A Place to Stand

From CCNet Professor Eric Steig last month announced in Nature that he’d spotted a warming in West Antarctica that previous researchers had missed through slackness - a warming so strong that it more than made up for the cooling in East Antarctica.

...The paper was immediately greeted with suspicion, not least because one of the authors was Michael Mann of the infamous “hockey stick”, now discredited, and the data was reconstructed from very sketchy weather station records, combined with assumptions from satellite observations.

But Steve McIntyre, who did most to expose Mann’s “hockey stick”, now notices a far more embarrassing problem with Steig’s paper.

Previous researchers hadn’t overlooked the data. What they’d done was to ignore data from four West Antarctic automatic weather stations in particular that didn’t meet their quality control. As you can see above, one shows no warming, two show insignificant warming and fourth ...is a problematic site that was buried in snow for years and then re-sited in 2005. But, worse, the data that Steig used in his modelling which he claimed came from Harry (the name of the site of the readings - or not) was actually old data from another station on the Ross Ice Shelf known as Gill with new data from Harry added to it, producing the abrupt warming. The data is worthless. Or as McIntyre puts it:

Considered by itself, Gill has a slightly negative trend from 1987 to 2002. The big trend ... arises entirely from the impact of splicing the two data sets together. It’s a mess.

It seems these alarmist scientists not only regularly fake their facts, albeit conceivably accidentally, when real scientists (ie sceptical ones because scepticism is intrinsic to science) point out their errors they attempt to lie about who spotted the error:

Due to an inadvertent release of information, NASA's Gavin Schmidt (a
"real scientist" of the Real Climate blog) admits to stealing a
scientific idea from his arch-nemesis, Steve McIntyre (not a "real
scientist" of the Climate Audit blog) and then representing it as his
own idea, and getting credit for it. (Details here and here.)

In his explanation why this is OK, Gavin explains that he did some work
on his own after getting the idea from Steve's blog, and so it was OK to
take full credit for the idea. I am sure that there are legions of
graduate students and other scientific support staff who do a lot of
work on a project, only to find their sponsor or advisor, who initially
proposed the idea, as first author on the resulting paper, who might
have empathy for Gavin's logic. And of course researchers in many fields
try to keep their work secret lest an unscrupulous colleague steal the
idea. You just don't get to see such things in action when you are
outside of the academy. Well through the magic of the Internet everyone
can see the less than noble side of scientific practice.

But lets be clear, in science, the ethical thing to do is to give full
credit to the origination of an idea, even if it comes from your
arch-enemy. Gavin's outing is remarkable because it shows him not only
stealing an idea, but stealing from someone who he and his colleagues
routinely criticize as being wrong, corrupt, and a fraud.
To add definite lies to something conceivable as a stupid error Gavin Schmidt said on the alarmist site Realclimate that Steve McIntyre's discovery had been duplicated hours earlier by somebody else & so McIntyre was not entitled to be credited by them for discovering it.

Gavin claimed "BAS were notified by people Sunday night who independently found the Gill/Harry mismatch. SM could have notified them but he didn’t"

I was interested in who was the scientist that, unbeknowst to me, had "independently" identified the problem with Harry (the site of the wrong readings) - a problem overlooked by BAS, NASA GISS for a year or so anyway; and a problem which had been missed by his realclimate coauthors, Steig and Mann, during their preparation of Steig et al 2009, and which had been missed by the Nature peer reviewers. And remarkably this had been "independently" identified just after I had noted the problem at Climate Audit and Climate Audit readers had contributed ideas on it, even during the Super Bowl.

Yesterday, I inquired about the identity of Gavin's "mystery man"? Today (Feb 4) the British Antarctic survey revealed the identity of Gavin's "mystery man". It was…

GAVIN.

Now that one is fraud - there was no 2nd source that corrected the "error" - Gavin did it himself as soon as McIntyre went public & lied about it. Nature, having given such prominent coverage to the "discovery" that Antarctica was warming, as the alarmists requite, rather than cooling, as the evidence previously showed, must, if it is scientifically ethical, give even greater prominence not only to that fact that the new "discovery" was rubbish but that alarmist "scientists" have lied to hide their culpability.

On the other hand I have already crossed swords with a former Nature editor, Jeff Harvey & it turned out that not only did he have no ethical commitment but was also incapable of recognising that he was firing his broadside not at me but at a Britain's former chief science advisor (& alarmist obviously since he got the job) whom he, correctly, said was only capable of "kindergarten" science.

My guess is that Nature will have nothing more than a very token mention, & the MSM none.

I mentioned yesterday that Labour MP Dawn Butler had faked a letter from Obama & somebody suggested that it wasn't really important. The same argument may be made here. I disagree - I think it is important that we know that those in power have proven willing to tell absolutely any lie & that when it is proven there is neither surprise nor opprobrium for doing so. People who are totally corrupt in little things where the gain is small(& actually realclimate's act is not a little one) must be assumed to be at least equally so in big ones, as must those who support them in it.