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New Mashey Report Disrobes Climate Disinformer

What would cause a senior anthropologist such as Peter Wood to stagger outside his field of expertise and launch a bitchy, personal and error-ridden attack on a climate scientist and his defender? Wrong-headedness? Ideological blindess? Great wads of Richard Mellon Scaife’s cash? What?

Well, the question must be rhetorical, unless the President of the National Association of Scholars chooses to answer it himself. According to his fields of study, Wood is an “expert” in art, aesthetics, Catholocism and culture. He neither claims nor can demonstrate the tiniest academic mastery of atmospheric physics or any other aspect of climatology.

Yet he has used his launching pad as president of the NAS (suspiciously rendered with the same acronym as the National Academy of Sciences) and a podium at the Chronicle of Higher Education to try to dismiss both Michael Mann and John Mashey as huckster fellow travellers of P.T. Barnum.

As the attached report demonstrates, that was a mistake. Because Wood doesn’t fare at all well when someone turns the investigatory camera on him.

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Updated: With complete list of Mashey Papers

Computer scientist, entrepreneur, periodic DeSmogBlog contributor and “one of the good guys” John Mashey is the subject of an extremely favorable profile this week in Science. 

Science writer Eli Kintisch looks back over the last couple of years at the research and reports that Mashey has produced. Calling Mashey “an amateur” (which, on the question of climate science, he freely admits to being), Kintisch then looks for some journalistic “balance,” interviewing one person who is defensive and critical in the face of Mashey’s work (the confused and compromised physicist Will Happer) and one who is reassured and delighted (“hockey stick” co-author and director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State, Michael Mann).

“Both sides can agree on one thing, however: Mashey has become one of the most visible of a new generation of climate warriors.”

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New Mashey Report Drills into Academic Misconduct

The 2006 Wegman Report to Congress, already under investigation for extensive plagiarism, also appears to be guilty of falsifications, misrepresentation and frabrications that could give rise to a charge of academic misconduct, according to a new report by computer scientist and entrepreneur John Mashey (attached, below).

Mashey and the Canadian blogger DeepClimate have analysed Wegman extensively in the past, primarily for the plagiarism of which Wegman is so clearly guilty. But Mashey digs deeper in the current report, questioning whether the numerous errors, oversights and misrepresentations in the report can be explained by inadvertence or incompetence, or whether Wegman and his prinicpal co-author Yasmin Said were intentionally distorting the information they were plagiarizing and, in the process, pointedly misrepresenting science.

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Strange Tales and Emails: Said, Wegman, Sharabati, Rigsby (2008)

The discredited Dr. Edward Wegman tried to blame a student for the plagiarism in a paper that has since been retracted from the journal of Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, according to emails released in a new report by computer scientist Dr. John Mashey (attached below).

The emails, originally obtained by USA Today reporter Dan Vergano, reveal that Wegman and his friend, CSDA Editor Dr. Stanely Azen, both tried to convince the publisher Elsevier to allow the discredited paper to stand, perhaps with an errata sheet attached as what Azen described as “punishment” for the Wegman team’s academic misconduct.

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DeSmogBlog Tutor Examines the Trail of Denial

Three or four years ago, when the DeSmogBlog’s comments were still unmoderated (and too often unintelligent), we began to notice the consistent high quality of input from a frequent reader named John Mashey. His analysis was so sharp and his breadth of knowledge so impressive that we couldn’t resist tracking him down - to find out: who the heck is this guy?

Well, his Wikipedia page announces him as a “computer scientist, director and entrepreneur, ” a veteran of Bells Labs and Silicon Valley who has recently turned his prodigious energy and evident intelligence to the task of sorting out who’s saying what in the world of climate change denial and who’s paying them for their efforts.

Mashey has become a teacher, friend and contributor to the DSB in more ways than one. Aside from the remarkable research papers (1, 2)  that he has posted on our site in the last year, his was the greatest and most valued contribution to Climate Cover-up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming.

So, we’re thrilled he’s in “the neighbourhood,” speaking in our hometown of Vancouver tomorrow (Wednesday April 6, 7:30 p.m. in Theatre C300 at UBC Robson Square, 800 Robson Street) and  in Victoria (Thursday, April 7, 7:30 p.m. in Room B150 of the Bob Wright Centre at the University of Victoria). The trip, which included a lecture last night at the University of Northern BC in Prince George, was organized thanks to the good graces of Dr. Tom Pedersen, Director of the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions.

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WegmanGate, SkepticGate:

Isn’t it Time to Slam the Gate?

George Mason University continues to fritter away its reputation for academic integrity by failing to act on plagiarism charges against Dr. Edward Wegman - but the indefatigable John Mashey has not rested in the long interegnum since the complaint was filed.

Mashey’s latest update is attached below and with his first edition, here. John recommends particularly the paranoic rantings of Dr. Donald Rapp (in the new Section 3) as well as Wegman’s own unfolding commentary (Appendix A 3), which continues regardless of a GMU directive that he not comment on his investigation until the beleaguered braintrust at his university decides to recognize the obvious - or cover up.