All in a Good Cause
Here's a story you haven't heard, and you should have.
An intelligence source, working for a government agency. He's not a spy, he's
an analyst. He uses computers to crunch numbers and at the end of his work,
out pops the truth that was hiding in the original data. Let's call him "Mann."
The trouble with Mann is, he has an ideology. He knows what he wants his
results to be. And the original numbers aren't giving him that data. So the
agency he works for won't be able to persuade people to fight the war he wants
to fight.
Well, that's not acceptable.
Cooking the Figures
He starts with his software. There are certain procedures that are normal and
accepted in his line of work. But if he makes just one little mistake, his
program does a weird little recursion and if there's any data at all that shows
the pattern he wants it to show, it will be magnified 139 times, so it far
overshadows all the other data.
He can run it on random numbers and it gives him the shape he wants.
Unfortunately, the real-world numbers aren't random -- they have a very
different shape. All the numbers. Even his jimmied program won't give the
results he wants.
All he needs is any data shaped the right way. And so he looks a little farther, and ... here it is. It looks, on the surface, like all the other data that he's been working with. Other researchers working in his field, just glancing at it, will
assume it is, too.
But it isn't. Because the source that gathered this batch of data had some
other key information that takes it all away. The numbers don't mean what
they normally mean. In fact, this number set is absolutely false.
If you use these numbers along with all the other data, however, the clever
little program will pick them up, magnify them radically, and voilá! The final
report shows exactly the shape he needs the numbers to have.
The trouble is, these numbers are supposed to be doublechecked. Anybody
who looks closely at his numbers and at his program will see what he's done.
It's not hard to find, if you have the original data sets and can examine the
program. He will be exposed as a fraud. It will do his cause more harm than
good, if it's made public.
But he's not afraid. He knows how this works.
He doesn't show the program or the lists of his data sources to anybody.
Second, he is given a big boost by the fact that another researcher -- we'll call
him "Santer" -- had his own axe to grind. He was also the author of a
questionable report and got himself appointed to a position that allowed him to
get to the final report before it's published, delete all statements about how
"there is no way to reach a definitive conclusion," and replace them with his
own conclusion, which is absolute.
And it works. Santer's report is accepted, even though it has since been
proven false. Mann's report continues to be relied on, and no one questions it.
The government agency issues the report which they know has been altered to
fit preconceived conclusions.
Vast sums of money are expended on the basis of what he claims to have
found. People's live are put at risk.
Mann and Santer didn't do it for the money, though grants do flow in their
direction.
They did it for the cause. It's a noble cause. And even though the data don't
actually say what they wanted them to say -- in fact, they say the opposite --
they are untroubled by that. Because the government actions that are being
taken are the Right Thing.
Santer and Mann are true believers. They don't need evidence. Evidence is
just something you create to persuade other people.
Here's the amazing thing about Mann's original report: He's not the only
researcher working in this field. In fact, it's the job of many hundreds of
researchers to refuse to accept his data at face value. After all, his findings
disagree with everyone else's. Before they accept his results, they have a duty
to look at his software, look at his data, and try to duplicate his results.
But nobody does it. Not a soul.
Nor, when it goes public, does anyone in the press check the results -- because
they want him to be right, too.
Steve the Canadian Businessman
Not until a Canadian businessman -- let's call him "Steve" -- took a look at the
stats and got curious. Now, it happens that Steve is in the mining business; he
also happened to be a prize-winning math student in college. He knows how to
read number sets. He knows what good analysis looks like.
He also knows what cooked figures look like. He has seen the phony
projections that companies use when they're trying to swindle people. Their
results are too perfect. Mann's report looks too perfect, too.
So Steve starts digging. First, he read's Mann's original report. He finds it an
exercise in obscurity. From what he published, it's very, very hard to tell just
what statistical methods Mann used, or even what data he operated on.
This is wrong -- it's not supposed to be that way. Scientists are supposed to
leave a clear path so other people can follow them up and replicate their
research.
The fact that it's so obscure suggests that Mann does not want anyone
checking his work.
But Mann used government grants in his research. Which means he has an
obligation to disclose. Steve contacts him, asks for the information. He gets a
runaround. He gets pointed to a website that does not have the information.
He tries again, and again gets a runaround -- in fact, Mann sends him a very
rude letter saying that he will no longer communicate with him.
Why should he? Steve isn't a legitimate researcher in that field. He's just a
businessman.
But Steve is now sure there's something fishy going on, and he doesn't give up.
He gets other people to help him. Finally they are pointed to a different
website, where, to their surprise, they find that someone has accidentally left a
copy of the FORTRAN program that was used to crunch the numbers. It wasn't
supposed to be where Steve found it -- which is why it hadn't been deleted.
Also, there was a little more carelessness -- there is a set of data labeled
"censored." Steve can't see, right away, what's significant about it, except that
a score or so of data sets are left out of the censored data.
Steve looks at the program. He finds the glitch rather easily. He tries the
program on random numbers and realizes that it always yields the distinctive
shape that has caused all the stir.
Sorting out the data sets is much harder. He contacts a lot of people. He does
what anyone checking these figures would have to do, and he realizes: If
anyone had tried to check, a lot of this information would already have been
put together.
He realizes: I am the first person ever to attempt to verify these astonishing,
anomalous, politically hot results. Out of all the researchers in this field who
had a responsibility to do "due diligence" before accepting the data, none of
them has done it.
Finally he has all the original data put together. It includes more than just real
numbers -- it includes "extrapolated" data, which means that sometimes,
where there were holes, Mann just made the numbers up and plugged them in.
This is sloppy and lazy -- but it's just the beginning.
What's crucial is that Steve now understands why the "censored" data sets are
smaller than the ones Mann used. The full source data includes those
misleading results that shouldn't have been used. But the "censored" data sets
leave it out.
This means that Mann knew exactly what he was doing. This was not an
accident. Mann ran the program on the data without the misleading numbers,
and then he ran it with the misleading numbers. What he published was the
results that made his ideological case.
Where's the Press?
This story is true.
Anybody who cares to can verify the story. In fact, one of the leading science
journals was prepared to publish Steve's results. But then, before publication,
they kept cutting back and cutting back on the amount of space they would let
Steve's report take up in the journal.
Finally the space they were going to allot was so small that they concluded
Steve could not tell his story in that number of words, and therefore they
decided not to publish it at all.
Meanwhile, serious publications did publish Mann's savage response to what
Steve was saying on the website where he was putting up his results for
everyone to read.
Notice: Steve is making all his work transparent to the world -- anyone is free
to check his data.
Mann is still hiding, denying, attacking -- but not providing the full
information. You still have to do detective work to ferret it out.
Now, if you were a reporter -- you know, those brave guys and gals who are
committed, body and soul, to "the public's right to know" -- wouldn't you smell
a rat? Wouldn't you jump on the chance to expose such an obvious fraud?
After all, there are now governments all over the world basing their decisions
on Mann's false report. Crucial decisions are being made. Schoolchildren are
being terrorized with dire projections of what will happen if Mann's report is
not believed and acted upon. Vast sums of money are being spent. People are
treating Mann's cause as a crusade -- and his fake results are the chief
weapon they use to prove their case.
Where's the press? Why am I able to tell you this story in full confidence that
very few who are reading it will have ever heard it before?
Because Mann doesn't report to the Bush administration. The government
agency for which the result was filed was a UN agency -- specifically, the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
And Mann's report is the famous "hockey stick" that "proves" that global
warming not only is happening, but right now we're in the warmest climate
period in the past thousand years.
Ah! You've heard of that report, haven't you! The press has been all over that
one! Your kids are being taught about it in school!
You have friends who look at you like an idiot or the scum of the earth if you
don't get energized by it, frightened by it, determined to act on that
information. Don't you care about the future of the environment?
Why haven't you joined the cause? Why doesn't the Bush administration act to
save the world from the most terrible threat imaginable?
It's like the opening of the "Talk of the Town" section of the February 12th New
Yorker: "Except in certain benighted precincts -- oil-industry-funded Web sites,
the Bush White House, Michael Crichton's den -- no one wastes much energy
these days trying to deny global warming."
This statement is not just false, it's stupidly false. It speaks of such deep
ignorance at The New Yorker -- ignorance that they're actually proud of -- that
it makes one despair, for this is a magazine that once prided itself on knowing
what it was talking about.
"By the time the IPCC publishes an assessment, it has been vetted by
thousands of scientists," says The New Yorker -- but we know that in fact
nobody vetted the Mann paper, and nobody checked Santer except, of course,
Santer -- while he went ahead and removed statements of some of those
"thousands of scientists" (p. 27).
In other words, whoever wrote this New Yorker piece did not check. He or she
just spouted.
What is really being said here is, "We believe in the IPCC and anybody else who
supports Global Warming. We believe it so much that we refuse to listen to
anybody who says otherwise."
The only difference between this and Jim and Tammy Baker on the old PTL
Club is that nobody says "Jesus." It's all faith, no science.
They're like four-year-olds putting their fingers in their ears and chanting "La
la la la" until the person talking to them goes away.
The Hockey Stick Hoax should be a scandal as big as the discovery of the
Piltdown Man Hoax. Bigger, really, since so much more is at stake.
But because the media are dominated by True Believers, they are doing
everything they can to maintain the hoax, to keep the public from learning the
truth.
What were those bad numbers Mann plugged in to get his fake results?
Modern bristlecone pine tree-ring data in which recent tree rings showed the
widths that would normally mean unusually warm weather.
However, these trees were located near temperature recording stations that
showed lower than usual temperatures. So instead of being a sign of warmer
temperatures, the tree rings are actually responding to the increased CO2
levels.
Even the heading on this bristlecone pine study clearly stated that the wider
tree rings did not indicate higher temperatures. But Mann plugged them in as
if they did, producing the one dataset that showed "warmer weather" (i.e.,
wider tree rings) in recent years, allowing the defective software to produce its
hockey-stick result.
The bristlecone pine study was real science. Mann's use of it was deliberately
fraudulent.
Here's a story you haven't heard, and you should have.
An intelligence source, working for a government agency. He's not a spy, he's
an analyst. He uses computers to crunch numbers and at the end of his work,
out pops the truth that was hiding in the original data. Let's call him "Mann."
The trouble with Mann is, he has an ideology. He knows what he wants his
results to be. And the original numbers aren't giving him that data. So the
agency he works for won't be able to persuade people to fight the war he wants
to fight.
Well, that's not acceptable.
Cooking the Figures
He starts with his software. There are certain procedures that are normal and
accepted in his line of work. But if he makes just one little mistake, his
program does a weird little recursion and if there's any data at all that shows
the pattern he wants it to show, it will be magnified 139 times, so it far
overshadows all the other data.
He can run it on random numbers and it gives him the shape he wants.
Unfortunately, the real-world numbers aren't random -- they have a very
different shape. All the numbers. Even his jimmied program won't give the
results he wants.
All he needs is any data shaped the right way. And so he looks a little farther, and ... here it is. It looks, on the surface, like all the other data that he's been working with. Other researchers working in his field, just glancing at it, will
assume it is, too.
But it isn't. Because the source that gathered this batch of data had some
other key information that takes it all away. The numbers don't mean what
they normally mean. In fact, this number set is absolutely false.
If you use these numbers along with all the other data, however, the clever
little program will pick them up, magnify them radically, and voilá! The final
report shows exactly the shape he needs the numbers to have.
The trouble is, these numbers are supposed to be doublechecked. Anybody
who looks closely at his numbers and at his program will see what he's done.
It's not hard to find, if you have the original data sets and can examine the
program. He will be exposed as a fraud. It will do his cause more harm than
good, if it's made public.
But he's not afraid. He knows how this works.
He doesn't show the program or the lists of his data sources to anybody.
Second, he is given a big boost by the fact that another researcher -- we'll call
him "Santer" -- had his own axe to grind. He was also the author of a
questionable report and got himself appointed to a position that allowed him to
get to the final report before it's published, delete all statements about how
"there is no way to reach a definitive conclusion," and replace them with his
own conclusion, which is absolute.
And it works. Santer's report is accepted, even though it has since been
proven false. Mann's report continues to be relied on, and no one questions it.
The government agency issues the report which they know has been altered to
fit preconceived conclusions.
Vast sums of money are expended on the basis of what he claims to have
found. People's live are put at risk.
Mann and Santer didn't do it for the money, though grants do flow in their
direction.
They did it for the cause. It's a noble cause. And even though the data don't
actually say what they wanted them to say -- in fact, they say the opposite --
they are untroubled by that. Because the government actions that are being
taken are the Right Thing.
Santer and Mann are true believers. They don't need evidence. Evidence is
just something you create to persuade other people.
Here's the amazing thing about Mann's original report: He's not the only
researcher working in this field. In fact, it's the job of many hundreds of
researchers to refuse to accept his data at face value. After all, his findings
disagree with everyone else's. Before they accept his results, they have a duty
to look at his software, look at his data, and try to duplicate his results.
But nobody does it. Not a soul.
Nor, when it goes public, does anyone in the press check the results -- because
they want him to be right, too.
Steve the Canadian Businessman
Not until a Canadian businessman -- let's call him "Steve" -- took a look at the
stats and got curious. Now, it happens that Steve is in the mining business; he
also happened to be a prize-winning math student in college. He knows how to
read number sets. He knows what good analysis looks like.
He also knows what cooked figures look like. He has seen the phony
projections that companies use when they're trying to swindle people. Their
results are too perfect. Mann's report looks too perfect, too.
So Steve starts digging. First, he read's Mann's original report. He finds it an
exercise in obscurity. From what he published, it's very, very hard to tell just
what statistical methods Mann used, or even what data he operated on.
This is wrong -- it's not supposed to be that way. Scientists are supposed to
leave a clear path so other people can follow them up and replicate their
research.
The fact that it's so obscure suggests that Mann does not want anyone
checking his work.
But Mann used government grants in his research. Which means he has an
obligation to disclose. Steve contacts him, asks for the information. He gets a
runaround. He gets pointed to a website that does not have the information.
He tries again, and again gets a runaround -- in fact, Mann sends him a very
rude letter saying that he will no longer communicate with him.
Why should he? Steve isn't a legitimate researcher in that field. He's just a
businessman.
But Steve is now sure there's something fishy going on, and he doesn't give up.
He gets other people to help him. Finally they are pointed to a different
website, where, to their surprise, they find that someone has accidentally left a
copy of the FORTRAN program that was used to crunch the numbers. It wasn't
supposed to be where Steve found it -- which is why it hadn't been deleted.
Also, there was a little more carelessness -- there is a set of data labeled
"censored." Steve can't see, right away, what's significant about it, except that
a score or so of data sets are left out of the censored data.
Steve looks at the program. He finds the glitch rather easily. He tries the
program on random numbers and realizes that it always yields the distinctive
shape that has caused all the stir.
Sorting out the data sets is much harder. He contacts a lot of people. He does
what anyone checking these figures would have to do, and he realizes: If
anyone had tried to check, a lot of this information would already have been
put together.
He realizes: I am the first person ever to attempt to verify these astonishing,
anomalous, politically hot results. Out of all the researchers in this field who
had a responsibility to do "due diligence" before accepting the data, none of
them has done it.
Finally he has all the original data put together. It includes more than just real
numbers -- it includes "extrapolated" data, which means that sometimes,
where there were holes, Mann just made the numbers up and plugged them in.
This is sloppy and lazy -- but it's just the beginning.
What's crucial is that Steve now understands why the "censored" data sets are
smaller than the ones Mann used. The full source data includes those
misleading results that shouldn't have been used. But the "censored" data sets
leave it out.
This means that Mann knew exactly what he was doing. This was not an
accident. Mann ran the program on the data without the misleading numbers,
and then he ran it with the misleading numbers. What he published was the
results that made his ideological case.
Where's the Press?
This story is true.
Anybody who cares to can verify the story. In fact, one of the leading science
journals was prepared to publish Steve's results. But then, before publication,
they kept cutting back and cutting back on the amount of space they would let
Steve's report take up in the journal.
Finally the space they were going to allot was so small that they concluded
Steve could not tell his story in that number of words, and therefore they
decided not to publish it at all.
Meanwhile, serious publications did publish Mann's savage response to what
Steve was saying on the website where he was putting up his results for
everyone to read.
Notice: Steve is making all his work transparent to the world -- anyone is free
to check his data.
Mann is still hiding, denying, attacking -- but not providing the full
information. You still have to do detective work to ferret it out.
Now, if you were a reporter -- you know, those brave guys and gals who are
committed, body and soul, to "the public's right to know" -- wouldn't you smell
a rat? Wouldn't you jump on the chance to expose such an obvious fraud?
After all, there are now governments all over the world basing their decisions
on Mann's false report. Crucial decisions are being made. Schoolchildren are
being terrorized with dire projections of what will happen if Mann's report is
not believed and acted upon. Vast sums of money are being spent. People are
treating Mann's cause as a crusade -- and his fake results are the chief
weapon they use to prove their case.
Where's the press? Why am I able to tell you this story in full confidence that
very few who are reading it will have ever heard it before?
Because Mann doesn't report to the Bush administration. The government
agency for which the result was filed was a UN agency -- specifically, the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
And Mann's report is the famous "hockey stick" that "proves" that global
warming not only is happening, but right now we're in the warmest climate
period in the past thousand years.
Ah! You've heard of that report, haven't you! The press has been all over that
one! Your kids are being taught about it in school!
You have friends who look at you like an idiot or the scum of the earth if you
don't get energized by it, frightened by it, determined to act on that
information. Don't you care about the future of the environment?
Why haven't you joined the cause? Why doesn't the Bush administration act to
save the world from the most terrible threat imaginable?
It's like the opening of the "Talk of the Town" section of the February 12th New
Yorker: "Except in certain benighted precincts -- oil-industry-funded Web sites,
the Bush White House, Michael Crichton's den -- no one wastes much energy
these days trying to deny global warming."
This statement is not just false, it's stupidly false. It speaks of such deep
ignorance at The New Yorker -- ignorance that they're actually proud of -- that
it makes one despair, for this is a magazine that once prided itself on knowing
what it was talking about.
"By the time the IPCC publishes an assessment, it has been vetted by
thousands of scientists," says The New Yorker -- but we know that in fact
nobody vetted the Mann paper, and nobody checked Santer except, of course,
Santer -- while he went ahead and removed statements of some of those
"thousands of scientists" (p. 27).
In other words, whoever wrote this New Yorker piece did not check. He or she
just spouted.
What is really being said here is, "We believe in the IPCC and anybody else who
supports Global Warming. We believe it so much that we refuse to listen to
anybody who says otherwise."
The only difference between this and Jim and Tammy Baker on the old PTL
Club is that nobody says "Jesus." It's all faith, no science.
They're like four-year-olds putting their fingers in their ears and chanting "La
la la la" until the person talking to them goes away.
The Hockey Stick Hoax should be a scandal as big as the discovery of the
Piltdown Man Hoax. Bigger, really, since so much more is at stake.
But because the media are dominated by True Believers, they are doing
everything they can to maintain the hoax, to keep the public from learning the
truth.
What were those bad numbers Mann plugged in to get his fake results?
Modern bristlecone pine tree-ring data in which recent tree rings showed the
widths that would normally mean unusually warm weather.
However, these trees were located near temperature recording stations that
showed lower than usual temperatures. So instead of being a sign of warmer
temperatures, the tree rings are actually responding to the increased CO2
levels.
Even the heading on this bristlecone pine study clearly stated that the wider
tree rings did not indicate higher temperatures. But Mann plugged them in as
if they did, producing the one dataset that showed "warmer weather" (i.e.,
wider tree rings) in recent years, allowing the defective software to produce its
hockey-stick result.
The bristlecone pine study was real science. Mann's use of it was deliberately
fraudulent.
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