Home » Why won’t Michael Mann release his data?

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Why won’t Michael Mann release his data? — 37 Comments

  1. “Researchers need not have access to exactly the same computer programs (or “code”) as Dr. Mann developed. Dr. Mann’s results can be replicated using his underlying data and methodologies.”

    It is true that you can replicate the performance of a computer program without having the code IF the behavior of the code is precisely documented in a combination of English (or other language), flowcharts, and equations. But, as is well-known, very few programs of any size have fully accurate, or even decent, documentation.

    And how on earth can research that was based in whole or in part on public funding be ‘private intellectual property’?

  2. Why won’t Michael Mann release his data?

    Let’s see . . .

    ***
    Because Smeagol-like he cannot part with his precious!
    ***
    Because these data — like the contents of the Ark in Indiana Jones and the Raiders — would blind any innocents who look upon them.
    ***
    Because unscrupulous men will seek to monetize them for unjust and misbegotten profits.
    ***
    Because this revelation will cause Elvis to arise from the dead.
    ***
    Because releasing them will make goddess Pele angry, and you don’t want goddess Pele angry.
    ***
    Because “Men must endure their going hence, even as their coming hither: Ripeness is all.”
    ***
    Because Alex Ovechkin would use them to the detriment of his beloved Penguins.

  3. The moderator of the site “Climate Audit” offered some time ago that the internal communications of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia indicated they’d ‘lost control of their data’, meaning, if I understood him, that the collection and analysis to date had been so haphazardly documented that they didn’t quite know what they’d done with it in the past or how valid were their analyses then or now. That may be Mann’s situation, rather than outright fabrication. He doesn’t know what’s what anymore.

    Pretty foolish of him to be as litigious as he’s been. Presumably, his legal bills are being paid by some sorosphere outfit.

    Another object of his criticism has been Dr. Lonnie Thompson, who has gone to the ends of the Earth (the Andes in particular) to collect ice cores, most of which are parked in a warehouse not having been analyzed.

  4. Note that Mark Steyn’s case has been stopped up in the useless DC Superior Court for six or eight years. Aside from the usual process-for-process-sake quality of our court system, I’m wagering it’s an alignment of interests between the judge and Michael Mann’s lawyers, as they suspect the outcome is going to be similar to this one.

    Whatever the rights and wrongs of the scientific arguments and the legal case are, the resolution of the Mann suit in Vancouver is a strong indication that Mann is a big bag of hot air. The more you know about these characters, the worse they look.

  5. One possible factor here is that Dr. Mann had to defend himself and his faculty position to superiors at Penn State when the “climategate” email scandal broke years ago. At a minimum, there was more than one email where Mann strongly implies that his (and East Anglia U.) data was fraudulently manipulated. The investigation was completed and he kept his job.

    So did this libel suit somehow support statements he made to the Penn State committee in his defense? Just a guess. I know Mann has been receiving large sums of research funding, which you can’t pocket, though that does tend to make a prof. a BMOC. In the realm of technology, profs. at places like Stanford can pocket large sums brought in by things like patents. So it’s possible Mann had some kind to personally profitable side arrangements at Penn State.

    The factoid that sticks in my mind is that around ten years ago, I read that the land based temperature record (in the U.S. ?) from the year 1970 had been changed for the fifth time. You’d think that they would just measure the temp. and record it, but no. The problem is that many of these thermometers are located near urban heat sources and this necessitates that “corrections” be applied to the data. Isn’t it odd that they just can’t seem to decide which correction is the right one for 1970? Hmmm.

  6. Taking Mann’s data at face value to replicate the conclusions would not prove the conclusions valid. You would need to examine the data, how it was collected and analyzed first before accepting the conclusions. If Mann cannot defend the data collection and analyzation then it is bogus.

  7. This is why. From Mike Smith’s linky, emphasis mine.

    Of course, we had thermometers in the 20th Century and it wouldn’t do for the bristlecone data’s (BD) credibility to show falling temperatures during the period when global warming activists wanted to show a rapid rise. So, Mann used a “trick” where he decided to “hide the [bristlecone data] decline.” He did so by splicing the contemporary thermometer data onto the bristlecone data and deleting the BD after the vertex.

    I remember when the Climategate emails got released into the wild, that statement hide the decline stood out like a sore thumb. Because if the tree data would be decoupled from the temperature record in that time, when else has it been decoupled? additionally, isn’t tree ring growth dependent on two (or more?) variables? temperature and moisture? can one determine the difference between a cold year and a dry year?

    Then there’s this:

    It is sometimes said that we found Mann’s algorithm would always produce a hockey stick, even from random numbers. That is not quite right: we found that it could do so, given the right kind of random numbers (autocorrelated, rather than independent). We also found that it mined for hockey stick shapes and overstated their dominance in the underlying data patterns, and that it understated the uncertainties of the resulting climate reconstruction (or equivalently, exaggerated the significance).

    https://www.rossmckitrick.com/uploads/4/8/0/8/4808045/hockey-stick-retrospective.pdf

    Quoting Art Deco

    that the collection and analysis to date had been so haphazardly documented that they didn’t quite know what they’d done with it in the past or how valid were their analyses then or now

    Speaking as someone who’s done quality control on meteorological data, you don’t do this. First and foremost, you keep the original data in the original format along with the code to read the data as well as the documentation of the data formats. Then you merely have to document in human language as well as in your code what it is you’re doing to the data. Then if there is a problem that pops ups, you can go back and isolate the source.

    The trick is to make sure that the code does what you think it does. To add to your woes, real world data is messy. People make mistakes. They forget things. Programs don’t do exactly what you think they do. They don’t handle edge conditions well. I could tell stories, but I’ll refrain.

  8. “In January 2005, NOAA began recording temperatures at its newly built U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN). USCRN includes 114 pristinely maintained temperature stations spaced relatively uniformly across the lower 48 states. NOAA selected locations that were far away from urban and land-development impacts that might artificially taint temperature readings.”

    https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2019/08/23/climate_alarmists_foiled_no_us_warming_since_2005_110470.html

  9. I just did an internet search for article on the news of this lawsuit decision. None of the MSM have reported it. At all. Not even with their own spin. Nothing. I guess, for them, it isn’t news.

  10. I gave up following this in 2014 – no global temp increase since 1998, case closed. With not even a correlation between temps and CO2, how can one suggest causation? Nice to get caught up.

  11. Way back when I was a graduate student I had a class in optimal control and we studied estimation theory. Estimation theory is lots of statistics. In estimation theory you measure one thing to estimate something else, for instance you measure tree ring size to estimate temperature. However, to use estimation theory there has to be a functional relationship between what is measured and what is estimated. I could never find the functional relationship between tree ring size and temperature.

  12. So which is it? If the data’s so accessible already, why didn’t Mann allow the court to access it?

    neo: Good question. My impression is the climaterati play a lot of shell games.

    Before ClimateGate I was basically onboard with global warming, but I got skeptical after the emails leak. I went up against Gavin Schmidt at RealClimate, asked why isn’t the data and code released. He said, well, it has been and tossed a few links. I said, well, not all of it. He said, well, you’re a stupid person, and started censoring my comments.

    The climate change folks have released a lot of data and code, but not all of it and not all of it is well-documented. Plus they have been tinkering with past data and not been careful with documenting what they’ve done or necessarily preserving the original data. Then there were the threats to destroy data rather than give it up to skeptics. Furthermore, they don’t seem all that competent either.

    IMO one must assume Mann was hiding something from discovery for dodgy reasons, not for the good of science or the planet’s climate.

  13. It’s all very peculiar. Since Mann was the litigant, it is bizarre that he didn’t withdraw the suit years ago rather than fail to respond to the deadline and get this expensive result.

  14. Since Mann was the litigant, it is bizarre that he didn’t withdraw the suit years ago rather than fail to respond to the deadline and get this expensive result

    Maybe Mann wasn’t a free agent in this suit. Someone is financing his suits. Suggest the lawyers work for them.

  15. Huxley: “I went up against Gavin Schmidt at RealClimate, asked why isn’t the data and code released. He said, well, it has been and tossed a few links. I said, well, not all of it. He said, well, you’re a stupid person, and started censoring my comments.”

    My first introduction to CAGW (I refuse call it “climate change”) was at Real Climate. I kept asking questions about the evidence that CO2 was the main driver of warming. Gavin Schmidt finally admitted that CO2 alone couldn’t drive the warming and that’s, why they had to use “forcings” (water vapor, methane, aerosols, sulfates, etc.) in their climate models to get the warming they expected. When I asked how they arrived at values for the “forcings” he did some hand waving about educated values. Then he quit answering my comments as well.. That was when I knew the correlation between CO2 and warming was a theory, not a proven fact.

    The warmers (Hansen, Mann, Jones, Briffa, Schmidt, Trenbarth eatl ) search for any clue to prove CO2 is the main driver of warming and ignore all else. It has become a religion. We must accept their decree on faith……or else.

  16. Mann isn’t financing his own lawsuits. The team never planned to go to trial, and thus never intended to release any data that could be used to show his work was a fraud. I suspect that what happened is that Ball in the Canadian case, and National Review in the US case persisted in their defenses far, far longer than was anticipated by Mann and his lawyers.

    Look, if Mann can get a friendly court in Vancouver, Canada, he isn’t going to find one anywhere.

  17. It is appalling how far the warmists have gotten, in corrupting science and grasping for power, with so little basis.
    In a rational world, warmists would face a long series of hurdles, be forced to specify in detail and quantify everything:
    * Is there warming?
    * How much of it is man-made?
    * There are benefits as well as harms in global warming. What is the net cost or gain? Quantify,
    * IF there is a net cost, what specifically can be done about it?
    * How much will that cost and what are the benefits, all discounted for time value of money and risk?
    * Why are we even discussing this is India and China refuse to participate.
    *******************************************************
    All that to explain, quantify, and justify. But Mann couldn’t even bluff his way past the very first step, “is there warming?”

  18. > IF the behavior of the code is precisely documented in a combination of English (or other language), flowcharts, and equations.

    IIRC, a copy of one of Mann’s Fortran programs was found while searching the internet and had various things commented out and changed — the usual scientific code back in the day. The East Anglia code used to produce global temperatures was even worse. Everyday version control, code testing, and code publication were unusual twenty years ago, although an author might promise to send code on request. It is possible that Mann has lost much of the code, may not have kept careful lab notes of changes and code experiments used to produce the results, may not know the answer to the question, and couldn’t reproduce the results if asked to.

    There is a whole movement that goes under the name “Reproducible Science”, which is not an oxymoron. The aim is to establish protocols, tools, and public data access so that experiments, in particular experiments that depend heavily on computation, can be reproduced when they are published. It isn’t an easy thing, particularly when huge data sets are involved, software is constantly evolving, and compiler flags can change the treatment of floating point numbers. In practice, you have pretty much got to store the entire computational environment to guarantee that results can be reproduced.

  19. Art Deco on August 27, 2019 at 11:25 am said:
    Note that Mark Steyn’s case has been stopped up in the useless DC Superior Court for six or eight years. Aside from the usual process-for-process-sake quality of our court system, I’m wagering it’s an alignment of interests between the judge and Michael Mann’s lawyers, as they suspect the outcome is going to be similar to this one.

    Yancey Ward on August 27, 2019 at 6:54 pm said:
    Mann isn’t financing his own lawsuits. The team never planned to go to trial, and thus never intended to release any data that could be used to show his work was a fraud. I suspect that what happened is that Ball in the Canadian case, and National Review in the US case persisted in their defenses far, far longer than was anticipated by Mann and his lawyers.

    Look, if Mann can get a friendly court in Vancouver, Canada, he isn’t going to find one anywhere.
    * * *
    Indeed.
    SLAAP cases depend on not going to trial, but in wearing down the defendant (see Ball’s comments at one of those links about fighting back only after giving in a couple of times). The process is the punishment, so the platitude goes.
    My question is – why can’t some superior court force the DC judge to proceed with the case? Maybe only SCOTUS has that power.
    This seems to be the case, according to the defendants; I don’t know the current status of their petition.
    https://cei.org/litigation/michael-e-mann-v-national-review-and-cei-et-al
    That’s from this past May; CEI published the original post (July 2012) that Steyn excerpted at NR.

    Looks like even some climate-change-friendly courts (or at least presumed friendly because of their locations) eventually recognize when the law & facts are on one side rather than the other.
    Kind of like Mueller’s team finally having to admit they couldn’t prove anything against Trump – if they couldn’t do it, no one could!

  20. sdferr on August 27, 2019 at 11:58 am said:
    “In January 2005, NOAA began recording temperatures at its newly built U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN).

    * * *
    Also from that link, which interested me because I had seen the commenting at WUWT and elsewhere on the problems with older temperature measuring sites:

    There is also good reason to believe U.S. temperatures have not warmed at all since the 1930s. Raw temperature readings at the preexisting stations indicate temperatures are the same now as 80 years ago. All of the asserted U.S. warming since 1930 is the product of the controversial adjustments made to the raw data. Skeptics point out that as the American population has grown, so has the artificial warming signal generated by growing cities, more asphalt, more automobiles, and more machinery.

    If anything, the raw temperature readings should be adjusted downward today relative to past temperatures (or past temperatures adjusted upward in comparison to present temperatures) rather than the other way around. If raw temperature readings are the same today as they were 80 years ago, when there were fewer artificial factors spuriously raising temperature readings, then U.S. temperatures today may actually be cooler than they were in the early 20th century.

  21. On the “did he or didn’t he release his data” question, PS emphasizes that the defendant, Dr. Ball, wanted Mann’s R2 regression numbers, which are not the same as the raw data, which may be what was touted as being released earlier; the regression numbers, if I remember my stats classes, are what constitute the model.

    Dr Ball’s legal team adroitly pursued the ‘truth defense’ such that the case boiled down to whether Ball’s words (“belongs in the state pen, not Penn State”) after examining the key evidence (Mann’s R2 regression numbers) fairly and accurately portrayed Mann.

    The parenthetical is a link to this:

    Evaluating the model accuracy is an essential part of the process in creating machine learning models to describe how well the model is performing in its predictions. Evaluation metrics change according to the problem type. In this post, we’ll briefly learn how to check the accuracy of the regression model in R.
    Linear model (regression) can be a typical example of this type of problems, and the main characteristic of the regression problem is that the targets of a dataset contain the real numbers only. Once, the model is created, we can evaluate it by checking the error rates in prediction. The errors represent how much the model is making mistakes in prediction. The basic concept of accuracy evaluation is that comparing the original target with the predicted one.

    I am not a climate scientist, and don’t play one on television.

  22. I don’t know much a climate science, but I do know a hell of a lot about people cooking the books. Let me put it this way — if climate science were a public company, Michael Mann and a lot of his friends would be in prison.

  23. if climate science were a public company, Michael Mann and a lot of his friends would be in prison.

    Don’t know about that, but the behavior of advocates of ‘global warming’ is indicative of something amiss. The scandals at the University of East Anglia (papered over with ‘internal investigations’), Mann’s litigious behavior (almost certainly financed by someone else), the corruption of the peer review process, the attempt by one environmental science professor to defame the Heartland Institute with fabricated documents, the ad hominem attacks on dissenters (e.g. Willie Soon), the hide-the-ball tactics, the continual resort to crude arguments from authority (often with fictional bases), &c. Stances on climate are, among the professoriate an attitude which delineates in-groups and out-groups among that very other-directed occupational segment.

    Thirty-odd years ago, some of us elected a skeptical disposition toward this discourse because it seemed at the time just the latest iteration in a certain cultural phenomenon: the eschatalogical impulse conjoined to the sort of social hypochondria the media hawk 24/7 (‘growing problem with [fill in]”), conjoined to grant money hustling and influence seeking on the part of academics and their affiliates in government. Reading Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb in 1979 (when the lunacy of his ‘predictions’ published in 1967 was manifest) was an education, though not one Ehrlich intended you to have. Ehrlich, The Limits to Growth, The Global 2000 Report were all part of the same discourse. Some of us remembered that when public chatter about global warming got to be a thing around about 1988, that public chatter about global cooling had been the rage a decade earlier. (It was promoted by Carl Sagan, among others, in peer-reviewed articles in Science).

    Maybe these guys are right this time, but it all looks like another hard sell to provide an excuse for ordinary people to be harassed and inconvenienced and for productive business to be the bitc* of academics and lawyers who fancy themselves paladins of public virtue. Ehrlich got pwned by Julian Simon, and it was an embarrassment he’d earned.

  24. Global Warming alarmism, & climate change, are a fraud.
    Too bad “delay of justice” by judges doesn’t seem to be an impeachable offence.

    Plastic in the ocean is a much less calamitous problem, but at least it’s real — we’ll be hearing more and more about it.

  25. If Michael Mann’s work were not critical for the the weaponisation of climate change, which occurs naturally, it would be hard to understand how his hockey-stick could supplant the long-standing assessment of temperature variation over the last millennium. Based on far wider proxy data sources as well as historical evidence (the Viking experience of farming in Greenland for example), we were quite clear that the Medieval Warm Period and the the Little Ice Age were real, and that current temperatures are at a pleasantly moderate compromise between those two extremes.
    It is true that the Vikings might prefer the warmer weather they enjoyed before being forced out by the cold of the 14th century.
    But to throw out this understanding in favor of what appears to be a small sample of bristlecone pine trees, growing at high altitudes in Nevada and a similarly narrow sequence in Russia looks like revisionism. The oddest part of all this is that even the IPCC used the old graph of temperature in their early reports. But it’s all of a piece with the ‘adjustments’ that somehow always warm the present and cool the past.

  26. “…revisionism…”

    Yer being too kind.

    It’s Lysenkoism. (As is all politicized—and hysterical?—“science”….perhaps one can call it “applied” science…)

    With the MSM—AKA “the resistance!”—following Pravda’s 70-year precedent, falling over one another to fall into line.

  27. “That was when I knew the correlation between CO2 and warming was a theory, not a proven fact.”

    Sorry to be a pedant*, but the word you’re looking for is ‘hypothesis’. A theory is a tested explanation with a track record of reasonably correct predictions. It may not be perfect, but it’s at least useful until a better one comes along.

    *OK, not terrifically sorry. The ‘just a theory’ line, when ‘just a hypothesis’ would be correct, always sets my teeth

  28. You can always cause a warmest to pause if you ask “why can’t we find warming of the troposphere at 30,000 to 35000 feet? All the weather balloons and satellite sensors can’t find this after decades of searching; and every climate model says it should be there.

    [It is where the integral of the heat of condensation of water molecules should be released]

  29. Sonny Wayz, Thanks for that. You’re correct. My language was not precise enough. I’ll try to do better.

  30. “Sonny Wayz, Thanks for that. ”

    I hope that didn’t come across too bluntly. Cranky is my native language.

  31. Sonny Wayz on August 28, 2019 at 2:56 pm said:
    …on edge. Dunno what happened there.
    * * *
    Well, I have a hypothesis, based on personal experience …

  32. Sonny Waze: “I hope that didn’t come across too bluntly. Cranky is my native language.”

    Cranky works just fine for me. I’ve been known to be cranky myself.

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