Yet another report on the hockey stick is out, (see here and here and here) and it says….
OK, can we just stipulate that Mike Mann’s 1998 and 1999 papers were really totally completely wrong and that one time he wore a tie that didn’t really match his shirt and looked really bad on television and also I heard that he’s a really bad tipper and also my neighbor said Mann’s got a cousin who’s in the state penitentiary but I don’t know if that’s really true but that’s what my neighbor said and anyway can we get back to discussing climate science?
I think that would be absolutely the best (seriously). I am a Republican who beleive that GW is more likely than not. But I’m also a scientist who has very big problems with people skewing things. And Mann skewed them big time. It’s irrelevant what “side” you are on. Science needs to be thoughtful and truthful. Maybe Mike will never admit his errors (it is an unscienceish error not to be willing to do so), but still the community should and then we can move to REAL proof of what I think is happening. Not “false but accurate” logic.
P.s. CA needs to link to you, out of gentlemanliness.
dear john
I appreciate you may be tiring of the debate, but I thought your point isn’t helpful. It really is important to understand the science here; whether or not MBH is “wrong”, or can be improved, or whatever.
Both the NRC report, and the recent Barton report, appear in main part to be addressing the science, and policy implications (peer-review, setting policy) of that process. There has been little in there which is ad hominem, and I do not recall any personal criticism of Mann- which is what your sketch seems to imply.
By contrast, it would be very easy to quote Michael Mann’s prose, which is frequently littered with ad hominem attacks. Even your referred page cites him as saying that “Barton’s report, written by statisticians with no apparent background at all in the relevant areas, simply uncritically parrots claims by two Canadians…”.
i agree that ad hominem argument isn’t helpful; but I am not clear of the case that this is a smear job on Mann.
yours
per
I wonder John Fleck, whether you take the same sanguine view of Hwang woo Suk or Jan Henrik Schoen or Pons and Fleischmann?
In this particular case, not only were MBH98/99 not science, but neither was the scientific case of the IPCC that depended on them, and neither are the current crop of reconstructions that repeat most of the same mistakes and most of the same flawed proxies in the next IPCC review due to be published next year.
Nor are the climate models, which predict or project “scenarios” of future warming safe, since they use or have used the Hockey Stick to calibrate their sensitivity to carbon dioxide.
What has now happened is a trainwreck in climate science. It’s no use throwing up your hands that rail travel is unsafe and nobody should have got on the trains involved.
I saw it coming, crazy as I am.
Per – The first line of John A’s comment is yet another example of exactly what I was on about with my sarcastic little riff about Mike Mann’s necktie.
As for the relevance of MBH98/99 and the Wegman report to our understanding of the climate science questions that I think are significant, I agree with the report’s authors when they say: “In a real sense the paleoclimate results of MBH98/99 are essentially irrelevant to the consensus on climate change.”
It should not be surprising that the first attempt at a paleoclimate reconstruction of the sort Mann and his colleagues created eight years ago was inadequate. It’s a very hard problem. More recent work has highlighted the inadequacies and yielded improved results – though (as the NAS report made clear) significant weaknesses remain.
The continued obsession in the public sphere with this eight-year-old work is frankly pathological.
It should not be surprising that the first attempt at a paleoclimate reconstruction of the sort Mann and his colleagues created eight years ago was inadequate.
the issue is not “inadequate”; the issue runs much deeper than that. Mann knew that his reconstructions failed an r2 test, and just “forgot” to mention it. Mann knew that if he left out the bristlecones, his results changed markedly, and he actually wrote that his reconstruction was robust to the absence of all trees. Mann’s choice of data, choice of padding, looks significantly non-random; and all helps get that characteristic hockey-stick shape. Mann has deliberately obstructed attempts to replicate his data.
The continued obsession in the public sphere with this eight-year-old work is frankly pathological.
tell me you are joking. Einstein published papers a century ago, which still hold up, still have arithmetic errors in them, and which stand up to scrutiny. The experimental that demonstrated an expanding universe still holds up.
Science is about right and wrong. You can’t have it both ways here; you can’t say it was a fantastic piece of work, and there is nothing wrong with it, but let’s “move on”. There is either something wrong with it, or it stands. Which is it ?
Surely you must accept that it is important to know if it is right or wrong. I merely point out that if a variety of other reconstructions get varied differences/ similarity, it is kind of important to find out which one is correct…
yours
per
Mann knew that his reconstructions failed an r2 test, and just “forgot” to mention it.
‘ceptin’, of course, where he did.
In the purty figger with the squares on it that you always “fergit” to mention when you purvey your FUD.
I merely point out that if a variety of other reconstructions get varied differences/ similarity, it is kind of important to find out which one is correct…
All the later reconstructions show greater variability. Which you always “forget” to mention when you purvey your FUD.
As John points out, the science folks don’t agree with your FUD.
Best,
D
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‘ceptin’, of course, where he did.
In the purty figger with the squares on it that you always “fergit” to mention when you purvey your FUD.
Dear Dano
let me congratulate you on almost being specific.
Yes, dano, MBH do use an r2 statistic on occasion in their paper- when it gives an answer which helps their case. They show in figure 3 that both r2 and RE are significant using the data set from 1854-1901; indeed, they thought it was important enough that both statistics were good, that they put this in a Figure. However, when they calculated r2 for the 15th century dataset, it didn’t; so they didn’t tell anyone…
So a nice simple question for you Dano. Why is it necessary to show both r2 and RE for the 19th century, but not necessary to have an r2 statistic for the 15th century ?
I have a feeling I will be waiting for that one…
cheers
per !