Showing posts with label Wegman Report. Show all posts

Written by fatih al-farahat in ,


Edward Wegman, author of Wegman Report, under investigation for plagiarism. John Mashey shows Wegman Report to be full of lies, distortions, manipulations, plagiarisms. Wegman's e-mails deleted

Experts claim 2006 Wegman report plagiarized

by Dan Vergano, USA Today, November 22, 2010

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.

The charges of plagiarism don't negate one of the basic premises of the report — that climate scientists used poor statistics in two widely noted papers.
But the allegations come as some in Congress call for more investigations of climate scientists like the one that produced the Wegman report.

"It kind of undermines the credibility of your work criticizing others' integrity when you don't conform to the basic rules of scholarship," Virginia Tech plagiarism expert Skip Garner says.
 
U.N. CONFERENCE:Negotiators give talks another try

Led by George Mason University statistician Edward Wegman, the 2006 report criticized the statistics and scholarship of scientists who found the last century the warmest in 1,000 years.

"The report was integral to congressional hearings about climate scientists," says Aaron Huertas of the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C. "And it preceded a lot of conspiratorial thinking polluting the public debate today about climate scientists."

But in March, climate scientist Raymond Bradley of the University of Massachusetts asked GMU, based in Fairfax, Va., to investigate "clear plagiarism" of one of his textbooks.

Bradley says he learned of the copying from a year-long analysis of the Wegman report made by retired computer scientist John Mashey of Portola Valley, Calif. Mashey's analysis concludes that 35 of the report's 91 pages "are mostly plagiarized text, but often injected with errors, bias and changes of meaning." Copying others' text or ideas without crediting them violates universities' standards, according to Liz Wager of the London-based Committee on Publication Ethics.

Allegations under review
"The matter is under investigation," says GMU spokesman Dan Walsch by e-mail. In a phone interview, Wegman said he could not comment at the university's request. In an earlier e-mail Wegman sent to Joseph Kunc of the University of Southern California, however, he called the plagiarism charges "wild conclusions that have nothing to do with reality."

The plagiarism experts queried by USA TODAY disagree after viewing the Wegman report:

• "Actually fairly shocking," says Cornell physicist Paul Ginsparg by e-mail. "My own preliminary appraisal would be 'guilty as charged.' "

•"If I was a peer reviewer of this report and I was to observe the paragraphs they have taken, then I would be obligated to report them," says Garner of Virginia Tech, who heads a copying detection effort. "There are a lot of things in the report that rise to the level of inappropriate."

•"The plagiarism is fairly obvious when you compare things side-by-side," says Ohio State's Robert Coleman, who chairs OSU's misconduct committee.

The report was requested in 2005 by Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, then the head of the House energy committee. Barton cited the report in an October letter to The Washington Post when he wrote that Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann's work was "rooted in fundamental errors of methodology that had been cemented in place as 'consensus' by a closed network of friends."

The Wegman report criticized 1998 and 1999 reports led by Mann (Bradley was a co-author) that calculated global temperatures over the last dozen centuries. It also contained an analysis of Mann's co-authors that appears partly cribbed from Wikipedia, Garner says.

Lisa Miller, a spokeswoman for Barton, reiterated the congressman's support of the Wegman report on Monday, saying it "found significant statistical issues" with climate studies.

A 2006 report by the National Research Council (NRC), which examines scientific disputes under a congressional charter, largely validated Mann, Bradley and the other climate scientists, according to Texas A&M's Gerald North, the panel's head. The NRC report found the Wegman report's criticism of the type of statistics used in 1998 and 1999 papers reasonable but beside the point, as many subsequent studies had reproduced their finding that the 20th century was likely the warmest one in centuries.

In a 2007 presentation at the university, report co-author Yasmin Said of GMU said that a Barton committee staffer, Peter Spencer, provided the background material for the report. "Although Dr. Said's presentation seemed to imply that we were being coached by the Republicans by being given only their selected materials to look at, this was not true," Wegman said in response to a USA TODAY freedom-of-information act request.

Information not forthcoming from the report's authors
The Wegman report called for improved "sharing of research materials, data and results" from scientists. But in response to a request for materials related to the report, GMU said it "does not have access to the information." Separately in that response, Wegman said his "email was downloaded to my notebook computer and was erased from the GMU mail server," and he would not disclose any report communications or materials because the "work was done offsite," aside from one meeting with Spencer. 

Said did not reply to requests for comments on her role in the report.

"It's nothing personal. I don't want these guys fired or anything," Bradley says. "They should just retract or withdraw the report as you would any scientific publication that has these sort of problems."

Passages compared
Here is an example of passages Bradley believes were plagiarized with "substantially close" wording from his textbook, Paleoclimatology: Reconstructing Climates of the Quaternary. Sentences in bold italic represents sections he believes were paraphrased:

•Bradley text: "A cross section of most temperate forest trees will show an alternation of lighter and darker bands, each of which is usually continuous around the tree circumference. These are seasonal growth increments produced by meristematic tissues in the tree's cambium. When view in detail (Fig. 10.1), it is clear that they are made up of sequences of large, thin-walled cells (earlywood) and more densely packed, thick-walled cells (latewood). Collectively, each couplet of earlywood and latewood comprises an annual growth increment, more commonly called a tree ring. The mean width of a ring in any one tree is a function of many variables, including the tree species, tree age, availability of stored food within the tree and of important nutrients in the soil, and a whole complex of climatic factors (sunshine, precipitation, temperature, wind speed, humidity, and their distribution throughout the year). The problem facing dendroclimatologists is to extract whatever climatic signal is available in the tree ring data and to distinguish from the background noise."

•Wegman report: "A cross section of a temperate forest tree shows variation of lighter and darker bands that are usually continuous around the circumference of the tree. These bands are the so-called tree rings and are due to seasonal effects. Each tree ring is composed of large thin-walled cells called early wood and smaller more densely packed thick walled cells called late wood. The average width of a tree ring is a function of many variables including the tree species, tree age, stored carbohydrates in the tree, nutrients in the soil, and climatic factors including sunlight, precipitation, temperature, wind speed, humidity, and even carbon dioxide availability in the atmosphere. Obviously there are many confounding factors so the problem is to extract the temperature signal and to distinguish the temperature signal from the noise caused by the many confounding factors."

Link:  http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/globalwarming/2010-11-21-climate-report-questioned_N.htm

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Deep Climate Eviscerates Wegman Report, again

Replication and due diligence, Wegman style

Deep Climate, Posted on November 16, 2010 by Deep Climate| 24 Comments
Today I continue my examination of the key analysis section of the Wegman report on the Mann et al “hockey stick” temperature reconstruction, which uncritically rehashed Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick’s purported demonstration of the extreme biasing effect of Mann et al’s “short-centered” principal component analysis.
First, I’ll fill in some much needed context as an antidote to McIntyre and McKitrick’s misleading focus on Mann et al.’s use of principal components analysis (PCA) in data preprocessing of tree-ring proxy networks. Their problematic analysis was compounded by Wegman et al.’s refusal to even consider all subsequent peer reviewed commentary – commentary that clearly demonstrated that correction of Mann et al.’s “short-centered” PCA had minimal impact on the overall reconstruction.
Next, I’ll look at Wegman et al.’s “reproduction” of McIntyre and McKitrick’s  simulation of Mann et al.’s PCA methodology, published in the pair’s 2005 Geophysical Research Letters article, Hockey sticks, principal components, and spurious significance).  It turns out that the sample leading principal components (PC1s) shown in two key Wegman et al. figures were in fact rendered directly from McIntyre and McKitrick’s original archive of simulated “hockey stick” PC1s. 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%!
Finally, I’ll return to the central claim of Wegman et al. – that McIntyre and McKitrick had shown that Michael Mann’s “short-centred” principal component analysis would mine “hockey sticks,” even from low-order, low-correlation “red noise” proxies . But both the source code and the hard-wired “hockey stick” figures clearly confirm what physicist David Ritson pointed out more than four years ago, namely that McIntyre and McKitrick’s “compelling” result was in fact based on a highly questionable procedure that generated null proxies with very high auto-correlation and persistence. All these facts are clear from even a cursory examination of McIntyre’s source code, demonstrating once and for all the incompetence and lack of due diligence exhibited by the Wegman report authors.
TO SAVE SPACE, I LEFT OUT THE MIDDLE OF DEEP CLIMATE'S POST; PLEASE GO TO LINK AT BOTTOM TO READ THE ENTIRE POST.

So Wegman et al.’s “compelling” demonstration is shown to be completely false; the biasing effect of “short-centered” PCA is much less evident when applied to AR1(.2),  even when viewing the simulated PC1s in isolation. To show the extreme effect claimed by McIntyre, one must use an unrealistically high AR1 parameter. This is yet one more reason that the NRC’s  ultimate finding on the matter, namely that “short-centered” PCA did not “unduly influence” the resulting Mann et al. reconstruction, is entirely unsurprising.
In summary, then, I have shown in Wegman et al. a misleading focus on one particular step of the Mann et al. algorithm, accompanied by a refusal to substantively consider the the peer-reviewed scientific critiques of M&M.
And to top it all, Wegman et al. flatly stated that the biasing Mann et al. algorithm would produce “hockey stick” reconstructions from low-order, low-autocorrelation red noise, while displaying a set of curves from the top 1% of “hockey sticks” produced from high-persistence random proxies. Those facts are clearly apparent from McIntyre and McKitrick’s source code, as modified and run by Wegman et al. themselves.
Make no mistake – this strikes at the heart of Wegman et al.’s findings, which held that the writing of Mann et al. was “somewhat obscure,” while McIntyre and McKitrick’s “criticisms” were found to be “valid” and their arguments “compelling.” And yet the only “compelling illustration” offered by Wegman et al. was the supposed consistent production of “hockey sticks” from low-correlation red noise by the Mann et al. algorithm. But the M&M simulation turned out to be based on nothing of the kind, and, to top it all, showed only the top 1% of simulated “hockey stick” PC1s.
So there you have it: Wegman et al.’s  endorsement of McIntyre and McKitrick’s “compelling” critique rests on abysmal scholarship, characterized by deliberate exclusion of relevant scientific  literature, incompetent analysis and a complete lack of due diligence. It’s high time to admit the obvious: the Wegman report should be retracted.

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John Mashey on Strange Scholarship in the Wegman Report

John Mashey on Strange Scholarship in the Wegman Report


Guest post by John Mashey
Strange Scholarship in the Wegman Report (SSWR)
A Facade for the Climate Anti-Science PR Campaign
This report offers a detailed study of the “Wegman Report”: Edward J. Wegman, David W. Scott, Yasmin H. Said, “AD HOC COMMITTEE REPORT ON THE ‘HOCKEY STICK’ GLOBAL CLIMATE RECONSTRUCTION”(2006).
It has been key prop of climate anti-science ever since. It was promoted to Congress by Representatives Joe Barton and Ed Whitfield as “independent, impartial, expert” work by a team of “eminent statisticians.” It was none of those.
A Barton staffer provided much of the source material to the Wegman team. The report itself contains numerous cases of obvious bias, as do process, testimony and follow-on actions. Of 91 pages, 35 are mostly plagiarized text, but often injected with errors, bias and changes of meaning. Its Bibliography is mostly padding, 50% of the references uncited in the text. 
Many references are irrelevant or dubious.  The team relied heavily on a long-obsolete sketch and very likely on various uncredited sources. Much of the work was done by Said (then less than 1 year post-PhD) and by students several years pre-PhD. The (distinguished) 2nd author Scott wrote only a 3-page standard mathematical Appendix.  Some commenters were surprised to be later named as serious “reviewers.”  Comments were often ignored anyway. People were misused.
The Wegman Report claimed two missions: #1 evaluate statistical issues of the “hockey stick” temperature graph,  and #2 assess potential peer review issues in climate science.  For #1, the team might have been able to do a peer-review-grade statistical analysis, but in 91 pages managed not to do so. For  #2, a credible assessment needed a senior, multidisciplinary panel, not a statistics professor and his students, demonstrably unfamiliar with the science and as a team, unqualified for that task.   Instead, they made an odd excursion into “social network analysis,” a discipline  in which they lacked experience, but used poorly to make baseless claims of potential wrongdoing.
In retrospect, the real missions were: #1 claim the “hockey stick” broken and #2 discredit climate science as a whole. All this was a facade for a PR campaign well-honed by Washington, DC “think tanks” and allies, underway for years.
Most people can just read the 25-page main discussion, but 200+ pages of backup text are included to provide the necessary documentation, as some issues are potentially quite serious.
For a quick download, read the Executive Summary (first six pages). Then, here is the complete report, including the main discussion and 200+ pages of appendices.

Written by fatih al-farahat in ,


"GMU investigating climate change skeptic cited by Cuccinelli" by Rosalind Helderman, Washington Post, October 8, 2010

GMU investigating climate change skeptic cited by Cuccinelli

Rosalind Helderman

by Rosalind Helderman, Washington Post, October 8, 2010
A leading skeptic of climate change science whose work was cited last week by Virginia Attorney Gen. Ken Cuccinelli is himself under investigation on charges that his work contained plagiarism and inaccuracies, a George Mason University spokesman confirmed Friday.
The investigation was first reported by USA Today, which quoted GMU statistics professor Edward Wegman as saying he knew of the investigation but he had been asked not to comment about it by the university.
Wegman headed up a 2006 congressional committee that reported problems with scientific research that showed the earth has experience rapid, recent warming, notably a 1999 paper by then-University of Virginia professor Michael Mann.

The Wegman Report was cited repeatedly in the civil subpoena filed last week by Cuccinelli's office to the University of Virginia seeking e-mails and documents related to Mann. The citations came in an attachment to the subpoena intended to show that there was reason to believe that Mann might have committed fraud as he sought state money for research.

Cuccinelli says he wants to investigate a $214,000 grant Mann received from the state. Mann says the grant funded research unrelated to climate change, but the civil investigative demand alleges that he might have used his earlier research on the topic to help get the funding.
In the subpoena, lawyers for Cuccinelli noted that the Wegman Report found the data in Mann's articles "poorly documented and archived."
But now it turns out that Wegman and his report are the subject of scrutiny as well. Other scientists have been posting analyses of his work online, indicating that portions are plagiarized and that the report contains inaccurate citations.
Dan Walsch, a spokesman for GMU, confirmed that the university was investigating charges that the report was plagiarized and that it contained inaccurate information.
Referring to the university's faculty handbook, he indicated such charges are investigated by a faculty grievance committee that turns over its findings to the university president. According to the handbook, tenured professors can be terminated for "violations of professional ethics" or for "a finding of research or scholarly misconduct."
USA Today quotes University of Massachusetts professor Raymond Bradley, a co-writer of Mann's 1999 paper, as saying he wrote GMU a letter in April raising concerns about Wegman's report. Scientists examining the Wegman report have found text that appears to be taken from Bradley's work. He received a letter from the university indicating that it anticipated completing an investigation into the charges by the end of September.
It's worth noting that climate change science has become such a hot potato that professors on both sides have come under scrutiny. Pennsylvania State University convened a panel to investigate charges of professional misconduct by Mann this year. It concluded that there was no evidence Mann falsified or suppressed data.
Cuccinelli, meanwhile, is trying to withstand scrutiny from a judge, who had found that an earlier demand for documents from U-Va. insufficiently explained why Cuccinelli had reason to believe that Mann might have committed fraud.
We've asked Cuccinelli's office for reaction to news of the GMU investigation and we'll bring you any response we receive.

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Old claims of bad climate science countered by new claims of plagiarism by Wegman of the Koch owned George Mason University

Old claims of bad climate science countered by new claims of plagiarism

by The Great Beyond blog, Nature blog, October 8, 2010
hockey.stick.1.jpgBack in 2006, George Mason University professor Edward Wegman made waves on Capitol Hill with a report challenging the statistical methods used in creating the famous "hockey stick" graph depicting a rise in global temperatures over the past century. Now USA Today reports that GMU is investigating allegations that Wegman plagiarized large portions of that report.
What's more is the allegation, first posted in an analysis on the Deep Climate blog, that Wegman plagiarized text from Raymond Bradley, a University of Massachusetts professor who was on the original Nature paper with Michael Mann that Wegman sought to undermine.

It isn't clear when the university's investigation will be finished. In the meantime, for anyone who wants to brush up, Wegman's full report to the House Energy and Commerce Committee is available in PDF form here. And you can read his testimony before the committee here.
As it happens, depending on how the November elections play out, climate scientists may well be in for another showdown or two with Republicans on Capitol Hill. Now at Pennsylvania State University, Mann recently weighed in on this with a commentary in the Washington Post. 

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Eli Rabett weighs in on Wegman plagarism and Judy's friends at GMU

Stop the blogs!

by Eli Rabett, Rabett Run, October 8, 2010
In an article appearing on line in USA Today, Dan Vergano writes:
GMU spokesman Daniel Walsch confirms that the university, located in Fairfax, Va., is now investigating allegations that theWegman report was partly plagiarized and contains fabrications. . .
Many bunnies will miss the significance of this. 

When a formal research or professional misconduct complaint is received, universities are required to open an inquiry. This is a less formal procedure, usually conducted by administrative personnel with or without academics taking part. it is very confidential. Only when the inquiry finds strong evidence of misconduct is a formal investigationopened. In this regard what Penn State did with respect to charges against Michael Mann was exceedingly irregular. First, they opened an inquiry without a formal complaint (which can be anonymous) on the basis of the uproar fed by friends of Judy (and no one else). Second they published their report, something that can be done but usually is not. Third they started a formal investigation without the inquiry finding grounds for it. This resulted in the second report. Eli should note that Prof. Mann agreed to these procedures. His co-author, Ray Bradley is not a happy camper either.
"Clearly, text was just lifted verbatim from my book and placed in the (Wegman) report," says Bradley, who is also one of the authors of the 1999 Nature study. In response to earlier concerns raised by the Deep Climate website, Bradley says he wrote a letter in April to GMU, noting the possibility of plagiarism and demanding an investigation of both the 2006 report and a subsequent, federally-funded study published by some of Wegman's students. "Talk about irony. It just seems surreal (that) these authors could criticize my work when they are lifting my words."
Many thanks to John Mashey and Deep Climate who have brought this academic misconduct to light.

Link:  http://rabett.blogspot.com/2010/10/in-article-appearing-on-line-in-usa.html

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Edward Wegman who lied to Congress, who purposely misled Congress, who is a noted tool of the Koch brothers, who are traitors to the U.S., finally under investigation by George Mason University for misconduct and plagarism

University investigating prominent climate science critic
Officials at George Mason University confirmed Thursday that they are investigating plagiarism and misconduct charges made against a noted climate science critic.


[Readers, if the quality of prose and punctuation of Stough's letter is at all representative of the quality of faculty and education at GMU, then the university itself is suspect.]

CAPTION
R. Bradley
In 2006, GMU statistics professor, Edward Wegman, spearheaded a Congressional committee report critical of scientists' reconstructions of past climate conditions -- notably the 1999 "hockey stick" paper in Nature, which concluded that the 20th Century was the warmest one in a millennium. A National Research Council report later that year largely validated the 1999 paper's research, but the "Wegman" report has knocked around in public debate over climate ever since.
GMU spokesman Daniel Walsch confirms that the university, located in Fairfax, Va., is now investigating allegations that the Wegman report was partly plagiarized and contains fabrications. Last month, a 250-page report on the Deep Climate website written by computer scientist John Mashey of Portola Valley, Calif., raised some of these concerns. Mashey says his analysis shows that 35 of the 91 pages in the 2006 Wegman report are plagiarized (with some of the text taken from a book, Paleoclimatology: Reconstructing Climates of the Quaternary, by Raymond Bradley of the University of Massachusetts) and contain erroneous citations of data, as well.
"I'm very well aware of the report, but I have been asked by the university not to comment until all the issues have been settled," Wegman says, by phone. "Some litigation is underway." Walsch confirms that the university has asked Wegman not to comment.
"Clearly, text was just lifted verbatim from my book and placed in the (Wegman) report," says Bradley, who is also one of the authors of the 1999 Nature study. In response to earlier concerns raised by the Deep Climate website, Bradley says he wrote a letter in April to GMU, noting the possibility of plagiarism and demanding an investigation of both the 2006 report and a subsequent, federally funded study published by some of Wegman's students. "Talk about irony. It just seems surreal (that) these authors could criticize my work when they are lifting my words."
In a July 28, 2010, letter to Bradley, GMU vice-president for research Roger Stough said he expected a university committee to complete its investigation of Wegman by the "end of September." University policies allow professors to appeal any finding of misconduct within 30 days. The university president has 100 days to respond to that appeal.
"Dr. Wegman's status as an employee and faculty hasn't changed at all," says Walsch.

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Fight Back Now!: Rep. Joe Barton, traitor to his country, purposely misled Congress, a crime, with the completely false Wegman Report, John Mashey's 250-page dissection proves

Wegman-gate: Readers, please alert Congress and the Media!


by Scott Mandia, September 28, 2010

There are some that that wish to delay action on climate change and some that refuse to accept the scientific consensus that humans are causing significant global warming with possible devastating impacts. These delayers and contrarians often hang their hats on the Wegman Report as proof that climate scientists are either corrupt or incompetent.  The Wegman report, commissioned by Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) and Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-KY), is central to the infamous Hockey Stick Controversy and was promoted as “independent, impartial, expert” work by a team of “eminent statisticians.”  It was none of those.   
As detailed in John Mashey on Strange Scholarship in the Wegman Report, the Wegman report was a facade for a PR campaign well-honed by Washington, DC, “think tanks” and allies, underway for years.  
Most of my readers are likely aware of the Hockey Stick Controversy but I will briefly summarize here.  (Click the link for all the gory details.)  As described in Determining the Climate Record, historical temperatures (before the use of thermometers) can be determined using physical and biological fossil data called proxy data, such as ice cores, corals, trees, marine fossils, and boreholes.  Most temperature reconstructions end up appearing with a hockey stick shape: relatively flat temperatures between 1000 AD and 1900 (handle) followed by a very sharp rise since 1900 (blade).  

The hockey stick graph as shown in the 2001 IPCC report. This chart shows the data from Mann et al. 1999. The blue lines are temperatures estimated from proxy indicators, red lines are temperatures from thermometers, and the gray shaded region represents estimated error bars.
At the request of Congress in 2006, a panel of scientific experts was convened by the National Research Council to assess the validity of the hockey stick reconstructions of climate scientists Drs. Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley, and Malcolm Hughes.  The panel chaired by Dr. Gerald North found that although there were some statistical problems with the reconstructions, these issues were minor and did not change the results.  Modern global temperatures were significantly warmer than in the past 1000 years.  
Around the same time, Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) and Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-KY) convened their own panel chaired by Edward Wegman.  The panel’s final report is known as the Wegman Report.  The Wegman Report came to quite a different conclusion.  The Wegman Report claimed that the hockey stick reconstruction could not be supported by the data and that there was a social network of scientists tied to Dr. Mann that may have made independent studies “not independent”.  
So why the disparity?  
Do you recall Joe Barton’s well-publicized apology to BP for what he called a “shake down” by the Obama Administration because the US government demanded that BP help those that were suffering?  Let me refresh your memory:  
  
According to Opensecrets.org, Rep. Barton gets most of his campaign finance money from the fossil fuel industry.  

Rep. Barton Major Campaign Contributors
Explains a lot, does it not?  The Wegman Panel was commissioned by Barton.  Barton’s donors stand to lose market share to alternative energy sources if carbon fuels are regulated.  Of course, to stop the threat that is global warming, all nations must immediately reduce their carbon fuel use, especially the biggest polluter: the United States.   
Is this guilt by association or is there really guilt regarding the Wegman Report?   
John Mashey answers that question in his 250-page dissection of the Wegman Report.  Please view the six pageExecutive Summary and the full report.  Arthur Smith has an excellent summary of Mashey’s Report on his blog:  
Among Mashey’s findings:  
  • Of 91 pages, 35 are largely plagiarized text, often injected with errors, bias and changes of meaning. 3 pages are a mathematical appendix that seems to be the only contribution of the report’s 2nd author (David Scott). 7 pages are a padded bibliography (see below). That leaves barely half the report as actual original material from Wegman and Said.
  • A sketch of central England temperatures for the past 1000 years from the first (1990) IPCC report was highlighted in the Wegman report, but the report’s version was altered, at least by shifting the time axis and truncating the recent temperature rise (already truncated at 1975 in the original). An unaltered version of the same sketch can be found in the NAS report; until now nobody seems to have noticed that Wegman (or a source or associate) had distorted the graph.
  • Of 80 references in the bibliography, 40 are never cited in the report.
  • Many of the science papers in the remaining 40 are, while cited and sometimes summarized, otherwise ignored in the analysis
  • Wegman sent the report to a few statisticians; all known to him. Some were given only a few days to comment. Some gave strong advice that was simply ignored. This was claimed as peer review by Representative Whitfield
  • Some commenters were surprised to be listed as reviewers
  • Wegman and Said promised to publish their analysis in the peer-reviewed literature, but other than one paper in a journal where Said was associate editor (accepted 6 days after receipt), none have appeared
  • Incriminating documents associated with Said have disappeared from websites in recent weeks
One might ask why raise this ghost now?  Many reconstructions since 1999 show the hockey stick using various proxy data and various statistical techniques so we are quite confident that modern global climate is significantly warmer than in the past 2,000 years.  The IPCC (2007) concluded: “warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level.  Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.  Discernible human influences now extend to other aspects of climate, including ocean warming, continental-average temperatures, temperature extremes and wind patterns.”  Since 2007, there is not a single international scientific body that holds an opposing view.  
We need to highlight the Wegman Report and its many flaws because those that wish to delay action or to deny the science are waving the report like a flag of truth.  More disturbingly, as reported in Politico, House Republicans will kill Nancy Pelosi’s special global warming committee if they win back the House in November.  Worse,  Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI) wants to keep the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming alive so it can investigate climate science and police President Barack Obama’s green policies.  Essentially a witch hunt against science much like Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s Misguided Investigation of Michael Mann.  Not to be outdone, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) wants to conduct inquiries into the Climategate emails.  Of course, several independent investigations found no wrong-doing and Climategate coverage was unfair and unbalanced.  Far more press coverage was given to the accusations than the exonerations.  
Here is where YOU can help:  
Write to your elected leaders and to news outlets and let them know that Barton’s Wegman Report is a sham and that the witch hunts must stop.  Science drives most policy issues and the United States and the world can ill afford the anti-science positions of these prominent politicians.  Tell your elected leaders and the press to investigate Wegman’s report with the same zeal as they did the stolen CRU emails.   
They investigated Climategate.  Now they need to investigate Wegman-gate.  
I created a page that lists contact information for US Congress and many US news outlets.  The page is titled: Media & Gov. Contacts and appears at the bottom of my Blogroll list.  Please use this link now and in the future to express your concerns.  Agreeing with each other on blogs isn’t going to stop the witch hunts.  You must get the general public and our elected officials to see that climate science and scientists are being attacked.
The public does not respect weakness.  Fight back!