And of course there’s this famous animation where the middle 20th century got cooler as if by magic. Watch how 1934 and 1998 change places as the warmest year of the last century. This is after GISS applied adjustments to a new data set (2004) compared with the one in 1999:
There’s another plagiarism incident around the same time that I’d meant to document and more serious. A longstanding Climate Audit technique has been to illustrate proxy weights by plotting circles with area proportional to the weights. I’d observed that proxy weights could be extracted from the linear algebra, even for RegEM. The points had been revived in CA posts at this period concerning Steig and I reported that I’d tweaked the RegEM algorithm to extract the weights. The same technique was applied in Mann et al 2009 (Science); Mann’s language closely tracked the CA language. But more importantly the concept was identical to the concept written up at CA, both in the extraction of weights and the illustration in a graphic.
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Mann Contradicts Himself
While so far Mann has simply misrepresented his sources, he also contradicts himself. On page 138, Mann, brings up a paper by Eugene Wahl and Caspar Ammann, saying:
They showed that, had McIntyre and McKitrick subjected their alternative reconstruction...No paper by McIntyre and McKitrick has ever claimed to make an “alternative reconstruction.” This should seem more like a fabrication than a contradiction until the reader reaches page 191. There, Mann quotes a description of McIntyre:
Paleoclimatologist Tom Crowley perhaps summarized it best: “McIntyre ... never publishes an alternative reconstruction that he thinks is better ... because that involves taking a risk of him being criticized. He just nitpicks others. I don’t know of anyone else in science who ... fails to do something constructive himself.”58Mann approvingly quotes Crowley criticizing McIntyre for not publishing an “alternative reconstruction” despite the fact 53 pages earlier, he claims McIntyre published an “alternative reconstruction.”
Mann Contradicts His Sources and Himself
Mann contradicts his sources. Mann contradicts himself. It is hardly surprising he would do both at the same time. On page 123, he says:
The central claim of the McIntyre and McKitrick paper, that the hockey stick was an artifact of bad data, was readily refuted.45To understand Mann's misrepresentation here, there is no need to understand any technical details. All you need to do is compare a few simple sentences. First, compare the above sentence with a quote from the abstract of the paper he discusses (emphasis added):
The particular “hockey stick” shape derived in the MBH98 proxy construction – a temperature index that decreases slightly between the early 15th century and early 20th century and then increases dramatically up to 1980 — is primarily an artefact of poor data handling, obsolete data and incorrect calculation of principal components.Even though McIntyre and McKitrick's conclusions refer to “poor data handling, obsolete data and incorrect calculation of principal components,” Mann claims their argument dealt solely with “bad data.” On its own, this would be bad, but it becomes silly when the reader looks at Mann's note #45. It says (in part):
To be specific, they claimed that the hockey stick was an artifact of four supposed “categories of errors”: “collation errors,” “unjustified truncation and extrapolation,” “obsolete data,” and “calculation mistakes.”In the main text of his book, Mann portrays the paper's argument as solely referring to “bad data.” In the note he attaches as a reference, he lists as part of the paper's argument, “calculation mistakes.” …
