New Round of ClimateGate Emails Reveal "Scientists" Extremely Interested In "The Cause," Public Relations

You know what you get when you mix science and politics? You get politics, period.

Hockey Stick Charlatan Michael Mann gets the worst of it from this batch of emails (but a lot more are coming).

<3373> Bradley: I’m sure you agree–the Mann/Jones GRL paper was truly pathetic and should never have been published. I don’t want to be associated with that 2000 year “reconstruction”.

<3115> Mann: By the way, when is Tom C going to formally publish his roughly 1500 year reconstruction??? It would help the cause to be able to refer to that reconstruction as confirming Mann and Jones, etc.

Waah, when is someone going to publish something that claims my discredited graph is true?! Waaah. That would help "the cause," and by "the cause," I mean myself.

<3940> Mann: They will (see below) allow us to provide some discussion of the synthetic example, referring to the J. Cimate paper (which should be finally accepted upon submission of the revised final draft), so that should help the cause a bit.

<0810> Mann: I gave up on Judith Curry a while ago. I don’t know what she think’s she’s doing, but its not helping the cause.

The cause?

Mann would probably claim he didn't mean "the cause" in a political way. I think he did, but what he'd claim is he meant "the cause of scientific truth."

The problem with that, from these emails, is that he seems antagonistic to someone critiquing his work, or global warming work, and dismissive of her simply because she is critiquing it.

But that process of constant challenge and critique is science, or it used to be anyways, at least outside the special groupthink of "global warming" science, where things are not proven by, what's the word, "proof" but rather consensus -- majority vote! -- so anyone who is doing actual science is therefore harmful to "the cause."

In science, if a fellow scientist has badly erred, you say so publicly, and you prove it. Even if he is your friend. Because the real "cause" of science demands that. Science is not a popularity contest.

In fake science -- which is what global warming is -- you instead privately, in secret emails, dismiss a major, and completely wrong, finding, but you let it continue limping along publicly, because the guy responsible for the indefensible error is a leading light in the cause and apparently we're supposed to keep serious objections to false "science" on the downlow.

Mitchell/MetO

Is the PCA approach robust? Are the results statistically significant? It seems
to me that in the case of MBH the answer in each is no
Wilson:

I thought I’d play around with some randomly generated time-series and see if I
could ‘reconstruct’ northern hemisphere temperatures.

[...] The reconstructions clearly show a ‘hockey-stick’ trend. I guess this is
precisely the phenomenon that Macintyre has been going on about.

McIntyre had long objected to Mann's graph, because, using Mann's algorithms, 99% of data entered into it would produce a hockey-stick sudden increase at the end. The algorithm itself was ludicrously biased to produce this false result; the result was an artifact of the algorithm used to create it, not something existing in actual reality.

Someone actually finally bothered to check, and oh look, McIntyre was right.

Quick, let's keep that quiet. We'll talk about it in emails, but we certainly won't mention it in one of the journals we control.

Bradley:

I’m sure you agree–the Mann/Jones GRL paper was truly pathetic and should
never have been published. I don’t want to be associated with that 2000 year
“reconstruction”.

I know I already printed this one but it's a keeper. Point is, while he doesn't want to be "associated" with it, I don't see him taking the necessary scientific step of proving it to be false... publicly.

Because that would help the cause.

Since when is science done by secret consensus, rather than public demonstration of proofs and public critiques thereof?

Osborn:

Because how can we be critical of Crowley for throwing out 40-years in the
middle of his calibration, when we’re throwing out all post-1960 data ‘cos the
MXD has a non-temperature signal in it, and also all pre-1881 or pre-1871 data
‘cos the temperature data may have a non-temperature signal in it!

Esper:

Now, you Keith complain about the way we introduced our result, while saying it
is an important one. [...] the IPCC curve needs to be improved according to
missing long-term declining trends/signals, which were removed (by
dendrochronologists!) before Mann merged the local records together. So, why
don’t you want to let the result into science?

Because they're not doing science, Silly-billy.

Cook:

I am afraid that Mike is defending something that increasingly can not be
defended. He is investing too much personal stuff in this and not letting the
science move ahead.

Cook:

One problem is that he [Mann] will be using the RegEM method, which provides no better diagnostics (e.g. betas) than his original method. So we will still not
know where his estimates are coming from.

If you don't know where they're coming from, that's a problem, isn't it? Aren't proofs supposed to be publicly available, resting upon publicly-available data?

If Mann is cooking this stuff like The Great Oz behind the curtain, and you're going along with this -- it's not science, and you are betraying science too.

All these people have a big problem with Mann's falsified and fake Hokey Stick graph. They want it to quietly go away, without a fuss. What they don't want to do is publicly announce that it is false, because that would hurt their dear friend Mann and hurt the cause as well.

In fact, that's what they did end up doing -- without ever stating the reasons why, they have in fact simply stopped referring to the Mann Hockey Stick.

Usually, in science, when a major falsehood like this is abandoned, there is a public repudiation of it, so that scientists coming later know they cannot rely on it any further.

But not here. Scientists working in this field, relying on the public record, would think the Mann graph is still part of "science."

They'd have to be included in the secret emails to find out it's not.

This is science?

No, this is message coordination of the kind that happens in no-press-or-public-allowed strategy sessions at the DNC.

This is not a hybrid of science and politics; this is just politics, period.

posted by Ace at 02:04 PM

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