Comments on: The “Hockey League”

By: Richard Sharpe

Richard Sharpe — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 23:15:37 +0000

There are lots of trolls over at WUWT pointing to a Real Climate article and screaming:

“McKitrick and McIntyre are cherry picking and Wegman plagiarised M&M”

By: Fred

Fred — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 20:25:34 +0000

Doesn’t it bother you in the slightest that for Wegman’s ‘replication’ of MM05, they simply plotted a sample of the random PCs that you had archived?And then mislabelled the caption (fig 4.4) to indicate that it was drawn from an AR(1) distribution, when it in fact was drawn from the ‘full’ acf case? That they gave the highly misleading impression that they had actually done something with your calculation?

Plotting a picture of someone else’s archived result, using the original code doesn’t sound much like auditing ….

By: Steve McIntyre

Steve McIntyre — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 16:23:04 +0000

This is nonsense.

No one seriously contests the bias introduced by short-centering. In addition to Wegman, the point was confirmed by the NAS panel.

The effect of short-centering on the MBH network was to promote the bristlecones into the PC1 where Mann thought that they were the “dominant” component of variance, rather than merely one small regional artifact.

By: Punksta

Punksta — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 15:55:39 +0000

So McIntyre cherry-picked, and Wegman just copied his results. Had Wegman done a proper job, he would have found he could not replicate McIntyre.
Well – looks like case closed, the hockey stick lives…

Steve: your assertions are untrue. The bias introduced by Mannian short-centering has been confirmed not just by Wegman, but by the NAS panel on the simple AR1 case.

By: Richard Sharpe

Richard Sharpe — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 15:36:10 +0000

This seems to be the current type of the Hockey Team critique of McIntyre and the Wegman report (from WUWT):

——————————————–
Steve Metzler says:
November 24, 2010 at 7:06 am

redneck says:

If the point of the exercise is to replicate the results you absolutely need the code. Without the code it would be extremely difficult and time consuming to replicate the results as you would not know what proceedures were used to produce that result. After all if you want to replicate the result you need to repeat the exercise using the same methodology used previously which is given by the code.

I’m afraid you just don’t get how science is done at all. Wegman is a *professional statistician*. As in… that’s what he does for a living. All McIntyre needed to do was tell Wegman what raw data he used and what methodology he used, and Wegman should have been able to reproduce McIntyre’s results himself in just a few days honest work. Then he would have noticed that by using AR1(.2) to generate the red noise, that he *couldn’t reproduce McIntyre’s results*. That is how science is done.

But, no, he instead took the lazy way out and just copied McIntyre’s results without bothering to verify them. And for that he will be hung out to dry.

Also, a statistician knows well better than to cherry-pick just 1% of the simulations that were run and call that the ‘results’. That’s *scandalous* behaviour. That’s why I call the whole thing a ‘stitch-up’ of Mann et. al.

By: Brian H

Brian H — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 07:27:13 +0000

http://news.discovery.com/earth/polar-bears-wont-eat-snow-geese-into-extinction.html

Journal links @link.

Happy now?

By: G

Tue, 23 Nov 2010 20:23:59 +0000

@ Brian
citation please! Who measured the populations of these animals. There are all sorts of claims related to climate change made on the internet every day.
If I had to guess, half of the stuff on atypical site is little more than rumor.

By: Maybe

Maybe — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 20:20:30 +0000

Which IPCC report are you referring to? They have different people for each report and there have been several IPCC reports. Two thirds of the bodies for the next IPCC report are supposed to be scientists who previously never worked on an IPCC.
Judging by most of the surveys of researchers on the topic, nearly any random sample of climatologists would come up with something similar to the IPCC.

By: Maybe

Maybe — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 20:15:47 +0000

Randi might change whats in the inquirer but the relics of his original sentiment will not die.

@ Redbone. I do not see much logical fallacy in Randi’s reply?
I have read a lot around, and there are plenty of fanatics who look, talk and and act exactly like Randi said. Hearing a lot of material from those types and not guys like MacIntyre, is more than enough to confirm Randi’s initial bias. Good that he is more open minded though.

By: Keith Sketchley

Keith Sketchley — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 23:26:02 +0000

Lessee – a hockey league is a cartel of teams who try to hurt each other, whereas within a team they don’t.

And Michael Mann claims persecution with his evolution analogy – why didn’t he use a “cry wolf” or “sky is falling” analogy? Methinks the analogies get convoluted/stretched, so should be rejected out of hand in favour of straight talk.

PS: Well, maybe the debate is between teams trying to hurt each other intellectually, alarmists versus skeptics, but I doubt that’s what Mann meant.