Readers here are probably already familiar with the Wegman report “strange scholarship” scandal but if not read up on it a bit at Eli Rabbet’s place. The mess goes much deeper, but the relevant aspect is an ongoing plagarism investigation into Wegman by George Mason University. The GMU investigation was pushed forward by a formal complaint by Raymond Bradely because passages from his text, Paleoclimatology: Reconstructing Climates of the Quaternary, were copied and placed verbatim, uncited and without quotation marks into Wegman’s report.

Now, to the subject of this post. I don’t recall how I ended up there because I do not follow the machinations at Climate Audit even semi-regularily, but I did, and I found myself reading this post. The usual topic there tends to be impenetrably technical or requires tedious amounts of nit-picking background and/or statistical expertise (why I avoid it) but this topic required no such effort.

What it is, is an attempt to “balance” the plagarism charges against Wegman with a not-to-subtle “Clinton did it too!” defense.

First things first: two wrongs don’t make a right (it takes at least three), my mother taught me that (not that extended version, I confess). So, a pretty weak start. Then again, I am very fond of throwing the “hypocrite” charge myself so sauce for the goose and all that.

McIntyre’s charge is that Raymond Bradley copies another author in his book even as he cries foul that Wegman has done this to him:

In all 12 figures, Bradley copies often lengthy text from Fritts1976 (in the form of captions). In six of the 12 figures, although the language is taken from Fritts 1976, Bradley cites other provenance for the articles. In each such case, the language in Bradley appears to be a paraphrase of the cited article, while it is, in fact, a copy of the uncited version in Fritts 1976.

Since much of Bradley’s dendro chapter is a commentary on the figures from Fritts, Bradley’s text draws heavily on ideas from Fritts 1976, and, in some cases, Bradley’s language tracks Fritts’ rather closely (without specific attribution.) Bradley 1985 included a commendation of Fritts 1976 in its introduction, but this commendation was removed in Bradley 1999.

“copy”, “uncited”, “without attribution”. Got it. Steve kindly presents the evidence which is a bit of a head scratcher, because all the examples are clearly cited! To whit:

Fritts:

Trees growing on sites where climate seldom limits growth processes produce rings that are uniformly wide (A). Such rings provide little or no record of variations in climate and are termed complacent. Trees growing on sites where climatic factors are frequently limiting produce rings that vary in width from year to year depending on how severely limiting climate has been to growth. (B) These are termed sensitive.

Bradley:

Trees growing on sites where climate seldom limits growth processes produce rings that are uniformly wide (left). Such rings provide little or no record of variations in climate and are termed complacent. (right): Trees growing on sites where climatic factors are frequently limiting produce rings that vary in width from year to year depending on how severely limiting climate has been to growth. These are termed sensitive (from Fritts, 1971).

Yes, they are practiclly identical and there is no excuse for including material like that without a citation. But, what was that last bit? (from Fritts, 1971) That is known as a citation. So what’s the point? Well, it seems those words came from another source, Fritts 1976! Every example Steve offers is the same, though in some cases Bradley has cited it with (after Fritts 1976). So the whole charge is less than weak, this is baseless slander blown up from a harmless error.

Kind of like “the hockey stick is a scientific fraud and the MWP was hot” on closer inspection becomes “MBH used sub-optimal statistical methods in otherwise correct and ground breaking research”, here we have “Bradley is a hypocrite accusing Wegman of plagarism when he did it first” becomes “Bradley mistakenly cited Fritts 1971 when he menat Fritts 1976″

Phfft! The comments are what you would expect.