Fighting Back - The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars - page 164

informed public policy relies.” 34 Soon enough, the scientific community would fight back too.
Wegman Revisited
In late December 2009, near the height of the climategate feeding frenzy, and just as climate scientists
were most on the defensive, a dramatic new development instead put climate change deniers on the
spot. Thanks to the sleuthing of computer scientist John Mashey 35 and an anonymous blogger known
as Deep Climate, some dramatic new revelations came to light that shattered the myth that the now-
three-year-old Wegman Report (WR) had been the independent, nonpartisan scientific assessment
climate change deniers continued to claim it to be. Through a series of posts at Deep Climate's site 36
and Mashey's own full-length report, 37 the WR was put in a new, very different light. Mashey
showed, first of all, that a network of high-level partisan political operatives and professional
climate change deniers had been involved in the planning of the report. 38 Mashey and Deep Climate
moreover unearthed compelling evidence of a disturbing pattern of conduct by Wegman and coauthors
in their preparation of the WR. The developments would be reported in a series of articles over the
next year and a half by USA Today reporter Dan Vergano. 39
Deep Climate and Mashey detailed striking similarities between large sections of the WR and
other previously published works. Most remarkably, the background discussion of paleoclimate proxy
data appeared largely taken without attribution from MBH hockey stick coauthor Ray Bradley's well-
known Paleoclimatology textbook. 40 Where Wegman and coauthors did tweak Bradley's original text,
the changes were often far from innocuous. Bradley's words were systematically altered in a way that
downplayed the reliability of the science and, in a perverse twist of irony, made them appear to
undermine the conclusions of Bradley's own work. 41
Consider one of the report's “key findings”: “As mentioned earlier in our background section,
tree ring proxies are typically calibrated to remove low frequency variations. The cycle of Medieval
Warm Period and Little Ice Age that was widely recognized in 1990 has disappeared from the
MBH98/99 analyses.” Let us neglect for the moment the resuscitation of the “Lamb” curve of the 1990
IPCC report to attack more recent work, the false assertion that the Little Ice Age and medieval warm
period “disappeared” in MBH98/MBH99, and the false implication that the MBH hockey stick was
based exclusively on tree ring data. Most significant is how the WR background discussion of low-
frequency information in tree ring data was altered relative to Bradley, in what appears to have been
a cynical effort to call our work into question.
A key passage in the Bradley account explained how data derived from a regional set of tree ring
cores are combined to form a composite chronology that can preserve long-term (“low-frequency”)
variations even if the individual cores cannot. 42 In the WR, that passage was replaced 43 with a shorter
statement that blurred the key distinction between a single tree core and a composite, providing a
straw man that was then used to call into question the reliability of “low frequency, longer-term”
information in tree ring data (and by direct implication, the MBH hockey stick). 44 Mashey and Deep
Climate documented many other examples where small changes made in Bradley's original wording
inevitably favored the WR's hockey stick-bashing narrative. The irony was not lost on Deep Climate:
“That such a shoddy misrepresentation of another author's work has been used as part of a baseless,
politically motivated attack on that author is beyond shameful.” 45