Wegman Report

The Wegman Report (officially called the Ad Hoc Committee Report on the 'Hockey Stick' Global Climate Reconstruction) was prepared in 2006 by three statisticians led by Edward Wegman at the request of Rep. Joe Barton of the United States House Committee on Energy and Commerce to validate criticisms made by Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick of reconstructions of the temperature record of the past 1000 years, in particular the reconstructions by Mann, Bradley and Hughes of what had been dubbed the hockey stick graph.

The Wegman Report was not peer reviewed in the same way as the NRC Report, but was sent out to a number of referees before it was released. Wegman lacked the procedures and staff which the NRC had in place to organise peer review. One of the referees, Grace Wahba, later said she was given the report only 3 days in advance, and her criticisms were ignored. The Wegman Report said that there was no evidence that Mann or any of the other authors in paleoclimatology studies have had significant interactions with mainstream statisticians. It alleged that the paleoclimate community was relatively isolated, relying heavily on statistical methods but not seeming to interact with "the statistical community". In his written response to questions, Mann said Wegman appeared to have written this without making any investigation, and many statisticians working in climatology had been offended by Wegman's claim. The NRC committee included the statisticians Douglas Nychka and Peter Bloomfield who had both worked with climatologists, and Mann himself had been a member from 2003 to 2005 of the American Meteorological Society Committee on Probability and Statistics along with other scientists and statisticians. The National Center for Atmospheric Research Geophysical Statistics Project had provided such interaction for over a decade, and more than 24 of those participating had subsequently gained doctorates in statistics. Mann as a graduate student had participated in its inaugural workshop in 1994. Its head Doug Nychka had been directly consulted for Wahl & Ammann 2006. Textbooks had been published on statistical climatology, and von Storch testified that he had co-authored "Statistical Analysis in Climate Research" with the statistician Francis Zwiers.