Those who work at public institutions owe the public, their patrons, a duty of truth. Private citizens are free to engage in any foolishness that suits them, but public servants must be held to a higher standard.

The graph above was recently published by Shaun Marcott et al in Science Magazine. It is a graph showing world temperature as recorded by some “proxies”, 18O in the shells of sea critters and such, for the past 2000 years. It involved some heavy statistical techniques and it seems to show a dramatic spike recently.

But here is the same graph from Marcott’s PhD thesis a few months earlier that shows no recent spike.

There is no excuse for a paper in a premium journal to not at least offer an explanation for this change in results. It has become clear that the dates of data points were changed to create the spike.

This is scientific misconduct and a cynical abrogation of the duty of truth.