Edward Wegman

Edward Wegman is a prominent statistics professor at George Mason University and chair of the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics.

Energy and Commerce hearing

For their testimony in the July 2006 Energy and Commerce hearing "Questions Surrounding the 'Hockey Stick' Temperature Studies: Implications for Climate Change Assessments," [1] Wegman and colleagues authored a report (full report, fact-sheet) critical of Michael Mann's "Hockey Stick" graph, saying:

• It is important to note the isolation of the paleoclimate community; even though they rely heavily on statistical methods they do not seem to be interacting with the statistical community. Additionally, we judge that the sharing of research materials, data and results was haphazardly and grudgingly done. In this case we judge that there was too much reliance on peer review, which was not necessarily independent. Moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that this community can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility. Overall, our committee believes that Dr. Mann’s assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade of the millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year of the millennium cannot be supported by his analysis.'
• Our committee believes that the assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade in a millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year in a millennium cannot be supported by the MBH98/99 analysis. As mentioned earlier in our background section, tree ring proxies are typically calibrated to remove low frequency variations. The cycle of Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age that was widely recognized in 1990 has disappeared from the MBH98/99 analyses, thus making possible the hottest decade/hottest year claim. However, the methodology of MBH98/99 suppresses this low frequency information. The paucity of data in the more remote past makes the hottest-in-a-millennium claims essentially unverifiable. (testimony)

The report of Wegman and his colleagues has been criticized by a RealClimate.org, a proponent of man-made global warming, for drawing such conclusions. [2]