Deltoid

Tim Curtin's incompetence with basic statistics

Thu, 17 May 2012 02:05:07 -0500

Tim Curtin's incompetence with basic statistics is the stuff of legend. Curtin has now demonstrated incompetence at a fairly new journal called The Scientific World Journal. Consider his very first "result" (emphasis mine):

I first regress the global mean temperature (GMT) anomalies against the global annual values of the main climate variable evaluated by the IPCC Hegerl et al. [17] and Forster et al. [28] based on Myhre et al. [29], namely, the total radiative forcing of all the noncondensing greenhouse gases [RF]

Annual(Tmean) = a + b[RF] + u(x)

The results appear to confirm the findings of Hegerl et al. [17] with a fairly high R^2 and an excellent t-statistic (>2.0) and P-value (<0.01) but do not pass the Durbin-Watson test (>2.0) for spurious correlation (i.e., serial autocorrelation), see Table 1. This result validates the null hypothesis of no statistically significant influence of radiative forcing by noncondensing GHGs on global mean temperatures.

Any first year stats student or competent peer reviewer should be able to tell you that you a statistical test cannot prove the null hypothesis. But it's far worse than that as Tamino explains:

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May 2012 Open thread

Tue, 01 May 2012 12:11:48 -0500

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April 2012 Open thread

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 01:54:51 -0500

More thread.

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March 2012 Open Thread

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 01:19:50 -0500

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Wegman Heartland update

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 18:59:27 -0500

John Mashey, in comments writes:

It has been a busy week or so, with more to come.

1) See Fakery, p.3 and p.12. In ~2009, Heartland+SEPP+CSCDGC got ~$8M. The other 9 on p.3 got ~$39M.The additional 36 501(c)(3) on p.12 added another $283M.

Now, only some of that is for climate disinformation, but some of it is for tobacco advocacy and other science disinformation, such as on environmental issues. In addition, these entities cross-support each other in various ways. One often finds them cross-quoting, cross-writing articles, signing petitions, together.

It is far cheaper to create confusion than to actually do science and improve understanding. Still, there's a $330M in 2009 for these folks.

2) Wegman. In addition to the prime site where this all started over 2 years ago Deep Climate, where there have been recent updates, and USA Today, where story broke, but as gotten updates, there is:

Retraction Watch,

Chronicle of Higher Education

Rabett

Stoat.

I can assure you that this story ... is only starting again. It only took 709 days to reach this conclusion, and people might ponder this passage from Strange Inquiries at GMU (SIGMU), p.21, from GMU's policy:

'In conducting the investigation, the committee - (a) Uses diligent efforts to ensure that the investigation is thorough and sufficiently documented and includes examination of all research records and evidence relevant to reaching a decision on the merits of the allegations;
(b) Interviews each respondent, complainant, and any other available person who has been reasonably identified as having information regarding any relevant aspects of the investigation, including witnesses identified by the respondent; and
(c) Pursues diligently all significant issues and leads discovered that are determined relevant to the investigation, including any evidence of additional instances of possible research misconduct, and continues the investigation to completion.'

Now, inquiring minds might want to know:

1) Was there any other information that a diligent committee might have found? Like Strange Scholarship? Wegman certainly knew about it. Maybe the diligent commiteee somehow didn't notice it?

2) Did the committee ever check Deep Climate to see if anything else came up? Guess not.

3) Did the committee ever get anything like this graph of the various alleged plagiarisms with Wegman and students?

4) Are Roger Stough (VP Research), Peter Stearns (provost) and Alan Merton (GMU PResident) involved?

Anyway, main conversation is at Deep Climate for the latest news, but others should know.

Here's a theme.

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Robert Manne on Monckton's plan for the Australian media

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 23:52:45 -0500

Over at the Monthly, Robert Manne writes about Monckton's plan for a super-rich person to establish a Fox News for Australia. I thought we already had that in the Australian.

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February 2012 Open Thread

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:52:21 -0500

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More fraud from Pat Michaels

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 11:40:37 -0500

Pat Michaels is infamous for his fraudulent graph presented to Congress in 1998. Dana Nuccitelli at Skeptical Science details some more fraudulent graphs from Michaels.

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The Australian's War on Science 76: Dad Jokes

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 09:58:36 -0500

Whenever we had bean salad, my Dad would always ask "What's that?" When told what it was, he would say "Don't tell me what it's been, tell me what it is now!" That's a Dad joke. The defining properties of a Dad joke are that it is not funny and that Dad keeps repeating it. In their ongoing war on science The Australian is now committing war crimes by deploying Dad jokes (which I recall were banned by the Geneva Convention in 1949).

Imre Salusinszky, who declared global warming to be dead in January of last year has repeated the same unfunny joke this January:

Last year, other parts of the globe followed suit. According to the World Meteorological Organisation: "The most significant area of below-normal temperatures in 2011 was in northern and central Australia, where temperatures were up to 1C below average in places . . . Other regions to experience below-normal temperatures in 2011 included the western United States and southwestern Canada, and parts of east Asia."

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January 2012 Open Thread

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 20:51:15 -0500

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Better late than never at The Australian

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 00:08:22 -0500

The Australian finally publishes Mike Sandiford's correction of the false claims from Plimer that The Australian published two weeks earlier:

Deliberately misrepresenting data or making it up is just not on.

Here's an example. In a section from his new book, How To Get Expelled from School, as reprinted in The Weekend Australian recently, Plimer claims: "Antarctic ice core (Siple) shows that there were 330 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the air in 1900; Mauna Loa Hawaiian measurements in 1960 show that the air then had 260ppm carbon dioxide."

Plimer goes on to say: "Either the ice core data is wrong, the Hawaiian carbon dioxide measurements are wrong, or the atmospheric carbon dioxide content was decreasing during a period of industrialisation."

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Merry Christmas

Sat, 24 Dec 2011 08:14:03 -0500

Best wishes to all my readers. A more successful gingerbread house than last time.

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Keith Kloor's thinking on climate change

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 05:10:07 -0500

Keith Kloor says that this "concisely expressed" his thinking on climate change:

I categorise myself as somebody who recognises that additional CO2 in the atmosphere as a result of man's activities (fossil fuel burning and land use change) will have an effect on the balance of radiation coming into and leaving our atmosphere.

I do not have a confirmed view as to exactly what the impact of the CO2 will have (feedbacks etc being uncertain) but I know that it must have an effect - that's physics.

Monckton would not disagree with any of this. This seems to be an example of The View from Nowhere.

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Wegman one of The Scientist's top five science scandals

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 03:46:22 -0500

The Wegman scandal has made The Scientist's list of the top 5 science scandals of 2011:

A controversial climate change paper was retracted when it was found to contain passages lifted from other sources, including Wikipedia. The paper, published by climate change skeptic Edward Wegman of George Mason University in Computational Statistics and Data Analysis in 2008, showed that climatology is an inbred field where most researchers collaborate with and review each other’s work. But a resourceful blogger uncovered evidence of plagiarism, and the journal retracted the paper, which was cited 8 times, in May.

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The Australian's War on Science 75: Plimer vs Plimer

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 11:05:42 -0500

The Australian has continued its war on science by printing an extract from Ian Plimer's new book, How to Get Expelled from School. The extract is largely plagiarised from this press release on a recent paper in Science by Funder et al finding large fluctuations in Arctic sea ice over the last 10,000 years. Plimer did change this passage in the press release

In order to reach their surprising conclusions, Funder and the rest of the team organised several expeditions to Peary Land in northern Greenland.

to this:

In order to reach their unsurprising conclusions, Funder and the rest of the team organised several expeditions to Peary Land in northern Greenland.

Plimer contradicts his alteration of the plagiarised text in his next paragraph:

What is interesting about this study is that the new understanding came from getting away from computer modelling and doing fieldwork in pretty inhospitable areas.

Is it a "new understanding" or is it "unsurprising"? And while this sentence is original, it's also wrong -- the study's estimate that Arctic ice was 50% less 7000 years ago came from computer modelling. Plimer would have known this if he read the paper instead of just the press release. He perhaps would also have noticed that the paper begins with this:

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