Experts claim 2006 climate report plagiarized

Experts claim 2006 climate report plagiarized

www.usatoday.com

An influential 2006 congressional report that raised questions about the validity of global warming research was partly based on material copied from textbooks, Wikipedia and the writings of one of the scientists criticized in the report, plagiarism experts say.

Review of the 91-page report by three experts contacted by USA TODAY found repeated instances of passages lifted word for word and what appear to be thinly disguised paraphrases.

(visit the link for the full news article)

There is more to come about this, and also more that has been uncovered.

At this point, the report is potentially going to lead to a charge of scientific misconduct against either Wegman or the actual author. The reason I say 'actual author' is that plagiarism has been uncovered in one of Wegman's students PhD thesis. As the senior author, he carries a good chunk of the can. This was obviously a congressional report, and perhaps has some related consequences. Moreover, any work funded by external agencies will now attract attention.

He is currently under investigation at George Mason for this issue, and is reportedly banned from supervising any new students.

The chances are it will grow into an even greater problem for Wegman (relating to the statistics he used and abused), and perhaps even to people like Steve McIntyre.

The blog Deep Climate has been crucial in uncovering the issues in the Wegman report, and reports on some of the emerging statistical issues here.

www.usatoday.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

reply to post by melatonin



Oh! The irony.
This will surely be ignored by the "Climategate" cheer and smear squad who couldn't even scrape up a email that was fraudulent let alone published work.

This messes with the Holy Grail for Deniers, "The Hockey Stick" and Mann are fundamental(pun intended) to the faithful.

Even worse, though, is the astonishing fact that this special collection of “hockey sticks” is not even a random sample of the 10,000 pseudo-proxy PC1s originally produced in the GRL study. Rather it expressly contains the very top 100 – one percent – having the most pronounced upward blade. Thus, McIntyre and McKitrick’s original Fig 1-1, mechanically reproduced by Wegman et al, shows a carefully selected “sample” from the top 1% of simulated “hockey sticks”. And Wegman’s Fig 4-4, which falsely claimed to show “hockey sticks” mined from low-order, low-autocorrelation “red noise”, contains another 12 from that same 1%!

I don't believe it, who would have thought.

Kudos to this site.

Yeah, Deep Climate (and John Mashey) have done some great work here.

The statistical issues are interesting. As Wegman was meant to provide an independent assessment of the 'Hockey Stick' controversy. What he actually did was simply use McIntyre's software to produce the same data - ridiculous. Moreover, this was posed as independent, lol.

So it contains the same issues as McIntyre's work (blatent cherrypicking), but also misrepresented what they actually did. In addition, Wegman had refused to pass over the software he used to perform his analysis and provide anything asked for by others - which is ironic, when they concluded with a call for openness.

You might also remember the furore over the climategate manufactroversy and deleting emails. Check out the USAtoday article...

And I'm sure it will be ignored (here and elsewhere). This was uncovered months back, and GMU have been investigating since before the summer. The first articles started to trickle out a month back without much of a splash.

Sort of highlights how well the media arm of the denial machine works - self-perpetuating noise machine.