Mann attempts to defend the manufactured consensus.
[Update a few minutes later]
Note, as usual, that he confines his defense to the emails, and never even attempts to address the much more damaging revelations from the models and data sets:
I cannot condone some things that colleagues of mine wrote or requested in the e-mails recently stolen from a climate research unit at a British university. But the messages do not undermine the scientific case that human-caused climate change is real.
Both true, and irrelevant. A straw man, in fact. The emails raise suspicion to tropospheric levels, but no, they don’t in themselves undermine the case. What does that is the clear cherry picking of station data and arbitrary “homogenization” that miraculously always results in a temperature increase.
[Mid-afternoon update]
Patrick Michaels isn’t impressed by the apologia:
Penn State and East Anglia have initiated “investigations” into Mann’s and Jones’s activities. Will Penn State request all of Mann’s e-mails from University of Virginia, where he was for the most of Climategate? Will the school comply? Will East Anglia clean out its massively politicized house?
Don’t hold your breath. Penn State gets over $750 million in federal-taxpayer dollars, and Jones alone received $22 million since the turn of the century. Because universities charge 50 to 125 percent “overhead” on research dollars, climate change is supporting a lot of humanities departments around the world.
So, the tragedy of Climategate is that we simply don’t know how many papers were rejected or simply not submitted because skeptics found it very difficult to publish in this climate. Does anyone seriously think Penn State and East Anglia are going to starve their English departments because of the activities of a few climate scientists?
Curiously, none of this — the attempts to rig the peer-reviewed literature, or the massive amounts of money that likely to influence any university investigations — were discussed in Mann’s Washington Post apologia.
Federal funding of higher education is one of the things that allows the academic bubble to stay inflated, and it’s a vast enabler of left-wing propaganda on campus, in addition to supporting fraud and corruption like this.
[Bumped]
Mann’s not defending the data analysis because other people are.
Sure Chris, this sounds like an objective blog: “Those in denial want to distract the public from graphs like the one shown above. Why should we let them decide what science we choose to discuss. Those in denial wish to introduce doubt and confusion in people’s minds, b/c they know all too well that people tend to do nothing when even the least bit confused or skeptical.”
Having spent several disagreeable minutes going through this link, I have this observation: it sounds like a bunch of self-proclaimed “very important” people who are truly offended there remains some lesser people out there not willing to bow to their almighty wisdom.
Just an observation…from one of “those in denial.”
Steve A – so if Tim Lambert (author of the post) had been nicer when he said the “code analysis” was flawed you’d be okay with it? I mean, since when is “I don’t like your tone?” the same as “your facts are wrong?”
Chris,
I looked at that link and found it a fairly moronic defense. The summary is, “Yes. They do compute something that is unseemly but the place where it’s plotted is commented out. And anyway I can’t find a plot in a paper where they use the same legend as the one associated with the crap result in this revision of the code.” I guess it doesn’t occur to this computer science professor that changing string in a text file is inexpensive.
In any case, let’s apply this defense to, say, code delivered by a drug company to the FDA. In it the FDA finds code that removes all dead rats from a toxicity analysis but the plot with that result is commented out. So no harm? Or maybe that result is used elsewhere. If I’m the FDA three things happen: I want to know why they went to the effort of coding a junk result, I expect all plots of all results to demonstrate a non-cheating provenance and I expect those experiments to be redone.
But that’s the problem with Mann, et al. Their results are irreproducible. Surely you’ve heard the latest excuse: “We got rid of the data when we moved.” Got that?
It would be reproducible. It would be science. But they needed a place for the artificial plant.
Addressing your first post. This is Mann’s work and it has always been his responsibility to defend it. The fact that he’s farming it out doesn’t mean that the defense is trivial. This isn’t politics, you don’t get points for staying above the fray. His approach tells me he’s hoping that something plausible will come along and save his bacon.
When that plausible thing does come along, he won’t deserve the benefit of a doubt.
Raymond seems to have found where the commented-out code was actually used, namely in producing the “adjustments” to the temperature data that produce the bulk of the “hockey stick”.
see http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1508#comments
And then there’s the Russians, pointing out that the Alarmists spiked papers showing that Alarmists were cherry-picking the Russian data to argue for warming. The Russians, using the complete dataset, found no such thing.
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1523#more-1523
Joe Triscari – was this code even in production, or was it test code? Perhaps it was a “dummy” version to test / develop some other function later in the program. How would we know, unless you can find a graph generated by this code?
Andy Freeman – Russian analysis confirms 20th century warming.
Joe Triscari – was this code even in production, or was it test code? Perhaps it was a “dummy” version to test / develop some other function later in the program. How would we know, unless you can find a graph generated by this code?
Until the CRU demonstrates otherwise, the safe assumption is that yes, this code was in production.
Andy Freeman – Russian analysis confirms 20th century warming.
So what happens to the paleoclimate record when you use the new graph? Looks like it’s at least a half degree higher for everything prior to 1860, at least. If this sort of consistent bias is common, then that’s not going to look good for claims of global warming.
The IEA analysis is, in any case, misguided. CRU has not released all the station data they use, so the red curve is not the CRU temperature trend for Russia at all. If you want that, all you have to do is download the gridded data and average all the grid cells in Russia. You have to wonder why the IEA did not do this.
Convenient that once again, nobody has access to the same data that the CRU used. In my view, we’ve passed the point where closed data sources are justified. The CRU has abused the public trust too much. Either publicly release the raw data or it’s not science.
Tim Lambert? People actually cite him without intent to mock? The guy is the Scott Ritter of climate change. I am not the least bit surprised at what Steve A.
Sorry. my last quote above was from Andy Freeman’s article.
Nice analysis, Rand. The connection between gimmicked research funding and the leftist academic bubble of indoctrination has never been more clear.
Chris, you don’t understand–it is up to Mann et al to prove that the code in question was NEVER used in their reconstructions.
Actually, the “Russian analysis” does not confirm global warming. Lambert “adjusted” their data until he got the answer he wanted.
Gerrib seems to have problems with citing people accurately.
> Joe Triscari – was this code even in production, or was it test code? Perhaps it was a “dummy” version to test / develop some other function later in the program. How would we know, unless you can find a graph generated by this code?
As I cited above, Raymond did find what was generated by that code.
The “test/develop” argument doesn’t make any sense – that data isn’t different enough from the published data to test anything.
Chris,
As Andy, Blue and Karl have said, it is CRU’s and Mann’s responsibility to demonstrate their results are reproducible. However, if you don’t believe that I have very good new for you.
I have done a detailed analysis demonstrating that the results of Mann and CRU are faked. These results will be published in the Journal of Awesome Results (JAR) which is the technical publication of the American Association of Super-Smart Smarties (AASSS). This is a peer-reviewed journal of a very exclusive organization (and obviously a Super-Smart Smarty is more reliable than a Geophysical American). In the article I present the results but I will refuse to release code or data because… Oh, let’s say they were stolen by terrorists.
If you’re buying the defenses of CRU and Mann these days, then I can think of no principled reason why you should regard my new analysis as anything but pure science.
Don’t hold your breath. Penn State gets over $750 million in federal-taxpayer dollars, and Jones alone received $22 million since the turn of the century. Because universities charge 50 to 125 percent “overhead” on research dollars, climate change is supporting a lot of humanities departments around the world.
I think this sort of thing is the number two reason why universities are heavily liberal (tenure being the number one reason). It has nothing to do with liberals being smarter and everything to do with who’s buttering the bread.
Andy Freeman – no, Lambert didn’t adjust the data. He put the raw data on top of CRU’s data. Where I come from, when data from various sources has a high correlation, that means the data is good.