By John Timmer, Ars Technica

The so-called “hockey stick” plot of recent climate, in which recent temperatures appear as a sudden and anomalous rise after a thousand years of relative stability, has become a bit of an icon for climate change. Even though it’s rather secondary to the concerns about rising greenhouse gas levels — CO₂ would be a concern even if we were limited to the 150 years of instrument records — the hockey stick attracted so much attention that, in 2006, it was the subject of Congressional hearings. Now, it appears that the sharpest critic of climate scientists at those hearings relied on plagiarized material to prepare his report.

The report in question was prepared by Edward Wegman of George Mason University. In it, he criticized the methods used to generate a version of the hockey stick graph generated by Michael Mann, a Penn State climatologist (similar results have been produced by other researchers). But he also raised questions about anything published by climatologists by performing a network analysis that ostensibly showed that it was a small field in which most participants collaborated and then served as reviewers on each others’ papers, despite the potential for conflicts of interest. That analysis was later published as an independent paper, in which certain styles of research were suggested to be prone to “group-think, reduced creativity, and the possibility of less rigorous reviewing processes.”

In the intervening years, a climate blogger spent an inordinate amount of time analyzing Wegman’s report to Congress, and came up with extensive evidence of plagiarism. The blogger’s findings were picked up by USA Today’s Dan Vergano, who has been following the accusations, including George Mason’s investigation of the accusations, which is ongoing. Early today, Vergano published word that the journal in which Wegman’s paper was published, Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, has decided to retract the paper. In an e-mail to the journal, Wegman blamed the plagiarism on a former student; his lawyer told Vergano that Wegman had no involvement in its appearance.

Given the overlap between the paper and the Congressional report, if the paper contained plagiarized material, the report almost certainly does as well.

Documents requested by Vergano appear to show that the paper was accepted five days after submission by an editor who was a personal friend of Wegman’s, an irony given that the study was about the nefarious influence of social networks. The editor in question claims that more extensive review must have taken place, but the records were destroyed during an office move. A researcher in the field of social network analysis is quoted as dismissing the Wegman paper as more of an “opinion piece.”

At the moment, the sloppy scholarship done by Wegman doesn’t appear to invalidate his statistical criticisms of Mann’s work. Similar hockey sticks have since been generated using improved methods and different data, both by Mann and others, though, so it’s not clear if those criticisms are especially relevant anymore. What it does suggest is that the excessive attention that is now paid to all areas of climate research can bite anyone who gets involved, whether they support or criticize the scientific consensus. The impact of this scrutiny on Wegman’s academic career will be more clear once George Mason University completes its investigation.

Image: Variation of Earth’s surface temperature, in degrees Celsius, from 1000 A.D. to 2000 A.D. (IPCC)

Source: Ars Technica

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