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 Edward Wegman tried to blame a student for the plagiarism in a paper that has since been retracted from the journal of Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, according to emails released in a new report by computer scientist Dr.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

Mashey and the Canadian blogger DeepClimate have been the two most effective forces at discovering, analyzing and revealing the incorrect, plagiarized and academically incompetent work generated by Wegman, his collaborator and former student Yasmin Said, as well as other students including Walid Sharabati and John Rigsby in their ongoing attacks on climate scientists who contributed to the iconic “hockey stick” climate reconstruction graph (inset).

Earlier Mashey reports include Strange Scholarship in the Wegman Report and Crescendo Climategate Cacaphony, both of which leverage DeepClimate’s research and then canvas in extraordinary detail the connections and manipulations that mark the Wegman campaign. The retraction of the CSDA paper is the first obvious result of Mashey and DC’s painstaking scholarship. This new report is yet more evidence that more dramatic punishments may still be in store for the Wegman team and for the Republican legislators (such as Joe Barton) and functionaries (including Barton’s staffer Peter Spencer) who originally engaged Wegman to launch the hockey stick attack.