Results management can be defined as interventions used to change the actual or interpretation of a result. The most recent example in the financial area is Enron, where revenue numbers were subject to upwards revision via dubious accounting interventions.

Results management is distinct from ‘results-based management’ – a legitimate management approach focusing on achieving outcomes, implementing performance measurement, learning and changing, and reporting performance.

Luboš Motl of The Reference Frame identified a possible example of results management in Science in his article Borehole climate reconstructions & hockey stick revolution in 1998. By way of background,
Boreholes were identified as decoding past temperatures by examining the temperatures profiles down the hole. Using this method the authors published the success of this result, and summarized the scientific finding that temperatures were higher than the present during a number of periods in the past.

Late Quaternary Temperature Changes Seen in World-Wide Continental Heat Flow Measurements.

Abstract: Analysis of more than six thousand continental heat flow measurements as a function of depth has yielded a reconstruction of a global average ground surface temperature history over the last 20,000 years. The early to mid-Holocene appears as a relatively long warm interval some 0.2-0.6 K above present-day temperatures, the culmination of the warming that followed the end of the last glaciation. Temperatures were also warmer than present 500-1,000 years ago, but then cooled to a minimum some 0.2-0.7 K below present about 200 years ago. Although temperature variations in this type of reconstruction are highly smoothed, the results clearly resemble the broad outlines of late Quaternary climate changes suggested by proxies.

Shaopeng Huang, Henry N. Pollack, Po Yu Shen, GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 24, NO. 15, PAGES 1947–1950, 1997

Shortly after, a paper appeared in Science claiming boreholes provided independent confirmation of the unusual character of 20th-century warmth.

Climate change revealed by subsurface temperatures: A global perspective

Abstract: Analyses of underground temperature measurements from 358 boreholes in eastern North America, central Europe, southern Africa, and Australia indicate that, in the 20th century, the average surface temperature of Earth has increased by about 0.5°C and that the 20th century has been the warmest of the past five centuries. The subsurface temperatures also indicate that Earth’s mean surface temperature has increased by about 1.0°C over the past five centuries. The geothermal data offer an independent confirmation of the unusual character of 20th-century climate that has emerged from recent multiproxy studies.

Henry N. Pollack, * Shaopeng Huang, Po-Yu Shen Science 9 October 1998: Vol. 282. no. 5387, pp. 279 – 281

How is it that one paper can state that temperatures were warmer than the present 500-1000 years ago, and another state categorically that the current warm temperatures are unusual? To be consistent, the conclusion of the previous paper should have been – The geothermal data offer show 20th-century climate is not unusual. The conclusions are completely contradictory!

One hint is of the effect of the interpretation intervention can be seen in the number of citations recorded in Google Scholar. The first paper, “Late Quaternary Temperature Changes Seen in World-Wide Continental Heat Flow Measurements”, has received 20 citation, while the second “Climate change revealed by subsurface temperatures: A global perspective” has received 63 citations to date. The intervention increased its popularity considerably. The paper with the sexed up conclusion was also successfully published in Science – a powerful incentive.

Luboš suggests another factor that may have influenced the authors to tweak their message. During the same time, in May 1997, Mann, Bradley, and Hughes (MBH) submitted their multiproxy paper with the hockey stick graph (MBH98) that revolutionized the field of paleoclimatology by wiping out variations in temperature for the last 1000 years, for 5 years only.

Their paper – now known to be seriously flawed – argued there were virtually no natural variations of the climate in the past 600 years (and in their 1999 follow-up, the last millennium) and only in the industrial era of the 20th century did temperatures start to skyrocket. Since then, a number of new reconstructions of past climates have contradicted MBH98 with greatly enhanced variability of past temperatures over the last millennium.

So where does this leave us? This article is simply my attempt to document a single instance of results management in science. A more detailed analysis of the type of intervention that occurred is possible, such as the change in the number of boreholes between the two studies, the change in the period under discussion, and how subtly semantic were the variations in the message.

I don’t want to go into that. These are simply the kind of obstacles one faces in developing a fair view of the state of knowledge in the global warming field. I don’t think interpretation intervention is unusual, or wrong in every case. However, “Climate change revealed by subsurface temperatures: A global perspective” clearly commits a misrepresentation by failing to mention results for the period prior to 500 years ago in the abstract. At some point the results management become a slippery slope that actually changes results. This example is interesting because there there are documents before MBH89 and after MBH89. Most studies don’t have an example of before, where results were interpreted outside of the global warming presumptions.