Science at the gates of plagiarism

Steve McIntyre:

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.