George Will-misled and misleading

Don't overlook RealClimate's take-down of a column by George Will.

Comments

[TM Lutas]

Thanks for the guide. Realclimate.org is only half of a conversation between Mann and his partisans and his critics, principally McKitrick and McIntyre who, if nothing else, discovered that the hockey stick figure in the 3rd IPCC report and the MBH98 paper upon which the IPCC version was based hadn't actually been checked and replicated by anybody in the climate science field for 6 years until the MM03 paper did so and found material errors in same. Nature finally printed a "Corrigendum" in its July 1 2004 issue admitting some (but arguably not all) of the errors.

Just think of it. We have the most dramatic element in the case for global warming presented internationally in a UN conference after passing peer review and being published in Nature, a highly prestigious journal, and nobody even checks their work for six years.

Why do the climatologists even bother? It isn't modern science if nobody seriously attempts to replicate the work, whether the work is accepted or not by fellow professionals in the field. It's a real scandal regardless of the eventual outcome of who's right, MBH or MM on the facts of the hockey stick.

Policy makers should keep their distance from scientists who don't bother to do science.

[Laurence Aurbach]

As RealClimate notes, "Numerous myths regarding the so-called "hockey stick" reconstruction of past temperatures, can be found on various non-peer reviewed websites, internet newsgroups and other non-scientific venues."

Congratulations, you've managed to repeat most of the myths in just three paragraphs.

[TM Lutas]

Wow, Nature didn't actually publish a Corrigendum correcting errors in the MBH98 paper in their July 1, 2004 issue? The MM03 paper discovering errors in MBH98 wasn't a reviewed journal? Nature's Corrigendum policy is specifically to publish one only on errors that affect the results or the scientific reputation of the authors or the magazine. A missed listing without impact does not fall under the guidelines for a Corrigendum.

I very carefully stuck to the bedrock claim that has been admitted by Nature and the reasonable inference that if other climatologists had properly approached the issue of replicating experiments, the errors that Nature admitted to would have been uncovered far sooner than six years earlier. If they had replicated in error, MM would have mentioned the others making the same errors as well and other Corrigendums would have been published elsewhere correcting those errors.

The alternative exists that Nature published a paper that was correct but published the Corrigendum in error. This seems highly unlikely as the process of getting such a correction in print is at least as involved as getting an actual paper submitted and has the added difficulty of hostile parties being involved (the original paper submitters) arguing that no Corrigendum need be issued at all.

Feel free to explain to me how Nature was in error in issuing the Corrigendum. No really, I'd like to hear it. How much the MM critique is smoke and how much is actual fire is up for grabs in my book but you cannot merely wave it away without explaining how Nature made an error in issuing a Corrigendum this summer.

The truth is that there's a problem in MBH98 as amended. Where that problem is and how important it is to the final results isn't out yet as MM03 needs replication as much as MBH98 needed it. The nature of Nature's Corrigendum policies means that they don't get published for inconsequential errors that don't affect validity.

As for me, I've put realclimate on my daily reading list. I'll see whether they have the best of the argument (though I can tell already that their writing is going to give me a headache) because it's a hugely important question. So far, they've got a distressing number of hallmarks of pretentious windbags, the bearers of orthodoxy who are frightened that they will be exposed as frauds.

We'll see.

[Laurence Aurbach]

I provided the link, but since you insist on being spoon-fed, here's a quote:

The second falsehood holds that there are errors in the Mann et al (1998, 1999) analyses, and that these putative errors compromise the "hockey stick" shape of hemispheric surface temperature reconstructions. Such claims seem to be based in part on the misunderstanding or misrepresentation by some individuals of a corrigendum that was published by Mann and colleagues in Nature. This corrigendum simply corrected the descriptions of supplementary information that accompanied the Mann et al article detailing precisely what data were used. As clearly stated in the corrigendum, these corrections have no influence at all on the actual analysis or any of the results shown in Mann et al (1998). Claims that the corrigendum reflects any errors at all in the Mann et al (1998) reconstruction are entirely false.

The article goes on from there to detail the many ways that McIntyre and McKitrick's claims have been discredited.