Tuesday, July 26, 2005

Global Warming Fraud

Here's an entry from Greenie Watch on Michael Mann finally releasing his source code that he used to generate "his "hockey stick" reconstruction of the earth's climate."

They seem to give him a bit of an out that the original program was lost, but I don't accept that. If he was using that program to generate data he then published, he should have retained the original program or not used the data. Essentially this "loss" makes replication of the data impossible and should by all rights nullify the data.

Here's the crux:
However, the newly-archived source code demonstrates clearly that MBH did calculate the cross-validation R2 statistic (pages 28-29 in my printout). Accordingly, I can now assert that the information was withheld in the original SI.

At this point, we also know that the values of the cross-validation R2 were very insignificant (~0.0) in the controversial 15th century reconstruction. One can reasonably surmise that this information would have been very detrimental to widespread acceptance of the MBH98 reconstruction had it been disclosed. The IPCC assertion that the MBH98 reconstruction "“had significant skill in independent cross-validation tests" is obviously not true for the withheld cross-validation R2 statistic. I previously discussed this inaccurate disclosure by IPCC as illustrating the potential conflict of interest between an author in his capacity as an IPCC review author and in his capacity as the author of the underlying study.
I'll agree with GW that it sounds like fraud to me.

Please note, I'm not saying that there is no likelihood that there is global warming at present related to industrialization. I'm saying that the report that provided most of the major backbone for the argument is likely scientifically unsound.


1 comment:

geekwife said...

"If he was using that program to generate data he then published, he should have retained the original program or not used the data."

Oh, Nylar, there you go using that scientific background of yours. Loosen up! Don't be so darn technical and picky. If the outcome feels right, how can the methodology be wrong?