Science has recently weighed in with an editorial in which the editor of Science, Donald Kennedy, stated that he is “outraged” by the Barton Committee inquiring into processes for due diligence and disclosure in connection with science being applied for large-scale public policy. I thought that people might be interested in an account of my experience with Science in trying to obtain underlying data from Lonnie Thompson’s ice core studies, regularly published in Science.
Recent Science Statements
First, here are recent statements from Science in connection with the Barton Committee. The publisher of Science sent a letter to Barton about a month ago. The press release is here; the letter is here; I posted a short comment here. The publisher of Science stated:
My colleagues and I would be pleased to discuss these matters with you and your staff should you so desire.
I hope that the Barton Committee takes them up on their offer as their viewpoint on due diligence and disclosure from a journal aspect would be invaluable.
The recent Kennedy editorial is here . I will link to a better URL if I identify one. Kennedy concludes:
There are ways of avoiding both the harassment and the precedent. Chairman Boehlert could take charge of matters, because this debate belongs with the real science committee. If hearings are necessary, they can be held. If independent and objective information is needed, the Congressional Research Service could help. Better still is the time-tested way of reaching scientifically sound conclusions: scientific experiment, analysis, debate, and review. A letter* to Chairman Barton from Science’s publisher, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, points that out in prose more tactful and elegant than I can presently manage. As for me, I’m just the editor–and I’m outraged at this episode, in which science becomes politics by other means.
Since Science as a publication is committed to “scientific experiment, analysis, debate, and review”, I thought that readers might be interested in how this works itself in a particular case where they are involved as the journal of record.
Thompson
Lonnie Thompson’s publication of record has generally been Science, although he has published review articles and analyses relying on the original Science publications quite widely. Major ice cores published by thompson in Science include: in South America: Quelccaya, Sajama and Huascaran; in the Himalayas: Dunde, Guliya, Dasuopu; in Africa, Kilimanjaro. Purugangri (2000) in the Himalayas is still unpublished.
The Dunde ice core was drilled in 1987. It was used in MBH98 and is widely used in multiproxy studies. In late 2003, when I was trying to verify Mann’s dataset against archived versions, I noticed that there was nothing archived on Dunde. (There is an incomplete Quelccaya archive at WDCP for the 1983 drilling, and very incomplete archives at WDCP for Sajama and Huascaran, but there was then nothing archived at WDCP on Dunde, Guliya or Dasuopu.).
In late 2003, I wrote the Thompsons, asking politely for information on Dunde, but got blown off. My side of the correspondence is here ; I can’t presently locate the answers, but you can tell that they were non-responsive by my side. In June 2004, in a letter to NSF about some non-compliant scientists, I listed Thompson as non-compliant in his archiving responsibilities. Again, I got blown off, with NSF saying that the information was either archived or already sent to me privately, both obviously false. I’ve discussed NSF before.
Now for a little detour. Thompson had published a review article in Climatic Change. I had had some contact with Climatic Change in connection with a submission by Mann et al. criticizing our 2003 article, in which I acted as a reviewer. In my capacity as a reviewer, I requested the source code and supporting data e.g. R2 statistics, a digital version of the 15th century step etc., which Mann had refused to provide. This provoked great consternation at Climatic Change, with Stephen Schneider, the editor, (who was an engaging and interesting correspondent), saying that this was the first such request that he had received in 28 years of editing the magazine – which says something about how people do “peer review”. Climatic Change. Climatic Change then convened their editorial board and decided that Mann would not be required to produce his source code, but would be asked to provide supporting calculations. Mann refused to do so. I pointed out to Schneider that the authors were in breach of the newly articulated policy. The article was never published.
However, by this time, Mann had managed to get in a dig at us in Jones and Mann [2004], which cited the Climatic Change submission. He did not submit an erratum, when Climatic Change rejected the submission. Here’s the connection of this detour to Thompson. Shortly after the above exchange in connection with Mann, I wrote to Climatic Change, asking for Thompson’s data pertaining to his then recently pulished Climatic Change article under their new policy. Thompson complied in the narrowest and most technical way. The Figure in Climatic Change showed the decadal dO18 averages for the various drill cores. So rather than archiving all measurements (including potentially relevant things like Cl, SO4, particulates), Thompson archived only the decadal dO18 information at his website back to 1000, exactly as shown in the Climatic Change figure, and not one gram more information than that. Later in 2004, he archived the same information at WDCP – the very first archiving of Dunde, Guliya and Dasuopu information by Thompson at WDCP. So I perhaps had a very small impact on this situation.
Prior to this, there had been grey versions of the Dunde data floating around (one version in the MBH98 dataset, another version in the Yang et al dataset) and the new version was inconsistent with the two prior versions. You really need to go back to the original sample data to see how the various versions reconcile. Since this is a very important data set in the multiproxy studies, it’s actually of quite a bit of significance. I posted up a note here on the differing Dunde versions. Science Correspondence In Feb. 2005, there was a rush of publicity surrounding the recent publication of our GRL article and I was asked for an interview by Richard Kerr of Science. Following that interview, I sought to involve Science in trying to get Thompson’s data. To date, I’ve had no luck (although, uncharacteristically for my correspondence with officials, I left a ball in my court for a few months as you will see below). Here’s my exchange:
Feb. 6, 2005 McIntyre to Kerr Dear Richard, perhaps you could help me with something. Does Science have a policy requiring contributing authors to archive (or otherwise make available) data reported in Science. I have been trying for nearly 18 months to get data published in Science by Lonnie Thomspon on the Dunde, Guliya and Dasuopu ice cores, all staples of multiproxy studies. Last year, in response to my inquiries to Climatic Change, Thompson archived 10-year average values for Dunde, Guliya and Dasuopu ice cores, corresponding to Figure 5 in their Climatic Change article( see http://bprc.mps.ohio-state.edu/Icecore/Climatic-change-2003-Fig5-table.XLS). This was slightly helpful but fell far short of proper archiving. This is especially so because this data version is inconsistent with different “grey” versions of Dunde previously circulating and used in Mann et al. [1998] and Yang et al[1002] as shown in the two figures below.
Figure 1. Dunde: Yang version versus smoothed version of Thompson [2003] version.
The next figure compares a smoothed version of the annual Dunde data used in MBH98 (11-year smoothing) with the CC 2003 decadal version, again with obvious differences.
Figure 2. Dunde – Thompson 2003 version versus smoothed MBH98 version.
There has never been any explanation of the differences, which are visually quite material. In order to effect a reconciliation, one needs to see the original data by sample (which was taken 17 years ago), together with an explanation of the differences. Since Thompson originally published in Science, perhaps Science could take some initiative in getting him to archive the original data and methods. Secondly, Cook, Woodhouse and others published an article on American aridity, calculated from tree rings, referring to 835 sites. While there is an SI to this study, the study does not contain a listing of sites (together with ITRDB codes.) I am very anxious to compare the network in Cook et al [2004] with the network in MBH98. I have sent a couple of emails to Ed Cook. On prior occasions, he has either failed to reply to emails or failed to provide requested data. Obviously, with my recent publicity, he is not very willing to provide this information, but it seems to me that the Science may have some obligations in this respect. If there is anything that you can do (including forwarding this to the person responsible), I would appreciate it. Thanks, Steve McIntyre
Feb. 2005 Kerr to McIntyre
Dear Steve, Interesting questions. I’m only a news writer here, so I would point you to the following two links in our Advice to Contributors pages. Requirements for archiving data seem to focus on the biological and genomic, or at least those areas with prominent public archives. Climatic and geophysical data archives exist, but Science doesn’t seem to notice. Also, even the biological requirements are fairly new. http://www.sciencemag.org/feature/contribinfo/prep/gen_info.shtml#datadep http://www.sciencemag.org/feature/contribinfo/prep/prep_online.shtml#categories You might direct any questions to our online editor, Stewart Wills: swills AT aas.org Good luck. Dick
Feb 15, 2005 McIntyre to Wills
Dear Stewart, I am writing at the suggestion below of Richard Kerr who interviewed me about 10 days ago. In the email below [see email above] , I requested data pertaining to paleoclimatic studies published in Science, where I have been unable to obtain data from the authors and requested the assistance of Science as the publishing journal. Thanks for your attention, Steve McIntyre
Feb 15, 2005 Wills to McIntyre
Subject: Re: Fw: Thompson et al (2003) Dear Dr. McIntyre: Dick Kerr is correct that our policy on deposition of data to public repositories has tended to focus on the life sciences. However, one of our published conditions of acceptance is that “any reasonable request for materials, methods, or data necessary to verify the conclusions of the experiments reported must be honored,” which would seem to cover the situation you discuss herein. If I am understanding your request > correctly, you are looking for the data underlying the three Science papers by Thompson et al. from 1997, 1998, and 2000, which undergird a later (2003) study by Thompson et al. in a different journal. I am copying this to Brooks Hanson, the deputy editor for physical sciences here at Science, who is really more qualified to respond to the issues raised here. Cordially yours, Stewart Wills Stewart Wills, Ph.D. Online Editor, Science American Association for the Advancement of Science 1200 New York Avenue, NW Washington, D.C. 20005 USA
Feb. 15, 2005 McIntyre to Wills
Dear Dr. Wills, Thanks for the prompt and courteous reply. With respect to the Thompson data, the problem is that the version of the Thompson data published in 2003 in Climatic Change on a decadal basis is inconsistent with other versions (also published in smoothed forms). Accordingly, there is little point in merely providing the plot-points for previous alternative smoothed version, as Thompson would almost certainly do. What is needed is a digital record of the sample data together with a Readme reconciling the different versions. This applies to the Dunde, Guliya and Dasuopu data, all of which was published in Science. Since these sites have been widely applied in multiproxy studies and were drilled many years ago, I think that comprehensive archiving of all drill data is long overdue. I have also requested that Climatic Change take initiative in this matter, but they have either not done so or have been unsuccessful. I also requested a listing of the 835 sites used in Cook et al [2004], including ITRDB codes, and would appreciate consideration of this matter as well. Thanks for your consideration, Steve McIntyre
March 17, 2005 Hanson to McIntyre
Dear Dr. McIntyre: Dr. Wills passed me your inquiry, and I’m looking into it further. Can you please provide a bit more detailed request of what you would like with respect to the data for these papers and what specifically you have already requested from the authors (Thompson and Cook), then I’ll be happy to look into it further. We can look into requesting data, but would not ask the authors for or require further interpretations of the data at this point (e.g., your note on a readme file) or for data published in other journals. Sincerely, Brooks Hanson Deputy Editor, Physical Sciences.
Apr. 20, 2005 Hanson to McIntyre
Dear Dr. McIntyre: I have not heard back from you, and am thus resending this note. Please let me know if you are still considering this as an open matter. Sincerely, Brooks Hanson
Apr. 20, 2005 McIntyre to Hanson Thanks for the reminder. I had partly drafted a reply and got sidetracked on other matters. I’ll be right back at you on this. Thanks, Steve McIntyre
July 15, 2005 McIntyre to Hanson
Sorry not to respond earlier. I failed to do so at the time and just noticed my oversight. I presume that you will have taken some initiative in the mean time. In the event that you have not done so, here are some thoughts. As far as I’m concerned, Thompson et al. should archive at the World Data Center for Paleoclimatology an authoritative, organized and complete archive for each drill-hole of all their samples, including whatever measurements were taken for each sample, as well as the log for each hole. Science has been the primary outlet for the publication of their results. However, for example, Thompson et al. had never archived any results for Dunde, Dasuopu or Guliya (all published in Science) until last year when they made a limited archive of decadally averaged results after I pressed Climatic Change, where they published decadally-averaged information on dO18. However, this is far from being a complete archive. Their archiving responsibilities under the purview of Science extend to every ice core published in Science. They have archived information from Kilimanjaro, but not for samples. Since the authors have carried out age adjustments on their ice cores based on pattern-matching, it is highly pertinent to have the entire corpus of samples in order to validate their proposed sample matching. Given the authors concern that the glaciers themselves may be receding, it is particularly vital that they archive this data in a permanent archive such as WDCP. Regards, Steve McIntyre
Aug. 26, 2005
Dear Dr. Hanson, Any progress with this inquiry originally made on Feb. 6? Regards, Steve McIntyre
I realize that there was a ball in my court for a period of time. Usually, I’m pretty good about not letting this happen, but I did here. Having acknowledged that, the underlying issue is that Science does not seem to either have policies that require authors to archive data or administration practices that ensure that their policies are applied. Since NSF then relies ( a reliance which seems to me to be an abdication of their own separate responsibilities) on journals like Science, with either inadequate policy or inadequate administration, there’s a knock-on effect.
Climate Audit 
55 Comments
Steve, I’m prompted by your account of your correspondence with Stephen Schneider, editor of “Climatic Change” for the past 30 years, to paste in the following paragraph which was posted on Schneider’s website in early-March 2004 and remains there at the link stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Climate/Climate_Science/ClimateScienceProjections.html :
“Note: Very recently, two retired statisticians criticized the SRES scenarios as being extremely exaggerated (see Castles and Henderson, and an overview of their criticism of the SRES containing various letters and articles, and “Hot Potato” and “Hot Potato Revisited” “¢’¬? in the latter the Economist continues its error-filed critiques of climate issues, saying that the Lavoisier group that supported Castles is “an Autralian governmental body, whereas it is in fact a conservative dot com think thank notorious for contrarian rhetoric. It seems that from Lomborg to Casteles, the Economist just can’t get it straight). Several economists and technologists have responded, showing that the purported criticisms of method cause only minor alterations to the original SRES results “¢’¬? see “IPCC SRES Revisited: A Response” by Nakicenovic et al., and a Manne-Richels working paper; also see “PPP-correction of the IPCC emission scenarios – does it matter?”.
So far as I know, The Economist has never mentioned the Lavoisier Group, and it has certainly never, either in one of its supposedly “error-filed (sic) critiques” or otherwise, said that it is “an Autralian (sic) governmental body” or that it “supported Castles” (or “Casteles”). The Lavoisier Group is neither an Australian governmental body nor “a conservative dot com think thank (sic)”, and neither this Group nor any other organisation has supported my work. In response to a claim that he and I were associated with the Lavoisier Group in Australia, Professor David Henderson wrote to USA Today in April 2003 as follows: “Neither Castles nor I are members of the [Lavoisier] Group, no member of it is or has been involved on our work, and what we have written does not purport to be on the Group’s behalf or to represent its views. We are independent persons, holding no official position. And we speak and write for ourselves alone.”
Well, I followed the link to Schneider’s site and noticed that “Hot Potato Revisited” was a link to the Economist article. Clicking on the link I found that the Economist stated:
The Lavoisier Group is an astroturf organisation as Schneider suggests.
The link in the Schneider website is to a Free Republic website, not to the Economist. The Freeper version contains the sentence quoted by Lambert. However, if you go to the Economist website http://www.economist.com/finance/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2189568, the sentence quoted above does not occur in the text of the article said to have been presented in the print version and I presume that the sentence quoted by Lambert did not occur in the print edition. The sentence did occur in a frame on the Economist website providing a link to the C&H article.
It doesn’t look to me like anyone has correctly described this: Lambert did not notice a “link to the Economist article“, but to a Freeper variation. The Economist did not mention Lavoisier “in a critique” (error-filled or otherwise), but did mention them “otherwise”.
OK, the Economist was wrong in saying that the Lavoisier Group was an Australian govnernmental body, and Schneider was wrong in saying that the Lavoisier Group backed Castles. At least the Economist, the Lavoisier Group and “Energy and Environment” (the editor of which Schneider also denigrates on his site) published the presentations that David Henderson and I made, at the IPCC’s invitation, to the Expert Meeting on emissions scenarios that it convened in Amsterdam in January 2003. Scores of experts from around the world participated in the “by invitation only” meeting, but after nearly three years the IPCC has not published any report of the proceedings. To the best of my knowledge, none of the presentations made at the 3-day meeting has been made publicly available, except those by David Henderson and me. In April 2003, I asked the Chairman of the IPCC, Dr. Pachauri, to release the agreed draft record of the technical discussions at the side of the meeting which Henderson and I had had, again at the IPCC’s request, with a number of the IPCC’s modelling experts. He declined my request.
I posted #4 above before seeing #3. I accept Steve McIntyre’s clarification.
I copied the sentence I quoted from the sidebar to the article on the Economist’s web site. Schneider is correct to say that the Economist called the Lavoisier group an Australian Government body and accurately described the nature of the Lavoisier group. McIntyre is wrong to claim that I confused the Economist with Free Republic. Lavoisier has supported Castles in the sense of publishing his work and it also claimed that Castles was a member.
One further point about the extract from the Schneider website (#1 above) and “Climatic Change”. The hypertext link at the end of the extract is to a pre-publication version of Bjart Holtsmark and Knut Alfsen (H&A), “PPP-correction of the IPCC emissions scenarios – does it matter?”, which was published in “Climatic Change” (CC), vol. 68, no. 1, in January 2005, twenty months after the receipt of the original version by CC in May 2003. In the meantime, versions of the paper had been published in January 2004 by the Norwegian Government organisation CICERO (Center for International Climate and Environmental Research) as Cicero Policy Note 2004:01; and in February 2004 by Statistics Norway as No. 366 in its Research Department Discussion Paper series. (The latter version of the paper was cited in a UK departmental memorandum of March 2005 which was submitted to the recent inquiry into “The Economics of Climate Change” by the House of Lords). In both of the versions published in Norway the authors make EIGHT references to “mistakes” or “errors” in the IPCC “Special Report on Emissions Scenarios”. In the version of the paper published in “Climatic Change”, all of these references have disappeared.
Although the sub-title “Does it Matter?” could be taken to imply that PPP-correction does not matter (and, probably for that reason, was not used in the Cicero version), Holtsmark and Alfsen clearly believe that it DOES matter because, by the time that their earlier paper had been published in “Climatic Change”, they had had a more recently completed paper published in “Climate Policy” (vol. 4, no. 2, 2004) which carried the title “The use of PPP and MER in the construction of emissions scenarios is more than a question of metrics.” In the latter paper, the authors were strongly critical of the assertion by the IPCC, in its press release criticising Castles and Henderson, that “the economy does not change by using a different metrics (PPP or MEX), in the same way that the temperature does not change if you switch from degrees Celsius to Fahrenheit.”
On Tim Lambert’s argument that “Lavoisier has supported Castles in the sense of publishing his work”, the journal “Energy & Environment” has supported the authors of the IPCC “Special Report on Emissions Scenarios” by publishing their “rebuttals” of the Castles and Henderson critique. The first of these responses was seized on by the Union of Concerned Scientists and used in political debate in the US in June-July 2003. In early-2004, an Annex to a submission to a Parliamentary Committee by Australia’s leading governmental scientific organisation, the CSIRO, cited “Nakicenovic and others” in support of the statement that “The claims [by Castles and Henderson] have been revieewed and refuted by international experts”. So far as I know (Tim Lambert may be able to correct me) E&E is the only journal that has published papers by SRES authors responding to the C&H criticism. However, according to Stephen Schneider:
“[I]t is well known that the editor of Energy & Environment, Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen, has sometimes allowed her political agenda, rather than the high standards of scientific peer review, to dominate the content of the journal… [S]he is known to be against ratification of the Kyoto Protocol and supportive of the work of Bjorn Lomborg, another contrarian … Though Energy & Environment is geared towards social scientists, she told the Chronicle of Higher Education that she published scientific papers that refute the notion that global warming is a problem because there are very few outlets for such work. This practice fits nicely with her political stance … and calls the objectivity of Energy & Environment into question.”
It would be tedious to pursue every nuance of the paragraph on Schneider’s website that I quoted in #1 above, but questions could be raised about Schneider’s opening phrase “Two retired statisticians”. I did indeed retire from the position of chief executive of Australia’s national statistical office in 1994, but I had previously been for seven years the Secretary (chief executive) of the Australian Department of Finance and I was subsequently the Executive Officer of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. David Henderson is a former head of the Department of Economics and Statistics at OECD, a former Director of the Economics Department of the World Bank and a former Professor of Economics at University College London.
The Chairman of the IPCC, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, didn’t call the objectivity of E&E into question when he advised the IPCC Bureau, at its meeting in Paris on 18 February 2003, “that Dr Nakicenovic would shortly publish, IN A LEADING INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL, an article that responds to the substance of the [Castles and Henderson] criticism” (Report, para. 3.2.3, EMPHASIS added). At the time of the meeting, Dr Pachauri had already accepted Dr Boehmer-Christiansen’s offer to publish a response on behalf of the IPCC, and had made it a condition that the response appear in the same issue of the journal as the Castles and Henderson article. (The SRES Team then complained in a footnote about “the extremely short journal time table for preparation of their article”!).
Lambert first said the following:
The link at Schneider’s website was http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1018222/posts which links to a Freeper discussion group, which did not contain the print version of the Economist article, but a version which incorporated an incorrect frame as a sidebar in the Economist website described in #3 above.
Lambert now says the following:
This is, of course, possible, but, if so, it was not done by "clicking on the link" at SChneider’s website. The process which I carried out in going from Schneider’s website to the actual Economist link was: 1) follow the link from Schneider’s article to the Freeper website; 2) observe that it was a freeper website; assume nothing and re-google the title of the article to locate a more definitive rendition; 3) observe that the sentence in question was in a sidebar in the Economist rendition and not in the print version.
It is possible that Lambert did copy the sidebar from the Economist website as he claims in his second account of the matter. But then it is hard to explain why his first account simply said that he "clicked" on the Schneider link.
Nigel, I clicked on the link and found the false claim about Lavoisier in the Free Republic copy of the Economist article. I checked to see if the false claim was also on the Economist’s web site. Which it was. I then copied the sentence I quoted from the Economist’s web site. I hope that clears things up for you.
Re: #10 “Nigel”
Is that an obscure reference to the XTC song, or just a typo?
Jean Baptiste Joseph, too bad that isn’t what you said the first time.
Come on Mr Lambert, we now expect “Schneider Screws it up Again” posts on your blog. Why are you so keen to ensure the suppression of important information with regard to a scientific subject ?
Armand, the “Nigel” reference is explained here.
Ed, Schneider was correct when he stated that the Economist had claimed that Lavoisier was a government body. The Economist was wrong when it claimed that Lavoisier was a government body. Castles was wrong when he asserted that the Economist has never mentioned Lavoisier. McIntyre was wrong when he claimed that I confused Free Republic with the Economist. McIntyre has compounded his error by refusing to admit to it. This is similar to the way John A has conducted himself about his bogus calims about entropy. I suppose I could have a post entitled "Climate Audit screws up yet again" — would that satisfy you?
Tim, no. Schneider’s comments about Castles and Henderson are grossly misleading, and unless he is incompetent he should be aware of that. The Economist may well be wrong, and that is relevant because …?
You are also being misleading and wrong. You said Quote “Well, I followed the link to Schneider’s site and noticed that “Hot Potato Revisited” was a link to the Economist article. Clicking on the link I found that the Economist stated…” I followed that link and it lead to the Free Republic. You are claiming (and in fact state so directly) that Schneider’s link to “Hot Potato Revisited” was a link to the Economist, that is a false, and claiming otherwise makes it a deliberate falsehood. Unless of course you want to claim that the Free Republic really is the Economist ?
How about “Lambert Screws Up Yet Again (and can’t get around to admitting it)”
Jean Baptiste Joseph, I didn’t say that you "confused" Freeper’s with The Economist.
This idea of "confusion" is something that’s very much on your mind. It’s a word that you use about others. It’s not a word that I used about you; I would have used a different adjective, were I so inclined, mon petit. Let’s review this again. You said:
As I said before, mon petit,
If you got to the Economist website, you did not do so by “clicking the link” at Schneider’s website, as you claimed, Jean Baptiste Joseph, but by a process like the one which I outlined for you. If you proceeded to the Economist website through a different process than clicking the link at Schneider’s website, it would have been easy to say so in the first place – so why didn’t you, mon petit. But perhaps you were busy calculating square roots. Go, Golden Bears.
How about a lack of substance report on blog comments? Exhibit 1 would be this exchange. Schneider attempts to tar Castles and Henderson by association with the Lavoisier group. The evidence is that you can find an article by the two on the Lavoisier group website (give me a break!). These blog comments now go back and forth in excruciating detail about how you can find the words Lavoisier, Castles and Henderson on the same webpage. Would anything change one way or another on the outcome of the current blog fight?
At least I can’t call ‘ob Goodwin’ yet.
Sockie 54, the point is that Lambert is well aware that the substance of Castles and Hendersons criticism of the SRES scenarios is both well founded and accurate, so he won’t even attempt to debate the substance. Instead he will focus on the slurs by association and alleged errors in minute points in posts. This is exactly the same way that the AGW proponents attempt to sweep criticism of MBH98 & 99 under the rug, ignore the gaping flaws in the data and attempt to smear the authors of any criticism in any way possible.
Allow me to outline some history for Tim Lambert’s benefit. In March 2002 the President of the Lavoisier Group, the Hon. Peter Walsh, AO sought my agreement to his nominating me to participate in a workshop that had been convened by the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (ATSE) to review and update a 1995 publication on climate change which had been produced jointly by the Australian Academies. (I have been a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia since 1989). I had known Mr Walsh for more than 20 years, and had been Secretary (public service Head) of the Australian Department of Finance for some years when he was Minister for Finance. I mention that Peter Walsh was one of the leaders in the “Centre Left” faction of the Parliamentary Labor Party only to underline the absurdity of the proposition that I might have declined Mr Walsh’s request on the grounds that the organisation of which he was President was a “conservative dot.com think tank”. Mr Walsh’s letter to ATSE nominated me as an expert in statistics and especially in their misuse by international organisations.
I attended the workshop, criticised some aspects of the economic and statistical work of the IPCC and followed up with a letter to ATSE, copied to all participants in the workshop, elaborating on these criticisms. The letter was drawn to the attention of the newly elected President of the IPCC, Dr Pachauri, by the Australian Member of the IPCC and its Bureau, Dr John Zillman, during Dr Pachauri’s official visit to Australia some weeks later. Dr. Zillman was co-chair of the ATSE Workshop and was Vice President of ATSE (he’s now the President). At a briefing for Dr Pachauri hosted by the Australian Academy of Science (AAS) in Canberra, I outlined my criticisms to the Chairman and suggested that experts from national statistical offices be involved in the next IPCC Assessment Round. This suggestion was well received by all present. Dr Pachauri asked me to put my criticisms and my suggestion for the involvement of statisticians in writing so that he could have them considered. Thus began the process which the recent House of Lords Committee Report says has “helped to generate a valuable literature that calls into question a whole series of issues relating to the IPCC SRES, not just the issue of MER versus PPP.” The process began with the initiative taken by the Lavoisier Group.
Some months later, I heard that Peter Walsh had said that I was a member of the Lavoisier Group at the Group’s annual meeting. Given the history as outlined in the previous paragraph, this was an entirely understandable mistake and I didn’t see the matter as of any great importance. I decided, however, to clarify the issue in my presentation to the IPCC Expert Meeting on Emissions Scenarios in Amsterdam in January 2003, as follows:
“Although I have spent most of my life working for Australian Governments, I need to make clear that I am not now affiliated with any government agency, nor indeed with any other organisation involved in climate change matters.”
After my presentation, Stephen Schneider excoriated me from the floor of the meeting for having raised criticisms of the IPCC in the form of email messsages rather than submissions to learned journals. Apparently Schneider thinks that I should not have acceded to Dr Pachauri’s request to put my criticms of the SRES in writing to him.
Following the clear declaration in my presentation, I was dismayed to read the following footnote in the dismissive response made by 15 SRES lead authors to the Castles and Henderson critique:
“In his introductory remarks at the Amsterdam meeting … Mr Castles asserted that he is ‘not affiliated with any … organisation involved in climate change matters” … whereas he is a member of the Lavoisier Group … that deals almost exclusively with climate change matters. This begs the question whether other statements and criticisms advanced in his contribution to this issue of Energy and Environment are equally misleading. We believe that this is the case with many of the assertions that the SRES scenarios are unsound.”
In our second article in Energy and Environment, David Henderson and I included an Annex on “Protocol and Procedures” which included the following:
“The Team state … that Castles ‘is a member of the Lavoisier group’ in Australia, and that in this context he made a ‘misleading’ statement at the IPCC meeting in Amsterdam. Neither of these assertions is correct.”
I marvel at my moderation. I think that I was owed an apology. Instead, five months later, Dr Pachauri issued a statement to the world’s media at the COP9 meeting in Milan in which he said (I’m quoting from memory, but it’s on the public record) “Mr Castles is a member of the Lavoisier Group in Australia, which opposes everything that would protect the environment” (quite a feat for an organisation which, according to the SRES Team, “deals almost exclusively with climate change issues”).
The IPCC subsequently selected the writing teams for its next Assessment Report. So far as I know, there are no national accounting statisticians. Of the members of the SRES Team that had stated that I was a member of the Lavoisier Group and that I had made a misleading statement in asserting that I wasn’t, Nebojsa Nakicenovic and Priyabarshi Shukla have been appointed Coordinating Lead Authors, and Arnulf Grubler, Keywan Riahi, Detlef van Vuuren and Rob Swart have been appointed Lead Authors in the Writing Teams for the next Assessment Report. Most of them are on the writing team of the chapter that is to assess criticisms of the SRES.
Steve, I did not claim that I got to the Economist’s website by clicking the link at Schneider’s website. This is another one of your fabrications. Here is what I actually wrote:
Clicking on the link takes you to a copy of the Economist’s article at Free Republic and I never said anything contrary to this. In my comment I did not mention that I had checked that the same claim appeared on the Economist’s website because it wasn’t important.
Though by now I suppose I should be aware of your desperate need to find some sort of a mistake in anything I write.
By the way, have you used any other sock puppets beside "Nigel Persuad"? Have you sent letters to climate scientists, newspapers etc under a fake name?
Ian, I am a bit puzzled why you are not bothered when the Lavoisier group, which should know whether or not you are a member, says you are a member, but feel entitled to an apology when others repeat the Lavoisier group’s claim. On the Lavoisier group’s website they still say that you are a member. Have you considered asking them to correct it?
We amateur psychologists call this “projection”.
Hi. My bitter compatriot Stephen Schneider screwed the pooch. Again.
I’m going to pretend it didn’t happen. And scurry back to my blog to make derrogatory hmtl tables about nothing. Don’t ask me for the html code. Like ice core data, its somehow proprietary.
Tim, I was surprised at the readiness of 15 members of the SRES Team to accept information that they had found on the Lavoisier website at face value: the IPCC Press release accusing Castles and Henderson of spreading disinformation says that the IPCC mobilises the best experts from all over the world, that the SRES like all IPCC reports was based on an assessment of the peer review literature, that rigorous preparations had been undertaken for structuring the Fourth Assessment Report, etc. So why are these experts relying on statements made on the websites of organisations that the IPCC maligns?
However, I’m more concerned about the serious analytical errors in the SRES and in other IPCC reports that David Henderson and I have identified than the trivial error by the 15 SRES authors in saying that I was a member of Lavoisier when I wasn’t. I feel entitled to an apology because the assertion by the SRES Team effectively amounts to saying that I’m either a liar (for saying I wasn’t affiliated with an organisation involved in climate change matters when I knew that I was) or a fool (for not knowing whether or not I was a member of the organisation concerned). I’ve got more to do with my time than to ask Lavoisier to correct a non-consequential error on its website. I’d rather see the removal of some of the “material errors” that David Henderson and I have exposed in IPCC reports. I pointed out some months ago to Robert Watson, Chief Scientist at the World Bank, that the Bank’s Media Experts website still says that he’s Chair of the IPCC, a position he had ceased to hold before I met Dr Pachauri in Canberra in July 2002. Dr Watson has ignored me, so perhaps you could ask him to have his personal entry corrected, if you’re so anxious to have the record straight. Or perhaps you could suggest to the IPCC that they remove their press statement of 8 December 2003 from their website – the one that says that David Henderson and I are ‘so called “two independent commentators”.
There is a detailed discussion of Ian Castles’ non-membership of Lavoisier here
http://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2003/09/08/ian-castles-correction/
(not that I can see that his membership or non-membership has the faintest relevance to the validity of Catles’ statements.) I presume that Jean Baptiste Joseph (T.)Lambert, inventor of the orthonormal hockey-stick system of series representation, was familiar with the correspondence at quiggin’s website.
IPCC seems to skew all aspects of connected with climate science. People with accepted attitudes select the results and methods produced by the scientific community.
It is interesting to read Ian Castle’s posts on how methods and results are distorted in economics in the IPCC report.
A corresponding case on health aspects is reported by professor Paul Reiter, a specialist on vector borne diseases who resigned from the IPCC.
I strongly recommend everybody to read Reiter’s report. Especially the paragraphs about lead authors and IPCC’s attitudes. The report is found on:
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200506/ldselect/ldeconaf/12/12we21.htm
I now expect to find Mr Schneider (with Tim Lambert cheering from the sidelines) describing Paul Reiter as “a retired epidemiologist” with no real experience or knowledge with mosquito borne diseases, as the scientific consensus is quite clearl that malaria and other such diseases are already increasing primarily because of global warming. He (and the IPCC) will also assert on the basis of a consensus of expert opinion that malarial mosquitos cannot survive winter temperatures lower than 16 degrees C, and any suggestions that maqlaria was once rife in such places as St Petersburg and Siberia as mere anecdotal evidence unworthy of genuine scientific debate. All evidence that the IPCC has on these matters is conclusive but private, and cannot be revealed to mere mortals who only seek to challenge it out of a spirit of contrariness.
In response to post #1, I would say that there is an air of “nastiness” in Stephen Schneider’s remark about two “retired” statisticians – it is a very unpleasant and unnecessary way to refer to Mr Castles and his colleague.
Since I think that there is a sporting chance that the occurrence of malaria in places such as St Petersburg and Siberia might be regarded as “anecdotal evidence”, I found from Google that the last case of malaria in the United Kingdom (apart from cases arising from mosquitoes ariving on aircraft) occurred in the 1920’s. It was prevalent for a long time in Norfolk, owing to the presence of the Norfolk Broads.
Roger Bell
I think that the plots which Steve has shown of the Dunde, Gulya and Dasuopu data, cmparing the Thompson and Yang versions and the Thompson and MBH98 versions, show the crying need for archiving this ice core data. The current editor of Science should be replaced if he thinks it is more important for him to criticise Representative Barton than to establish a data archiving program at Science.
Roger, finally someone actually commented on the Science editorial!!! BTW I’ve now plotted up the Dunde verion embedded in Crowley and Lowery [2000] which is smoothed and transformed. However, it’s a different version again. I’ve been looking at some of the publications with Dunde data in them and there seem to be still further versions. The correlations between different Dunde versions is remarkably low. In some cases, e.g. the 14th century, a very cold period in one version is a warm period in another version. Companies sometimes re-state results – it’s very seldom a good sign; but, when they do, they are obligated to provide notice of the re-statement. Because Thompson didn’t archive Dunde, he had much more freedom to re-state results without any notice.
Reading Kennedy’s comment from above: “As for me, I’m just the editor–and I’m outraged at this episode, in which science becomes politics by other means,” one might erroneously assume that he is speaking about something which the IPCC has done.
You should keep pursuing this (data request) until you get satisfaction. Perhaps a better tack to take than “you guys are hypocrits because you say data should be shared and then don’t enforce it wrt me” is “understand your policy…and I am not getting satisfaction wrt your own authors…can you help?”
TCO is right on point. The tone of this site also takes a scorched-earth tack. You are not getting cooperation because your reputation preceeds you. (OK to delete this, Steve, but the bolded point I had for Ed Snack on the MBH98 about assuming validity was instructional, and leads one to think one’s beliefs are reinforced when actions like this are taken)
D
Dano, the scorched earth is just an excuse. I was embargoed by the Hockey Team long before climateaudit.
Second, I don’t expect "cooperation" with me because I’m me; I expect people to do what they are supposed to do. I ‘ve always asked people to archive their data with WDCP rather than to send it to me. I don’t always get a negative reaction. Some people didn’t know how, thanked me for drawing it to their attention and archived their data.
Third, the problem is not just me. Apparently, Hughes won’t let Esper at some of his data.
I got blown off by Thompson long ago before anyone had heard of me.
I always ask nicely. I have never sent an impolite inquiry to anyone. In fact, I always ask a number of times politely. I’ve tried nicely with anyone that’s a topic of a post here.
Also, the problem is not unique to paleoclimate. Look at my posts about McCullough and Vinod. They found lots of replication problems in econometrics – this resulted in very firm rules for econometrics journals. The polices that I’m advocating for paleoclimate archiving of data and methods are simply those that are contemporary practice for econometrics journals.
There is NO way that paleoclimate guys will be able to avoid having to ultimately meet McCullough type standards. The current publicity is simply moving the process along a little faster. They’d be a lot smarter to recognize the inevitable .
Note that I do not think that scorched earth is an excuse for not sharing data. and that it’s quite possible that many would refuse to share them because of the major thing…the data will be reviewed critically. all that said, steve has a better chance of getting the scientists to do what they should be doing regardless (share the data as required by their journals and by common science ethics) if he takes a temperate tone. And while my comments stand wrt Steve modifying his tone, I don’t think that he is “scorched earth”. I can show you scorched earth…:)
I think that sounded a bit too much as if I’m distinguishing myself from DanO. Basically I agree with him on the tone thing. I think that you’ve got a lot of math and facts on your side on the specific issue of how flawed the MBH work was. If you give people a chance, they will join you there (many already are). human nature being what it is, they need to be allowed to go there gracefully. And of course, we need to keep the general issues of GW seperate from MBH. that should be obvious, but there is a human tendancy to be a bit tendentious and mix the two (from either side).b
TCO, do you think that our articles had a scorched-earth tone to them? I tried to stay away from editorializing in them. They inevitably have a critical tone.
I think it worth pointing out that RealClimate was and is, first and foremost, a weblog to defend the scientific career of Michael Mann from the conclusions made by McIntyre and McKitrick.
By then, M&M had already collected a choice selection of lumps from people who clearly don’t know any better. Mann had long before decided to stop any contact with Steve and childishly block Steve’s home IP address from his ftp site.
I encouraged Steve to get a proper weblog, because I knew that, before and after the publication of M&M 2005 (GRL), that quick rebuttal from Steve to news events was at least as important as getting published.
I don’t think this weblog has a scorched earth policy. Steve could be wrong. But as time has gone on, that possibility becomes increasingly remote. Unlike Mann’s construction, interested people can replicate Steve’s entire argument using identical source materials, and people have.
The most startling aspect to this whole affair has been the inability of some professional scientists to seriously engage in a dialog about the robustness of their conclusions , preferring the route of political spin and propaganda, until to their horror, real politicians got involved.
John A, given the way you trumpeted your bogus claim that I had blocked you from my site, I’m rather sceptical of your claim that Mann blocked McIntyre from his FTP site.
Tim, I’m not.
Tim Lambert:
” given the way you trumpeted your bogus claim…”
Is this the same tim lambert that trumpets bogus claims, when he can’t even get an IP address right ?
The one who bans people from his blog, because he doesn’t like losing the argument ?
yours
per
You are perfectly free to believe your own delusions, Tim. Your only problem is that there’s a lot of us who don’t share them.
The block could be automated, as Steve obvously is causing major traffic on that server from his IP address, so it could be the IT staff of the universty who is to blame…
An optimist. I admire that.
I always thought of scorched earth as a desperate defensive strategy – like the Russians falling back on Moscow before Napoleon’s advance, burning their own fields to deny his advancing armies any foraging opportunities.
As such, I think the term would be more applicable to the Hockey team hiding their data, rather than to Steve’s efforts here.
Tim, please don’t hijack this thread with a discussion of exclusion policies at your blog.
This topic was fully aired on Is It Karma? I received complaints from some reputable people (lurkers) about that thread, so I closed the topic down. You made your points and were not denied access to this blog; but the topic had become a flame war. Again, please don’t hijack this or other threads with discussion of exclusion policies at your blog or other unrelated hobbyhorses; it becomes hard to differentiate from being spammed by poker sites.
The same goes for everyone. Please – no more criticisms of Lambert on this thread.
If there is a groundswell that anyone feels absolutely obliged to further discuss Lambert’s exclusion policies, please post a request on an open thread related to Lambert (Lambert on Cosine Latitudes) and I will re-open Is It Karma as a sort of industrialized zone for behaviour between consenting adults in semi-private cubicles. In the meantime, I would prefer that there be no flashing in public threads, where there are some innocent civilians.
Tim, I don’t see why you would make assertions about something about which you have no knowledge. I reported being blocked from Mann’s FTP site a long time ago.
Hans, I do not believe that it was the IT staff of the university for the following reason. Sometime after the FTP directory containing MBH98 proxy data suddenly materialized in November 2003 after publication our first EE article, I asked the university IT department when this directory first appeared in the publicly indexed part of Mann’s FTP site. (There are private areas of the FTP site, which are not publicly indexed and inaccessible without knowing the exact file name in advance. If a directory is moved from unindexed to public indexed, the data does not change. I noticed this with the transfers of the MANNETAL98 directory which was in an unindexed part of the sdr directory and later moced to the pub directory without a change.) In repsonse to my inquiry, the IT staff of the university said that they had nothing to do with Mann’s FTP site and could not comment. It seemed odd as the site contained the reference *.virginia.edu, but that’s what they said.
Some of my neighbours are interested in my debates. I asked one of them to check and he was blocked as well. I’m on a cable network, which (I think) works as a high-speed party line and it’s possible that we don’t have unique IP addresses from the point of view of the outside server. I don’t know this, but it’s hard to explain his exclusion otherwise. I do not wish anyone to discuss Mann’s blocking on this thread either. I’ve got an old thread on this topic More Mann Deletions and I request that people use this thread if they wish to pursue a further discussion of Mann’s blocking policy.
Steve, scorched earth is too strong. You are a nice guy in general and are doing a good job of hanging in there. Still. At times, you marginalize yourself by lapsing into the snideness or he-said, she-said or speculating too much on motives and the like. You would be better served by pushing the twin points of your statistical arguments and the Mann et al refusal to share data. Then outsiders will look at the two sides and wonder why the heck Mann doesn’t share data. However, if you’re percieved as shriller, some will not bother reading further or will think of you as a crank. Need to give people time to realize that Mann et al are scared to show how they skew the data.
In my opinion, Steve McIntyre sometimes gave some questions related to original data or papers. In most cases, However, he can not locate the innermost reasons or nature of published data. It seems that McIntyre’s points is not correct and biased with personal feelings. If you want to assess the nature of one matter, you have to participate in the whole process and then you can give an objective appraisal for one thing. Otherwise in some way you saw only one tree at most cases rather than forest.
re #49
IOW, he’s not one of the cogniscenti and thus can be ignored. I don’t buy it. There’s nothing keeping anyone with the inside scoop from posting here to explain what Steve is deficient in. Such guidance, however, has clearly not been given. Nor, for that matter, has such reproof been offered in the supposed ‘refutations’ of M&M in the peer-reviewed press. If you’re an expert in tree-ring climatology, feel free to let him know what he’s missing.
Term limited himself to observing one dead tree at the edge of the forest.
============================================================================
Kim always like to run into a dead tree.
Dead Tree Press missed the boat on this one. Ever read S. Clemons on James Fenimore Cooper and canoes, streams, and falling trees? Almost as funny as the obvious sight of a naked Mann hiding behind a dead tree.
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To think that I saw it on Mulberry Street,
Betty with not a boop on.
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On Monday, Feb 13th, a lengthy article was published in the New York Times. “Reporters Find Science Journals Harder to Trust, but Not Easy to Verify” by Julie Bosman. Donald Kennedy got a spotlight for his work and Science was shown on the top of a stack of journals in a photo. A central quote was “Now news organizations say they are starting to look at science journals a bit more skeptically.”
Good work Julie Bosman! I hope she stays interested.
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