Archive for the ‘Scientific Fraud’ Category

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Et tu IAC? Time for Pachauri to exit.

August 30, 2010

The IAC report is in.

And this is a report by a “friend”.

It is time for Pachauri to leave the reform and the improvement of the IPCC (assuming such a politically charged body can ever be reformed) to somebody else since he has clearly not been up to the task.

http://images.cheezburger.com/completestore/2009/11/22/129033627605776300.jpg

The Telgraph: The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change should only make predictions when it has solid scientific evidence and avoid straying into policy advocacy, a group of national science academies has warned in a report.

The report said the chairman of the IPCC should be limited to one six year term. Its current head Rajendra Pachauri of India, is in the middle of his second term. It called for an overhaul of the panel’s management, including the creation of an executive committee that would include people from outside the IPCC. Regarding the errors that appeared in the IPCC reports, the review group’s report called for stronger enforcement of the panel’s scientific review procedures to minimise future mistakes.

Professor Mike Hulme, a professor of climate change at the University of East Anglia, is due to deliver a keynote lecture to the Royal Geographical Society Annual conference this week in which he will call for a dramatic changes to the way the IPCC operates. Speaking ahead of his lecture, he said: “The IPCC has not sufficiently adapted to the changing science and politics of climate change, nor to the changing expected and demanded role of science and expertise in society. “The IPCC’s approach of seeking consensus obscures and constricts both scientific and wider social debates about both knowledge-driven and value-driven uncertainties that surround climate change politics.”

Rajendra Pachauri

The BBC: UN climate body ‘needs reforms’, review recommends.

Among the IAC committee’s recommendations was that the UN body appoint an executive director to handle day-to-day operations and speak on behalf of the body. It also said the current limit of two six-year terms for the chair of the organisation is too long. The report also suggests the UN body establish an executive committee which should include individuals from outside the IPCC or even outside the climate science community in order to enhance the UN panel’s credibility and independence.

The use by the IPCC of so-called “grey literature” – that which has not been peer-reviewed or published in scientific journals – has been subjected to particular scrutiny of late, partly because this type of material was behind the glacier error. The committee said that such literature was often relevant and appropriate for inclusion in the IPCC’s assessment reports. But it said authors needed to follow the IPCC’s guidelines more closely and that the guidelines themselves are too vague.

Bishop Hill: “Furthermore, by making vague statements that were difficult to refute, authors were able to attach “high confidence” to the statements. The Working Group II Summary for Policy Makers contains many such statements that are not supported sufficiently in the literature, not put into perspective, or not expressed clearly.”

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Posted in Alarmism, Bureaucracy, Environment, Science, Scientific Fraud | Comments Off on Et tu IAC? Time for Pachauri to exit.

Climategate and Hausergate: Different routes to the faking of science

August 30, 2010

Clearly academia can only reflect surrounding society. Scientists are not saints and political motives, financial greed and fame-seeking will be just as prevalent within academia as in the surroundings. Frauds and fakers will inevitably exist. Nevertheless it is peer review – by colleagues within the organisation and within the peer-review process – which is supposed to maintain the quality of scientific work but perhaps it must now be expanded to protect and maintain the integrity of scientific work as well. Reviewers cannot continue to use the independence of the review process as an excuse to remain cocooned within their comfort zones of anonymity. They do need to stand up and be counted.

In recent months two very different scandals in the scientific world but both relying on fake science have surfaced. In one peer-review has been lax and in the other it has been perverted to a cause.

In the case of Climategate (and the IPCC), the peer-review process was perverted to falsify scientific conclusions and suppress dissent in support of a particular political (and financial) agenda.

In the case of Hausergate predetermined conclusions were supported by falsified data which were then endorsed by the peer-review process to make non-science seem to be science. The financial motive is probably only secondary to the primary motive of seeking acclaim and reputation.

http://www.stochasticgeometry.ie/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/snakeoil.jpg?w=257

In both cases the normal sequence of the scientific method of

Question > research >hypothesis > experiment /test > analysis > conclusion

has been distorted.

In the case of Climategate a small clique of academics perverted the peer-review process to control and prevent the publication of opposing views. The IPCC (where the authors were often the same academics with a few charlatans, railway engineers, thrill seekers, politicians and financiers thrown in for good measure) not only prevented the consideration of alternate views but went further by including non-peer-reviewed advocacy reports, newspaper articles and the like when they were favourable to their cause. Of course the IPCC is a political institution so perhaps it is asking too much to expect it to be a force to maintain scientific integrity.

“Since the IPCC gives Lead Authors the sole right to determine content and accept or dismiss comments, it is more like a weblog than an academic report.”

See “Fix the IPCC process” by Ross McKitrick at http://opinion.financialpost.com/2010/08/27/fix-the-ipcc-process/

An alarmist agenda was used to satisfy the greed associated with the Carbon Offset and Trading scams. Some data manipulation is also evident from the Climategate e-mails but the control of peer-review was the main tool used.

In the case of Marc Hauser he simply fabricated data to fit the conclusions he had already come to (and it is irrelevant that his theories or conclusions may or may not be correct). It is stated that he was publishing at the rate of a paper – each one peer-reviewed – every month for 4 years. Obviously not too difficult to do or too time-consuming  if data only had to be fabricated whenever needed. What were the peers and reviewers doing? Had his colleagues and reviewers no suspicions or doubts?

What is not clear is why Hauser felt it was advantageous to fake the science instead of doing the science. Clearly he could not have been as prolific if he had to actually do the science and perhaps account for data which did not support his  theories. It would seem therefore to be connected with the gaining of an academic reputation quickly and perhaps also with the financial benefits flowing from that.

But the message coming through is that peers and peer-review must be transparent and very much more rigorous. They cannot restrict themselves to quality control alone – which itself is not applied uniformly – and not take a position on the integrity of the work. Reviewers are effectively servants of the Journals they serve and the Journals too cannot escape responsibility for what they publish and what they choose not to.

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Posted in Non-Science, Science, Scientific Fraud | 3 Comments »

Hausergate: When did Hauser start making it up?

August 30, 2010

By all accounts Marc Hauser has been falsifying data at least since 1995.

Harvard probe kept under wraps

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100817/full/466908a.html

http://culture.froggytest.com/modules/xoopsgallery/cache/albums/albup60/le_charlatan.jpg

He joined Harvard in 1992 and the first known data falsification was in 1995, so Harvard colleagues and associates could not have been unaware of his creative use of data. All the journals which published his papers since 1995 and all his peers and reviewers must also have been aware of his fertile imagination. It could just be gullibility or it could be incompetence but they can have few other excuses.
Their silence is telling.
But when did his creativity start?

All his work must now be suspect. From his PhD in 1987 from UCLA, and through to his post-doctoral “work” at Ann Arbor, Michigan, at the University of California, Davis and at Rockefeller University, and all his production at Harvard, the presumption must be of  exaggerations (which is probably how it started) and falsification.

The magnitude of his fraud must encompass at least his salary and grants ever since he joined Harvard.


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Posted in Non-Science, Scientific Fraud | 3 Comments »

Mild rap on the knuckles likely for IPCC / Pachauri from friendly IAC

August 29, 2010

The Hindustan Times reports that former railwayman Pachauri will likely get away with a mild rap on his knuckles from the Inter Academy Council (little known)-  an establishment body tasked with defending another establishment body.

There is speculation that Pachauri might get away with just a rap on the knuckles for IPCC’s assessments that the Himalayan glaciers will be gone by 2035, and the Amazonian forests were in danger too. The Wall Street Journal quoted an unidentified member of the probe team to say the report will merely suggest that IPCC “should beef up its capacity to ferret out errors in its scientific assessments”.

http://www.cartoonsbyjosh.com/index.html

The Telegraph comes out a little stronger and suggests that the IPCC could actually be “warned”. But when the IAC report is presented to Ban Ki Moon tomorrow it is unlikely to find much fault with one of its own.

The United Nation’s climate change organisation faces a warning over how it uses scientific facts in its influential reports, following the discovery of a series of embarrassing errors in its work.

Professor Robert Watson, the chief scientific adviser to the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and a former chair of the UN’s IPCC, told the InterAcademy Council’s review committee that more needed to be done to prevent errors appearing in the panel’s reports.

He described the way the IPCC handled the mistakes as “totally and utterly atrocious” and suggested that the panel should consider hiring additional staff to check through the sources of information, or references, to ensure the accuracy of statements made in future reports.

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Posted in Bureaucracy, Science, Scientific Fraud | Comments Off on Mild rap on the knuckles likely for IPCC / Pachauri from friendly IAC

Hausergate: An utter lack of ethics

August 19, 2010

Fiction passed of as science

Further revelations in The Chronicle of Higher Education provides sordid details about the Hauser paper published in 2002 in Cognition and which is now being retracted. But the pattern of behaviour described is that of an accomplished liar well-versed in creating bogus data. To become such an accomplished inventor of data must have taken years of practice.

For how long has Hauser been passing off works of fiction as works of science?

Hauser’s hectoring tone towards his research assistants to try and force his false interpretations on them are also very revealing. The author of Moral Minds exhibits an utter lack of ethics.

Rather than getting a year off to write another work of fiction should he not be required to return all the salary and grant money he has enjoyed as the fruits of his inventiveness?

Where are all the peers who have recommended his being published?

Document Sheds Light on Investigation at Harvard 1

An internal document, however, sheds light on what was going on in Mr. Hauser’s lab. It tells the story of how research assistants became convinced that the professor was reporting bogus data and how he aggressively pushed back against those who questioned his findings or asked for verification.

(more…)

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Posted in Ethics, Science, Scientific Fraud | 1 Comment »

Flattening the Mann hockey stick

August 15, 2010

The shape of Mann’ s hockey stick is morphing. The long horizontal handle (obtained by eliminating the MWP)  actually turns out to be sloping and the sharp upturn gets flattened.

WUWT reports a new and important study on temperature proxy reconstructions (McShane and Wyner 2010) submitted into the Annals of Applied Statistics and is listed to be published in the next issue.

A Statistical Analysis of Multiple Temperature Proxies: Are Reconstructions of Surface Temperatures Over the Last 1000 Years Reliable?

BY BLAKELEY B. MCSHANE∗ AND ABRAHAM J. WYNER†
Northwestern University∗ and the University of Pennsylvania†
This paper is a direct and serious rebuttal to the proxy reconstructions of Mann. It seems watertight on the surface, because instead of trying to attack the proxy data quality issues, they assumed the proxy data was accurate for their purpose, then created a bayesian backcast method. Then, using the proxy data, they demonstrate it fails to reproduce the sharp 20th century uptick

FIG 16. Backcast from Bayesian Model of Section 5. CRU Northern Hemisphere annual mean land temperature is given by the thin black line and a smoothed version is given by the thick black line. The forecast is given by the thin red line and a smoothed version is given by the thick red line. The model is fit on 1850-1998 AD and backcasts 998-1849 AD. The cyan region indicates uncertainty due to t, the green region indicates uncertainty due to β, and the gray region indicates total uncertainty.

The Mann Hockey Stick
Multiproxy reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere surface temperature variations over the past millennium (blue), along with 50-year average (black), a measure of the statistical uncertainty associated with the reconstruction (gray), and instrumental surface temperature data for the last 150 years (red), based on the work by Mann et al. (1999). This figure has sometimes been referred to as the hockey stick. Source: IPCC (2001).

The authors conclude that:

“…..we conclude unequivocally that the evidence for a ”long-handled” hockey stick (where the shaft of the hockey stick extends to the year 1000 AD) is lacking in the data.…..Climate scientists have greatly underestimated the uncertainty of proxy based reconstructions and hence have been overconfident in their models.”


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Posted in Environment, Science, Scientific Fraud | 1 Comment »

“Hausergate” and the perversion of peer review

August 14, 2010

It would seem that  Marc Hauser fudged or exaggerated or imagined or just plain made up some of the results in at least 3 papers which were published after peer review.

Predictably, Harvard is being very reticent with information but as reported by The Boston Globe the university has assured the world that all necessary corrections will be made. Harvard University confirmed yesterday that it has examined concerns about scientific work by prominent psychology professor Marc Hauser and said it has “taken steps to ensure that the scientific record is corrected’’ in three journal articles for which he was a coauthor.

Also predictably others at Harvard are rationalising and taking a sympathetic view. Greg Laden says: “I know Marc Hauser, and I trust him.”

http://homelessmanspeaks.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/circling-wagons-nov-27-2008.jpg

Hauser himself is taking a year off as penance and to purge himself of his misconduct.

1. A 2002 paper published in the journal Cognition is being retracted by Hauser and two coauthors. The retraction notes that an internal Harvard examination found that the data do not support the findings.

The journal ( or is it magazine) and Elsevier need to now defend their editorial process. Who were the peers and what did they review?

2. Also called into question by the investigation is a 2007 paper in the journal Science. Ginger Pinholster, a spokeswoman for the journal, said that one of the coauthors — Justin Wood, a former graduate student at Harvard who now is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Southern California — wrote a letter to the journal in late June. According to Pinholster, the letter stated that an internal investigation at Harvard found there were missing field notes and that the team at Harvard had recreated its research as a result. Science has yet to make a formal change to the article.

Did the missing notes ever exist? Time for Science to open up.

3. A 2007 paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B has already been corrected, because of missing video records and field notes. Earlier this week, Victoria Millen, publishing editor of the British journal, confirmed that the authors contacted the journal last month and informed it of the investigation. The correction notes that incomplete video records and field notes were collected by “the researcher who performed the experiments,’’ a scientist named David Glynn, who has not responded to multiple e-mail and voicemail messages.

Hausergate and Climategate and all its associated “gates” show that the peer review process is sufficiently perverted and corrupted that it needs an overhaul. It is time for the assenting and dissenting peers to stand up and be counted and not hide behind the skirts of anonymous independance.

The Harvard statement said that in cases like Hauser’s, Harvard reports its findings to federal funding agencies, which do their own reviews.

But Harvard cannot pass the buck.

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Posted in Ethics, Science, Scientific Fraud | 2 Comments »

IPCC / GISS: This is fraud !

August 12, 2010

Post by Willis Eschenbach in WUWT

There seems to be no end to the fraud-based advocacy being touted as science and propagated by the IPCC.

Temperatures in Nepal seem to have been particularly crudely “homogenised” by GISS.

IPCC Table 10.2 says: Nepal:  0.09°C per year in Himalayas and 0.04°C in Terai region, more in winter

The black line below is unadjusted temperatures and the red is temperatures after homogenisation. The yellow represents the level of “fudging” that was introduced to convert a cooling trend (in spite of the explosive urbanisation of Kathmandu and the consequent UHI effect) into a “warming” trend.

As Willis Eschenbach puts it

GISS has made a straight-line adjustment of 1.1°C in twenty years, or 5.5°C per century. They have changed a cooling trend to a strong warming trend … I’m sorry, but I see absolutely no scientific basis for that massive adjustment. I don’t care if it was done by a human using their best judgement, done by a computer algorithm utilizing comparison temperatures in India and China, or done by monkeys with typewriters. I don’t buy that adjustment, it is without scientific foundation or credible physical explanation.

This is not just shameless – it is simple fraud.

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Posted in Environment, Ethics, Non-Science, Scientific Fraud | 1 Comment »

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