Auditing Assessing Climate Change

UPDATE: See the chicken or the Wegman Report for a possible answer to the many questions raised here

Capital Climate reports that Donald Rapp has emerged in USA Today to post a comment which fills in some holes and opens others. Dr. Rapp provides a letter that he wrote to Ray Bradley and a Mr. Fedor, who most likely is associated with Elsevier. Elsevier owns Academic Press, the publisher of Bradley's Reconstructing Climates of the Quaternary.

Dear Mr. Fedor and Dr. Ray Bradley:

You recently wrote to Praxis/Springer Publishing, the following message:

"Thanks to everyone for your prompt reply. I've copied author Ray Bradley and a couple of representatives from our Legal team on my reply. This is a bit of a complicated scenario. Dr. Edward Wegman (author of the Wegman Report) originally plagiarized from Bradley, and from what we can tell, some of that same content was then used by Rapp without attribution. The details can be found in the links below. Once you've had the opportunity to investigate this further, please let me know how best to proceed. We've yet to hear back from George Mason on the Wegman situation. I've had the misfortune of having to manage plagiarism throughout my career, but this is the first triangular instance. If Rapp did plagiarize, he did it from a report that isn't ours, but some of the content in that report is ours. Bit of a head scratcher."

Elsevier is concerned that it's copyright has been breached. They leave no doubt about their certainty that the Wegman report contains plagiarized material, but are not sure about Dr. Rapps's book, which they believe has substantial material from the Wegman Report including some of the plagiarized material. They are not certain of how to proceed. Since Dr. Rapp's book, Assessing Climate Change, was published with Springer, Elsevier's beef, if they decide there is any there, is with Springer.

Dr. Rapp continues

My book: Assessing Climate Change" published by Praxis/Springer contains 1,348 specific citations to references giving credit to authors for their work. It also includes 411 specific quotations by authors with their own words included in quote signs. In addition, my book provides the specific attributions to Dr. Wegman:

Note the claims here. 1348 citation and 411 specific quotes. As we shall see, this may have nothing to do with the case. The issue is whether sections have been taken directly from the Wegman report, if so whether they are are a) cited or b)shown as quotes and whether any sections, if any, taken from the Wegman report are among those which the Wegman Report took from Prof. Bradley's book. Bunnies who wish to follow along can read the text on Google Books, but before we get to that let us look at the rest of Dr. Rapp's comment.

• "A team led by Professor Edward J. Wegman performed an independent examination of the hockey stick controversy (Wegman, Scott, and Said, 2006). They produced a lengthy report, full of details. According to Wegman, Scott, and Said (2006):"
• "Wegman, Scott, and Said (2006) performed a calculation..."
• "Wegman, Scott, and Said (2006) went on to say...:"
• "Wegman, Scott, and Said (2006) performed a calculation..."
• "The findings of Wegman, Scott, and Said (2006) are quite lengthy and only a very brief summary is given here."
• "Adapted from Wegman, Scott, and Said (2006)."
• "Wegman, Scott, and Said (2006) have suggested that the field..."
• "Wegman, Scott, and Said (2006) also said...:"
• "According to Wegman, Scott, and Said (2006)...:"
• "A team led by Professor Edward J. Wegman performed an independent examination of the hockey stick controversy (Wegman, Scott, and Said, 2006). They produced a lengthy report, full of details. According to Wegman, Scott, and Said (2006):"
• "Wegman, Scott, and Said (2006) have suggested that the field, temperature history of the Earth, is dominated by a cadre (cabal) that is vitally concerned about the potential impacts of global warming, and supports the hockey stick result, as well as the procedure used to derive it. Wegman, Scott, and Said (2006) said:"

It is possible that in a few places, I may have slipped up and used words from a paper and forgot to give attribution. Let's suppose I did this 10 times, or 20; big deal.

Well, as was said above, none of this really meets the issue of whether sections of Dr. Rapp's book were taken from the Wegman Report without attribution or quoting and whether any of those sections were the ones which came from Prof. Bradley's book, but as we are quite used to now, Dr. Rapp closes with the sue John Abraham ploy

I am warning you now that if you persist in spreading the idea that I committed plagiarism, I will sue you for all you are worth. If I ever find out who the jerk is who put this on deepclimate.org, I will sue him for all it is worth.

I also plan to contact Wegman in case he feels that he should sue Ray Bradley who is clearly at fault here.

Given what we know about the George Mason University inquiry and investigation some, not Eli to be sure, might find the ultimate statement in Dr. Rapp's comment not as reassuring as Dr. Rapp does.

By the way, this is what Wegman had to say in a recent email: “It is my opinion that Dr. Rapp has not plagiarized anything and I hold him harmless” and claims that these are “wild conclusions that have nothing to do with reality”.

Donald Rapp

Eli thought that it would be useful to compare what Dr. Rapp had written and the Wegman Report. Deep Climate had shown the similarities of a paragraph dealing with tree rings between the Wegman Report and Dr. Rapp's book, but Eli will cover the entire section. This will establish whether or not there is a substantial overlap between the two, and whether, where there is a substantial overlap, there has been a proper acknowledgement.

The rules of the game are that direct quotes must be acknowledged as such and paraphrases acknowledged by citations. Eli will provide the text from the Wegman report in black and additions, deletions from Dr. Rapp's book in red. Some, not Eli, may conclude that Dr. Rapp has simply copied most this section from the Wegman Report, with very minor grammatical changes and a very occasional substitution of a minor word. But wait, there are a couple of sentences that are not in the Wegman Report and a long quote from Dr. Soon and Dr. Baliunas added toward the end.

Still, there is no reference to the Wegman Report in this section of Dr. Rapp's book. Perhaps it was simply one of those ten or twenty careless errors. But remember the rules, direct quotes must be indicated as such. In something of this sort it is very important to provide a complete record which Eli will endeavor to do so as to be as fair as possible to Dr. Rapp. On page 2 of Dr. Rapp's book and page 13 of the Wegman Report, we read

Tree Rings – A cross section of a temperate forest tree shows variation of lighter and darker bands that are usually continuous around the circumference of the tree. These bands are the so-called tree rings and are due to seasonal effects. Each tree ring is composed of large thin-walled cells called early wood and smaller more densely packed thick walled cells called late wood. The average width of a tree ring is a function of many variables including the tree species, tree age, stored carbohydrates in the tree, nutrients in the soil, and climatic factors including sunlight, precipitation, temperature, wind speed, humidity, and even carbon dioxide availability in the atmosphere. Obviously there are many confounding factors, so the problem challenge is to extract the temperature signal and to thus distinguish the temperature signal from the noise caused by the many confounding factors. Temperature information is usually derived from inter-annual variations in the ring width as well as inter-annual and intra-annual density variations. Density variations are valuable in paleoclimatic temperature reconstructions because they have a relatively simple growth function that, in mature trees, is approximately linear with age. The density variations have been shown empirically to contain a strong climatic temperature signal. Two values of density are measured within each growth ring: minimum density representing early wood and maximum density representing late wood. Maximum density values are strongly correlated with April to August mean temperatures in trees across the boreal forest from Alaska to Labrador, Schweingruber et al., (1993). Both tree ring width and density data are used in combination to extract the maximal climatic temperature signal.

The Cclimate signal is strongest in trees that are under stress. Trees growing in sites where the climate does not limit growth tend to produce rings that are uniform. Trees that are growing close to their extreme ecological range are greatly influenced by climate. Climate variations that strongly influence annual growth increments. Two types of stress are commonly recognized:, moisture stress and temperature stress. Trees growing in semiarid regions are limited by water availability, and thus variations in ring width reflect this climatic moisture signal. Trees growing near to their ecological limits either in terms of latitude or altitude show growth limitations imposed by temperature and thus ring width variations in such trees contain a relatively strong temperature signal. However, the biological processes are extremely complex so that very different combinations of climatic conditions may cause similar ring width increments. Tree growth and carbohydrate production by a tree in one year will precondition the tree for strong growth in the subsequent year so that there is a strong autocorrelation in the ring width time series. Photosynthetic processes are accelerated with the increased availability of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and, hence, it is conjectured that ring growth would also be correlated with atmospheric carbon dioxide. Robinson, Robinson and Soon (2007) and Idso and Idso (2007) provide data and references that indicate that plant growth is stimulated by increased CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, particularly at warmer temperatures. There is some evidence that long lived, 1000 to 2000-year old pine trees have shown a sharp increase in growth during the past half century. Other examples are provided by Robinson, Robinson and Soon (2007). In addition, oxides of nitrogen are formed in internal combustion engines that can be deposited as nitrates that also contributeing to fertilization of plant materials. It is clear that while there are temperature signals in the tree rings, the temperature signals are confounded with many other factors including fertilization effects due to use of fossil fuels in the 20th century.

Wider rings are frequently produced during the early life of a tree. Thus, the tree rings frequently contain a low frequency signal that is unrelated to climate or, at least, confounded with climatic effects such as temperature. In order to use tree rings as a successful temperature signal successfully, this low frequency component must be removed. This is typically done by a nonlinear parametric trend fit using a polynomial or modified exponential curve. Because the early history of tree rings confounds the climatic signal with low-frequency- specimen- specific signals, tree rings are not usually effective for accurately determining low-frequency, longer-term effects. Once there is reasonable confidence that the tree ring signal reflects a temperature signal, and then a calibration is performed using the derived tree ring data and instrumented temperature data over the (comparatively recent) period during which actual climatic temperature measurements were made. The assumption in this inference is that when tree ring structure observed during the recent instrumented period that is similar to tree ring structure observed in the past, both will have correspondingly similar temperature profiles (Beckman and Mahoney, 1998). However As pointed out earlier, many different sets of climatic conditions can (and do) yield similar tree ring profiles. Thus tree ring proxy data alone is not are unlikely to be sufficient to determine past climate variables. See Bradley (1999) for a discussion of the fitting and calibration process for dendritic-based temperature reconstruction. (Mann, Bradley and Hughes, 1998).

As Soon and Baliunas (2003a, b) pointed out:

Long quote from S&B placed here

Despite these repeated warnings and cautions by a number of scientists, paleoclimatologists have used tree rings widely and repeatedly to infer past temperature variations, although the variations from investigator to investigator are large (Esper, et al., 2005 a)

Anon. (N) provides further details on the use of tree ring proxies.

Eli reports, you decide. The Bunny invites others to continue this audit.