Special post on IPCC study cherrypicking

 

Apples, Oranges, and Normalized Hurricane Damage - An incredible data error in a paper celebrated by the IPCC offers a science integrity test for climate science. When the IPCC AR6 and the Sixth US National Climate Assessment (USNCA) chose to highlight just one 2018 study of normalized hurricane damage from among more than 70 similar studies, one of the authors of many of those studies, who is also co-author of the very methodology for doing such studies, dug into the highlighted study to understand how it reached conclusions so different from every other study in the literature. 

What he found was that the 2018 researchers had attached a recent data series, that had not been through peer review, to a long-term data series that had been thoroughly peer-reviewed, and that the recent data series had already been identified as having severe flaws. The researcher has written to the journal that published the paper to ask for a retraction and also to the lead author of the study. I encourage everyone to read the Apples, Oranges link above to see for themselves how the scientific process can go off the rails, but also how it can be corrected through open and transparent dialogue among scientists, something sorely lacking in climate science these days, when prominent figures like Michael Mann, inventor of the infamous hockey stick graph, sue and bankrupt people who disagree with them. 


The hockey stick graph had an eerily similar procedure: use cherry-picked long-term temperature proxy data from tree rings, but when the tree ring data shows cooling instead of warming in recent decades, throw it out and use modern thermometer records instead, which in turn are known to have a wide range of biases and errors. Hey, presto - a hockey stick!

The author says: "The headline results that have been cherrypicked by IPCC and the USNCA disappear when the erroneously spliced base damages dataset is corrected. This is one of those rare cases where a fatal error in research is obvious, consequential and simple for anyone to document for themselves. I have requested of PNAS that G18 be retracted, and corrections from IPCC and the UCNCA must occur as well. This is a simple but important test of scientific integrity for climate science. Let’s see what happens." [emphasis added]

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