Plagiarism and poor scholarship rife in statistician’s tight circle

The blogger Deep Climate has released another devastating analysis of the shoddy scholarship and obvious cheating that characterized the work of the statistician Edward Wegman and his team, authors of a report to Congress that Deep Climate calls “nothing more than a politically motivated attack on climate science and scientists from the start.”

DeepC, surely on of the most careful, thorough and tireless researchers currently working the climate blogosphere, has been here before, collecting evidence that demonstrated massive plagiarism by Wegman and his proteges when they were preparing their Republican-commissioned attack on Michael Mann’s oft-vindicated, but still controversial hockey stick graph.

As on the last occasion, DeepC has prepared a side-by-side analysis showing the work of Wegman and his principal assistant Yasmin Said juxtaposed with the documents from which they mined a shocking amount of their material. It’s shocking because they didn’t attribute any of it and, on many occasions, the few efforts they made to change the text merely obscured or rendered insensisble the original meaning. It’s not just that they were cheating, they were doing it in a way that invites applications of the term “incompetent.”DeepC calls at the end of his excellent post for an investigation by George Mason University, whence this substandard work originated. It seems relevant, though, to also call for Congressional attention. Some of this material was prepared using government funding and even if the specific intent was NOT to mislead Congress, there is certainly a compelling argument to be made that Congress was, indeed, misled.

That, in lots of different ways, is a crime.