt, you might as well get what you paid for.
I think we know who’s really vicious and dishonest here, Dave. And it’s not Michael Mann. Simply hurling abuse might dupe a few people for a while, but in the end it rebounds on those who do it. Or to put it another way, you’re only insulting yourself.
I take it, then, that you’re unable to point to anything Mann said that was “vicious”, and you will shortly be retracting this accusation?
It seems bizarre to me that anyone could listen to Mann’s numerous lies about Morano, and even his accusation that Morano is a “hired assassin” who puts Mann at risk of physical harm, and still deny that Mann is vicious.
thanks, may apologies for the fumble – I hit “publish” and hit the sack without checking – I plead exhaustion.
Motormouth in action, the kick is right at the end:
Marano was behind the Kerry Swift Boat attack(lies)?!!!
So I’m trying to come up with a term to describe a despicable, morally corrupt, hired minion type of person and unfortunately “asshole” just doesn’t cover it.
I’ll give Watson credit, I think he was actually being too kind.
Now I feel unclean for having given a denier an extra view.
I didn’t realise until part way through that it was a dubbed and munged version of the exchange that I had seen previously. As for Marano having less talk time than Watson – hot air moves faster.
Watson’s judgement was spot on.
Yo, Peter–the link doesn’t worksez “This video has been removed by the user.”
Peter, the reason Climate Movement activists refuse to debate or appear in the same forums with skeptical scientists is the same as the reason that nearly all Climate Movement bloggers (except you!) refuse to allow polite, substantive dissent on their blogs. It is because Climate Movement activists are, as a rule, more interested in promoting a political agenda than they are in the truth. From their perspective, the facts have an unfortunate conservative, skeptical bias, so to”win” the political argument requires suppressing the scientific evidence.
Dave,
Find something better to do.
“It is because Climate Movement activists are, as a rule, more interested in promoting a political agenda than they are in the truth. ”
This is not polite or substantive, and neither are most of your comments. You personify the rebuttal to your own assertions. You accuse people of being horrible, you lie, and you lie about the motivations of others. Just because you “do it quietly” doesn’t mean it’s not rude, or absent of any substance.
So what are you doing here uncensored, $$$$$? What kind of brain complains in a post that they are censored. You are not censored. Your posts are thrown in the garbage with the rest of the junk mail where they belong. The whining of a demented loon crying about his underwater real estate investments and pleading for someone to wish sea level lower so he can unload his dubious investments on unsuspecting dupes. I’ve seen better Nigerian phone scams.
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vxLHCXah-6o&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DvxLHCXah-6o
Write up your science. Publish it. Nobel. Simple.
Oh, I forgot. http://www.pattern-recognition-in-physics.net/
They found a pattern.
Paradolia no doubt.
DavidBurton – You think only the U.S.A has discovered the effect of Greenhouse gas – only US politicians and scientists can address it. You have tunnel vision, population of U.S.A 314 million, population of world 7 billion.
Look outside of the USA, other scientists have come to the same conclusion, there are independent non U.S versions of the hockey stick you know. U.S.A is a great country it was second in space and first to the moon, but now others have caught up, and non U.S.A climate scientists like Michael Mann exist. Are you Xenophobic too ?
“Climate Movement” eh? Is that like the “Gravity Movement” or the “Round Earth Movement” or the radical “Jesus Did Not Ride Dinosaurs Movement”
Unfortunately “This video has been removed by the user”
‘What an asshole’ is actually not character assassination, as it’s actually a falsifiable fact as proven by Morano’s mouth.
And the troll award goes to …
You trolls really have the wrong website if you are trying to stir people up.
Most of us here, are interested in learning about the research being done, and are not into this whole combative left vs right thing.
Try http://www.democraticunderground.com/ they’ll be more than happy to give you what you are looking for.
Wegman. It’s unbelievable. Morano will toss any trash against the wall to see if it sticks. A thoroughly discredited plagiarism filled non peer reviewed screed.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Wegman_Report
The Wegman Report has not been discredited. The “plagiarism” accusation was never about the correctness of the Report. The problem was simply that a student failed to properly source some material.
Wegman tosh. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wegman_Report
From the above link:
On 23 July David Ritson, Emeritus Professor of Physics at Stanford University, emailed Wegman to ask if the Wegman team had used the same red noise method as MM, and if they had carried out a basic procedure to check if the Principal Component (PC1) they showed in their illustrations was due to a systemic signal or to random noise. Wegman did not reply to this, or to followup emails which pointed out that MM had provided Ritson with their code on 6 November 2004, and this code had an error which produced noise with “extraordinarily high persistence” resulting in the hockey stick shapes. The Wegman Report did not discuss this improper procedure or provide specification data for their own results. After Ritson copied this correspondence to Mann and North, he wrote to congressman Henry Waxman on 16 August 2006 about this key information missing from the Wegman Report.[54] In his written evidence to questions raised at the hearing, Mann said that “the errors that Dr. Ritson has identified in Dr. Wegman’s calculations appear so basic that they would almost certainly have been detected in a standard peer review.”[55]
The “extraordinarily high persistence” mentioned in the above excerpt is a direct consequence of the failure to remove the slowly-varying, long-correlation-time “hockey stick” signal from the tree-ring data before using that data as a random-noise “template”. This is the exactly the problem that I described in my earlier post here.
Here are some problems with the Wegman report.
#############
1) To support his claim that Mann’s methodology (short-centered SVD) generates hockey-sticks from random noise, a canned script (not written by the Wegman repor authors) that generated a set of 10,000 “random noise” results was run. Only the 12 most hockey-stickish results out of the 10,000 runs were selected to be plotted in the report.
It turns out that cherry-picking on that level will also produce hockey-sticks when random noise is run through a standard full-centered SVD procedure.
2) The random noise generated by the canned script that Wegman used was contaminated with hockey-stick signal statistics.
What the script did (and I verified it by examining it myself) was read in tree-ring noise, compute autocorrelations of the tree-ring time-series, and then use those autocorrelation results to generate synthetic random noise used in (1) above.
However, the script failed to perform one critically important step — it did not filter out the underlying “hockey-stick” signal from the tree-ring data before computing the autocorrelations.
One must remember that the tree-ring data contains *signal* as well as noise — if you are going to use that data as a “template” (as the script did) for you synthetic random noise, *you first must remove the signal components*. Otherwise, your random noise will be contaminated with signal-statistics, rendering it useless for evaluating the “noise-only” behavior of a procedure. This alone invalidates the whole “hockey sticks from random noise” argument.
3) The Wegman report did not compare the random-noise vs. tree-ring data singular value spectra. A quick look at the random noise singular values would tell any competent analyst that there’s not much of a coherent signal in the data. And a quick look that the tree-ring singular values *would* indicate the presence of a coherent signal in the data. A competent analyst would be able to distinguish the random noise SVD outputs from Mann’s tree-ring SVD outputs (even “short-centered” SVD outputs) in about 5 seconds simply by looking at the singular values.
Mann determined which singular vectors to retain by comparing his tree-ring singular values with a large ensemble of random-noise singular values. That is how he knew how many singular vectors to retain (even with the short-centering offset effect).
If you take use Mann’s singular value thresholding procedure and apply it to full-centered SVD outputs (what critics said that Mann should have done all along), you will get the same hockey-stick results that the short-centered SVD produces. Had Wegman taken Mann’s scripts, applied the corrections suggested by Mann’s critics, Wegman would have seen the same hockey-stick results. (Mann’s Matlab scripts were freely available to Wegman — or anyone else — for that purpose).
#################
The bottom line is, Wegman used hockey-stick-contaminated random noise, performed a massive level of cherry-picking of results, and failed to consider the very obvious fact that Mann’s singular-value thresholding procedure automatically compensated for the effects of the SVD short-centering that Mann’s critics criticized him for.
This happened because Wegman simply ran a canned script that he was handed without taking the time to go through it and see what it really did.
If Wegman were really serious about verifying the claim that Mann’s hockey-stick was a random noise artifact, he would have coded up his own Matlab/R/whatever scripts and performed his own independent analysis to test that claim (instead of running someone else’s canned scripts the he did not bother to scrutinize).
Quickie note/correction:
In my post above, when I wrote,
“What the script did (and I verified it by examining it myself) was read in tree-ring *noise*”
I really meant,
“What the script did (and I verified it by examining it myself) was read in tree-ring *data*”.
I sort of get what you’re saying. So there’s random noise {-1,-2,3,0,-1,4,4,-2} then there is some tree ring data {0,0,0,1,2,4,8,16} and in some way they’re merged: {-1,-2,3,1,1,8,12,14} (I just added my two examples together), and this is mistakenly used as ‘random noise’ that would mimic data characteristics of a tree ring series (such as amplitude, autocorrelation, etc.). I assume their goal was to generate random noise that looked plausibly like tree ring data, but they fudged it up by not removing the signal.
I don’t get the autocorrelation method though. Are they taking lags of the merged data {-1,-2,3,1,1,8,12,14} versus {-2,3,1,1,8,12,14} versus {3,1,1,8,12,14} etc. then assigning a correlation for each lag, then using those r values in some f(x,r)=rx fashion (where x is a ‘point’ or ‘residual’ in some series)?
It would seem like a better method would be to take tree ring data {0,0,0,1,2,4,8,16} and just randomly scramble it {1,0,16,2,0,0,8,4}, then cherry pick those scrambled sets that show no signals on a correlogram or whatever test would be appropriate (spectral analysis?). Then use those sets as the tree ring noise.
The autocorrelation method for generating synthetic red noise (based on noise in real data) that *should* have been used by McIntyre/Wegman can be summarized as follows:
####
1) Take your real tree-ring data and filter out the signal. This is what McIntyre/Wegman didn’t do. In the case of tree-ring data, the signal is the slowly-varying, low-frequency “hockey stick” climate signal. Run the tree-ring data through an appropriate high-pass filter to remove this signal. This will leave the short-term “noise wiggles” in the tree-ring data while removing any long-term temperature trend.
2) Take the output of 1 and compute its autocorrelation function (using the R acf() procedure.)
3) Use the R hosking.sim() procedure to generate synthetic Gaussian noise with the autocorrelation properties of your tree-ring data minus the “hockey stick” climate signal. Basically, this is done by running white noise through a filter produced internally by the hosking.sim() procedure to generate “red noise” with the autocorrelation properties of the properly filtered tree-ring data.
#####
Step (1) is where McIntyre/Wegman dropped the ball. By failing to remove the low-frequency climate signal, they produced an autocorrelation function with a very “long tail”. This resulted in “random noise” with a long autocorrelation time relative to the data length — basically “random noise” contaminated with hockey-stick signal statistics.
When it comes to generating synthetic noise with “tree-ring noise” properties, you don’t need to worry about trying to “merge” tree-ring data with random noise — the above procedure (run as a canned script) will do all the work for you. Basically, it’s white-noise –> filtering per above –> red noise.
Scrambling tree-ring data to eliminate the long-term climate signal autocorrelation would also cause you to lose the autocorrelation properties of the short-term noise in the tree-ring data. So you don’t want to do that. You want to process the tree-ring data to remove the long-term signal without messing up the short-term noise properties in the data.
Anyway, for folks who are wondering why I’m “talking shop” here — it’s not out of any desire to impress folks with techno-speak; it’s to see whether a certain troll whose name I won’t mention, and who likes to brag about his technical/software prowess, will seriously engage in real technical discussion about issues in the Wegman Report.
Will he just disappear, only to pop up in a future thread? Will he try to change the subject with another conspiracy theory angle? Or will he actually demonstrate that he has a bit of understanding of the technical material underlying the Wegman Report that he’s so enamored with?
Ok got it. Basically you want random noise with the same amount of autocorrelation as real tree ring data. Once you get that, you apply it to Mann’s procedures and check to see if it produces anything significant (such as a hockey stick signal, etc.) or if it just produces some signal that signifies nothingness or randomness to an interpreter.
By ‘very long tail’ I suppose you mean r values are larger than expected at high lag values?
I wonder if there are any Youtube videos on this subject? A video full of graphic comparisons and explanations would help people like me with no signal processing background to better understand the denialists incompetence. After all we are ‘visual’ creatures that have a natural ability to see visual patterns or see the difference between comparatory patterns.
Tamino has a great post on “staggering decline” in Arctic sea ice decline which shows a lot about how we can be statistically sure that there is a significant signal to among what many deniers consider “noise” and natural variation.
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2014/02/02/arctic-sea-ice-decline/
Ofc you have to be a complete nutcase not to see the trend in the data for Arctic melt. Tamino nails this one good (as he often does).
By ‘very long tail’ I suppose you mean r values are larger than expected at high lag values?
Basically, that’s it. Here’s a way oversimplified analogy to help folks visualize the problem.
Imagine that you have very low frequency noise with no long term trend — imagine one of the noise components is a strong 1/10 Hz sine wave (period length of 10 seconds).
Now imagine that you cut out a 2.5 second segment of that noise (corresponding to one quarter of the 1/10Hz sine-wave period) and plot it up.
If your 2.5 second segment starts at a negative value of the sine wave and ends at a positive value of the sine wave, you would, by looking only at that 2.5 second segment, erroneously conclude that there was a strong positive trend. But it only looks like that because you didn’t look at enough of the data. What you have here is a noise correlation time that is long relative to the length of the data segment you are looking at. To determine whether or not there is any trend in this noise, you have to look at a *much longer* time period.
Now, the “hockey-sticks from random noise” situation isn’t that extreme, but it does suffer from the same problem — the random noise has a very low frequency component that varies slowly over the data-length. And as a result, you can easily be fooled into thinking that there’s a trend in the noise *if you don’t look at a long-enough time-segment* of the noise.
If you were to take McIntyre’s noise model and generate a 1,000,000 year noise plot (instead of a 1,000 year plot), then you’d never get a “noise hockey stick”. You’d see trendless random noise, because the 1,000,000 time period is *much longer* than the longest correlation time in the noise.
However, a 1,000 year plot isn’t all that much longer than the longest correlation time in McIntyre’s noise (the long correlation time in the noise is due to the hockey-stick signal that McIntyre forgot to filter out), so spurious trends can crop up if you look at just that 1,000 year segment.
Anyway, I hope that this clarifies things a bit (instead of muddying things up even more).
Actually, it makes a lot of sense, and I’m just a dumboldguy who does little “statistics” beyond balancing my checkbook anymore. Thank you.
caerbannog666 wrote, “Wegman simply ran a canned script that he was handed without taking the time to go through it and see what it really did.”
I’m not a statistician, but the Wegman Report wasn’t the product of just one man. Among the contributors to it were at least five highly credentialed statisticians. You make it sound as if it were the product of just one man.
caerbannog666 wrote, “One must remember that the tree-ring data contains *signal* as well as noise — if you are going to use that data as a “template” (as the script did) for you synthetic random noise, *you first must remove the signal components*. Otherwise, your random noise will be contaminated with signal-statistics, rendering it useless for evaluating the “noise-only” behavior of a procedure.”
In the first place, it sounds like you’ve made the classic mistake of “affirming the consequent.” One of the questions at issue is whether or not there really was a hockey-stick signal in the tree rings, at all.
But more importantly, I seriously doubt that Wegman’s team of statisticians could have been silly enough to have accidentally used pseudo-random data that wasn’t even pseudo-random. That accusation doesn’t pass the smell test. I smell FUD.
There are some very fundamental problems with attempts to derive temperature data from tree ring proxies. Most obviously, tree growth rates depend on many things other than temperature. But even if things like dry/wet year differences “average out'” (which is not at all clear), other factors, like differences in shading due to changes in the surrounding vegetation, almost certainly do not. As the Wegman Committee noted:
“Our committee believes that the assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade in a millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year in a millennium cannot be supported by the MBH98/99 analysis. As mentioned earlier in our background section, tree ring proxies are typically calibrated to remove low frequency variations. The cycle of Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age that was widely recognized in 1990 has disappeared from the MBH98/99 analyses, thus making possible the hottest decade/hottest year claim. However, the methodology of MBH98/99 suppresses this low frequency information. The paucity of data in the more remote past makes the hottest-in-a-millennium claims essentially unverifiable.”
I do not believe that criticism has been convincingly rebutted.
The Wegman Committee also noted:
“As statisticians, we were struck by the isolation of communities such as the paleoclimate community that rely heavily on statistical methods, yet do not seem to be interacting with the mainstream statistical community. The public policy implications of this debate are financially staggering and yet apparently no independent statistical expertise was sought or used.”
That is an especially striking criticism since the “party line” in the Climate Movement is that only the most highly specialized climate researchers are qualified to have respect for their opinions about climate. That’s why Doran & Zimmerman culled all but 2.5% of the responses to their survey of Earth Scientists, to get their “97%” (really at most 94.9%) “consensus” result.
So how is it that these same folks seem to think that the expertise of actual statisticians is not needed to do statistics?
What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, my mom the chemist used to say. Someone who insists that only specialists in his own specialty (like climate) are qualified to have opinions about that specialty should therefore be obliged to admit that he and his highly specialized colleagues are unqualified to work in another specialty (like statistics), without the assistance of specialists in that field.
Two points for the lurkers:
I actually looked the R code and confirmed that McIntyre did not filter out the low-frequency climate signal.
I also took that tree-ring data in question, averaged all the chronologies together, and confirmed that there *is* an underlying low-frequency “hockey stick” signature in the data. It’s noisy, but it’s there. And it needs to be filtered out if you want to use that data to construct a valid noise model.
David may know enough to regurgitate talking-points, but he does not have the technical skills required to comprehend the very real problems with the Wegman Report.
That report is 91 pages long. I haven’t even read the whole thing. Have you?
So, caerbannog666, tell me which of these statements you agree with:
1. When making statements about the Earth’s climate, only specialists in climate science are sufficiently qualified for their opinions to be considered to be trustworthy.
2. When making statements about the correctness or incorrectness of statistical methods for evaluating noisy data, only expert statisticians are sufficiently qualified for their opinions to be considered to be trustworthy.
If you agree with the first and not the second, please tell how you justify that.
Oh shut up about that stupid Wegman report. Its not even worth to use as toilet paper. Mann’s work has been proven over and over in lots of other proxy measurements. Its not like he is alone in his theory of global warming. Get over it.
That’s a statement that I can agree with far more easily than either of Dave’s two “loaded” choices.
It’s time for Dave to be “put on leave” again—he is starting to clog up the plumbing and that makes bad smells.
You’re so dismissive of the Wegman Report that I’ll bet you haven’t even read a substantial part of it, have you, John Christian Lønningdal?
As for Mann’s thoroughly discredited hockey stick, you’re just in Denial. The next stage is Anger. Then comes Bargaining, Depression, and finally Acceptance.
You’ll get there, eventually. Even the IPCC is making progress. But healing takes time.
You have no shame, Dave. Your link is a huge pile of distorted horsepucky (as usual), and certainly does not show that the IPCC is moving in the direction that you would like us to believe. Again, give it up. And it’s DNFTT time for me—-farewell for now, Dave.
Old Guy, did you not look at the graphs from the successive IPCC Assessment Reports, or did you just not understand them?
“Old Guy, did you not look at the graphs from the successive IPCC Assessment Reports, or did you just not understand them?”
Good old Dave—basking in self-satisfied ignorance and imagined superiority. Yes, Dave, I did look at “the graphs”, as I have looked at many dozens if not hundreds of similar graphs. I have actually read the explanations and discussions, and watched deniers like you repeatedly attempt to make silk purses out of sow’s ears (or chocolate bars out of horsepucky) with your “but-but” protestations.
What I DO understand from this latest compilation is that some people work very hard at distorting truth. For instance, some of these graphs plot temperature while others plot temperature anomalies, they have different scales, some have different starting and ending dates, some are “old” and some are “newer” with regard to data sources. They all lead in the same direction, that AGW exists and has become more serious over time, except for the “blinking tail” at the very end of the last graph, and that has been discussed at great length here and in other places.
Give it up, Dave—-you are wasting our time.
On behalf of myself and other resolute lurkers, thanks caerbannog666 (and Dave) for the explanation (and magical mystery tour).
‘The Wegman Report has not been discredited.’
Only in the sense that it had no credit from the start with Wegman riffing at the behest of ‘Smokey Joe’ Barton and using McIntyre as a prop.
‘Wegman Report: Not just plagiarism, misrepresentation’
http://www.desmogblog.com/wegman-report-not-just-plagiarism-misrepresentation
and plenty more in that seam:
http://www.desmogblog.com/search/google/Wegman?query=Wegman&cx=010071853556961239608%3Apfdia-m7na8&cof=FORID%3A11&sitesearch=
Get some facts Burton before using keyboard.
“Get some facts Burton before using keyboard”.
Burton doesn’t believe in the same kind of “facts” as the rest of us do. He makes up his own to suit whatever his argument may be on a given day.
He is a paid denier troll. Stop feeding him and let him starve.
Here’s my approach to feeding trolls: I feed them to the lurkers. 😉
It wasn’t that Wegman used McI as a prop, but that the blueprint for the Wegman Report was this PPT file, given to Wegman by Joe Barton’s staffer Peter Spencer ~Sept 2005, along with key papers, which were most of those summarized in the Wegman Report. I.e., the choice of key papers was mostly made by somebody else, probably not Peter Spencer.
“DeSmogBlog,” anotheralionel? Seriously? The site that promoted Gleick’s forged “Heartland Climate Strategy” memo? That’s your idea of a reliable source?
Do you realize that DeSmogBlog still insists that the forged document is authentic! Everyone on the planet with an IQ above room temperature has, by now, realized that the forged document is a forgery… except Hoggan / DeSmogBlog, who are still in denial. How ironic that they call climate skeptics “deniers.”
It is hard to imagine a less credible source than DeSmogBlog.
He keeps saying Mann refused to release the computer program. Thats false. Its on Wikipedia. He just makes it up as he goes along. There is absolutely no effort on his part to moderate, or balance any of his ideas from different sources or any activity that one would balance and judge references. Someone referenced Wegman Report and Wikipedia. So I read it. Nice to know that, but OMG, its like a visit to the looney farm dealing with him. You could almost bet whatever he says is false (about seal level and GW) and be certain.
Nice Dave. Take the high road. Defend plagiarism. It was ripped to shreds substantively by the teacher that taught the flunkies who cut and pasted this thoroughly discredited unscientific non peer reviewed political polemic sponsored by paid political operative oil lackey Joe Barton.
the nas investigation of mann supported the findings of the wegman investigation.
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2011/03/there-he-goes-again-mann-claims-his.html
Very informative link, Rick! Thanks for sharing it.
There was only sloppy attribution, not actual plagiarism, in the Wegman/Scott/Said Report. USA Today reported that:
In a statement to GMU faculty, provost Peter Stearns said that one investigation committee unanimously found that “no misconduct was involved” in the 2006 Congressional report. “Extensive paraphrasing of another work did occur, in a background section, but the work was repeatedly referenced and the committee found that the paraphrasing did not constitute misconduct,” he said, in the statement.