Stokes’ most recent post, entitled “What Steve McIntyre Won’t Show You Now”, contains a series of lies and fantasies, falsely claiming that I’ve been withholding MM05-EE analyses from readers in my recent fisking of ClimateBaller doctrines, falsely claiming that I’ve “said very little about this recon [MM05-EE] since it was published” and speculating that I’ve been concealing these results because they were “inconvenient”.
It’s hard to keep up with ClimateBaller fantasies and demoralizing to respond to such dreck.
Far from regarding the MM05_EE results being “inconvenient”, I tried very hard to draw further attention to them by publication of a joint statement with Wahl and Ammann on points of agreement and disagreement – a story that I’ve told on numerous occasions.
Within a day or two of Wahl and Ammann’s announcement in May 2005, I had determined that our code and the Wahl-Ammann code reconciled to approximately seven 9s – Wegman waggishly said that Wahl and Ammann had replicated McIntyre and McKitrick rather than Mann. I had a major dispute with them over their refusal to report the controversial verification r2 results – I knew that they got the same answer as us, because our codes reconciled exactly. Our disagreement with Wahl and Ammann came from the characterization of the various reconstructions, not on the squiggles themselves. As readers are aware, I was anxious to settle as many technical issues as possible and made a formal offer to Caspar Ammann to publish a statement of points agreed and points disagreed. Ammann refused because it would be “bad for his career”. A contemptible excuse even for climate academics.
I wanted to publish a joint statement of agreed results to avoid wasting time on stupidity like we’re seeing nine years later from Stokes and the ClimateBallers. Unfortunately, the career greed of Wahl and Ammann won out or else these matters would have been put to rest years ago, as they ought to have been.
Having tried so hard to publish a joint statement of agreed results with Wahl and Ammann, it is ludicrous for Stokes to claim that they are somehow “inconvenient” for me. I wrote detailed blogposts in 2006 showing the exact parallels between Wahl and Ammann variations and the previously published variations in MM05-EE, posts conspicuously ignored by Stokes, though they are both categorized and tagged.
For example, a CA post here showed graphs demonstrating the equivalence of MM05-EE and WA Scenario results. The figure showed actual MM05 and WA digital results plotted in a consistent style and scale. Results using two covariance PCs were shown in pink, with two Mannian PCs in red; two correlation PCs in blue and MBH98 in orange.
Figure 1. From here. Original caption: MBH-style reconstructions. Left: Archived results from MM05(EE) Figure 1. Right – WA Scenario 5 results (emulation). Pink – 2 covariance PCs; blue – 2 correlation PCs; also 4 covariance PCs; red – WA case with Mannian PCs; orange – MBH98.
In the same blogpost, I compared WA scenario 6 (no bristlecones) to the MM05 scenarios shown in WA Scenario 5. Without bristlecones, results were essentially identical regardless of PC methodology – a finding that Mann had presumably encountered when he did calculations from his CENSORED file.
Figure 2 . Original caption: Left – WA Scenario 5 as previously described. Right – WA Scenario 6 with bristlecone series excluded. Orange – MBH98 for reference. Red – with two Mannian PCs (WA Scenario 6a); magenta – with 2 covariance PCs (WA Scenario 6c) ; blue – one graph with 2 correlation PCs (WA Scenario 6b); one graph with 5 covariance PCs. As I recall, some differences arose because WA did not exclude all the stripbark series in the CENSORED directory, but I’d need to fisk the file to crosscheck.
These results, including the above diagram, were later applied in rebutting untrue assertions in Juckes et al.
Long before the publication of Wahl and Amann, we had already reported (MM05-EE) that, despite Mann’s bluster and unsupported claims, we were in substantial agreement on the impact of various permutations on the reconstruction, though not on the implications, stating:
While we differ with Mann et al. on the issue of which methodological assumptions are “correct”, if the assumptions are specified sufficiently precisely, there is surprising consensus on the actual effects…
For example, here is a figure from Mann’s submission to Climatic Change in early 2004, showing calculations from a couple of permutations that relate fairly closely to subsequent presentations by ourselves and Wahl and Ammann.
A few months later, in Mann’s reply to our 2004 submission to Nature (and also in Realclimate posts), Mann raised nearly all the lines of argument that Stokes attributes to Wahl and Ammann. For example, the following paragraph from Mann’s submission to Nature raises topics, subsequently presented by Wahl and Ammann without citation or credit:
The choice of centering of the data in PCA simply changes the relative ordering of the leading patterns of variance. Application of Preisendorfer’s selection rule “Rule N'” (MBH98) selects 2 PCs for the MBH98 centering (1902-1980), but 5 PCs for the MM04 centering (1400- 1971). Although not disclosed by MM04, precisely the same ‘hockey stick’ PC pattern appears using their convention, albeit lower down in the eigenvalue spectrum (PC#4) (Figure 1a). If the correct 5 PC indicators are used, rather than incorrectly truncating at 2 PCs (as MM04 have done), a reconstruction similar to MBH98 is obtained. Moreover, similar results are obtained whether or not proxy networks are represented in terms of PCs.
In MM05-EE, we commented on this discussion (Mann’s reply to our Nature submission being online by then) as follows:
- In a centered calculation on the same data, the influence of the bristlecone pines drops to the PC4 (pointed out in Mann et al., 2004b, 2004d). The PC4 in a centered calculation only accounts for only about 8% of the total variance, which can be seen in calculations by Mann et al. in Figure 1 of Mann et al. [2004d].
- If a centered PC calculation on the North American network is carried out (as we advocate), then MM-type results occur if the first 2 NOAMER PCs are used in the AD1400 network (the number as used in MBH98), while MBH-type results occur if the NOAMER network is expanded to 5 PCs in the AD1400 segment (as proposed in Mann et al., 2004b, 2004d). Specifically, MBH-type results occur as long as the PC4 is retained, while MM-type results occur in any combination which excludes the PC4. Hence their conclusion about the uniqueness of the late 20th century climate hinges on the inclusion of a low-order PC series that only accounts for 8 percent of the variance of one proxy roster.
- If de-centered PC calculation is carried out (as in MBH98), then MM-type results still occur regardless of the presence or absence of the PC4 if the bristlecone pine sites are excluded, while MBH-type results occur if bristlecone pine sites (and PC4) are included. Mann’s FTP site [Mann, 2002-2004] actually contains a sensitivity study on the effect of excluding 20 bristlecone pine sites5 in which this adverse finding was discovered, but the results were not reported or stated publicly and could be discerned within the FTP site only with persistent detective work.
- If the data are transformed as in MBH98, but the principal components are calculated on the covariance matrix, rather than directly on the de-centered data, the results move about halfway from MBH to MM. If the data are not transformed (MM), but the principal components are calculated on the correlation matrix rather than the covariance matrix, the results move part way from MM to MBH, with bristlecone pine data moving up from the PC4 to influence the PC2. In no case other than MBH98 do the bristlecone series influence PC1, ruling out their interpretation as the “dominant component of variance” [Mann et al, 2004b]
All of these issues later became “scenarios” in Wahl and Ammann, who cited our articles, but did not refer to our prior discussion and analysis of the various permutations and combinations (or Mann’s even earlier discussion), thus leaving subsequent readers, like Stokes, with the incorrect belief that Wahl and Ammann had originated analysis of these permutations. In one of my blogposts, I commented:
There is virtually no difference between what we said in MM05b and the WA Scenario 5. It is exceedingly annoying that WA did not discuss the close relationship between what we had said in MM05b and what they said. Indeed, their failure to reconcile the results arguably rises to a distortion of the record – a point which that I made as a reviewer, but which Climatic Change and WA ignored.
Plagiarism is not simply the use of sentences without attribution, but the use of ideas without proper attribution and credit. Through their failure to properly cite either Mann or ourselves on many of these issues, Wahl and Ammann obviously left subsequent readers, like, as we have seen, Nick Stokes, with a false sense of their priority, while at the same time, distorting the research record through their failure to cite and discuss prior analyses of these issues.
Conclusion
I’m sure that Nick Stokes was somewhat stung by my post entitled “What Nick Stokes Wouldn’t Show You”, but the disturbing fact was that my title was true. Brandon Shollenberger had challenged Nick in multiple venues to show a panelplot of randomly selected PC1s in consistent orientation (as the NAS panel had done), but Nick had refused. So my title was cutting, but justified. I’m sure that Nick wanted to give me a taste of my own medicine, but, if he wants to do so, he should not resort to fabricated headlines and deceptions that are no better than National Inquirer scumminess, such as the following:
In his effort to falsely portray me as withholding results, Stokes claimed that I’ve “said very little about this recon since it was published” and speculated that I found its results as “inconvenient”. I obviously presented these results both in academic literature and in multiple Climate Audit blogposts. I also showed them in presentations. I tried hard to present them in a joint statement with Wahl and Ammann, and have complained on multiple occasions about their refusal. Stokes’ suggestion and implication to the contrary is both unfounded and contemptible.
I’m not going to bother commenting on his supposed gotcha, challenging why issues with Mannian PCs appear to have relatively less impact in the modern period where the data mining is occurring than in earlier periods. Given that there is no dispute between ourselves and Wahl and Ammann (or Mann) on this point, Nick might think for a while on why this is not an issue among us, before falsely claiming a gotcha.
