Weaver: “I do not lobby for more climate funding”

Mar 18, 2015 – 10:20 AM

J Burke’s decision contains a chronology of prior interactions between Weaver and National Post, much of which, when closely examined, is highly misleading. In today’s post, I’m going to discuss one small but interesting issue: Weaver’s claim that he “did not lobby for climate funding”. J Burke referred to this when she said that Weaver “sought to correct a number of factual errors” in an earlier article by Corcoran. J Burke did not mention that National Post had published a rebuttal contesting Weaver’s claim. In today’s post, I’ll review the sides of the dispute. I plan to get to more central issues in the case, but wish to first clear up some smaller issues (in part to avoid accusations of ignoring them.)
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Another Upside-Down PAGES2K Non-Corrigendum

Mar 17, 2015 – 8:37 PM

Kaufman and McKay recently and quietly issued an Arctic2K correction file at NOAA xls here (now here)  that concedes yet another upside-down series previously pointed out to them at Climate Audit. Once again, they used information from Climate Audit without acknowledgement or credit (see NSF definition of plagiarism here). Continue reading →

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Weaver’s Next Generation Climate Model: Breaking News!!

Mar 17, 2015 – 10:22 AM

According to the University of Victoria, Andrew Weaver says:

the next generation of his climate model will address the influence of climate on human evolution—much like it’s now being used to examine the influence of humans on climate evolution”.  

In breaking news, Climate Audit has obtained exclusive information on output from the first runs of Weaver’s “next generation” climate model. These are the first known climate model predictions of the future of human evolution. The results are worrying: take a look.

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Weaver Suggests Buddy Review for Mann et al 2005

Mar 15, 2015 – 8:59 AM

Coauthors of Rutherford et al (J Climate 2005) (pdf) were Rutherford, Mann, Bradley, Hughes, Jones, Osborn and Briffa.  Its editor was Andrew Weaver.  It was formally submitted on Sept 16, 2003,  received two reviews in January 2004, revised and resubmitted on June 29, 2004, accepted without revision on September 27, 2004 and published in July 2005.

On January 1, 2005, Weaver became chief editor of Journal of Climate.  On January 4, 2005, Mann, Rutherford, Wahl and Ammann submitted Testing the fidelity of methods used in proxy-based reconstructions of past climate (pdf),

On January 7, 2005, Weaver asked Keith Briffa, one of the coauthors of Rutherford, Mann et al 2005, to act as a peer reviewer for Mann, Rutherford et al 2005.   Because of his IPCC commitments, Briffa declined (suggesting Wigley), but neither Weaver nor Briffa seemed the least bit concerned about any potential impropriety arising from Briffa acting as a buddy peer reviewer.

Postscript:  The following AMS policies adopted in 2010 would appear to discourage such buddy review (and also enemy review), but also seem to leave discretion with the editor to override the policy:

A reviewer should be sensitive even to the appearance of a conflict of interest when the manuscript under review is closely related to the reviewer’s work in progress or published. If in doubt, the reviewer should indicate the potential conflict promptly to the editor.

A reviewer should not evaluate a manuscript authored or co-authored by a person with whom the reviewer has a close personal or professional connection if the relationship would bias judgment of the manuscript.

 

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Brandon’s ebook on the Hockey Stick

Mar 15, 2015 – 8:03 AM

shollenberger ebook

 

A couple of years ago, Brandon Shollenberger  wrote up a lengthy review of Mann’s Hockey Stick Wars at Lucia’s.  Brandon has fleshed out his review in an ebook here. Brandon summarized the book as follows:

“there is a great deal of misinformation, and even disinformation, polluting the airwaves. One prime example was world renowned climate scientist Michael Mann, and his book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches From the Front Lines.  Mann’s book contains many errors, misrepresentations and outright false statements. Responses to his book have been limited primarily to the blogosphere where the average person will never look. Even worse, those responses have been disjointed, broken up across many web pages and scattered throughout numerous discussions.   This book is the first part of an attempt to bring together those responses to create informative counternarrative which allows people to quickly get up to speed on the infamous hockey stick controversy while correcting much of the misinformation present in Mann’s book. It covers about half of the hockey stick controversy in slightly over ten thousand words.”

Other books on the incidents are, of course, Andrew Montford’s Hockey Stick Illusion and Hiding the Decline; Steve Mosher and Tom Fuller’s The CRUTape Letters; Fred Pearce’s The Climate Files; and Rupert Darwall’s The Age of Global Warming, as well as fictional accounts of events by Mann and Bradley.

Brandon’s objective was to focus on deceptions in Mann’s Hockey Stick Wars and does not attempt to cover the same ground as the other works.  Brandon’s work is also influenced by the interest in 2014 in connection with Mann v Steyn in itemizing the most direct misrepresentations in the Mann corpus, some of which, as Brandon observes, Mann has unrepentantly repeated for over a decade.  For example, Brandon observes about Mann’s bizarre Excel spreadsheet fabrication: “Despite this correspondence being readily available for a decade now, Mann has continued to repeat his fabricated story about a spreadsheet error. This demonstrates an apparent pattern of deception consistently found in Mann’s book and other writings.”

Take a look.

I regret not giving more coverage to the earlier works.  Because their coverage of me was so favorable, I felt somewhat abashed in endorsing them, but, in retrospect, I should have done so.

 

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Josh: Andrew, Put on your big boy pants

Mar 14, 2015 – 1:14 PM

 

 
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Weaver on Tortious Sarcasm towards an Academic

Mar 13, 2015 – 1:29 PM

In 2005, serial litigant Andrew Weaver, now a politician but then an academic at University of Victoria active in public controversy, threatened Climate Audit about alleged defamatory remarks.  I asked Weaver to explain why the seemingly innocuous remarks (by John A, not myself) were supposedly defamatory. As I understand Weaver’s theory of libel, sarcasm towards an academic is supposed to be tortious. It may seem -preposterous spelled out like this, but so does the decision in Weaver v National Post.

I will present the correspondence pertaining to Weaver’s libel allegations in full, so that readers can judge for themselves whether I have accurately characterized the Weaver’s doctrine of tortious sarcasm towards an academic. [Note: I was concurrently discussing issues related to Rutherford et al, 2005, of which Weaver was editor. To focus on the flow of discussion on Weaver’s libel allegations, I haven’t shown these sections of the emails, but, to reassure Brandon, will place a pdf online of the emails including Rutherford discussion – see here]

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How Mann tricked Weaver

Mar 11, 2015 – 12:51 PM

In today’s post, I’ll show that even Andrew Weaver was tricked by Mann’s IPCC 2001 hide-the-decline. Weaver’s incorrect belief that the IPCC diagram showed “four” “independent” “hockey sticks” constructed using “different techniques” led him to believe that the research was much solider than it really was (or is), to say that our focus on the Mann reconstruction was “vindictive” and that any suggestion that our work might impact IPCC conclusions on the topic was “pure and unadulterated rubbish”.   Because of Weaver’s rhetorical style (see yesterday’s post), the National Post news reporter slightly misunderstood Weaver as saying that our research was “pure and unadulterated rubbish” – a view that Weaver probably held – as opposed to saying that the idea that our research would have any impact on IPCC conclusions on the topic was “pure and unadulterated rubbish” Continue reading →

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Andrew Weaver and Karl Rove-Style Rhetoric

Mar 10, 2015 – 5:53 PM

Last year, Karl Rove was reported to have suggested that Hillary Clinton had brain damage:

Karl Rove stunned a conference when he suggested Hillary Clinton may have brain damage. Onstage with Robert Gibbs and CBS correspondent and “Spies Against Armageddon” co-author Dan Raviv, Rove said Republicans should keep the Benghazi issue alive. He said if Clinton runs for president, voters must be told what happened when she suffered a fall in December 2012. The official diagnosis was a blood clot. Rove told the conference near LA Thursday, “Thirty days in the hospital? And when she reappears, she’s wearing glasses that are only for people who have traumatic brain injury? We need to know what’s up with that.”

Rove subsequently denied reports that he said Hillary Clinton may have brain damage. Peter Beinart in the Atlantic dissected Karl Rove’s denial as follows:

Karl Rove now denies reports that he said Hillary Clinton may have brain damage. “I never used that phrase,” he said on Fox News. True. What Rove said was, “Thirty days in the hospital? And when she reappears, she’s wearing glasses that are only for people who have traumatic brain injury? We need to know what’s up with that.” In other words, Rove didn’t say Hillary Clinton has brain damage. He hinted it, thus giving himself deniability while ensuring that the slur lingers in the public mind. Which is what he’s been doing his entire career.

In an unrelated incident, Andrew Weaver was reported as having called for Pachauri’s resignation.  Weaver subsequently denied that he had called for Pachauri’s resignation.  Alert readers may detect some structural similarity in the disputes.

Communications specialist Christopher Witt here, who is definitely not a Rove supporter, used Rove’s verbal (rhetorical) technique as an example of the “rhetoric of deception”.  In today’s post, I’ll show that some of the statements in the Weaver (and other) controversies fall squarely within Witt’s typology. I intend to apply some of these concepts in a future post on the second major count of Weaver’s libel suit: whether he believed that the fossil fuel industry was responsible for break-ins at the University of Victoria.  But in today’s post, I will re-visit a 2003 incident involving Weaver and McIntyre and McKitrick 2003, showing a very clear example of Weaver employing one of the rhetorical techniques listed by Witt.

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Andrew Weaver: It was “defamatory” to say that he called for Pachauri Resignation

Mar 8, 2015 – 12:14 PM

One of the more startling aspects of Andrew Weaver’s libel case was Weaver’s claim that it was defamatory in Canada to say, even in an opinion column, that Weaver had called for Pachauri’s resignation or even a change in leadership at IPCC.   It was even more startling that novice judge Emily Burke found in Weaver’s favour on this point. Given the controversies surrounding Pachauri in 2010, one might ask of Weaver: if you didn’t call for Pachauri’s resignation, why didn’t you?    The absurdity of Weaver’s libel claim on this point became particularly stark when Pachauri was charged in India with sexual harassment and finally resigned as IPCC chairman.

J Burke’s absurd acceptance of Weaver’s claim arose, in my opinion, from multiple legal errors, which I’ll summarize in the conclusions.  To get there, I’ll briefly discuss the background of the Himalaya glacier controversy, which proves to be considerably more complicated than a single factoid error in an enormous report.  Although today’s post is long, the material, closely examined, goes in many directions and is voluminous and the post in no way covers all the potential issues.

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