Who says there is no Santa? It’s beginning to feel a lot like
Christmas. Santa’s helpers were busy hacking emails earlier this year;) Just one of the early gifts Americans received. He does live at the
North Pole.

http://youhavetobethistalltogoonthisride.blogspot.com/2009/12/tgif-circus-life-yes-virginia-there-is.html

Anyway, that you for buttressing my point about peer review. In concept, it may sound like a good idea, but the establishment of any scientific industry will always want to keep out those papers that it doesn’t agree with. Ultimately, the old way of doing things may be better, especially now that response to errors can be so swift thanks to the internet.

Thank you for showing how you can be a supporter of the belief in GW and yet question how they’re showing it.

I’d add, that Michael Mann denied knowing anyone doctored the data, yet it’s called ‘Mike [Mann]‘s trick”!

So apparently you have to accept that Michael Mann altered data, then used the memory-flashy-thing from Men In Black to remove the memory.

Know whats “pathetic” CLD?
Taking one post about the actions of AGW skeptics while ignoring ALL the others and then saying “that is all I can say”

Hmmm. When I made my comment you had posted 5 of your own, with 3 being substantive ones containing links. I mentioned two of those three. I don’t see where you have cause for complaint.

I summed up your comments in my reply to Livewire at #42:

Any report of bad or foolish behavior by AGW skeptics — even if it isn’t really all that bad or foolish — is supposed to nullify any and all points they raise. Meanwhile, any report of bad or foolish behavior by AGW proponents — no matter how truly bad or foolish the behavior was — is to be ignored or explained away.

I’m perfectly willing to accept the reports at hot topic and LGF. But they prove nothing about AGW skeptics in general, yet alone universally.

With the entire “ClimateGate” affair, we have the CRU, on of the world’s leading climate science centers, and home of some of the world’s foremost AGW proponents, caught engaging in all sorts of dubious scientific practice. Yet this didn’t seem to bother you at all. All you could do is say ‘global warming skeptics got some facts wrong in reporting the CRU story,’ and ‘some skeptics in New Zealand were naughty.’

Honestly! You think misreporting one e-mail given to the BBC as several is the equivalent of Tom Wrigley writing this to Micheal Mann?

If you think that Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU channels to get him ousted.

Whether or not too much has been made of the comment “Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!” appearing in some computer code is ridiculously insignificant compared to this, and to the basic dishonesty of the graph in the first place. (See my comment #43 above.)

And frankly, as far as Charles Johnson’s whole attitude is concerned, his post calling this bit of whistleblowing “a criminal attempt to sabotage the Copenhagen climate summit” is idiotic in the extreme. Forget that the CRU folks evaded FOI requests and destroyed requested documents — which is a crime under British law. Don’t worry about how honest the AGW proponents are. All that matters is letting the Copenhagen summit go on without a hiccup. My god!

What is really criminal (besides the actual lawbreaking the scientists did to evade FOI requests) is the high-jacking of science and public policy to favor a pet hypothesis. And bloggers like Johnson are complicit in the crime.

Now your hot topic link was a much better, more serious one. But do you really think any group of AGW skeptics in New Zealand has the clout the CRU has (or had)?

We haven’t had the news media, the entertainment media, governments, and the UN all telling us that the Earth is cooling, or that we can pour carbon dioxide into the atmosphere forever at even 1,000 times the rate we have and temps will never change. What we have had shouted at us is that the industrial revolution is heating the globe and is about to warm it up to the level of the Jurassic. Whether or not there has been any good science behind this claim is what this affair is about.

You can further the usual pattern of ‘your side is as bad as mine’ all you want, gillie. But that’s pathetic. So I said so.

Its called the peer review process. You need to convince your peers that your work meets the minimal standard for publication. Thats how science works.

Or doesn’t work, as the case may be.

I’m a chemist, Tano, so I don’t need you telling me how science is supposed to work. Peer review is a relatively new thing in the world of science. For a long time scientists got along quite well without it. And as for the process itself, I wrote:

The peer review process is, by its very nature, also a process by which groupthink can be maintained in the scientific community. This is simply the nature of the beast. So when a paper is rejected for publication, any claim that it is being suppressed may be specious, or it may be correct.

When Albert Einstein’s papers on special relativity and the photoelectric effect were published there was no such thing as peer review. Given how outside the mainstream of scientific thought his paper’s were, how likely were they to have survived a peer review process? If you think I’m making [too] much of this, just note that Einstein’s understanding of gravitation had been empirically vindicated, yet the Noble Prize committee refused to mention it in his award. It was just too radical.

Do you care to respond to this, Tano? Or are you just going to continue blustering about peer review?

(Seriously, Tano, if you want to defend the process of peer review again then address these points. Otherwise shut up about it. We don’t need to listen to a damn broken record.)

Perhaps you want to sound like some noble defender of the sciences so the discussion here will be distracted from the attempts of the folks at CRU to keep papers opposed to their pet hypothesis from being published.

Are you denying that Phil Jones wrote this to Michael Mann:

The other paper by MM is just garbage – as you knew. De Freitas again. Pielke is also losing all credibility as well by replying to the mad Finn as well – frequently as I see it. I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is ! [emphasis added]

Come off it, Tano. Anyone can see the game you’re playing here.

Horsecrap. The “doctoring” was to add REAL TEMPERATURE DATA, from thermometers, to replace proxy data – inferred from tree rings – data that the “doctorers” had long argued – in print – was unreliable, and had demonstrated so.

The horse crap being peddled here is coming from you, Tano. The graph didn’t say it was two kinds of data — that’s doctoring right there. When this was first called into question by John Finn at RealClimate.org:

Whatever the reason for the divergence, it would seem to suggest that the practice of grafting the thermometer record onto a proxy temperature record – as I believe was done in the case of the ‘hockey stick’ – is dubious to say the least

Mann’s response was:

No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, “grafted the thermometer record onto” any reconstrution.

Of course the replacement had to be denied: because it’s dishonest practice.

The proxy data was replaced because it showed a recent decline in temps — Mr. Jones admitted as much:

“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”

(e-mail from Phil Jones to Raymond Bradley, Michael Mann, and Malcolm Hughes of 16 Nov 1999)

And if the proxy data is unreliable to begin with, what good is it to compare it with real temp data or anything else? Honestly, Tano, did you realize you’d skewered you’re own point?

Now, Tano, you can grow up and actually defend your assertions about peer review and its use in this case, and you can attempt a real defense of the behavior of Phil Jones and his colleagues, or you can just go away. Your choice.

Nice to see you posting again CLDave.

Thank you, Livewire. I hope my posts on this thread continue to earn your admiration.

So let me see, gillie posts a link that confirms that the BBC received an email and didn’t do any following up, yet somehow this debunks the arguement?

Yes, Livewire, that’s how it works. Any report of bad or foolish behavior by AGW skeptics — even if it isn’t really all that bad or foolish — is supposed to nullify any and all points they raise. Meanwhile, any report of bad or foolish behavior by AGW proponents — no matter how truly bad or foolish the behavior was — is to be ignored or explained away.

This sort of nonsense goes on in politically charged arguments all the time. The global warming debate is just following the typical pattern.

Tano, on your last comment, you are dead wrong. Yes I have read some of the papers that were originally rejected. I know you’ve read this blog for a while, and you must have noticed that I am (A) not one that tows a party line, and (B) when I state something, I put full weight of research behind it. I have even admitted when I’m wrong. I do not believe, as others have stated here, that Climategate disproves AWG. What it does show is that the bullet proof consensus has only appeared bullet proof by a rigged process that cannot be considered unbiased… no, that is not the right word, scientifically objective peer review process.

You don’t need to take my word for it. Please read very carefully this post from climate scientist Judith Curry, or Richard Lindzen, or this from hurricane researcher and fellow computer modeler Vincent Gray. These are real scientist, working in the field, who have between them had many papers subjected to peer review and see the same problems that I do.

You say this:

I am sensing that you simply assume that whatever the GW advocates did must have been bad, and whatever someone who is a skeptic has done, must be good and valuable. And if thats the case, then there is no reason to even discuss the point, because you seem committed to your position a priori.

This seems to be the inverse. Again, I’m not coming to this as a novice. Though I didn’t finish my geology degree (calc killed me), I do have some base in scientific studies. You seem to buy every utterance by the GW advocates, even when the e-mails suggest otherwise. Jones says that they would destroy data in e-mails, and now that data is conveniently missing. The e-mails do not in any way corroborate the current story that the data in question went missing in the eighties, which surely would have been mentioned at some point in the battle over releasing data via FOI requests. There is NO MENTION that they don’t have the data, but there is Jones writing that others on the Team also delete e-mails and other documentation, which is quite illegal when facing a FOI request. Notice Gavin and others won’t touch that subject. Yet if a private company, such as Microsoft, or, lets say Haliburton, were shown to have executive doing the same thing and hiding info from FOI requests, both of us would be screaming bloody murder!

When Gavin Schmidt at RealClimate says that they never hid the decline, that this fact was already out there, he’s telling only a half truth. When it was mentioned at all, the divergence was downplayed. And the severity of the divergence was NEVER brought to the public fore. Here is a reconstruction of the decline in question. It has NEVER been shown by Schmidt, or Briffa, or Mann, or by anyone else to the general public when the IPCC reports were created and packaged for general consumption. Go to almost every AWG site, and you will NEVER see this presented, because they rely on the IPCC report, and by excluding this info from the main report they bury the divergence problem from the public. Why? Because if the divergence is happening now during the current warming, if the divergence is related to a rapidly warming climate, and if this current divergence cannot be explained, then how can the climate scientist argue against the premise that warming in the past didn’t produce the same temperature / proxy divergence in the past? This is one of the most important aspects of the valid criticisms of the way the climate science community has literally shut down debate on this subject. You instinctively want to shout right about now that there are no proxies that show other periods of warming. In which case you would be quite incorrect. Again, see Soon /Baliunas 2003. And note my criticism of Mann’s debunking of that paper.

Again. None of this proves that AWG is a hoax. What it does show is that the Wegman report was accurate in describing the situation that too few in the scientific field of climate research had acquired too much influence on the peer review process and the inner-workings of the science as a whole.

The peer review process IS a gatekeeper function. THat is the whole point of it – to keep out bad science. Otherwise the line would go straight from the scientist writing the paper to the publisher who prints it. The only thing that peer review does is say NO to the work that is not up to snuff (actually it does more in the sense that suggestions are made through the process to improve the papers that end up being published).

What it comes down to of course is your assertion, your assumption, that the papers that were rejected deserved to be published. I wonder how you can simply assume that, given that (I bet) you havent read them yourself, nor would you be qualified to judge their quality if you did. I am sensing that you simply assume that whatever the GW advocates did must have been bad, and whatever someone who is a skeptic has done, must be good and valuable. And if thats the case, then there is no reason to even discuss the point, because you seem committed to your position a priori.

That IS NOT how science is supposed to work.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/earth/4338343.html?page=1

Its called the peer review process. You need to convince your peers that your work meets the minimal standard for publication. Thats how science works.

What you don’t seem to get is that these scientists may have interfered with the peer review process, acting as gatekeeper to keep other valid scientific papers out of print. That IS HOT how science is supposed to work.

Know whats “pathetic” CLD?
Taking one post about the actions of AGW skeptics while ignoring ALL the others and then saying “that is all I can say”

I have given you many links that clearly show what they did, why they did it and the science behind it.

And of course, you have no response to that other than ripping LGF…

So either using tree rings data have always been flawed, or the laws of the universe changed in 1960 and they suddenly became flawed.

And yes, when you add real temp data to proximate data that’s altering data.

Keep crying on your hamburger Tano. It’s sad.