by Judith Curry
What a week.
While the Heartland/Gleick affair has dominated the climate news, there are some other things that I’ve spotted that are of interest.
Wegman
George Mason U. professor reprimanded over climate paper
George Mason University has issued a reprimand to Edward J. Wegman, a professor of data sciences and applied statistics, after more than a year of investigation into accusations that Mr. Wegman included plagiarized material in a 2006 report that congressional Republicans used to challenge scientific findings about global warming. The reprimand followed the unanimous vote of a faculty committee that plagiarism occurred and that it was the result of “poor judgment” attributable to Mr. Wegman, USA Today reported. A second faculty committee also reviewed the matter and concluded unanimously that Mr. Wegman’s report contained “extensive paraphrasing” but no misconduct, the newspaper said.
JC comment: this seems to be an appropriate and measured response. I haven’t seen this discussed in blogosphere, after Mashey and DeepClimate made such a big deal of this. I guess they don’t want to do a side by side comparison of Wegman and Gleick.
New WSJ op ed
Recall, last month there were dueling op-eds “No Need to Panic About Global Warming,” by 16 authors that included Lindzen. There were two responses: Kevin Trenberth and 37 others and by Robert Byer of the American Physical Society. I wasn’t at all impressed with any of these letters.
Now, The Wall Street Journal posted another op-ed by the original 16 scientists: Concerned Scientists Reply on Global Warming. This is a must-read op-ed, this time they hit the nail on the head. The tepid response from Real Climate is here.
Climate Research Funding
I have long been planning a post on climate research funding. This post by Paul Homewood makes one of the points I was planning to make: How Climate Research Starves Other Scientists of Funding. This is with particular reference to funding in the UK:
Put simply, the EPSRC are making top down decisions about which areas should receive more funding and which ones less, rather than judging individual applications on their own intrinsic merit.
As a result certain areas of science are having all funding withdrawn, for, at the least, the next year. For instance PhD fellowships will no longer be available for Engineering graduates, and will be limited to only Statistics & Applied Probability for Mathematicians, as the EPSRC website makes clear.
This is a very interesting article. In the U.S. I have seen the same thing from WITHIN the climate field, where funding agencies preferentially target funding in specific areas that the administrators and program managers of the funding agencies deem important.
Heartland/Gleick
I originally intended to make this a Heartland/Gleick free thread, but I spotted two really insightful articles, by Donna Laframboise and Hilary Ostrov.
Donna’s article is titled Peter Gleick Then and Now. She discusses Gleick’s pronouncement in 2001 that the debate is over, with his confessional plea for a rational debate (in the context of turning down Heartland’s invitation to debate.
Hilary’s article is titled From the ashes of gleickgate: a new mantra is born. This is a thoughtful post on the lessons we might learn from this.
Warming climate could make us all shrink.
And finally, something to make your head spin, read it here.
And, of course, human beings could shrink too.
“I joke about this all the time – we’re going to be walking around three feet tall if we keep going the way we’re going,” says Philip Gingerich, a researcher at the University of Michigan.
“Maybe that’s not all bad, and if that’s the worst it gets, it will be fine. You can either adapt, or you go extinct, or you can move, and there’s not a lot of place to move anymore, so I think it’s a matter of adaptation and becoming smaller.”