Connoisseurs of scientific fraud may enjoy David Grann’s terrific article about an art authenticator in the current New Yorker and this post about polling irregularities. What are the odds that two such articles would appear at almost the same time?
I suppose I’m an expert, having published several papers about data that was too unlikely. With Saul Sternberg and Kenneth Carpenter, I’ve written about problems with Ranjit Chandra’s work. I also wrote about problems with some learning experiments.
Columbia, you have a problem. First, President Lee Bollinger. Then former provost Jonathan Cole. Then several business school professors. Now this.
A fish rots from the head, as they say. I disliked The Sociopath Next Door (repetitive, preachy) but it may be relevant here.
Thanks to Bryan Castañeda.
If Adam Wheeler, a former Harvard student, hadn’t applied for a Rhodes Fellowship, it appears he would have gotten away with four years of academic dishonesty. While at Harvard, he won several prizes. On his Rhodes application, he listed “numerous books he had co-authored, lectures he had given, and courses he had taught”. “Numerous books”? Yet this is how he was caught:
A Harvard professor first became suspicious of Wheeler while reviewing his application for the Rhodes scholarship. He discovered that Wheeler had plagiarized his piece almost completely from the work of another professor.
His “piece”? What’s that? When you apply for a Rhodes fellowship you don’t submit an academic article as part of your application. Why didn’t the reviewer check if the “numerous books” that a college senior claimed to have written actually existed? What’s next, a sixth-grader says she’s won a Nobel Prize and a Harvard prof doesn’t notice a problem?
Like Wheeler, Ranjit Chandra was caught toward the very end of his academic career. My impression with Chandra is that, as he repeatedly escaped detection, the falsifications became more extreme.
Recently a WSJ columnist told this story:
I was chatting with a friend who, over the years, has helped her kids slog through the obligatory science-fair projects.
“The experiments never turned out the way they were supposed to, and so we were always having to fudge the results so that the projects wouldn’t be screwy. I always felt guilty about that dishonesty,” she said, “but now I feel like we were doing real science.”
Yes, science with a human touch. The Hockey Stick Illusion by Andrew Montford (sent to me by the publisher) is a great book because it tells a great story. That story has a hero (Stephen McIntryre) and a villain (Michael Mann) and illustrates a basic truth about the world: A consensus of the “best people” can be wrong. This point was first made, as far as I know, by The Emperor’s New Clothes. It was later made by the Asch experiment (about line-length judgments). It’s not obvious; Elizabeth Kolbert and her editors at The New Yorker, not to mention Bill McKibben, have yet to understand it. (“No one has ever offered a plausible account of why thousands of scientists at hundreds of universities in dozens of countries would bother to engineer a climate hoax,” Kolbert recently wrote, with the permission of her editors.)Â It’s a sad comment on our education system that I first learned it via self-experimentation. My results showed that an acne medicine that my dermatologist prescribed didn’t work — a possibility for which my dermatologist (in consensus with other dermatologists) hadn’t allowed. As truths go, this one is scary: It means you have to think for yourself. But it is also the most liberating truth I know.
The Hockey Stick Illusion tells how McIntyre, skeptical of Mann’s hockey-stick result (a sharp increase in global temperature to unprecedented levels during the 20th century), tried to get the data and computer code that Mann used. Mann put him off. He still hasn’t released the computer code he used. Mann found a hockey stick where none existed because (a) he used principal-components analysis to summarize a lot of temperature series (bad idea), (b) he used that method in an unusual way, making a bad idea worse, and (c) one of his time series had a serious problem. After McIntyre noticed this problem and pointed it out, the story really begins: How did everyone react? Much as a reader of The Emperor’s New Clothes would expect. Nature denied it. The Washington Post denied it. Most climate scientists denied it (and continue to). Montford started writing the book before Climategate, whose overall message was the same — that climate scientists have been distorting the truth, that the case for man-made global warming is far weaker than they say, that a consensus of experts can be wrong. As Montford puts it,
None of the corruption and bias and flouting of rules we have seen in this story [and in the Climategate emails] would have been necessary if there is, as we are led to believe, a watertight case that mankind is having a potentially catastrophic effect on the climate.
Climategate and the story within The Hockey Stick Illusion are bad news for some very powerful people, such as Al Gore and those who gave him a Nobel Prize, but are helpful to the rest of us. When Big Shot X says “This is incredibly clear, everyone knows this” . . . maybe they’re wrong.
Thanks to Peter Spero.
Thanks to Vic Sarjoo, Anne Weiss, and Marian Lizzi.
Andrew Gelman, in a comment on the previous post, said that he believes the science of climate change is “much more settled” than I do. He’s right — in the sense that I believe the state of the world is different (less certain) than claimed. Andrew sees correct certainty; I see false certainty. Because science slowly becomes more accurate, I think the science will slowly shift toward “less settled” — a prediction I don’t think Andrew would make. Here’s an example of such a shift. According to the Mail on Sunday, Phil Jones
admit[s] that there is little difference between global warming rates in the Nineties and in two previous periods since 1860 and accept[s] that from 1995 to now there has been no statistically significant warming.He also leaves open the possibility, long resisted by climate change activists, that the ’Medieval Warm Period’ from 800 to 1300 AD, and thought by many experts to be warmer than the present period, could have encompassed the entire globe.
The New Yorker website has a weekly podcast called The Political Scene. I’ve listened to almost all of them. This week’s was unlike any other.
The brief description is “Elizabeth Kolbert and Peter J. Boyer discuss recent attacks on climate science.” Never before have the discussants been so far apart. They should have replaced discuss with debate. Boyer hasn’t written a word about climate science — or even science. He moved from the New York Times to The New Yorker after he wrote an (excellent) book about television. Recently he’s covered politics. Kolbert has written dozens of articles and a book about climate science. In spite of this, the moderator (Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor of the magazine), asked Boyer to describe the Climategate emails and their significance. They showed, he said, “an intolerance [by the scientists] of skepticism of their narrative . . this was a real shock to the system and a real shock to the global warming consensus.” I think any unbiased observer would agree.
Then Wickenden asked Kolbert what she thought:
KOLBERTÂ I don’t agree with him [Boyer] . . . One of the things that comes out in these emails is the climate scientists’ frustration with having to deal with people who use the data in all sorts of irresponsible ways. . . I’m not aware of any instances where people have had to go back and had to say “you’re right and the conclusion we drew was wrong.”
BOYER Perhaps we could say that language was used in these communications that would allow for an interpretation that perhaps there was fudging or something going on that needed to be obscured. There was a whole tone of intolerance of questioning of their data or — and this was what was so disturbing to hear from scientists — any questioning of what sounded an awful lot like their mission.
Boyer went on and on — as if he were the expert. (And he clearly knew what he was talking about.) Then Wickenden turned to the United Nations IPCC report and asked Kolbert what she thought of recent criticism (which Wickenden learned about from the NY Times).
KOLBERT . . . [The error was in Part 2.] In [Part 2 of] this report, which was literally 986 pages long, there were a couple of things inserted that weren’t from the peer-reviewed literature. . . .
BOYER Well, Betsy, I’m sorry, these aren’t just 986 pages of Scripture, and then a couple of little awkward errant notations on the side. The IPCC isn’t an inconsequential body. Al Gore and Mr. Pachauri shared the Nobel Prize. They are granted a level of authority when they speak. These reports were certainly granted authority. . .
KOLBERT [interrupting] I guess I should ask you: What is your point? . . .
BOYER . . . The consensus about the consensus has begun to crack. That’s just the political reality . . . There is a crack in the consensus.
Kolbert has published hundreds of thousands of words about global warming in the most prestigious magazine in the world. That she is unable to see or at least say this basic truth but must have someone else say it is another sign of problems with her reporting.
Until now, all speakers on The Political Scene have sounded calm and confident. On rare occasions they disagree, but never like this. And the conversation always has a relaxed tone. Not this time. Boyer sounded calm and confident but I thought Kolbert sounded nervous and upset. With good reason: It struck me as a huge and public rebuke from her employer. She’s been the expert. Now someone with no credentials has been allowed to say she’s wrong — has been brought on the program, apparently, in order to disagree with her. As if it’s no longer clear she’s right. And her dismissal of the Climategate emails, as if they taught her nothing, didn’t help her. The debate with Boyer was preceded and followed by softball questions by Wickenden to Kolbert. They struck me as attempts to soften the blow, as did a comment at the end by Boyer about a Super Bowl commercial.
Thanks to Aaron Blaisdell, Tim Beneke, and Stephen Marsh.
This reasonable article gives ten reasons why the Prime Minister of Australia has suddenly stopped talking about global warming.