Logicalscience

The Wall Street Journal's
Op-Eds are distorting the science
Part of the Common Arguments by Skeptics and Deniers series



The authors of realclimate.org, Scientific American, and Seed Magazine's Tim Lambert have frequently stated that while the paper itself is of good quality the WSJ editorials are of extremely poor quality and distort science. Scientific American has even challenged the editorial board to meet with top climate scientists so they can get a free lesson. The editorial board has not answered Scientific American's call.

WSJ libel

One of the most obvious distortions of science is the WSJ's claim that the hockey stick was removed from the IPCC's fourth assessment report due to being "widely rebutted":

"All this appears to be resulting in a more cautious scientific approach, which is largely good news. We're told that the upcoming report is also missing any reference to the infamous "hockey stick," a study by Michael Mann that purported to show 900 years of minor fluctuations in temperature, followed by a dramatic spike over the past century. The IPCC featured the graph in 2001, but it has since been widely rebutted."

The Present:
The Hockey Stick is Still There

So did the IPCC really drop the hockey stick? Well if you go to page 35 of this PDF you will see the symbol for the Mann's hockeystick (MBH1999) in the top left hand corner of figure 6.10.



What's more is that if you do a case sensitive search on the IPPC report (PDF) for "Mann" you will see that he is referenced 63 times in chapter 6 alone. A good portion of those are referencing Mann's 1999 hockey stick. And if you do a search on "hockey stick" you will get a hit on page 34 in the middle of a series of paragraphs dedicated solely to defending the Mann's hockey stick. The WSJ's claim that the fourth assessment report is "missing any reference to the infamous hockey stick" simply couldn't be further from the truth.

The Past Evidence:
No Excuse for the Wall Street Journal

Some of you may be thinking that since this opinion journal was published before the official report was released maybe they just had some bad information. The problem with this argument is that the working draft of the IPCC's fourth assessment report was freely available on the internet. One of the biggest critics of the IPCC is the tobacco and oil funded website junkscience.com. And not only was junkscience able to get a copy of the draft, but they were hosting the working drafts for anyone to download. The service was even free of charge. And if you go to chapter 6 of the working draft (PDF) you will see a very similar graph on page 14. Again, the symbol for the hockeystick (MBH1999) is in the top left hand corner.



If you search this PDF you will find that "Mann" was referenced 66 times in chapter 6 of the working draft. Again, if you do a search on "hockey stick" you will get a hit on page 28 in the middle of a series of paragraphs dedicated to defending the hockey stick from it's critics. It would appear that the author of this paper has no excuse for screwing up like this.

The Rebuttals:
It's Upside Down Land at the WSJ

So what about the "widely rebutted"? Well there was one paper in a peer review journal written by Ross McKitrick that claimed the hockey stick was flawed. But peer review is only a first filter and reproducibility is what counts. So who's work was reproduced? McKitrick's or Mann's? Well Wahl and Amman managed to reproduce the hockey stick. The results can be seen below:



This was published in the very same journal that McKitrick's paper was published. A press release subsequently said that the McKitrick's criticisms of Mann's hockey stick were "unfounded". After defending the hockey stick, Wahl and Amman challenged the public to download their code and check their work. The hockey stick was yet again defended by the National Academy of Sciences, Nature, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and the American Meteorological Society. More on the reproducibility can be found here. So where was this 'wide rebuttal' that the WSJ op-ed talks about? Well, it certainly doesn't appear to be in peer review journals. In peer review the complete opposite is going on. The hockey stick is being widely defended. With work this sloppy one has to wonder if the WSJ editorial board has avoided Scientific Americans invitation because they already know the truth but they refuse to admit it.

*MBH1999 stands for Mann, Bradley, and Hughes with a publication date of 1999.

Sources:

• Wall Street Journal, Climate of Opinion, The latest U.N. report shows the "warming" debate is far from settled., Monday, February 5, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST
• Authors were clear about hockey-stick uncertainties, Raymond S. Bradley Malcolm K. Hughes & Michael E. Mann Nature 442, 627 (2006). Full Text
• Nature - News: "Academy affirms hockey-stick graph"
• NAS: Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years
• Geophysical Research Letters: ROBUSTNESS OF THE MANN, BRADLEY, HUGHES RECONSTRUCTION OF NORTHERN HEMISPHERE SURFACE TEMPERATURES: EXAMINATION OF CRITICISMS BASED ON THE NATURE AND PROCESSING OF PROXY CLIMATE EVIDENCE
• National Center for Atmospheric Research: Media Advisory: The Hockey Stick Controversy
• Rutherford et al. American Meteorological Society, "Journal of Climate": Proxy-based Northern Hemisphere Surface Temperature Reconstructions: Sensitivity to Methodology, Predictor Network, Target Season and Target Domain,