If I was hoping to think about more salubrious characters than Lewandowsky, Mann and Gleick, the 2012 AGU convention was the wrong place to start my trip. All three were prominent at the convention.

AGU is a huge convention – over 20,000 people and thousands of presentations. Only a few presentations are sufficiently important to be featured on the AGU billboard leading to the conference halls. Almost the first thing that I saw at the convention was a billboard publicizing a session on the Mann case:



Also prominently advertised was the opportunity to meet one-on-one with an attorney (who I presume to have been Mann’s attorney):



Mann himself was honored as a new AGU Fellow for his achievements in orientation-neutral and low-verification paleoclimate reconstructions, with special citation to his innovative use of upside-down sediments and success in popularizing reconstructions with verification r2 of 0. In addition to his fellowship acceptance, Mann spoke at two other sessions. (My recollection of past AGU conventions was that members were limited to one oral presentation, but this policy seems to have been waived {SM Jan 7 – see note below].) One of the session chairs, who was six foot three or so, wryly asked the audience not to confuse with the little man he was introducing. Mann’s wing-woman in one presentation was the even more diminutive Oreskes, who peeking above the podium, was a fitting consort, both in rhetoric and stature. Oreskes’ opening image was, needless to say, a polar bear on an ice flow.

There were at least three sessions on blogs, one of which was convened by John Cook of SKS. Cook’s invited speakers were Michael Mann, Michael Tobis, Zeke Hausfather, Peter Sinclair. For some reason, Cook’s invitation did not include either Judy Curry or I, both long-time AGU members and proprietors of substantial blogs.

AGU used to be about physical sciences. Its erosion of standards was well exemplified by its inclusion of Stephan Lewandowsky, a social psychologist from western Australia, as co-convenor of two sessions. Lewandowsky’s field of social psychology has recently been severely criticized for lack of replicability. Indeed, Lewandowsky’s own recent work can perhaps be best described as a unique combination of Mannian statistics and Gleickian ethics. Doubtless, this will place Lewandowsky on the short list for next year’s AGU fellows.

But the most surprising, even astonishing, appearance was by Peter Gleick himself. Gleick did not simply return, but was honored by an invitation to speak at a prestigious Union session. I hadn’t even thought to look for Gleick on the program, but noticed him outside a session.

I then checked the AGU program and, to my surprise, learned that Gleick was speaking at a Union session. I went to his session with Neal King of SKS, who I’d been chatting with quite cordially in the early afternoon; I encouraged him to attend. Unfortunately, we missed the start of Gleick’s speech so I can’t comment on whether he was accorded a returning hero’s welcome or not. In any event, here’s Gleick on the podium. (I have a new phone; I hadn’t learned yet learned how to zoom or other obvious things so my quality of picture isnt great).



Gleick’s welcome back to AGU prominence – without serving even the equivalent of a game’s suspension – was pretty startling, given his admitted identity fraud and distribution (and probable fabrication) of a forged document. Last year, then AGU President Mike McPhadren, a colleague of Eric Steig’s at the University of Washington, had stated on behalf of AGU that Gleick had “compromised AGU’s credibility as a scientific society” and that his “transgression cannot be condoned”. McPhadren stated that AGU‘s “guiding core value” was “excellence and integrity in everything we do” – values that would seem to be inconsistent with identity fraud and distribution and/or fabrication of forged documents, even by the relaxed standards of academic institutions.

Although McPhadren had stated that Gleick’s “transgression” would not be “condoned”, AGU’s warm welcome to Gleick shows that McPhadren’s words meant nothing, because AGU has in fact condoned Gleick’s actions. Take a look at the definition of “condone” in respect to an offence or transgression, where its etymology, curiously, derives from adultery cases. dictionary.com says:

1. to overlook or forgive (an offence)

2. (Law) Law (esp of a spouse) to pardon or overlook (an offence, usually adultery)

Another dictionary amplifies the second definition as follows:

2) to forgive the marital infidelity of one’s spouse and resume marital sexual relations on the condition that the sin is not repeated

It’s hard to contemplate a more vivid example of an institution pardoning or overlooking an offence and resuming relations. In other words, McPhadren’s words meant nothing. By its actions, AGU has “condoned” Gleick’s identity fraud and distribution and (almost certain) fabrication of a forged document.

Opposite the well-publicized session with Mann’s lawyer was a little publicized workshop of the AGU Ethics Task Force. (Update Jan 7: As I mention in a comment below, I presume that AGU scheduled them at the same time on the basis that people interested in ethics would not be interested in meeting with Mann’s lawyer and vice versa.) In any event, the ethics workshop was sparsely attended – probably the most sparsely attended session at the entire conference. Other than members of the Task Force, I doubt if there were more than 15 attendees (out of 20,000 or so.)

The session was led by Linda Gunderson, Gleick’s successor as chair of the Ethics Task Force, Linda Gundersen. Readers may recall Willis Eschenbach’s impassioned open letter to Gundersen last year. Willis was, as usual, plain spoken:

Make no mistake. If Peter Gleick walks away from this debacle free of expulsion, sanction, or censure from the AGU, without suffering any further penalties, your reputation and the reputation of the AGU will forever join his on the cutting room floor. People are already laughing at the spectacle of the chair of a task force on scientific integrity getting caught with his entire arm in the cookie jar. You have one, and only one, chance to stop the laughter… You have a clear integrity case staring you in the face. If you only respond to Dr. Gleick’s reprehensible actions with vague platitudes about “the importance of …”, if the Task Force’s only contribution is mealy-mouthed mumblings about how “we deplore …” and “we are disappointed …”, I assure you that people will continue to point and laugh at that kind of spineless pretense of scientific integrity.

Gundersen spoke about AGU’s work on ethics, but made no mention of her predecessor as Chair of the Ethics Task Force and provided no explanation of his return as an invited speaker at a Union session. I asked Gundersen whether the AGU Task Force on Ethics had considered the Gleick affair and, if so, what were its conclusions. In particular, I asked whether they had investigated the forged strategy memo which Gleick had distributed, but had not confessed to.

Gundersen said that the Task Force had not considered the Gleick affair at all. It had done no investigation of Gleick’s conduct whatever. She said that Gleick wasn’t her responsibility and refused to be drawn into commenting on the affair in any way. She observed that the proposed Ethics Policy had not been in place at the time of the Gleick affair and that the AGU could therefore not retroactively apply the policy to Gleick, suggesting that this further demonstrated the need for an AGU ethics policy. She also observed that, in any event, the primary responsibility for enforcing ethics lay with the employing institution. (In Gleick’s case, the Pacific Institute, whose “investigation”, to my knowledge, did not include contact with Heartland Institute or any investigation of the document forgery.) [Update Jan 7- For the record, in response to Gundersen’s unsatisfactory answers to my questions, I told Gundersen that I thought that AGU’s failure to confront the problem warranted criticism and that I intended to do so as forcefully as I could.}

While I endorse AGU’s adoption of a more formal ethics policy, I do not agree that AGU was completely naked prior to adoption of a formal code. It doesn’t require a formal code for an organization to expect its officers, committee chairs and members not to commit fraud or to forge documents, as, for example, McPhadren’s original statement which relied only on AGU’s core value of “excellence and integrity”.

Willis had worried that the Task Force would respond to Gleick’s conduct only “with vague platitudes about ‘the importance of …'” or “mealy-mouthed mumblings about how ‘we deplore …’ and ‘we are disappointed …’. In fact, the AGU Ethics Task Force did not even do that much. They totally ignored the issue, while Gleick was welcomed back.

So for anyone wanting a break from Mannian statistics, Gleickian ethics, especially as synthesized by Lewandowsky, this year’s AGU conference was a bad one.

Don’t get me wrong. I had more pleasant moments at AGU than unpleasant ones. I arrived late on Monday, had excellent dinners with good company the next three days and, on Friday night was off to New Zealand and then Thailand. I’m home now. While I was away, I had to file pleadings in my Yamal FOI appeal, had a case conference in my Wahl attachment appeal and then had to file an application in the Wahl attachment appeal and am a bit weary of pettifogging by UEA lawyers. I’ve been reading the blogs. I’ve got a number of topics in inventory, but have been short on energy. I have some interesting angles on Hurricane Sandy and the New York Panel on Climate Change but they are large new topics and will take time to develop.

Update – Jan 7. A reader pointed out in comments that authors are only allowed one contributed submission but this restriction does not apply to invited presentations. I checked the AGU policy for the 2012 meeting here . It states:

First Authors can have a maximum of one (1) contributed and one (1) invited abstract, or two (2) invited abstracts.

So how did Mann (and Oreskes) come to have three podium appearances. The policy continues:

The only exemption to this policy is the submission of (1) additional contributed abstract to an Education (ED) or Public Affairs (PA) session.

Mann and Oreskes both took this policy to the limit: each made two invited presentations plus one PA session. The invitations are intriguing. Mann’s PA session was convened by John Cook of SKS. Oreskes’ PA session was convened by Mark McCaffrey of NSCE (Gleick was formerly a director of NSCE), while one of her invitations came from a session convened by Lewandowsky.



