One of the world's most corrupt climate activists, Michael Mann, is, once again, stirring the climate change debate over data.

For those who do not know of Michael Mann, the "inventor" of the now discredited "hockey stick" ...

Global Warming Bombshell -- A prime piece of evidence linking human activity to climate change turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics

In the scientific and political debate over global warming, the latest wrong piece may be the hockey stick, the famous plot published by University of Massachusetts geoscientist Michael Mann and colleagues. This plot purports to show that we are now experiencing the warmest climate in a millennium, and that the earth, after remaining cool for centuries during the medieval era, suddenly began to heat up about 100 years ago–just at the time that the burning of coal and oil led to an increase in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide.

Unfortunately, discussion of this plot has been so polluted by political and activist frenzy that it is hard to dig into it to reach the science.

But now a shock: Canadian scientists Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick have uncovered a fundamental mathematical flaw in the computer program that was used to produce the hockey stick. In his original publications of the stick, Mann purported to use a standard method known as principal component analysis, or PCA, to find the dominant features in a set of more than 70 different climate records.

But it wasn't so. McIntyre and McKitrick obtained part of the program that Mann used, and they found serious problems. Not only does the program not do conventional PCA, but it handles data normalization in a way that can only be described as mistaken.

Now comes the real shocker. This improper normalization procedure tends to emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppress all data that do not. To demonstrate this effect, McIntyre and McKitrick created some meaningless test data that had, on average, no trends. This method of generating random data is called Monte Carlo analysis, after the famous casino, and it is widely used in statistical analysis to test procedures. When McIntyre and McKitrick fed these random data into the Mann procedure, out popped a hockey stick shape! 

[OCS: As we learned from the purloined ClimateGate e-mails, there was an active attempt among activists to subvert and control the peer-reviewed climate journals.]

McIntyre and McKitrick sent their detailed analysis to Nature magazine for publication, and it was extensively refereed. But their paper was finally rejected. In frustration, McIntyre and McKitrick put the entire record of their submission and the referee reports on a Web page for all to see. If you look, you'll see that McIntyre and McKitrick have found numerous other problems with the Mann analysis. I emphasize the bug in their PCA program simply because it is so blatant and so easy to understand.

Some people may complain that McIntyre and McKitrick did not publish their results in a refereed journal. That is true–but not for lack of trying. Moreover, the paper was refereed–and even better, the referee reports are there for us to read. McIntyre and McKitrick's only failure was in not convincing Nature that the paper was important enough to publish. <Source: MIT Technology Review>

Mann Misrepresents the EPA

One of the most important misconduct allegations against Mann – the “amputation” of the Briffa reconstruction in IPCC TAR – was discussed recently by Judy Curry, who, in turn, covered Congressional testimony on the incident by John Christy, who had been a Lead Author of the same IPCC TAR chapter and whose recollections of the incident were both first-hand and vivid.

In one of the major graphics in the IPCC 2001 report, declining values of the Briffa reconstruction were deleted (“amputated” is Christy’s apt term), resulting in the figure giving a much greater rhetorical impression of consistency than really existed. This truncation of data had been known (and severely criticized) at Climate Audit long before Climategate.

However, the incident came into an entirely new light with the release of the Climategate emails, which showed that senior IPCC officials had been concerned that the Briffa reconstruction (with its late 20th century decline) would “dilute the message” and that Mann was equally worried that showing the Briffa reconstruction would give “fodder to the skeptics”.

Christy gave the following damning summary of Mann’s conduct as IPCC TAR Lead Author:

Regarding the Hockey Stick of IPCC 2001 evidence now indicates, in my view, that an IPCC Lead Author working with a small cohort of scientists, misrepresented the temperature record of the past 1000 years by (a) promoting his own result as the best estimate, (b) neglecting studies that contradicted his, and (c) amputating another’s result so as to eliminate conflicting data and limit any serious attempt to expose the real uncertainties of these data.

Christy left out a further fundamental problem in the amputation: there was no disclosure of the amputation in the IPCC 2001 report itself.

The impropriety of deleting adverse data in an IPCC graphic was easily understood in the broader world of brokers, accountants, lawyers and fund managers and one on which there was negligible sympathy for excuses. Not only did this appear to be misconduct as far as the public was concerned, the deletion of adverse data in the IPCC graphic appeared to be an act of “omitting data or results such that the research is not accurately represented in the research record” – one of the definitions (“falsification”) of academic misconduct in the NSF and other academic misconduct codes. <Source>

Cleared by the same self-protective University that investigated and ignored the long-running Sandusky sexual molestation case ...

In February 2010, the Pennsylvania State University released an Inquiry Report that investigated any 'Climategate' emails involving Dr Michael Mann, a Professor of Penn State's Department of Meteorology. They found 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". On "Mike's Nature trick", they concluded "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."

Of course, the investigation was a joke: allegedly making up answers to questions nobody asked ...

Point 1. Penn State President Spanier is quoted as saying:

“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.

The only interviews mentioned in the report (aside from Mann) are with Gerry North and Donald Kennedy, editor of Science. [Since they are required to provide a transcript or summary of all interviews, I presume that the Inquiry did not carry out any other interviews.] What does Donald Kennedy know about the matter? These two hardly constitute “looking at issues from all sides”. [A CA reader observed below that “North [at a Rice University event] admitted that he had not read any of the EAU e-mails and did not even know that software files were included in the release.”] They didn’t even talk to Wegman. Contrary to Spanier’s claim, they did not make the slightest effort to talk to any critic or even neutral observer.

Point 2. The Penn State Committee stated:

The so-called “trick” 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.

This is untrue on a variety of levels. The “trick” is not a “legitimate” statistical method; its essence is the failure to show adverse data. See Climate Audit here or the DailyMail here. Did they do any investigation of the “trick”? They don’t even seem to have read the relevant Climate Audit post – only realclimate. Read more of the refutations.

Now, Mann is back at it: forget the data and those pesky climate models ... 

Michael Mann, scientist: Data ‘increasingly unnecessary’ because ‘we can see climate change’

Leading climate doomsayer Michael Mann recently downplayed the importance of climate-change science, telling Democrats that data and models “increasingly are unnecessary” because the impact is obvious.

“Fundamentally, I’m a climate scientist and have spent much of my career with my head buried in climate-model output and observational climate data trying to tease out the signal of human-caused climate change,” Mr. Mann told the Democratic Platform Drafting Committee at a hearing.

“What is disconcerting to me and so many of my colleagues is that these tools that we’ve spent years developing increasingly are unnecessary because we can see climate change, the impacts of climate change, now, playing out in real time, on our television screens, in the 24-hour news cycle,” he said.

Mr. Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State, spoke before the committee June 17 in Phoenix, Arizona.

His comment drew hoots from climate skeptics, including the website Greenie Watch, which posted his comment under the headline, “‘Scientist’ Michael Mann says there is no need for statistics: You can just SEE global warming.”  The platform committee’s 15 members include Bill McKibben, head of the climate-change activist group 350.org.

Source: Michael Mann, climate scientist: Data 'increasingly unnecessary' because 'we can see climate change' - Washington Times

Bottom line ...

Once again a climate activist loon is affecting climate policy and convincing the progressive socialist democrats to use erroneous assumptions and data to drive their political agenda on climate policy. Corruption breeds more corruption. I cannot wait for the resolution of Michael Mann's defamation lawsuit against writer Mark Steyn to reveal the lengths to which Mann has tortured, truncated, and teased climate data to produce the result he needs to vindicate his view of climate science.

Meanwhile for the rest of us, let us hope that the crooked politicians do not use crooked data in making public policy. But, then again, when has that ever stopped them?

We are so screwed.

-- steve