Fighting Back - The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars - page 166

analysis.” 60 Reporting on the matter in USA Today , Dan Vergano noted that the editor of the journal—
a close friend of Wegman's—had accepted the paper within five days of submission, suggesting there
was no peer review of the paper at all. 61 Vergano also interviewed an independent expert in the field
of social network analysis, who dismissed the article as an “opinion piece,” offering the further
critique: “The authors speculate that the entrepreneurial style leads to peer review abuse. No data is
provided to support this argument.” 62 In response to the overwhelming evidence that the article
suffered not only from plagiarism, but also from shoddy scholarship that appears to have slipped
through the review process by virtue of questionable editorial oversight, the publisher (Elsevier)
officially retracted the article in May 2011. 63
Let us consider the WR's attempt at supporting the claim that the hockey stick was an artifact of
the statistical conventions used. Evidence now brought to light suggested that Wegman and coauthors,
rather than having independently assessed the underlying statistical issues, had simply repackaged
materials of Stephen McIntyre's. Not only had there apparently been 64 substantial undisclosed
collaboration between the WR authors and Stephen McIntyre, as hinted at earlier 65 —something
Wegman had denied in his testimony under oath in Congress 66 —but Wegman also appeared to have
presented McIntyre's work as his own. Deep Climate showed that Wegman's support for the McIntyre
claim that the MBH PCA convention “mined” simple red noise for “hockey sticks” (see chapter 9 )
rested on a kind of “bait-and-switch” McIntyre himself had introduced. 67
It all had to do with an unsourced figure shown in the WR. 68 Deep Climate was able to trace the
figure back to McIntyre. The results shown were not based on the appropriate model of standard red
noise as Wegman had claimed. Rather, they were based on McIntyre's so-called “trendless persistent
noise,” 69 which Wahl and Ammann had already demonstrated to be entirely inappropriate. The results
appeared to be taken from an archive produced by McIntyre himself. 70
Ironically, if there had been any mining for a particular result (an allegation that had often falsely
been made against us), it was Wegman and McIntyre who had done it. While the WR figure purported
to show twelve series randomly selected from twelve thousand realizations of simple red noise, what
it in fact showed was a massive cherry-pick: twelve series selected from a ranking of the hundred
most hockey stick-like series generated from twelve thousand realizations of McIntyre's unrealistic
noise model. 71 As Mashey put it, it was “like declaring the average male height to be 6'6”, without
bothering to mention the sample was taken on an NBA basketball court.” 72 Wegman apparently had
simply repackaged McIntyre's flawed work as his own, while excluding any discussion of published
refutations of the work. According to Mashey, “the legal term is culpable ignorance.” 73
In summary, then, the supposed independent review by Wegman et al. turned out to be a partisan
hatchet job from the start. 74 Wegman was handpicked by Republican party operatives working for Joe
Barton. Barton and his staff rejected the National Academy of Science's offer of an impartial review
so they could manufacture a report whose content they could control. Wegman had accepted a
Faustian bargain when he agreed to author the report.
In April 2010, the office of vice president for research at George Mason University initiated a
formal investigation into allegations of misconduct. 75 As of November 2011, no official finding had
been issued. Just days before Thanksgiving 2010, however, the scandal finally broke nationally when
news of the plagiarism charges received prominent coverage in a feature article in USA Today. 76 The
news quickly spread as other high-profile media outlets covered it. 77 Part of me genuinely felt bad for