The Penn State Collegian archive once again is first on a story, breaking the news that the Penn State Inquiry has finished its inquiry and that results will be available later this week. They report:
Penn State President Graham Spanier addressed the inquiry and the panel’s work during the Board of Trustees meeting on Jan. 22.
“I know they’ve taken the time and spent hundreds of hours studying documents and interviewing people and looking at issues from all sides,” Spanier said.
They didn’t contact me. The only inquiry that has contacted me so far has been an anti-terrorism officer seconded to the Norfolk Police who interviewed me about FOI requests and my views on climate change. Nor have any CA readers notified me that they’ve been contacted by the Penn State inquiry. I wonder who they interviewed. I wonder what they meant about “looking at issues from all sides”.
I’ll be looking for both how they address issues arising out of Climategate and issues that Cicerone kept out of the 2006 NAS inquiry:
– whether Mann was justified in providing results (and code) that contain “dirty laundry” only to “trusted colleagues” and not to potential critics. (The example, of course, being Mann’s provision of residuals to Osborn and Briffa, while refusing them to me.)
– the failure to report adverse verification r2 results for early steps in MBH (while reporting favorable results for later steps), and a consideration of the associated IPCC TAR comment;
– claims that MBH98 results were “robust” to the presence/absence of all dendroclimatic indicators when they were not robust to presence/absence of bristlecones;
– failure to display principal components from the “Censored” directory;
– the unique extension of the Gaspe tree ring series from 1404 to 1400;
– whether the retention of 5 principal components in an effort to salvage MBH results was, as Wegman observed, “of no statistical integrity”.
A few other topics will undoubtedly occur to me when I read the report.
Climate Audit 
117 Comments
I’ve just received an e-mail by a Norfolk police officer asking to discuss the issue of my request to the UEA.
Re: Paolo M. (Feb 1 10:04), Should I assume you mean the FOI many of us participated in regarding the confidentiality agreements?
If so, I also received one. Here is how I replied
He replied back saying he won’t bother to call, and will just forward my response to the board.
Re: Bob Koss (Feb 1 10:39), I must also say, the fellow took my reply goodnaturedly. Seems to be just working his way through a rather mundane task.
Damn,
They didnt contact me.
Re: Steven Mosher (Feb 1 11:35),
You are probably just not important enough to waste time on. 😉
I spent a half hour talking to the nice gentleman last week. I tried to explain to him why the requests were done in “bite-sized pieces” after the initial request received a refusal based on a “bound by unspecified agreements” argument.
He wouldn’t tell me how the investigation was going when I asked.
Plus you had the files linked to on your blog as I recall. Why did we do it in bite sized chunks again? I wanna get our story straight.
I just re-read the original post. A single request for “any confidentiality agreements” probably would have worked.
In any sensible office, one would expect these agreements to be in a single file cabinet. Producing the agreements wouldn’t be expected to create the same burden as asking CRU to sift through all 10,000 e-mails from the last twelve years and deliver any e-mails that talk about confidence intervals, for example.
Somebody simply assumed that the request had to be in “bite-sized groups.” The cart took off and everybody jumped on. Suddenly, there were a lot of people requesting agreements from five countries, each. [Of course, FOI results hadn’t been good, to that point]
But we’re talking CRU here:
“But Mr Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months.”
“Oh yes, well as soon as I heard I went straight round to see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn’t exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them, had you? I mean, like actually telling anybody or anything.”
“But the plans were on display …”
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’.”
h/t to Douglas Adams (RIP)
Re: Steven Mosher (Feb 1 11:35),
I wonder if any of ’em took a peek at da’ Book (maybe, secretly, at home) or if they just sat around in meetings saying “wah, wah, blah…”
News later this week.
Well, let me just say that CRU did request a free copy through 3rd party channels.
Re: Steven Mosher (Feb 1 13:24),
They needed to. They deleted what they had.
Re: Steven Mosher (Feb 1 11:35),
BTW, I got the book a few days ago and am about 1/3 through it. Of course most of it is just review for those of us who’ve been here from the beginning. Indeed I was deep into the subject for several years before Steve came along. I mostly hung out at Climate Debate run by Dave W…. When the first reports about the upcoming M&M03 came out I said, and on that board, that they’d damn well better be right or would give all skeptics a black eye they might not be able to recover from. We can thank any gods that be that instead M&M have been proven right and have given a big boost to the skeptic movement in the process. And this despite the fact that Steve isn’t a movement skeptic at all. The person he most resembles is Bjorn Lomborg.
But getting back to the book, it’s a good read, at least so far. (I like to fancy myself a True Witness as in Heinlein’s writings.)
Thanks.
Although skills have deteriorated over the years I was once a Fair Witness ( see stranger in a strange land) and blessed with eidetic memory for words and passages from most of what I read. Funny, I even worked for a company named Eidetics.
I spoke to the officer last week. I think he is contacting everyone who put in a FOIA to CRU.
Re: mpaul (Feb 1 11:50),
What, that must be a zillion phone calls for them given the way that FOIAs were so overwhelming.
I am sure the report was written before the investigation.
I’m assuming a preponderance of the Penn State investigative
investigation and interviews are on paper and not available
electronically.
Federally funded academic research programs may fall under
U.S. FOIA, but a University investigation not using Fed funds
may not.
However, Penn State is not a private institution.
The great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is covered
under Pennsylvania’s FOI law.
The list of those interviewed, notes on the interviews, any
documents used/not used but reviewed should all be available
for “viewing” to satisfy an FOIA request to Penn State.
The Collegian reporters may have another shot
at scooping all the other media folks.
According to the following website the University is NOT subject to the Open Record’s law that went into effect on January 1, 2009.
Click to access RTKQuickGuide.pdf
“What are “state-related institutions”? There is a special chapter of the law relating to these four
universities: Temple, University of Pittsburgh, Penn State and Lincoln. These “state-related institutions” are
NOT considered commonwealth agencies, and their records are NOT made public under the open records law.
However, the law does require these four universities to issue annual public reports that include IRS Form 990
information, plus the salaries of all officers and directors and the highest 25 salaries of other employees. The
reports must be filed with the state by May 30 of each year, and the law requires”
DGH, you’re right (I’m wrong) about Penn State being a private
institution.
If there’s a public instutution white wash, there’s a chance some
parts of the “report” may be archived in the Board of Trustee’s
minutes.
Otherwise, the only way to dislodge information will be to use
the Federal FOIA provisions for federally funded programs, grants, salaries,
etc.
It will take a bit of searching to track down the grants and contract numbers for the bits & pieces that federally funded Mann, et al.
Again, The Collegian has the first and best chance at the details.
Sorry to be right about that point. As a former resident of the Commonwealth, I recalled that there were two univerity systems. The first consists of the former state colleges, Kutztown, Mansfield, Stroudsberg, Slippery Rock, etc. and the second of the independent, semi-private variety i.e. Pitt, Penn State, etc.
Here is a link to the FOIA requirements for federally funded research as required by the White House Office of Management and Budget:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/rewrite/circulars/a110/a110.html#36
“(d) (1) In addition, in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for research data relating to published research findings produced under an award that were used by the Federal Government in developing an agency action that has the force and effect of law, the Federal awarding agency shall request, and the recipient shall provide, within a reasonable time, the research data so that they can be made available to the public through the procedures established under the FOIA. If the Federal awarding agency obtains the research data solely in response to a FOIA request, the agency may charge the requester a reasonable fee equaling the full incremental cost of obtaining the research data. This fee should reflect costs incurred by the agency, the recipient, and applicable subrecipients. This fee is in addition to any fees the agency may assess under the FOIA (5 U.S.C. 552(a)(4)(A)).”
Since Mann’s research was cited by the EPA for its endangerment finding, then any portion of his research funded by the US should be available to the public.
Re: Richard Henry Lee (Feb 2 00:26),
Heh, there’s lots of “should”‘s that aren’t. There’s been a lot of discussion about data vs. methods vs. the code.
The Mann, et al, typical bull has been to say “It’s all in the paper(s)” or “That wasn’t my data, it was his data” [even though all names are on the paper(s)]. Steve Mc used the term “Check-Kiting” of data. One problem has been that one would say, “I want the data”, and Mann would say, whiningly, “I gave them all the data…”. Then, whoever was the arbiter would say, “He gave you all the data, buzz off”. PSU could do that.
Allow me to predict:
1) the scope of what they covered did not include any of what Steve mentioned.
2) the role of Mann in manipulating graphics (the trick) and what was done with funny filters and padding etc, will be completely misconstrued if dealt with at all
3) Mann will be completely exonerated of any role in manipulation of journals
4) Mann will be exonerated in general and praised
Though this comment is rather pessimistic, given the current state of affairs regarding the politics of AGW, I must concur.
Mark
I had the same reaction.
Agreed. There is no way they will throw their colleague under the bus.
Agreed on the first 3 points. Whatever they release will be couched in employee privacy language and won’t be very informative.
But I would also raise the email deleting conspiracy as a problem for Mann. The fact that the FOIA people have indicated that UK laws were broken raises the importance of that matter. And given that Mann agreed to participate in deleting the emails, whether or not he actually deleted them, seems pretty serious to me.
I would also guess that behind the scenes he will receive a pretty signifcant wing clipping which might be evident in the quantity and tone of his future participation in public forums such as RC.
Aren’t we expecting a bit too much at this point? According to the article on the Daily Caller from earlier January this committee has to determine whether the situation warrants further investigation.
http://dailycaller.com/2010/01/12/climategate-professor-michael-mann-protected-to-maximum-extent-by-penn-state-policy/
If that report is correct then it seems rather unlikely that this group of three wouldn’t find some reason to continue the investigation. That’s the path of least resistance and risk, especially in the context of the state legislators clamoring and the IPCC collapsing.
My revised guess is that this group recomends the investigation continue and that they narrow the scope to particular incidents revealed by the emails. The best thing for PSU at this point is to stall their decision and allow the story to die slowly.
Re: DGH (Feb 1 16:56),
“quantity and tone of his future participation in public forums such as RC”. If they didn’t ask him what the heck he was doing writing that utterly inane editorial in the Washington Post then they didn’t do much at all. Unless, of course, it was PSU’s suggested course of action at the time.
I, too, had the same reaction. The investigation will ignore/misconstrue all of the issues that Steve raised and instead will be a complete whitewashing of the entire affair and a full exoneration of Mann, who will be praised as a top notch scientists who’s been unfairly harassed.
I wonder if, after the whitewashing is complete, there is any chance of getting the local newspaper up there to conduct an “independent journalistic investigation” by interviewing Steve, Ross and any others who’ve been involved in the hockey stick dispute? It would be a real scoop for the newspaper to show all of the facts that the University’s investigation ignored.
Re: Michael Smith (Feb 1 17:04), I expect that any FOI request to East Anglia would be under British law and would only cover records in East Anglia’s possession. Emails on Mann’s computer(s) at Penn State would not be applicable. The only reason for him to delete the emails would be to protect Jones by preventing any evidence to prove that Jones had deleted emails that were subject to British law. Either way, Mann doesn’t seem to be in violation of FOI laws. Again, I’d love to know what’s on Mann’s computer.
Craig,
I think you are going to be proven to be right on. Seems like a campaign to cover their boy to me. No real critical analysis or investigation was performed. Remember, he brings home the grant bacon. You cannot have an institution that benefits from his activities investigation him and expect an impartial review.
I predict that Mann will be found guilty of surfing the web on university time, while he was reading CA, of course.
Is there any way to contact Wegman to ask if he was interviewed by the PS committee
Here’s the Executive Summary:
Picture worth 1000 words?
Re: David Smith (Feb 1 10:30),
Now, are the outsiders the mongols from Yamal looking for those Polar Urals or did the wagon train get worried when Steve Mc asked “Where’s the closest Starbucks to those Bristlecone Pines?”
The inquiry didn’t seem to care.
While I would predict that Penn State will exonerate Mann and with the full blessings of the student newspaper, I always find these exercises of interest in seeing how far they will go to point fingers at the antagonists ala what Nature did in an editorial. I would expect that academic freedom will be invoked and perhaps even poor Michael Mann as a victim.
Re: Kenneth Fritsch (Feb 1 10:43),
Email from Phil: “is why the skeptics (for want of a better term) always pick on Mike.”
Poor Mike.
maybe Jones wanted some of that publicity
Re: Steven Mosher (Feb 1 13:49),
I still haven’t decided who’s who given Phil’s “The Empire Strikes Back”. Maybe Phil will say what he meant in his memoir. Or, maybe he’ll just collaborate with Mike and write a Pachy-like book.
Ya, the whole jones mann briffa triangle is fascinating.
Sidebar: In Oct/nov 09 with Briffa laid up in the hospital, RC turns to CRU for help. ( Gavin’s Guru, Tom P… are there hints there that
some of the help is being farmed out to some anonymous party
along with Delayed oscilator .. more on that)
And they say Melvin could help but he’s a loose canon.
What precisely does that mean? and how do they know he is a loose canon?
Ok. so more on Tom P and DO.
1. Tom P, evidence consistent with being UK based.
2. DO is in NYC
Like I said when these two appeared.. proxy forces. anonymous; Expendable. diversions.
Re: Steven Mosher (Feb 1 16:06),
OK, just mentioning Briffa, briefly: I think when Keith got sick then other things started. That’s why I think the Oct. 5 PhilWig discussion is important. Briffa was in twubble, maybe at that point for being sidelined, no longer a team player.
Re: Steven Mosher (Feb 1 16:06),
Oh, this just still on Keith…Keith was laid up but, finally, they called him in, maybe a month before he wanted to be back. It was a ‘crisis’ (for them).
Maybe the police think that the leaker also participated in the FOI inquiry.
So they’re going through the entire FOI list to see if anyone has any connections to UEA or any other loose ends. When they get a Bob Koss-type answer, they cross that person off the list.
Otherwise there wouldn’t be any rational purpose in the police working through the FOI list – as they know that there was nothing improper about the FOI Inquiry itself.
ya usual suspects.
I’m not going to parse the Collegian piece but I liked the lead: “…and is slated to release its “Climategate” findings later in the week…”
It reminded me of those little news memes I hear like ‘The government will release it’s most recent data for the consumer price index, the gross domestic product, and the jobeless rate. The markets are on hold until the data is announced on Thursday.’
meh, or something like that.
There was no money riding on Churchill’s research [sic]. Mann is a big money maker for Penn. They will exnorate him. In fact, I suspect they will clain he the innocent victim of a fossil fuel funded smear compaign.
It will be very interesting to see how Penn State handles this, for it the Institutes reputation on the line as well Mann’s.
A whitewash of this, or a very narrowly investigated and defined issue with a resulting “move along, nothing to see here” will simply expand the eventual downfall impacts of the whole AGE hysteria from just the people who flogged it to the Institution’s that abetted it.
The short time between announcing and completing the report assumes the worst…
I believe they announced it in December for an end of January “inquiry” result; then leading to a possible “investigation.”
Mann’s skin is pretty thin and he may have made enemies at PSU (not hard to believe), and those people may be on the inquiry committee.
I don’t think they have a clear “delete the e-mails” misconduct on Mann, like they have on Jones. I wonder if he really deleted his e-mails, he said he didn’t, but PSU should verify this if they were doing a real inquiry.
Phil Jones wrote:
Mike,
Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.
Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.
We will be getting Caspar to do likewise
Hi Phil,
I’ll contact Gene about this ASAP. His new email is: generwahl@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Don’t think Mann deleteing emails will be an issue as I doubt there is a policy against it. To comply with the Sarbanes–Oxley Act it is a given the university archives all email. Insuring documents are not destroyed is an institutional responsibility. Only makes sense that this would be independant of what the users do.
“It is a given…” From SOX enactmnt 7-30-2002, it will important long the “you, too” ripples took to reach PSU and for general PSU email preservation policies to be implemented.
I don’t think abstract debates on statistics (e.g. PCA truncation) should be handled by Penn State investigation. Nor should the general several year pissing contest with Steve. Am amazed that Steve lacks the perspective to think about this from the University’s (proper, not mendacious) point of view.
They should look at things like the email deletion. Depending on how much time they have, they might fish a little. But be real…they are not going to go off and do reconstructions of Mann’s papers. Nor should they. If Mike has most of the data and most of it was used, then he will be fine. And to be honest, the imperfect recons that STeve et al have done pretty much show that Mike (may have) made some poor choices, perhaps had the thumb on the scale or fished for results (whether overt or confirmation bias, hard to tell)…but the work has been looked at enought to see that there are no gaping lies like in the Korean cloning or the American firearms academic scandals.
I note that Wegman has had nothing to publish in the literature on Mannian methods. And Steve since 2005 hasn’t either. And there are lots of places where some interesting Burger Cubasch style quantification of differences could still be done. The problem is (as Huybers showed) that the differences are not as clear cut as Steve likes to think. And clear discussion of this would show it. Also that Steve is NOT interested in intellectual clarity…in issue disaggregation and mathematical understanding…but in talking points in the style of a lawyer or even worse an agitator.
It’s not illegal to be wrong, or a jerk, so that will not be looked at.
Re: marchesarosa (Feb 1 12:32),
27 of his colleagues know what the price is. If I were Mike I’d be feeling like one of those cartoon characters with the parts all lined-in, with $ signs.
Re: You know who (Feb 1 11:51),
TCO!
I note this in the news story:
“The inquiry’s findings will determine if the university will further investigate Mann’s work.”
So it appears to be like an indictment, a decision to do a full investigation. So M&M may yet get their day in court.
I have always felt that the principal academic misconduct by Mann was very early one, when he failed to describe his method of short-centred principal components in the 1998 Nature article. To claim to have used standard PCA when you haven’t looks bad to me. Of course it might have been a mistake, but he has insisted it was not. Has anyone yert found another use of this method?
Re: mikep (Feb 1 12:44),
There’s no use for the old method but if you hunt around you’ll find that he changed methods, didn’t tell anyone, and kept it all going as if it were one, seemless process. Oh, and the new method… “Dirty laundry”. Not just a single, early, mistake that could have been corrected (or was, MM2003, for example).
Thinking about this from a purely ‘game theory’ perspective, the University knows that if they completely exonerate Mann, that there will be a state congressional inquiry (the State has already told them that). If the State comes in and finds problems, then the administration looks really bad. The better approach would be to punt (to use an American/Canadian football term). My guess is that the report will say that certain unnamed irregularities were uncovered that warrant further investigation and that the university will ask for an independent review to be conducted.
Re: mpaul (Feb 1 12:44),
That is very plausible. It could have taken all this time just to reach a decision to call for a real inquiry. The wheels of Academe turn slowly.
Also, it’s not bad to punt if it looks like a real hot potato.
A standard tactic is to drop into the “we’ve got to gather more data” mode – hoping that attention is diverted and a report can be quietly completed. This has the benefit of getting a response out quickly that is completely neutral in content and no egg ends up on anyone.
Existence proof: The ethics committee investigation into Mr. Charles Rangel. With any luck they will still be studying it when he takes his retirement in one of his many unclaimed residences with full taxpayer paid luxury.
Re: CentralCoastRick (Feb 1 20:22),
I agree with “standard tactic” but it simply doesn’t work. They tried, and tried, and… to say “Nothing to see here, just move along” and, it didn’t work. Of course, some may not be the brightest crayons in the box and may try it again and I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re hoping it would all just go away.
I think they need a good long punt so they can then run real fast back into the ivory tower and start typing up resumes.
I think Penn State would love to just sweep this thing under the rug, but they know that they can’t. The “inquiry”, according to PSU spokeswoman Lisa Powers, was to “review every e-mail in question — a total of about 300 messages.” So it was rather limited in scope. The big fear at PSU has to be that others are investigating what went on and it will be quite a while before those are finished. If PSU let’s Mann off the hook and then someone else says that he acted unethically (a real possibility in my opinion), they’ll look really bad. And Penn State has to be a lot more concerned about their overall reputation than they about Mann.
So I think that they’ll announce that they’re taking the next step; “a committee of at least five tenured professors who have no conflict of interest and are competent to evaluate the issues objectively.” That’s supposed to take 120 days, so they’ll be able to wait for other decisions to come out.
What I don’t know is whether the “investigation” would include outside people. They really need to ensure objectivity with an outside panel. Also, I’m curious whether the “inquiry” included a forensic analysis to find out whether Mann deleted any emails. I doubt it.
Re: Jim Ogden (Feb 1 12:46),
“review every e-mail in question — a total of about 300 messages.” Hmmm, a search at eastanglia for “Mann” comes up with 489. I wonder if they missed anything?
Limited scope.
I would hope that Penn State is smart enough to see what us gadflies were able to do to Mann’s analysis and not open themselves up to our keen eye.
The State Senate seemed to be quite emphatic in their insistence that a whitewash just won’t wash.
They threatened Penn State where it hurts: funding.
You Know Who – As someone who has been reading Steve M.’s blog pretty much from the first, I can state unequivocally that this statement, “Also that Steve is NOT interested in intellectual clarity…in issue disaggregation and mathematical understanding…but in talking points in the style of a lawyer or even worse an agitator.” is total trash. You’re either uninformed and therefore negligent, or else you’re lying, with both possibilities reflecting your tendentious personal polemic.
“Disaggregation” is word that was used by someone who used to be a frequent poster here
Does You Know Who sound a bit like a sober and calmed-down TCO?
Presumably, Mann will say that whatever poor choices he may have made, he only made them because he was harrassed and hounded into making them by that horrible man, Steve McIntyre.
If he does so, and the University committee releases a statement supporting that characterization, without even interviewing Steve – that would probably be actionable as slander / libel.
Of course, if somebody reads this, or if a lawyer reviews their statement, they may decide to make a last-minute phone interview of Steve, to cover their collective a##es.
Steve [or Ross, etc], if this happens, please don’t just answer their questions. Prepare a short script, and make all your points, then memorialize your conversation and send your version of the conversation to the chair of the committee.
Example:
I am a published author in the field. My academic training is in statistics, which I believe is among the most suitable training for deriving a signal from these problematic datasets. I have had a long, successful career, outside of climatology, without encountering the sort of personal conflicts I’ve experienced during my dealings with Dr. Mann and his associates.
I have, on many occassions over the past six years, stated that I believed there was a warming problem, but that I believed that this issue was too important to allow non-reproducible science to be driving the debate. Dr. Mann and his associates have falsely described me as a ‘denialist’.
My consistent goal has been for scientists in this critical field to disclose their data and methods sufficiently for the work to be double-checked, even by perceived ‘enemies’. Post-‘climategate’, it appears that many scientists are finally willing to publicly agree with my position.
This is a timeline of events, as evidenced by my contemporaneous public statements, my saved e-mails, and leaked ‘climategate’ e-mails between and about Dr Mann and his colleagues.
1. In 2003, I asked for Mann’s supporting data for his very influential 1998 ‘hockey stick’ paper.
2. Mann referred me to Rutherford, who provided the ‘wrong’ data
3. I used the ‘wrong’ data to demonstrate problems with Mann’s work
4. Mann libelled me [see statements by Osborn…], after he was cautioned by his associates at CRU to restrain himself.
5. I redid my work using the new data. I found evidence that Mann had done his analysis excluding BCPs, and didn’t like what he saw. I found more problems with his work.
6. While my next paper was awaiting publication, Mann and his allies started a new blog, called Realclimate, whose early posts were dedicated to questioning my motives and competence. Realclimate has been an highly-censored blog; attempts to set the record straight were deleted, while personal attacks against me by Mann’s proxies were allowed to flourish. [leaked e-mails demonstrate this proxy method…]
7. In response to the libelous attacks on Realclimate, I started my own blog, Climateaudit, which I used to demonstrate problems with the Mann reconstruction – using my training in Statistics.
8. According to the climategate e-mails, Mann took an interest in getting other paleoclimatologists to freeze me out. He appears to have taken the view that a disagreement on facts requires an all-out war on many fronts, rather than communication and proof.
9. Some scientists were helpful in providing data or advice, but later became suddenly distant or antagonistic. I attended academic conferences / meetings and found a number of scientists to have a cold attitude toward me at our initial meeting; I felt a distinct chill.
10. On several occassions, I proposed to Mann or his associates that we come out with a joint statement on points of agreement, so that future efforts could be focused on the areas of disagreement. I was declined.
11. Through much effort, I was able to determine that much of Mann’s extraordinary result was driven by the improper use of BCPs, and a faulty application of mathematics.
12. A committee of the US House of Representatives took interest in my analysis of Mann’s very influential work. The committee commissioned an investigation by the NAS.
13. The NAS panel ignored Mann’s very contraversial [and novel] core claim that the 1990s were the hottest in 1000 years; they made the uncontraversial statement that Mann was correct in stating that it was the hottest in 400 years. The panel agreed with me that the use of the BCPs was inappropriate. The panel punted on further analysis, noting that reconstructions made by Mann’s associates, many using the same chosen proxies and Mann’s suspect BCPs, told similar stories.
14. After the NAS chose not to seek answers to the questions posed by the House committee, a separate investigation was authorized. This one was lead by Dr. Edward Wegman, chair of the NRC’s committee on statistics.
15. Dr. Wegman’s panel agreed with my assertion that Mann used an inappropriate mathematical technique, and so Mann’s results were not supported.
16. Wahl and Amman authored a paper that purported to refute my demonstration of Mann’s paper’s lack of statistical significance. When W & A finally added their table of statistics describing Mann’s work their results were remarkably similar to my own.
17. The Wahl and Amman work was cited to refute my work in AR4. Mann later received an e-mail from Phil Jones asking him to facilitate the deletion of e-mails involving Mann, Jones, Wahl, Amman, and AR4.
18. Dr. Mann and his associates continued to falsely describe me as a ‘denialist’, and I was denied access to data normally provided to persons in the field.
19. I asked various journals to enforce their published policies on data disclosure. Almost all declined.
20. I resorted to Freedom of Information laws to attempt to get access to data that was being freely distributed among Mann and his associates. Most of my attempts were unsuccessful, even though the use of FOIA was appropriate.
21. I made a total of ~20 FOIA requests distributed among approximately a half-dozen government-employed scientists over the past three years. This could hardly be described as a nuisance to any one of these scientists, who normally deal with occasional requests from their ‘friends’ by taking a few minutes to send data off.
[Please excuse my presumptuousness (and errors, above). It’s been my observation that Steve answers the questions he’s asked during interviews. I expect that, being Canadian, Steve lacks the inherent rudeness necessary to treat the questioning as a hostile cross-examination. Steve, if you are called at this late hour, become an American for an hour and push your version of the facts. Otherwise, prepare to be slimed, yet again. – JE]
Jim Edwards
A brilliant and very perspicacious summary and statement. I am full of admiration.
More importantly your advice for Steve is wise and I hope in time. While your cautionary view may appear slightly paranoid, in this situation it is not. The full weight of the establishment would dearly love to rubbish and smear Steve by any means, fair or foul. Make no mistake about that.
Thank you, sir.
“Steve, if you are called at this late hour, become an American for an hour and push your version of the facts. Otherwise, prepare to be slimed, yet again. – JE”
I wouldn’t even bother answering the phone. They ought to save their dime.
The Penn State Inquiry has only one aim – to exonerate Mann, period. To do therwise would only create a huge ambarassment that would take them years to recover from. Don’t worry, they know how handle such things. You watch.
This of course will only leave their Achilles heel even more exposed than before. They’re only postponing the inevitable.
Yes, well, there are different possible whitewashes:
“Under considerable attack by the reactionary forces of Exxon, under the guise of one Steve McIntyre – a Canadian – Professor Mann nobly stood his ground for the past six years. Professor Mann’s efforts to combat muzzling of his important work necessarily became heated. His private e-mails were stolen and a portion were selectively released to portray Dr. Mann in a bad light and discredit his vital work. The committee finds that Dr. Mann did not act inappropriately. His work represents the best in the Penn State academic legacy.”
…or, in the alternative…
“The committee read the 300 e-mails involving Dr. Mann that were unlawfully released from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit. The committee was provided with no corraborative evidence that Dr. Mann violated any standing rules of the Academic Senate. We find insufficient evidence to recommend this matter be pursued further.”
Which extreme would you rather see in the newspaper, and which will piss Mann off ?
Thanks Jim. I needed that.
Penn State is in a real fix. They cannot truly know the way the political winds of AGW are blowing,at this point of time, but yet they have to pass judgement on Mann.
How uncomfortable!
How can anything happen to Mann? He is the creator of the hockey stick.
I wonder what will be in The Report.
It’ll be earth-shattering, I’m sure. The suspense is killing me!
Dear Mr. McIntyre,
I assume a) that the Penn State Inquiry report will try and hide today’s sad decline in INDIVIDUAL climate research quality in a rather awkward way, and that b) you intend to dissect and break this report as elegant as you broke the hockey stick?!?
Cheers from (record cold…) Norway (which used to have 3000+ well fed farmers in Greenland in the Medieval times, even Michael Mann would have enjoyed the nice climate in those days!)
It occurs to me that if Mann didn’t delete any emails, as he says, then he may have some interesting messages that we haven’t seen yet. And it would also mean that he dumped on his colleagues by not deleting them after implying that he would. Of course, he could have conveniently had a hard drive failure and therefore lost them.
If he actually did delete the messages that Jones requested, then he has lied to us all.
an enquiry of the science behind the hockey-sticks is much more important to the public interest than the investigation of wrong doings, though these issues may be connected.
…and it is frightening, that none of the inquiries appear to care so far.
You’ve been contacted and interviewed by an anti-terrorism officer regarding your FOI requests and climate change views?
Wow. Hope you had “your papers” in order…
O/T but CA mentioned:
Sun, Scotland: Inconveniently for the experts, global warming IS a con
In order to keep the reality hidden from sceptics, especially Climate Audit, he allegedly asked for emails to be deleted, data altered and on one occasion convinced the university not to release information to Climate Audit because of “the types of people” they were…
http://www.thesun.co.uk/scotsol/homepage/news/papercolumnists/donaldmacleod/2831667/Inconveniently-for-the-experts-global-warming-is-a-con.html
According to C. Northcote Parkinson, “deferral is the deadliest form of denial”. I expect the “report” will be mainly double talk and B.S., kicking the can down the road for “further study” in the hope that eventually folks will forget about this.
re – jim edwards Posted Feb 1, 2010 at 1:56 PM
excellent summery of the event timeline & off Steve’s (Ross) central role in making this public.
ps. in brit land the ‘times’ is even beginning to pick up the story.
They didn’t contact me. The only inquiry that has contacted me so far has been an anti-terrorism officer seconded to the Norfolk Police who interviewed me about FOI requests and my views on climate change.
Maybe you should be grateful that Penn State, at least, wont be booking you for terrorism.
This is how they will be judging Micael Mann: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xi-agPf95M
On the advice “follow the money”, I searched the CRU emails with keyword “money”. It is a fascinating filter.
It shows possible money laundering and tax evasion by the Russians, with very delayed (or even non-)payment from Briffa as a possible cause for retribution if the leak indeed came from Russia. It shows that Steve was surmising correctly about many of his doubts with the Yamal etc data. 826209667.txt
865941506.txt
907339897.txt and more
It shows correspondence from within that some of Mann’s hockey stick related work was scientifically unjustified. Year 2000 963233839.txt From Ray Bradley “The graph patches together 3 things: Mann et al NH mean annual temps + 2
sigma standard error for AD1000-1980, + instrumental data for 1981-1998 +
IPCC (“do not quote, do not cite” projections for GLOBAL temperature for
the next 100 years, relative to 1998.”
It shows early rigging of the effects of GHG (“Faking up results”, 887057295.txt) without which the hockey stick might not be needed.
Much, much more, too long to discuss here.
Do follow the “money”.
An impediment, and one which a thorough investigation will need to overcome, is the lack of attachments to the CRU email set and those emails that are referenced but not reproduced.
Minutes of Penn State’s Trustee meetings are available here.
http://www.psu.edu/trustees/meetings.html
The minutes for the meeting on the 22nd have not yet been published.
Steve, it’s a great concern that Muir Russell has not yet contacted you, given your central role in the statistical backstory to the Climategate emails. I would urge anyone thinking of submitting to the Commons Science and Technology Select Committee looking into Sir Muir’s Terms of Reference to emphasize, as Lord Lawson has, the need for the inquiry to “take evidence from those who feel they or their work have been improperly treated”. You should become close to centre stage once this point is clarified.
It almost sounds as though you don’t believe they will find any wrongdoing. I know MBH98 was the big war for you, but Mann08/09 are so obviously and endlessly flawed and so obviously not real, I wonder if any issues WRT those will be addressed.
Id’s gonna throw a fit.
I’m sorry I made a facile comment before but, and if this is OT please squish it, have you seen the Sunday Times (uk) recent reporting on disasters v climate change a la Pielke. A quote in response to Muir-Wood “Muir-Wood may have been deceived by his own observations.” Priceless
Re: Lewis Deane (Feb 1 22:53),
Here, while your around.
Hello. I have been a faithful reader of CA for some time, but I don’t contribute much. I was wondering how the unthreaded thread mechanism works. I was wondering if anyone else had been watching Summit Camp in Greenland have an incredibly warm January (~ -29 C temp) I know that Steve likes to keep discussions topical. So I was wondering if there was a mechanism for just starting up a random discussion on the unthreaded thread. Do I just go ahead and make a post about it?
Steve just died a little inside.
Oh it can’t be a whitewash.
Senate Education Committee Chairman Jeffrey Piccola has already promised Penn State that if its investigation is a whitewash, he will do one that isn’t.
Just reminding the investigators 🙂
hmm
A letter to him might be in order
I sent mine to the Senator,the Commonwealth Foundation and Penn State University on 16 January.
The climate research budget from the US federal govt is $1 billion this year. Penn State would have kept that in mind during their inquiry.
TCO? Please help a Brit
Iain, I tried Google. It offered “Total Cost of Ownership” and “Terrestrial Carbon Observations”.
Anyone care to explain?
complete list of acronyms
http://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/TCO
Re: Dr Iain McQueen (Feb 2 04:06),
No need to look for acronyms.
TCO is the nom de plume of an erstwhile poster at CA. His one trick pony act was to continually insist that Steve should drop everything and spend all his time publishing papers rather than analyze climate results on the blog in an open forum.
Constant repetition of this mantra in every thread became an irritation and I believe he was one of the few posters to be banned on CA because of this nonsense. Since then he has been on other climate blogs (Air Vent, Open Mind) usually badmouthing Steve and his work and just generally being a pain in the butt. He has not been missed here.
Yes, I agree, there is strong evidence that “You Know Who” and TCO are (in IPCC probability parlance) very very likely to be one and the same.
Roman
Thank you very much! That fits!! I had begun to wonder about ‘You know Who’ myself
Re: RomanM (Feb 2 07:35),
The question then becomes did TCO have knowledge that the team was blocking (or at least trying to) every attempt of skeptics to publish in the peer-reviewed literature. If so that’s a moral problem. If not, he should at least apologize to Steve for having pushed a plan which wouldn’t have worked.
My recollection is that TCO is very likely not one person, but a group of persons blogging under that identity. My recollection is further that when TCO was specifically asked whether he/she/they is/are more than one person it was not denied. But TCO never agreed to be identified to my knowledge. In any event TCO owes Steve M. and the rest of us numerous apologies. But this is getting OT.
Steve:
This would be BOLD. But I think you have the resources and the time. If I we in your position, I would make a PERSONAL APPEARANCE at Penn State.
Maybe drop off some copies of your papers.
Stand IN FRONT OF THESE PEOPLE. (Just don’t throw water on them, you know from the “Wizard of Oz” what will happen then!)
Phone inquiries from officials are most often a means of obtaining information while at the same time carefully NOT producing an indisputable record.
There is no honest and good reason for any official inquiry to be conducted by hearsay over phone.
Remember to make paper.
Phone conversations are often disputable but in a court of law written correspondence is credible evidence.
Breaking! Penn State says they are exempt from Freedom of Information Act February 2, 2010 from Dr. John Costella, ClimateGate.com
John comment “It appears they made special provisions for Penn State excluding them from this law.
So does Penn State now feel they can “hide the decline” of science it has generated or permitted to be generated? This could be “Mike’s…[FOI]trick”
If the experience of my own institution is any guide, the first instinct of most university administrations is to suppress, deny, and ignore allegations of academic and scientific misconduct by any of their faculty, in the hope to dodge “bad publicity.” From your report, it doesn’t appear that Penn State is going to be an exception. And in Mann’s case, since he is so “high-profile” his adminstration will surely circle the wagons around him. It will be surprising if any of them have the guts to face up to what their celebrity scientist has done.
The inquiry report is now available at http://www.research.psu.edu/orp/Findings_Mann_Inquiry.pdf. (Did somebody already report this?)
Even though they haven’t completely let him off the hook, the report is good news for Dr. Mann. It seems to me that the Inquiry Committee didn’t really understand the scientific issues involved. Perhaps that’s only to be expected; but then, rather than taking responsibility for an independent inquiry, they just ended up accepting Dr. Mann’s word for everything. For example, in reporting on Dr. Mann’s interview with the committee [p. 4 bullet items], they repeatedly say “He EXPLAINED that [he had never falsified any data, used inappropriate influence in reviewing papers, etc.] …”
It’s particularly disappointing to see their response to the issue of the first charge.
“Allegation 1: Did you engage in, or participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions with the intent to suppress or falsify data?
Finding 1. After careful consideration of all the evidence and relevant materials, the inquiry committee finding is that there exists no credible evidence that Dr. Mann had or has ever engaged in, or participated in, directly or indirectly, any actions with an intent to suppress or to falsify data. While a perception has been created in the weeks after the CRU emails were made public that Dr. Mann has engaged in the suppression or falsification of data, there is no credible evidence that he ever did so, and certainly not while at Penn State. In fact to the contrary, in instances that have been focused upon by some as indicating falsification of data, for example in the use of a “trick” to manipulate the data, this is explained as a discussion among Dr. Jones and others including Dr. Mann about how best to put together a graph for a World Meteorological Organization (WMO) report. They were not falsifying data; they were trying to construct an understandable graph for those who were not experts in the field. The so-called “trick”1 was nothing more than a statistical method used to bring two or more different kinds of data sets together in a legitimate fashion by a technique that has been reviewed by a broad array of peers in the field.
Decision 1. As there is no substance to this allegation, there is no basis for further examination of this allegation in the context of an investigation in the second phase of RA-10. ”
Evidently they never heard of the CENSORED directory.
Re: jc-at-play (Feb 3 15:22),
Re: jc-at-play (Feb 3 15:22),
I see now that Steve has opened a new thread “The Mann Report”, with much more detail. [And a bit too much venting by commenters.]
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