Chip Clips
Skeptical Science has a nice article on how Pat Michaels and his Sancho Panza, Chip Knappenberger like to copy and paste figures and statements of others, adding, shall Eli say, a bit of the taste of their own garlic to the sauce. An early example of this saga, in which Eli had a bit of a role, was the good Dr. Michaels editing Hansen's 1988 predictions of global temperature anomaly changes based on three emission scenarios. In order to convince others that Hansen was not close, Patty managed to erase the lower two scenarios and insist that the highest one was the one that Hansen claimed most likely, before Congress no less.
Dana181 over at SkS discusses this and several other inconvenient eraser jobs emanating from the desks of Michaels and Knappenberger (good Chip bad Pat not being a game the bunnies play) and this brought Dr. Knappenberger out of the woodwork to discuss how they "adapted" a figure from Gillett et al. to erase some inconvenient data (somewhat smile making considering how Steve M and friends go on about how Phil Jones, Mike Mann and others are hiding the data). Chip wrote
The caption associated with our graphic showing the results of Gillett et al. included the following:So let Eli take a look at the original graph
"(figure adapted from Gillet et al., 2012: note the original figure included additional data not relevant to this discussion)."
Dana181 pointed out that this was not what Pat Michaels had shownBut once again, the data projecting larger future global warming was inconvenient for Patrick Michaels' narrative, so he simply deleted it.
The dashed lines in the horizontal direction are the projections from the unconstrained climate model for the three emissions scenarios (the RCPs). The solid vertical lines are the model projections using the 1851-2010 data, and the dotted vertical lines (deleted by Michaels) are the model projections using the 1901-2000 data.
and Eli said something along the lines of The figure was not adapted from Gillett, et al., it was copied and altered without permission in a [- snip- ] way.and the word dishonest got snipped.
Moderator Response: [Rob P] You're going to have re-phrase your comment here - the snipped portion is a breach of the comments policy.
If you think that ain't dishonest, Eli has fine, but underperforming football player to sell you, bids start at $10 million on Ebay.
Posts
38 comments:
Paul Knappenberger has a doctorate? That's news to me.
Ho Ho! Eli wins the Golden Carrot! Remember Don Easterbrook?
FS beat me to it. Just a Master's (of type and provenance unknown to me). It's really a pretty low-wattage outfit, innit?
Just to add that one seldom-highlighted principal purpose of these fud operations is to tell the various Masters of the Universe what they want to hear. We see the same syndrome in economics, as Krugman details, such that when ideologically-tinted wingnut economics come up hard on the shoals of reality, generally the former wins. It has long been thus, the record of such things dating back at least to Galileo's conviction by people who knew perfectly well that he was right. Would that we had ~four centuries to await, patiently or otherwise, correction of the record in the case of climate change.
BTW, heard tell that Pat's own dissertation at UW was a bit of a mick. That might bear some looking into, maybe with an assist from MT, who will perhaps know where some of the bodies are buried or at least where to locate a copy of said tome.
It would also be interesting to know how Pat got that nice VA state climatologist gig so soon after getting his degree. I suspect some sort of malign influence, but then I'm prone to that.
Fine work here examining the doc like that, BTW. I would vote to add a Parsley Cluster with Lettuce Leaf to that Golden Carrot.
> tell the various Masters of the Universe what they want to hear.
"Advocacy Science"
Aw shucks, I did the samething as Eli the day that the Michaels post was released.
I shoulda pre-empted the Rabbet...
Still, as Bill is turning this into a Hall of Shame, we should also recall Plimer's naughtiness:
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/05/ian_plimer_lies_about_source_o.php#comment-1655941
Bernard J. Hyphen-Anonymous XVII, Esq.
Dishonest sounds like a fair comment. And I do not want your football player.
PS: Internet Explorer does not like your new Rabett Run. So we are now on Firefox.
Little Mouse
I wouldn't waste time trying to shame these people. Someone going to this kind of trouble isn't unaware that they're up to no good. T
This is Confidence Man not American Tragedy.
For shame- cramping the style of the world's most conspicuous consumer of rubber graph paper, could lead to starvation on the upper Amazon, depression in Malaya, and the bankruptcy of the Snowpaque industry.
Eli,
Chip has learned nothing from this fiasco. Undeterred Chip continues to try and invert reality and misrepresents scientists' work.
As well as ignoring those papers and data and findings that do not fit his ideological agenda.
http://www.masterresource.org/2012/01/lukewarmering2011/
When called on it he then tries to misrepresent and distort my position and my words.
Disgusting and shameful-- but only to those with a conscience it seems.
Albatross
Dr. Jay Cadbury, phd.
@Albatross
hey at least you can comment there Albatross. I recall it was you who slandered me at skeptical science and got me banned.
@Eli
I honestly can't even see what was misrepresented in the graph. The portion you put a square box around looks no different in the graphic above it. Please go into more detail. Additionally, this isn't even close to the Michael Mann remake.
Eli,
Since when does “adapted” mean “redrawn or drawn from the data”? If I had the data that went into the graph, then I would have plotted up a new graph—but what’s the difference if I plot a new graph the way I want or alter some other graph so it plots what I want to show?
I go over to the CRU site and get the latest temperature data and plot it up—If I want to plot it up for 1901-2000 I can, if I want to plot it up for 1851-2010 I can. I am not bound to use only the plots contained in Brohan et al., but I could use those plots if wanted to. Had Brohan, for space reasons or other reasons, plotted the NH, the SH, and global combination as a single figure, and I’d have no compunction against erasing the NH and SH if I wanted to concentrate on the global results. If Brohan had plotted the HadCRUT2 and HadCRUT3 on a single figure (sorta like their Fig. 13), and I only wanted to show the HadCRUT3 data (after all, that is what the paper was about), I’d have no problem erasing the HadCRUT2 data from their chart. Had Gillett et al. plotted their “improved” 1851-2010 results and the presumably non-improved 1901-2000 results on the same chart and I only wanted to show the improved results (after all, that was the paper was about), I would erase the 1901-2000 results—oh yeah, I did do that! Had I asked Nathan Gillett for the data that went into that chart, I seriously doubt that he would have provided it with restrictions as to how I had to plot it. If Gillett et al. had only used 1901-2000 data, the paper probably would have never been produced or accepted—one of the major novelties of the research was using the full temperature record. Gillett et al. considered the results using 1851-2010 an improvement over previous work using 1900-1999 temperatures. So why oh why oh why is everyone so fired up over us focusing on the new improved results—those that were clearly preferred by the authors themselves?
If you all want to dredge up the Congressional testimony from 1998—then there seems to be a bit more room to argue as to which Scenario the original author preferred for the 1988-1997 period (of course, this has already been argued to death)—but in the case of Gillett et al. it is pretty darn clear the preferences of the authors.
Honestly, I am at a loss to understand the outrage over our handling of Gillett et al. (or Schmittner et al. for that matter—another case where we presented concentrated on the main results of the paper).
-Chip Knappenberger
Since erasing from a figure means you altered it, not adapted it, and since it was even easier to simply say we think the 1851-2010 series is more reliable (care to defend that?) we think the result from that series is more reliable.
You threw the 1901-2010 result down the memory hole with malice.
That's why anyone shaking hands with you or Pat should count their fingers.
Dear Jay,
You are making strawman arguments and also making false claims.
I am pleased to inform you that I was not the reason you lost your posting privileges at SkS. You lost your privileges them as readers of SkS know, b/c after repeated warning you failed to comply with the house rules.
And IIRC, you have run into trouble posting at at least one other location.
I'll let Eli deal with your other nonsense.
Albatross, PhD
Eli,
"we think the 1851-2010 series is more reliable (care to defend that?)"
Well, I didn't perform the study which led to that conclusion, Gillett et al. did--and what we did at WCR was to highlight that finding. However, FWIW, I did add my two-cents to its defense during the discussion of Gillett et al over at SkS last week.
-Chip
This is how Dr. Urban (a co-author on Schmittner et al.) feels about the doctoring (not "adapted from"):
"World Climate Report doctored our paper’s main figure when reporting on our study. This manipulated version of our figure was copied widely on other blogs....I find this data manipulation problematic. When I created the real version of that figure, it occurred to me that it would be reproduced in articles, presentations, or blog posts. Because I find the difference between our land and ocean estimates to be such an important caveat to our work, I made sure to include all three curves in the figure, so that anyone reproducing it would have to acknowledge these caveats....I find the result of their figure manipulation to be very misleading...They intentionally took our figure out of the context in which it was originally presented, a form of “selective quotation” which hides data that does not support their interpretation...I find World Climate Report’s behavior very disappointing and hardly compatible with true skeptical inquiry"
This is what Hansen had to say in response to Michaels doctoring a figure form Hansen et al. (1998):
"Pat Michaels, has taken the graph from our 1988 paper with simulated global temperatures for scenarios A, B and C, erased the results for scenarios B and C, and shown only the curve for scenario A in public presentations, pretending that it was my prediction for climate change. Is this treading close to scientific fraud?"
An apology to the authors by Michaels is warranted.
I think it prudent to go and thoroughly examine each and every graph that WCR and Pat Michaels have ever published. Call it an audit if you will, and since McIntyre is not up to the task, maybe skeptical bunnies will take up the slack.
And note dear bunnies how how the outspoken Michaels suddenly becomes very shy when it comes to facing critique one on one and trying to defend his scientific fraud. He has does not even have the courage to defend his own bad science, instead sending an administrator from WCR to be his spokesperson.
I would also like to know exactly whose idea it was to doctor the figures from Schmittner et al and Gillet et al.
We are unlikely to hear any public protests from Gillett et al, as the authors are all Environment Canada employees who are currently muzzled by the Harper government.
Jay Cadbury - time for some more carrots, methinks - your Ideological Astigmatism has led to a serious decline in perception!
(You're banned at SkS? What a blessing!)
Eli,
“Since erasing from a figure means you altered it, not adapted it,”
From the caption of IPCC AR4 Figure TS.1 p.24: “adapted from Figure 6.3”
If you want to play spot the differences, IPCC AR4 Figure 6.3, p.444 looks remarkably like Figure TS.1 except that it has an additional line of data on it and a few misc. annotations.
This is all so silly.
-Chip
Eli,
As to which window is the most appropriate window to use in Gillett et al., that is not a settled question:
This is what Dr. Annan had to say about Gillett et al. (my highlights):
"This new [linking to Gilett et al.] paper also suggests that the transient response of a modern model (albeit a particularly sensitive one) has to be significantly downscaled to match observations. Mind you, that paper also has a worrying discrepancy between the results obtained with 1900-2000, versus 1850-2010 data. Normally one would expect the latter to be broadly a subset of the former - more data means closer convergence to the true value - but the two sets of results are virtually disjoint, which suggests something a bit strange may be going on in the analysis (cf Schmitter et al with the land-only versus land+ocean results). But just a glance at the first figure shows a striking divergence between model and data over the first decade of the 21st century (compared to the close agreement prior to then). Something isn't quite right there"
And as we know, James has done quite a bit of work in the field of climate sensitivity. So his opinion/insight counts for something.
Yet Michaels would have his readers believe that the result they focused on is cock sure.
To m knowledge Pat/WCR didn't write long reviews of these papers (e.g., Park and Royer (2011), Pagani et al. (2010), Previdi et al. (2011), Kiehl (2011)). Why?
I'll tell you why, they do not support his ideology/narrative. That just goes to show how that Pat is both biased and is pushing an agenda. He cannot even make a weak case without ignoring inconvenient papers, key caveats in those papers or without doctoring graphics from the papers he does seek out to review. It all smacks of desperation on his part.
Albatross
Eli,
"This is all so silly."
Chip is projecting again.
It is really quite telling (and disturbing) that Chip really fails to understand the fundamental difference between scientific fraud (i.e., doctoring other scientists' figures to as to hide inconvenient data and thus misrepresent their work) and what is an acceptable way of adapting ones own a figure in such as way as to not change the interpretation or original meaning of that figure.
As I have mentioned before, people are (sadly) very good at justifying, rationalizing even the most heinous crimes. And Chip is demonstrating that very nicely here 9and elsewhere where he pops up on Pat;s behalf), and so did Pat in his denial piece he wrote (or was it Chip?) in response to SkS.
Pat and Chip are utterly divorced from reality and morality. They will stare you in the eye, smile and lie through their teeth and not even think twice about it. In fact, Pat has done that before Congress on a few occasions.
Given Pat's and Chip's complete disconnect with ethics and proper scientific conduct and deep-seated ideology, I fear that we are probably bashing our heads against a wall here. They are simply beyond the reach of rational and reasonable discussion.
Albatross said:
"Yet Michaels would have his readers believe that the result they focused on is cock sure."
That is the heart of the issue. The reason Knappenberg and Michaels erased the data is that it ran counter to their narrative. But if you need to erase data to make the graph fit your narrative, your narrative is not reporting on the original paper, but distorting it.
Anyway, this discussion is pointless. Any scientist who cannot bring themselves to publicly recognize the difference between one of three projections and a prediction is no longer interested in truth. End of story
Tom,
"Anyway, this discussion is pointless. Any scientist who cannot bring themselves to publicly recognize the difference between one of three projections and a prediction is no longer interested in truth. End of story."
Sadly, I have to agree. All the more reason for Waxman to haul Michaels before Congress. Pat can dismiss his peers, but he might feel less glib when faced with a hefty fine or when facing potential jail time.
"Pat can dismiss his peers, but he might feel less glib when faced with a hefty fine or when facing potential jail time."
Here's a thought...
At what point does consciously misrepresenting data that otherwise indicates danger to the security and the ongoing viability of one's country (including the safety and future prosperity of its citizens and its ecosystems) become treason?
If there is no current legislative mechanism to try deliberate intent to deceive and/or mislead that leads directly to national endangerment, might there be a case for suggesting that such be formulated in the future? Might such a legislative mechanism be retrospective?
Bernard J. Hyphen-Anonymous XVII, Esq.
[Heh, word verification says 'straphap'...]
Former Skeptic --- Remember
Piled
higher and
Deeper.
I'm trying to figure out whether Chip Knappenberger's corruption is so internalized that he really doesn't understand why people are objecting to WCR's doctoring of figures, or whether his corruption is overt and he is dishonestly pretending not to understand it. I think it is not yet clear from the evidence which sort of corrupt he is.
I honestly can't even see what was misrepresented in the graph. The portion you put a square box around looks no different in the graphic above it.
So you are literally blind to evidence that doesn't fit your ideology, Jay?
@Chip Knappenberger:
"what’s the difference if I... alter some other graph so it plots what I want to show?"
But you didn't alter it to 'show what you want it to show.'
You altered it to NOT SHOW the data that didn't agree with your conclusion.
The author showed the land/sea figures because they were hugely different - which is highly relevant in assessing the reliability of the combined data.
You took it out - because it is highly relevant in assessing the reliability of the combined data.
I agree with Chip Knappenberger that the altering of the figures themselves is not so interesting. Good practice would have been to mention exactly what was done and link to the original figure but this is a bit of a gray area.
The real problem is ignoring the evidence that weakened the prerferred history. You might want to ignore irrelevant data but you may not ignore inconvenient data and both the figures and the text fails to mention the important caveats. This is as true with others data as with your own.
This can of course sometimes be hard to judge but if you have altered the figures in a way which the original authors and many of your readers think is misleading you obviously failed. If done in good faith the proper response would be to apologize and post a correction. If done in bad faith I would call it scientific misconduct.
"Half Graph" Michaels strikes again.
Pete Dunkelberg
I do believe, those who suffer from fixed delusions, to them, their perceptions and interpretations of events make perfect sense, and everyone else is crazy, irrational, ignorantly unconcerned or part of the conspiracy.
Dr. Jay Cadbury, phd.
The thing that I find amazing about this is that 1901-2000 or 1850-2010 is so important to everybody. Basically the past billions of years of earth's history are irrelevant by your thinking. Of course we know that the past has been thrown out because it demolishes the narrative.
Again, I cannot see what was done to alter the graph. I can see the area in question is just a tick mark after 2040 but the graph lines and the pink, green and yellow bars all line up, I don't see the difference. Furthermore, the obsession with futurology by the alarmists is so stupid. The weatherman can't tell us if it will rain or be sunny tomorrow, yet you bozo clowns think they are going to be right on the money predicting the temperature 30 years from now, what a joke.
Jay, Jay, Jay,
As A N Other wrote, 'tch, tch, tch'.
The past has NOT 'been thrown out', as you say it is simply that in the past the Earth was a different country and the Earth systems did many things differently then because of different geography, solar irradiance and ecological factors.
But of course you knew that and are just trying to confuse the less well informed.
And of course you cannot 'see' unless you look with an open or informed mind. As for 'futurology and bozos' it takes a certain kinda bozo to try to confound weather forecasting with climate projections and a Bozo squared to further confuse projections with predications. A recent post at SkepticalScience can help you out with that latter.
You are making yourself look quite at best ignorant and at worst mendacious.
@Lionel A
So a weatherman telling me it will rain tomorrow is a prediction while a climate scientist telling me that it will be 5 degrees warmer in 2045 is a predication? So how many things is said scientists' predication based upon? 1 thousand? Then why would you listen to it? Do you think the 1000 predications are going to stay the same? I sure don't.
I can't visit skeptical science, Albatross got me banned and now denies it.
Dr. Jay Cadbury, phd.
@Albatross
"I am pleased to inform you that I was not the reason you lost your posting privileges at SkS. You lost your privileges them as readers of SkS know, b/c after repeated warning you failed to comply with the house rules.
And IIRC, you have run into trouble posting at at least one other location."
This is an unproven allegation. There has been no proof that I violated the rules at SkS. At Rc, I suspect foul play was also involved. There was 1 commenter (similar to Albatross at Sks) who complained every time I made a comment and I think there was some favoritism going on as well.
"There was 1 commenter (similar to Albatross at Sks) who complained every time I made a comment and I think there was some favoritism going on as well."
Yes, in Mr. Chocolate's world everyone else is being mean to him. LOL. I do not recall "complaining" every time he made a comment at SkS. As has been explained to Mr. Chocolate several times now, he lost his posting rights at SkS b/c he was incapable of following the comments policy.
He has also run into trouble at Curry's place and at The BlackBoard (IIRC) and at DeepClimate and at Tamino's. Just some examples folks...
Mr. Chocolate is in denial about more than AGW ;)
Albatross
Mr. Chocolate claims that
"I can't visit skeptical science, Albatross got me banned and now denies it."
This is simply false :) Mr. Chocolate got himself banned. How many time do I need to correct this falsehood?
Albatross
"There has been no proof that I violated the rules at SkS"
Really? Here and here. Just two examples, but I have more pressing matters to deal with.
Apart from anything else Knappenberger's use of another authors graphics for his own publication is a breach of copyright. When I've written review articles I've always had to obtain the copyright holders permission to use other author's material.
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