A Letter from Dr. McCulloch to Nature

Hu’s not too happy that his work was used without credit.  I imagine blatant plagiarism is new to him as well.  He’s actually requested a complete retraction of the Corrigendum

Here’s the letter posted on CA’s thread:

=============================================

Hu McCulloch

<!—->:
<!––>August 6th, 2009 at 9:27 am

Here’s what I sent to Nature:

Date: Thu, 06 Aug 2009 10:50:11 -0400
To: nature@nature.com
From: Hu McCulloch
Subject: Fwd: Comment on serial correlation in Steig et al 2009

August 7, 2009

Dr. Philip Campbell, Editor in Chief
Dr. Karl Ziemelis, Chief Physical Science Editor
Nature
c/o nature@nature.com

Dear Drs. Campbell and Ziemelis:

On Feb. 26, 2009, I informally published, in a well-known and closely watched
climate blog, a comment on the Jan. 22, 2009 Nature letter by Eric J. Steig et al.,
“Warming of the Antarctic ice-sheet…” (vol. 456, pp. 459-62). In my
comment, I pointed out that the confidence intervals they published
made no compensation for serial correlation, and that
when this is done, the results are substantially weaker than they
reported, albeit not by enough to overturn them in the key case of West
Antarctica. On Feb. 28, 2009, I called the authors’ attention to my findings
in the e-mail copied below.

In yesterday’s issue of Nature, Steig et al. published a Corrigendum
replicating my findings, with essentially the same results. However,
they make no mention of my prior, well-distributed results, of which
I had made them aware. Instead, they present my prior discovery as if it
were their own.

According to your Editorial Policies, “Plagiarism is when an author attempts to
pass off someone else’s work as his or her own.” There is no submission
date published with the Corrigendum, but if it this was after Feb. 28, I would
submit that this Corrigendum constitutes plagiarism as you define it.

I therefore request that you retract the Steig et al. Corrigendum and
replace it with my e-mail to them, copied below. The e-mail provides
the URL to my Feb. 26 Climate Audit post, “Steig 2009’s Non-Correction
for Serial Correlation.”

Since your policy on corrections and comments is to publish them
“if and only if the author provides compelling evidence that a major
claim of the original paper was incorrect,” and this error did not
in itself overturn their key result, I did not submit my comment to Nature,
and only published it informally instead. But since you have
now published Steig et al.’s replication of my findings, they
evidently are important enough for at least a mention in Nature.

Thank you in advance for your careful consideration.

Sincerely yours,

J. Huston McCulloch
Professor of Economics and Finance
Ohio State University

Date: Sat, 28 Feb 2009 15:51:44 -0500
To:[edited by Jeff to remove All of the Steig et al.  authors emails]
From: Hu McCulloch
Subject: Comment on serial correlation in Steig et al 2009

Dear Dr. Steig and co-authors,
FYI, I have recently posted a comment on your 2009 paper in Nature
on Climate Audit, at http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=5341 .
While I was able to replicate or virtually replicate the 1957-2006 trends you report
on p 460 for the three regions and the continent as a whole, the 95% Confidence
Intervals you report appear to have taken no account of serial correlation
in the regression errors. When this is done, the CI’s are substantially wider
than you report.
Any reactions, by comments there or by e-mail, would be welcome!
— Hu McCulloch

J. Huston McCulloch
Economics Dept. voice (614) 292-0382
Ohio State Univ. FAX (614) 292-3906, attn. J.H. McCulloch
1945 N. High St.
Columbus, OH 43210
URL: http://econ.ohio-state.edu/jhm/jhm.html

Since the Corrigendum was published yesterday in the Aug 6 issue of Nature, I figured that today must be the 7th. I’ve sent them a correction to the date.