Ron Wormus wrote:
There is no question that warming is occurring now. Only if such temp excursions have also occurred in the recent past. I think that article makes a good case that Mann cooked the books and that NO due diligence was ever done on his work.
It was just blindly accepted .."Nature" where it was published included.
I cannot judge whether this paper is correct or not, but the original paper does seem very fishy, and Nature has acted outrageously, just as they did with regard to cold fusion.
Full disclosure of data and methods are a prerequisite to good science. Especially when billion $ decisions are being made based on the data.
That is a ridiculous exaggeration. Billions of dollars are not riding on this one data set alone, but rather on data, computer models and theories from hundreds of different researchers.
I agree this looks like bad science. There has been a great deal of bad science and shoddy research on both sides of the cold-fusion debate. However, just because you find one bad cold fusion paper that does not mean you can dismiss the whole field. By the same token, just because you find this "hockey stick" paper is flawed, that does not mean you can dismiss the whole field of global warming.
Also, there is a difference between predicting the future and forecasting it. The weather bureau does not claim it is infallible. It forecasts what is statistically likely to happen in the near future. Climate researchers predict what is statistically likely in the more distant future. Obviously their predictions are much less certain, but that does not mean they are worthless. On the McIntyre web site, someone wrote that an event like the Krakatou explosion might throw off all of the predictions made by global warming experts. Of course it might! An unexpected shift in the path of a hurricane might spare a major city, no one can predict with perfect accuracy which direction a hurricane will go. That does not mean we have no idea what hurricanes will do, or that it is a waste of time trying to predict their paths, or that we should not evacuate when it seems likely a hurricane will strike. In any case, events like Krakatou are rare, and their influence only lasts for a few years as far as I know.
- Jed
