The Wegman Controversy (VERY briefly)
The original Wegman irony
Innocent until proven “Alarmist”
Wegmania
—-
The Wegman Controversy (VERY briefly)
In 2006 statistician Edward Wegman headed a small committee at the request members of the US House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee to review the work of climatologists with reference to the “Hockey stick” temperature reconstruction. At issue was whether the last few decades represent an unprecedented global temperature increase in the last millennium or so.
The Wegman Committee found that, in their opinion (Wegman Report):
- the methodology that had been used did not justify the conclusions (not that the “Hockey Stick” was wrong necessarily, just that they felt you couldn’t tell one way or another given the statistical analysis that had been used);
- that the alleged problems with the research were probably due to the work being done with in a relatively small social network (approx 50 people) within a highly specialized field.
The report has long since been irrelevant except as just another Denier myth because:
- Using the more robust statistical methods that the Committee was recommending did not change the results;
- The “Hockey Stick” remains essentially the same (and here) using a variety of techniques and data sets, including ones that exclude data that were considered problematical.
The Denialosphere clings to the belief that it somehow discredited any temperature reconstruction that has that ‘hockey stick’ shape. The Deniers cannot seem to grasp that:
- Wegman never claimed the reconstruction was wrong, just that at that time, using those methods on that data, it was not possible to say that it was right;
- Different methods showed the reconstruction was correct;
- We no longer use the reconstruction that the Wegman report examined regardless, and haven’t for years since we now have much more data and more robust analysis techniques*.
*Note to Deniers ... we also no longer rely on Copernicus's De revolutionibus orbium coelestium to know that the Earth orbits the Sun, so the fact that it contains errors is not proof that Copernicus was wrong and that the Sun actually revolves around the Earth. Just thought you should know.
So the Wegman report has been scientifically irrelevant pretty much since it was first released, but it remains politically relevant thanks to the Denier inability (or refusal) to understand the above points.
Then last winter the blog Deep Climate began posting evidence that the Wegman Report had been Highly Politicized – and Fatally Flawed. This was quickly followed by evidence that the Wegman Committee had plagarized significant sections of the report (Deep Climate again).
More evidence was shared through the spring and summer leading up to the release of an exhaustive examination by John Mashey; John Mashey on Strange Scholarship in the Wegman Report, excerpt:
“Of 91 pages, 35 are mostly plagiarized text, but often injected with errors, bias and changes of meaning. Its Bibliography is mostly padding, 50% of the references uncited in the text. Many references are irrelevant or dubious.”
More akin to a failing grade Sophomore paper than a work allegedly produced by academics. In response to these revelations George Mason University began an inquiry which has now become an investigation of Wegman for professional misconduct. USA Today went so far as to ask some plagarism experts (actual journalism … wow!) who said:
• “Actually fairly shocking,” says Cornell physicist Paul Ginsparg by e-mail. “My own preliminary appraisal would be ‘guilty as charged.’ ”
•”If I was a peer reviewer of this report and I was to observe the paragraphs they have taken, then I would be obligated to report them,” says Garner of Virginia Tech, who heads a copying detection effort. “There are a lot of things in the report that rise to the level of inappropriate.”
•”The plagiarism is fairly obvious when you compare things side-by-side,” says Ohio State’s Robert Coleman, who chairs OSU’s misconduct committee.
This has all been much reported and discussed on climate blogs (a sampling):
- Wegman exposed: Experts find “shocking” plagiarism in 2006 climate report requested by Joe Barton (R-TX);
- Hockey Stick Basher Wegman Under Investigation;
- Adventures in social network analysis
- Pop quiz on responses to Wegman plagiarism accusations
- Wegman plagiarised, but there is worse
- A Dummy’s Guide to Strange Scholarship in the Wegman Report
My Take:
The plagarism evidence is all laid out in the Deep Climate posts & the Mashey report (lots of links below); make of it what you will, but it does seem pretty damning. As for the charges of the Wegman Committee being a political hatchet job, I have only a couple of things to add to Maskey’s detailed analysis:
The Committee’s mandate was actually unacceptably vague for reviewing a scientific work, ie “whether or not the criticisms of Mann et al. are valid and if so, what are the implications.” Which criticisms? by who? about what? The Wegman Committee had considerable leeway to interpret it’s task, and hence how to frame it’s answer.
So what did they do? In her Experiences with Congressional Tertimony Said states that “The fundamental question was “Were the Canadians [ie McIntyre and McKitrick] correct in the critique of the Hockey Team?” “critique of the Hockey Team”? NOT of Mann et al‘s paper, or the Hockey Stick, or the science, but of the team?
This might be understandable as a slip of the tongue, but it is the text as it appears in her presentation to a colloquium in 2007. Whatever may be said elsewhere, Said at least understood their ‘target’ as the researchers, not the research.
This impression is borne out by the questions that were sent to Mann and the other researchers on behalf of the Wegman Committee.
It is not until the 5th question that there is anything at all relevant to the Man et al study.
Instead they were asked about their entire research history, all funding sources, etc.
It was clearly a fishing expedition for anything and everything that could be (mis)interpreted and/or twisted to discredit the scientists.
Finally, while the Committee was not asked to comment on the results & interpretation of Mann et al per se, the broad latitude of the mandate included “and if so, what are the implications?”” This meant it would have been possible and appropriate to do so.
Even if not in the report itself, had the Wegman Committee been at all interested in scientific truth they would have found some other venue to note that the alleged problems with Mann et al did not affect Mann et al‘s conclusions in the slightest.
They did not do so. In fact they went out of their way to sustain the illusion that they had somehow undermined the whole temperature reconstruction when in fact they had done no such thing. Clearly their real agenda was to attempt to discredit real science through ad hominem attacks (social analysis) and misleading reporting.
The original Wegman irony
Has no one else enjoyed the irony of the conclusions of the Wegman Report and just how the Wegman Committee was set up in the first place? I have been meaning to blog on this for a couple of years now, and may as well inject it into the current kerfuffle.
One of the reports initial conclusions/”hypothesis” was that research done and reviewed within relatively small social networks (researchers who knew one another personally, worked and published together, etc)(43 people in the case of Mann and his immediate research community, out of 75 most published authors) was simply not robust (ie reliable).
The Wegman report:
- Wegman himself was recruited by US Rep Joe Barton (old boy network);
- Wegman personally recruited two others, one of his own students (Yasmin H. Said) and someone else that he had co-authored papers with (David Scott);
- Much of the information used by the committee came through Peter Spencer;
- As a substitute for peer review he had half a dozen friends look the report over.
Experiences with Congressional Testimony
As many others have noted, the “Social Network” that produced the report was far smaller than that which had produced the “Hockey Stick”. Further, there were none of the checks and balances of independent editorial oversight and formal peer review which Mann’s work had been subject to.
That being the case, then according to the Wegman Committee, we cannot and never could take the Wegman Report seriously! On the other hand, if Wegman is wrong about social networks, then there is no problem with the work of Mann and the other climate researchers.
Most likely Wegman is partially right:
- Work done in a formal structured setting involving many dozens of people and subject to clear checks and balances (such as Mann’s work was) is reliable;
- Work done ad hoc within a tiny clique and not subject to any formal oversight (such as the Wegman’s Report was) is almost certainly unreliable.
The evidence seems to support this (maybe Said could co-author a paper about it with Wegman?).
Indeed the Wegman report itself states:
“Recommendation 1. Especially when massive amounts of public monies and human lives are at stake, academic work should have a more intense level of scrutiny and review.“
So where was the “intense level of scrutiny and review” of the Wegman report itself? after all, since it was part of the climate change policy process it clearly qualified as influencing “massive amounts of public monies and human lives.” The double standard, and the apparent blindness to it are breathtaking.
Innocent until proven “Alarmist”
We all remember well how when the CRU emails were first released last year the Deniers counseled sober caution and withholding judgment until a proper inquiry had been held (if you missed some of that mature, thoughtful discourse just watch the first minute of this video) ie the pants peeing screams of the lynch mob were deafening. So how is the Denialosphere responding to the revelations about Wegman? with complete consistency of course.
Consistent for the Denialosphere that is, ie hypocritical double standards. As of this writing John O’Sullivan’s “Global Warming Zealots Contrive Story to Smear Innocent Academic” gets 7500+ hits in the Denialosphere, undoubtedly more by the time you read this.
Important: Let’s not make their mistake. By all means form your own opinion and discuss it as appropriate, but let us as a community agree that we should wait until the proper authorities have had a chance to review all of the evidence before we pass judgment. Wegman is no less deserving of a fair hearing than Phil Jones or any one else.
In the same vein we should look at how the other side is covering the issue and how they see the issue. Who knows, maybe there is something we missed?
How the Denier’s know Wegman is innocent!:
So on what basis is O’Sullivan and the Denialosphere so certain of Wegman’s innocence? Here are the key points according to O’Sullivan:
“Under law, Bradley has no case against Wegman and these latest allegations are ineptly contrived. As we shall see below, the claims cannot be backed up by bona fide copyright lawyers for good reason. But under the ‘fair use’ doctrine [1] and rules that apply to reports commissioned by Congress Wegman’s conduct is faultless. His report correctly cites Bradley 35 times and in the reference section under, “BIBLIOGRAPHY Academic Papers and Books”, Bradley again appears 13 times. [2] As the law stands Wegman is bulletproof and there’s no plagiarism or copyright infringement here.” [3]
[1] “Fair use” still requires acknowledgment of the original work.
[2] Irrelevant; did Wegman correctly acknowledge the original work in all cases when he should have? This is analogous to claiming someone must be innocent of shoplifting because there were 35 occasions when they actually did pay for what they took.
[3] No doubt Wegman is also innocent of many other things that no one is charging him with or accusing him of, such as international arms smuggling, shoplifting and parking in a handicap zone. Wegman is under investigation by George Mason University for professional misconduct, not copyright violation etc. O’Sullivan’s argument is a straw man logic error and completely irrelevant.
“Skeptics have countered the claims by saying they know the real reason for the last-ditch strategy: to distract public attention away from the faked science.“
- That in no way responds to the points raised;
- It’s obviously false since no one has been able to show that any of the science has been faked, much less enough to cause any rational doubt about climate change;
- even if it were true it would still be irrelevant (see 1).
Actually it is not a counter at all, it is a red herring logic error, but then logical arguments have never been the Denier strong point.
If all of that is not silly enough, O’Sullivan goes on with:
” … evidence shows that Bradley implicates himself; he appears to have something to hide in leaked correspondence … the following damning email they received from Bradley:
“… That’s the long & short of it. I have told the University that I am prepared to drop this matter if Wegman makes a request to have his report withdrawn from the Congressional Record. No response on that.”
That was one of many attempts to stymie independent investigators. … With so many “friends in high places” Bradley and Mann have been able to evade justice for years – but is time running out?“
So offering Wegman an honourable out is “one of many attempts to stymie independent investigators.”? How exactly? Wegman would be more than free to clean up his work and publish the result. Bradley’s offer would stymie nothing and potentially save Wegman’s career if the allegations turn out to be true.
Probably too late now regardless. Once the GMU initial inquiry found grounds for an investigation I doubt simply withdrawing the original complaint would be reason for stopping it.
Over at Climate Fraudit they have the same kind of irrelevant defence of Wegman, viz Wegman cited Bradley some times so that should count for all, the plagarised sections don’t affect the conclusions so they don’t count, McIntyre synonymizes referring readers to a text for more detail with giving credit to those works for material used (totally different things), accuses Bradley of plagarizing (irrelevant to whether Wegman did or not)(see DeSmog for more), and so on.
Frankly I stopped reading it because it was just too silly. It is quite telling that McIntyre seems to think any of the above is acceptable or makes sense.
I hope that for Wegman’s sake that his response to this is actually relevant and coherent (apparently not /hat tip to the bunny), because Wegman’s career and reputation are over if his response in any way resembles the drivel O’Sullivan & McIntyre expect us to swallow.
Wegmania
Dec 2009 – Cozy Network of Lobbying Firms Think Tanks
- Contrarian scholarship: Revisiting the Wegman report
- Wegman (and Rapp) on tree rings: A divergence problem (part 1)
- Wegman and Rapp on proxies: A divergence problem (part 2)
- Donald Rapp: More divergence problems
Feb 2010 – Deep Climate Breaks the plagarism story:
- Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, part 1: In the beginning
- Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, part 2: The story behind the Barton-Whitfield investigation and the Wegman Panel
Apr – Sept 2010 – More plagarism, Mashey weighs in
- Wegman and Said on social networks: More dubious scholarship
- Wegman Report update, part 1: More dubious scholarship in full colour
- Wegman report update, part 2: GMU dissertation review
- John Mashey on Strange Scholarship in the Wegman Report
Oct – Dec 2010 – more and more revelations
- David Ritson speaks out
- The Wegman report sees red (noise)
- Replication and due diligence, Wegman style
- Wegman et al miscellany
We give our consent every moment that we do not resist.
Image Credits:
2 THINGS I HATE By Adrian Wallett
Comment Policy
Comments that are not relevant to the post that they appear under or the evolving discussion will simply be moved to the Dunce’s Corner, as will links to Denier spam known to be scientific gibberish
- The “Mostly” Open Thread” is for general climate discussion that is not relevant to a particular post. Spam and abuse rules still apply;
- The “Challenging the Core Science” Comment Thread is for comments that purport to challenge the core science of anthropogenic climate change.
Thanks. I have been trying and reding but I missed Said’s point that heir work was designed to discredit the hockey team ( all of them). When you pointed this out I saw the need for a 2×4 to the head.
John Mashey tried to point me in the right direction but used subtlety instead of buiding material.
Nice commentary, but a small nit:
“text as it appears in his presentation to a colloquium in 2007”
Yasmin Said is female:
See SSWR, A,.11. p.95 has pictures of her with Barton, Whitfield, Spencer, (and for some weird reason, Freeman Dyson).
But do read the annotated Said(12007) in that section. That’s the file that disappeared week of 08/16-08/23, got edited out of the GMU seminar history 08/20, just before Wegman’s memorable Facebook post 08/21:
“Edward J. Wegman Want to know a bad week? All in the same week. 1) accused of plagiarism, felony, anti-science, misleading Congress because of your climate science testimony, 2) have a rule made up, which only applied to you, that blocks you from mentoring graduate students, 3) have a friend tell you he was not happy with you because you were awarded a patent.
August 21 at 4:17pm”
—-
re: Dorothy in Oz innocent
In CCC, I wrote.
“My Summary Opinion.
Would anyone who really understood what was happening give this talk, and then leave it up on the Web?
She was the junior member of a team led by her Dissertation Advisor, patron and frequent co-author
Wegman. But there are many questions to ask her about how this all really worked.
I am honestly sorry for her, for if further hearings occur, they probably will not be so enjoyable.”
But then, the serial plagiarism appeared later, then her dissertation, then the fine talk she gave at Interface 2010, SSWR, p.82, whose abstract was:
“Climate Change Policy and the Climategate Scandal
Yasmin H. Said, George Mason University
The release of emails from the East Anglia University Climate Research Unit just before the Copenhagen Climate summit has had a damaging effect on public support for action on global warming. The lack of transparency by some climate researchers, the willingness to bend the peer review process, and the willingness to destroy data rather than share it with researchers of a different perspective all raise fundamental issues of climate change policy. Perhaps the best thing to come from the climategate scandal is the formal recommendation of engaging statisticians. In this talk I will discuss some of the implications of climategate on climate change policy.”
I’m afraid my view in CCC will need revised.
You know, it looks as if the pair of them may have been better advised to pick up a copy of Kuhn, and read and understand it, rather than make a report based on Yasmin’s 2006 thesis efforts to use computer software and math to understand and analyse the scientific establishment as a social network. I suppose it looked good on paper. 😦
If I may vent for a moment… it is frustrating to me that Yasmin could have instead been analyzing the effects of climate change on health, especially women’s health, and communicate about that. After all, her main area of interest has become computatinal analysis in the field of multiple health interventions. I think what happened may be partly a story about the challenges of competent cross-disciplinary collaboration. In the end, what you describe is Wegman and Said’s combined incompetence and lack of theoretical and methodological cross-disciplinary ability.
The report demonstrates poor knowledge of natural systems and social systems (never mind perhaps overlooking adequate standards of basic scholarship) in addition to an apparently overly-ambitious and narrow application of statistical analysis.
Wegman may be a lost cause, but I look forward to Yasmin developing her expertise. Maybe in the future she will use it to understand the problem of the gap between what science has made clear about climate change, and what the public realizes. Elites continue to shift and stall, and are so transparently unwilling to take the necessary steps. It is sometimes an extra disappointment to me when educated women count themselves among these elites.
😦
Martha, I think you are putting too much faith in Yasmin Said. More than likely she was the one who did most of the work (being a supervisor of postdocs and PhD students myself, I know how these things work). She has also been the one most willing to claim fraud, and I know she once claimed to be writing a book about climate science.
Her best expertise appears to be copying what others have written, and presenting that as her own (the highly plagiarised article she wrote is evidence she lacks proper morals in this field).
Marco, you may be right.
I may be minimizing her responsibility. In the back of my mind, I was considering that Wegman had professional credit for the report even though it was, as you say, likely mostly authored by Yasmin (and students). It raises all kinds of questions for us about collaborative work. I think it’s safe to say that Ed was happier to be considered the author of ‘the Wegman’ report, before this… but who is the author, really?
If Yasmin did most of the plagiarism, I guess she has the bulk of the moral and substantive responsibility for it, even though she didn’t get the previous credit, attributed to Wegman. The extent and nature of the plagiarism shows she is incompetent but I hope she can radically improve her work. Having said that, even if she can increase her competence, I do find it hard to believe that she did not understand what was also being asked of her ethically, at that level.
Alongside this trouble, however, I think Wegman shows himself to be an even worse supervisor. Wegman had authorship of the report (even though he may not have done much, if any, of the work himself) but apparently couldn’t spot dozens of pages of blatant plagiarism. It would be interesting to know to what extent this one student’s work is really loaded with these problems, or if other students under Wegman also have these problems. Wegman seems hardly proactive in ensuring students are up to standards for ethical, competent scholarship or an academic career. It’s disgraceful, for him and his department, especially if there’s a pattern to it.
We know the report request and process was a transparently partisan abuse of political power to begin with, so I guess I also wonder to what extent Wegman failed to encourage his students to reflect on the ethics and objectivity of research proposals, never mind the bad technical and scholarly quality of this particularly worthless exercise. What on earth is he doing?
Over at Deep Climate the last two posts discuss a plagiarism chain before Said appeared, involving reuse of material from someone else’s PhD, into 2 Wegman articles, a 4th wegman PhD an then a patent.
One must ask why Said, a year or two into a post-doc,was coupervusung Sharabati PhD.
Recall that some of hhe same plagiarized social networks text was in WR, Said et al (2008), and 2 PhD dissertations.
John, I see no problem in a postdoc co-supervising a PhD student. I’ve done it myself and I had a postdoc as my co-supervisor.
And while I know the plagiarism chain, I don’t think Wegman knows. He’s not an expert in the areas he has his PhD students working on. That is, of course, *his* error, and he should get criticism for that. But I don’t think he will have actively supported plagiarism.
I’m currently co-supervising a PhD student & I don’t have one (post graduate degree) myself. Whilst I was surprised to be asked I, like marco, don’t think it’s anything out of the ordinary.
marco: co-supervision: things vary. Academics have expressed surprise to me, which is why I mentioned it.
Plagiarism chain:
1) One need know nothing about a topic to notice that the same or equivalent text was in
the WR
Said, et al 92008)
Sharabati (2008)
Rezazad (2009)
The 5-way comparison (the 5th being the originals) is in
SSWR, Appendix W.2.3
2) In general, even if one didn’t know something was plagiarized, would one want to look closely at a big chunk of text with no citations?
3) The recently-found chain at Deep Climate starts with an original source Grossman, gets used in a Wegman-led article, and shows up later in a Wegman-directed PhD.
John, you can then add an academic to the list who is NOT surprised.
1) No, a busy professor easily would overlook this, in particular if he is sloppy in reviewing his students’ papers.
2) Ibid.
3) Ibid.
I really don’t think Wegman initiated the plagiarism, nor do I think he has been aware of the issue. He appears to me to be amongst those supervisors who are just really, really, really bad at properly proofreading the articles his students write. I know a few of those.
Thanks for the updates and discussion.
To me, Wegman is looking incompetent to supervise collaborative work among students or engage in capable cross-disciplinary collaboration, himself. Wegman, and his students, do not seem to have a basic understanding of the unique nature and responsibilities of collaborative work, and plagiarism — or consequences. 😦
Marco:
1) There was a PhD in another department, 1995.
2) A chunk of text from that showed up in a Wegman-lead-author report, 1996.
3) Years later it showed up in a Wegman-supervised PhD and from there into a patent.
“”We are not the bad guys. … We have never intended that our Congressional testimony was intended to take intellectual credit” for other scholars’ work.”
USA Today.
Sad to say, GMU is having difficulty handling the plagiarism case. It has now been 9 months, and GMU has yet to give Ray Bradley an *inquiry* report.
In particular, you may wish to read an example of why it is not good to post on Facebook.
There is a 15-page update to the earlier SIGMU (Strange Inquiries at George Mason University), see V2.0 PDF at DeSmogBlog.
+ It adds a new section 3, which has emails from Donald Rapp:
– threatening {Ray Bradley, Elsevier, Deep Climate, and me}
– blaming Ray for everything
– castigating the USC administration
– introducing new terms, like climategate-ists, along with “Taliban of the Internet”
– forwarded to {Ray, Elsevier} or Dan Vergano
– and best of all, forwarding several emails of Wegman from September 2010
The final set offers interesting insights into Wegman’s thinking, which I think seems to have gotten a bit strange.
There is also more on the Koch/GMU connection and a new Appendix A.3 with post-USA Today comments by Wegman.