These people not only take in millions of taxpayer dollars, but they're treated like high priests who are allowed to ask for some of the most massive and sweeping public policy changes on the globe. There is not a damned thing wrong with asking them to answer hard questions for the taxpayers and the general public.
Hear Hear. Well put. They lost me when it became apparent that the famed “hockey stick” was at best a result of sloppy statistical analysis (I’ll stick with sloppy and avoid speculating on worse scenarios).
But now a shock: Canadian scientists Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick have uncovered a fundamental mathematical flaw in the computer program that was used to produce the hockey stick. In his original publications of the stick, Mann purported to use a standard method known as principal component analysis, or PCA, to find the dominant features in a set of more than 70 different climate records.
But it wasn't so. McIntyre and McKitrick obtained part of the program that Mann used, and they found serious problems. Not only does the program not do conventional PCA, but it handles data normalization in a way that can only be described as mistaken.
Now comes the real shocker. This improper normalization procedure tends to emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppress all data that do not. To demonstrate this effect, McIntyre and McKitrick created some meaningless test data that had, on average, no trends. This method of generating random data is called "Monte Carlo" analysis, after the famous casino, and it is widely used in statistical analysis to test procedures. When McIntyre and McKitrick fed these random data into the Mann procedure, out popped a hockey stick shape!
I’d say that is the most obvious and damning example of their failure to work with real statisticians. I’m really biting my tongue here to not speculate on intent and motivation – I’ll stick with “mistake” for now.
To think what this network of crackpots has been able to accomplish is staggering. From Kyoto to Al Gore. “An Inconvenient Truth” indeed.
Judas Priest, principal components factor analysis is not exactly rocket surgery. Okay, maybe it's outpatient rocket surgery, but there are any number of statistical software packages that can handle it just fine, and some of them are freeware! Look up QMethod sometime, a freeware package from a fine gent name of Peter Schmolk in Germany used for Q-methodological analysis. QMethod can give you either centroid or principal components factor analysis, and I durn betcha SPSS or SYSTAT or SAS or any number of others can do as well, if not better. Factor analysis is not a black art that has to be hand-coded.
Frankly, the thought that my tax dollars are being used to promulgate this nonsense puts me in visual range of Last Straw.
Dean
Thanks for the timely posting of this information. I've had it with the Global Warming crowd. They are dogmatic and now center stage whenever any discussion on science occurs in the public arena.
Worse, they are achieving legislative success - with CA now mandating a 20% cut in "greenhouse gas emissions" by 2020.
Money to pay for that will not come out of a vacuum: it will come from consumers and tax payers pockets. Energy costs are high enough in that state - and they will go higher.
People are going to suffer because of this delusion of the scientific community.
This stuff has been going on forever and I'm not at all surprised by this "revelation." Its infected nearly every field of science where science meets policy. Global warming, AIDS, ID... all of it.
It's more appalling than you think OCSteve. In a paper entitled "What is the Hockey Stick Debate About" (I'd link it if I could figure out how--maybe somebody could give me a tutorial), McKitrick reveals that Mann evidently knew his data was cooked. When McKitrick examined Mann's data, he found a folder called "censored" which corrected the error that he (Mann) had made. These data showed no trend in the 20th century. So Mann clearly knew that his vaunted "hockey stick" was an artifact of flawed analysis.
So Mann clearly knew that his vaunted "hockey stick" was an artifact of flawed analysis.
That's important info, if it can be verified. We need that link! So here it is (in PDF).
The result is in the bottom panel of Figure 6 (“Censored”). It shows what happens when Mann’s PC algorithm is applied to the NOAMER data after removing 20 bristlecone pine series. Without these hockey stick shapes to mine for, the Mann method generates a result just like that from a conventional PC algorithm, and shows the dominant pattern is not hockey stick-shaped at all. Without the bristlecone pines the overall MBH98 results would not have a hockey stick shape, instead it would have a pronounced peak in the 15th century.
Of crucial importance here: the data for the bottom panel of Figure 6 is from a folder called CENSORED on Mann’s FTP site. He did this very experiment himself and discovered that the PCs lose their hockey stick shape when the Graybill-Idso series are removed. In so doing he discovered that the hockey stick is not a global pattern, it is driven by a flawed group of US proxies that experts do not consider valid as climate indicators. But he did not disclose this fatal weakness of his results, and it only came to light because of Stephen McIntyre’s laborious efforts.
I think that's actually the problem. The existence of canned pca routines available in almost any mathematics suite (matlab, for example), means that people can do statistical analyses on data in an incorrect way. The issue with the 98/99 research, based on the accusations of this report, is that they were using subtly but importantly nonrepresentative data for calibration, which would lead to a bias in their validation results. You're right that it isn't rocket surgery, but it's an honest and understandable mistake almost everyone using pca makes at one point or another. It's just sad it didn't get caught before the data was published.
I guess maybe that last comment needs some background. From the same paper:
We of course did not drop the matter. We extended our study in two ways. First, we showed that the data mining procedure did not just pull out a random group of proxies, instead it pulled out an eccentric group of bristlecone pine chronologies published by Graybill and Idso in 1993.13 These trees (the Sheep Mountain series in Figure 5 is an example) were studied because of their pattern of cambial dieback. They all turned out to exhibit a 20th century growth spurt that has not been fully explained, but is likely to be at least in part due to CO2 fertilization and is known not to be a temperature signal since it does not match nearby temperature records. The original authors (and others) have stressed that they are not proper climate proxies. So we felt it was important to examine what would happen to the MBH98 results if the Graybill-Idso proxies were excluded from the NOAMER group.
So to clarify: the bristlecone pine growth "are not proper climate proxies", in the opinion of those who studied them. Dr. Mann produced a graph without them, and found no hockey stick shape. He moved that data set into a folder called CENSORED. Then he added the bristlecone pine data -- which themselves already showed a 20th century growth spurt (i.e., a hockey stick) -- and voila! A hockey stick emerged. And that was the graph which was published.
Good work presenting the paper's findings. I read the entire report about a week after it came out and saved a copy on my hard drive at home so that I could wade through it again; somehow, I never saw fit to post about it. I excerpted and highlighted almost exactly the same sections that you did and forwarded it to some GW true believers that I know. All I got in return was a lot of hand waving.
I liked the reference to the (non-)independent reviews. If I had written the report, I'd have described it as circle jerk. Then again, no one has ever accused me of being overly diplomatic.
When "Science" is practiced as a secular religion, you get the worst of human nature scheming to convert fact and doctrine into money and celebrity, and the authority over who gets more of it. This IS corruption.
HIV=>AIDS and Anthropogenic Global Warming have this very thing in common: Science practiced as a Secular Religion.
Worsening tribalism is a symptom of this form of social sepsis. It has reached striking proportions thoughout the modern university system. The sacking of Lawrence Summers at Harvard is a profoundly illuminating example of the diseased form of corporatism and thuggery which have taken hold in these institutions. There are predators in human society. Why do some well-meaning folks like Aziz think that Science or university are somehow exempt. Much the opposite is true. Bureaucratic institutions and 'academy' tends to instead concentrate the worst. "Science-ism" and Scientific Socialism murdered over 100 million innocent non-combatants during just the 20th Century. Please, let us fear all worship of anything of this earth. Malignant Narcissism is the WMD within the WMD.
Youngsters like Aziz need to read more Eric Hoffer, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Alan Watts and open their mind.
What we are told and what we have memorized are poor substitutes for an awakened intelligence, which comprises a state of understanding which is nearly always greater than the sum of the parts.
Worship facts and you will forever be the factgivers fool.
I think this Dr. Lindzen fellow oughta be given a large public forum to have his views aired and heard. Surely, the proponents of global-warming would welcome a fellow scientist attempting to falsify their opinions.
How are we supposed to learn which competing theory is more sound -- without a good, old fashioned scientific debate?
Hear Hear. Well put. They lost me when it became apparent that the famed “hockey stick” was at best a result of sloppy statistical analysis (I’ll stick with sloppy and avoid speculating on worse scenarios).
I’d say that is the most obvious and damning example of their failure to work with real statisticians. I’m really biting my tongue here to not speculate on intent and motivation – I’ll stick with “mistake” for now.
To think what this network of crackpots has been able to accomplish is staggering. From Kyoto to Al Gore. “An Inconvenient Truth” indeed.
Frankly, the thought that my tax dollars are being used to promulgate this nonsense puts me in visual range of Last Straw.
Thanks for the timely posting of this information. I've had it with the Global Warming crowd. They are dogmatic and now center stage whenever any discussion on science occurs in the public arena.
Worse, they are achieving legislative success - with CA now mandating a 20% cut in "greenhouse gas emissions" by 2020.
Money to pay for that will not come out of a vacuum: it will come from consumers and tax payers pockets. Energy costs are high enough in that state - and they will go higher.
People are going to suffer because of this delusion of the scientific community.
This stuff has been going on forever and I'm not at all surprised by this "revelation." Its infected nearly every field of science where science meets policy. Global warming, AIDS, ID... all of it.
Scientific fact: A stretchy, bendy fact.
That's important info, if it can be verified. We need that link! So here it is (in PDF).
I think that's actually the problem. The existence of canned pca routines available in almost any mathematics suite (matlab, for example), means that people can do statistical analyses on data in an incorrect way. The issue with the 98/99 research, based on the accusations of this report, is that they were using subtly but importantly nonrepresentative data for calibration, which would lead to a bias in their validation results. You're right that it isn't rocket surgery, but it's an honest and understandable mistake almost everyone using pca makes at one point or another. It's just sad it didn't get caught before the data was published.
So to clarify: the bristlecone pine growth "are not proper climate proxies", in the opinion of those who studied them. Dr. Mann produced a graph without them, and found no hockey stick shape. He moved that data set into a folder called CENSORED. Then he added the bristlecone pine data -- which themselves already showed a 20th century growth spurt (i.e., a hockey stick) -- and voila! A hockey stick emerged. And that was the graph which was published.
Good work presenting the paper's findings. I read the entire report about a week after it came out and saved a copy on my hard drive at home so that I could wade through it again; somehow, I never saw fit to post about it. I excerpted and highlighted almost exactly the same sections that you did and forwarded it to some GW true believers that I know. All I got in return was a lot of hand waving.
I liked the reference to the (non-)independent reviews. If I had written the report, I'd have described it as circle jerk. Then again, no one has ever accused me of being overly diplomatic.
HIV=>AIDS and Anthropogenic Global Warming have this very thing in common: Science practiced as a Secular Religion.
Worsening tribalism is a symptom of this form of social sepsis. It has reached striking proportions thoughout the modern university system. The sacking of Lawrence Summers at Harvard is a profoundly illuminating example of the diseased form of corporatism and thuggery which have taken hold in these institutions. There are predators in human society. Why do some well-meaning folks like Aziz think that Science or university are somehow exempt. Much the opposite is true. Bureaucratic institutions and 'academy' tends to instead concentrate the worst. "Science-ism" and Scientific Socialism murdered over 100 million innocent non-combatants during just the 20th Century. Please, let us fear all worship of anything of this earth. Malignant Narcissism is the WMD within the WMD.
Youngsters like Aziz need to read more Eric Hoffer, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Alan Watts and open their mind.
What we are told and what we have memorized are poor substitutes for an awakened intelligence, which comprises a state of understanding which is nearly always greater than the sum of the parts.
Worship facts and you will forever be the factgivers fool.
How are we supposed to learn which competing theory is more sound -- without a good, old fashioned scientific debate?
That's what good science is all about!
Hank Barnes