From Roger Pielke Jr.’s blog, some strong advice.
UPDATE: Dot Earth on the debate.
If you want to know why Steve McIntyre has a large following and the respect (often begrudging) from many professionals, you need look no further than his latest post on the Yamal controversy. Some people won’t like his tone and others won’t like how his work is used and spun in the political process. All fair complaints, but they are largely a side show to the substantive issues.
And so long as Steve is delivering detailed, systematic and devastating substantive arguments — and yes this post is all three — he will continue to have a following and earn respect (however begrudging).
Anyone coming to this fresh who compares McIntyre’s latest dissection with the recent screed from Real Climate will come to a similar judgment, I’d guess.
I stand by my unsolicited advice to McIntyre that he needs to publish his work in the peer reviewed arena if he wants to have his work accepted and included in the mainstream scientific discourse. Meantime, those professionals, such as the guys at Real Climate, who want to do public battle over scientific issues on the blogs had better step up their game, because no matter how much the blog chorus gets whipped up about the tribal aspects of the debate, fair minded people observing events are going to come to a very different conclusion, like it or not.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Nice article and they got the .org domain right!
Somehow ClimateAudit says what Steve MacIntyre performs. He does the job of auditing various climate papers. It is amazing to me that any of these papers gets published without scrupulous supporting data. It seems that in the peculiar world of climate studies supporting data is not archived with full archive version control. So Steve unwinds things that should have been supplied in the first place, witness YAD06.
The data has been, as in this case, chased after for many years. The results have been shocking to say the least. We need more professionals like Steve, unfortunately due to the grants with strings style of support I am not optimistic. With billions of dollars being spent by the government the results are clear, GTM (Get The Money).
But, but “peer-reviewed” journal is out there willing enough (courageous enough?) to actually present evidence and data, analyze evidence and data, and critique evidence and data that are being pushed/propagandized by the university elites who are the “STARS” of the academic press?
The Royal Society, for example, has been corrupt and inept at times since the beginning – as when the longitude problem (the chronometer) was presented for judgement to the one “scientist” who was calculating its competing product, the moon tables.
What journal now is NOT corrupted by power, money, influence, and the “feel good” tropisms of today’s liberal socialists who are playing politics with their data?
Pretence is a but a flimsy shield
Behind which to hide and proffer scorn
Sorely holed by arrows straight and true
Best of luck with that longbow Steve.
RACookPE1978 (20:36:32),
It was the Royal Society that brought Briffa to justice in this case. Steve just served up the prosecutions damning case against him. Without their strong stand demanding compliance from Briffa on data disclosure, this would never have happened and the RC yahoos would still be giggling at getting away with it rather than screaming at being called out.
I think a tide is rising among the scientific community to start demanding more of the peer review process and of journals to require more openness. Steve’s bold stand demanding disclosure is shaming many and they know they can only get away with their games for a bit longer.
RACookPE1978 (20:36:32) – PLoS was brave enough to publish that 9 of 10 PLoS authors did not make their data available.
Joe romm uses the expression “game changer”. Say it ain’t so Joe. This is a game changer.
I’ve done a simple review of RCS methods used to make the Yamal stick. This is based on Steve’s open and transparent work without which my analysis would have been impossible.
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/10/05/yamal-the-dirty-dozen/
There are some assumptions in RCS which create problems in tree series that have different properties than the average.
I wonder if anyone can find any problems with my results.
Some people won’t like his tone
But I liked it. It was funny.
“On the internet nobody knows you’re a dog”… (a famous New Yorker cartoon, I believe)
For most of “the internet”, everyone might as well be a dog. There are no prerequisites to commenting on the internet, so no knowledge is required, scientific or otherwise, no logic or math skills are required, and least of all any social skills. Which is all too human. I don’t have to give examples.
Science is a system for finding truth out of a mess of contradictory stuff and it works pretty well in the long run. But never confuse science with scientists. Scientists are human; see above. They can make mistakes, individually and collectively, with or without good intentions. This creates problems in the short run. Who can you believe? I don’t trust the ones who are gaming the system.
I am in awe of CA and SM. Steve and Climate Audit are science at its best, and also the internet at its best. Which unfortunately is not perfect. How do you hold a good scientific discourse with hecklers in the audience? Steve manages to do it. Steve handles dissenting opinions better than the leading scientific journals do on this topic.
It’s odd that bloggers and journalists feel qualified to challenge Steve when it is clear that everything Steve does is over their heads. It’s a strange world.
Steve should publish in a statistical journal.
I like all those hatchet jobs Anthony
As a layman, I am totally baffled by the fact that “peers” are not indentified in the scientific journals. What qualifies them as “peers” of the different authors of articles published?
The author’s qualifications are always cited.
Richard111,
Good question, but an even better question is why supposedly scientific journals do not require a statistician be on every peer review panel to audit the data and methods used to analyze it. Perhaps there is a difference between ‘scientific journals’ and ‘science journals’, where the first is merely purporting to publish science and the latter actually is.
Could the PEERS be the very people at RC or their supporters? Who knows?
“I stand by my unsolicited advice to McIntyre that he needs to publish his work in the peer reviewed arena if he wants to have his work accepted and included in the mainstream scientific discourse. ”
I thought the original paper was peer reviewed.
Oh, you mean a peer, peer reviewed arena.
It is certainly refreshing to scientific debate where it shod be. In the open. Only by withstanding attempts at falsification can any theory prosper. Gavin and his warm-mongering colleagues would do well to realise and acknowledge this simple idea that Steve demostrates so well. To any non-partisan observer it is obvious who is winning the debate.
And of I were keeping score I’d have to call it : CA-3, RC-0.
Some hockey match.
“…so long as Steve is delivering detailed, systematic and devastating[ly] substantive arguments — and yes this post is all three — he will continue to have a following and earn respect”
Except Steve McIntyre’s arguments might be lacking some of these qualities.
To overturn the hockeystick he combined Briffa’s original Yamal tree-ring series with another local series from the Khadyta River which contained much younger trees.
I posted my objections to this combination and Steve thought my comments were worth a rebuttal in a full post:
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=7278
He split up his new series into trees greater and less than 75 years old to claim that the chronologies matched irrespective of tree age apart from the end of the twentieth century, and were hence robust.
Steve wrote in this post:
“The most distinctive feature of this graphic is something quite different than the guru [apparently me] reported to us: given the similarity of the two series up to 1970, their divergence thereafter really is quite remarkable.”
Except if you actually plot, rather than eyeball, the difference between two plots you come up with a very different result:
http://img225.imageshack.us/img225/7910/yamkhaoldlessnew.png
The older and younger chronologies from Steve’s alternative series contradict themselves not just in the recent past, but continually with an even higher divergence over the last two thousand years. Steve McIntyre’s slaying of the hockeystick is based on a comparison to his alternative Yamal-Khadyta series which itself has some very serious problems.
Steve has yet to find time to respond to the contradiction I have pointed out between his statements and the data concerning his combined hockey-stick-slaying series. He has found time to write an extensive new post on the Fourth IPCC report.
Unless Steve resolves this contradiction, I find it rather difficult to agree with Roger Pielke Jr. that Steve McIntyre’s arguments are “detailed, systematic and devastating[ly] substantive”.
I am concerend about the way RealClimate seem to be rather unprofessional in their approach to criticism of SM & his work. Perhaps this is symptomatic of the blogosphere with a somewhat more “relaxed” approach! My professional body, would have me up before a profesional conduct committee pdq for speaking out against a fellow engineer, or indeed any other professional whose reputation could be considered to be at risk of damage from open criticism! Why can they not just say that he is wrong, has misinterpreted the data, & has drawn the wrong conclusions, & then demonstrate it as so? They seem far more concerned that SM has found something that may be wrong as opposed to accepting the criticism at face value, & then addressing it to show why & how the original conclusion drawn was done so. Their apporach suggests hackles have been raised because some one has dared to challenge their view, rather than the evidence provided. Closed mind or what? This is the problem when debate is closed down & restricted to only the internet, & not the full public domain, & by that I mean it’s like most things in life, it’s not finding the answers that is the issue as they are usually easy enough, it’s knowing where to look & what questions to ask in the first place, which Jo Public wouldn’t probably know.
We are repeatedly being told by the alarmist warmongers that the current warm period is the warmest in the past 1,300 years and warmer than the medieval warm period. This ignoring the mountains of evidence to the contrary, including among other things as the Viking sagas and relying instead on fabricated hockey stick graphs from a few carefully selected trees, and one tree in particular.
Now scientists at the University of Sunderland are using logbooks from the Darwin and Cook voyages to study the climate of the past.
Good sense seem to be prevailing at last. Human recorded history could possibly provide a better reconstruction of past climatic history than a a handful of carefully selected trees in remote Siberia, who knew?
I took a look at the “comments” at Dot Earth and was amazed. What amazed me was the popularity of pro McIntyre comments as evidenced by the numbers of people recommending different comments.
To take a specific example, comment 1 was a diatribe against McIntyre and it got 11 recommendations; comments 3 and 7 were pro McIntyre and got 25 and 29 respectively.
So either there is a vast consipiracy of WUWT and CA readers going to Dot Earth and clicking recommend buttons, or Dot Earths readers are not as blind as those who do not see over at Real Climate.
I suggest that Steve McIntyre and others that can see the misuse of statistics in these “computer models” of the planet’s climate should try to publish in an honest journal on statistics. After all, that is all these models are anyway: the computer allows fast predictive statistics and statistical analysis.
I think the level of statistical expertise by these climate alarmists is nil. I think our nation’s statisticians should be invited (it is science after all) to grade these models and tell us if they have any validity.
While I am on the subject; why does any scientist believe the ravings of anyone, scientist or not, who does not divulge publicly all data and methods? Why should I trust a guy who keeps his data selection of trees a secret? Or, more importantly, that keeps the computer code a secret?
The debate is over.
?
Here the lates reality check after the Hanno-scandal, the Jones/Hadcrut scandal, the Briffa/Hockey scandal:
http://www.klimadebat.dk/forum/vedhaeftninger/climateinternettraffic.jpg
A snowball is rolling down the hill…
As a non-scientist, non-professional, non-just about everything except taxpayer that has to pay for all of the nonsense, let me say that I am not sold on “peer review”.
As near as I can tell, under peer review, you can’t publish anything that rocks the boat, threatens the establishment, call the conventional wisdom.
If you can’t cite the proper number of places that said what you are saying (each of them citing the requisite number of approved authorities) you don’t get publish.
Read everything with Alan Sokol’s name near it and then come argue with me.
I want to see detailed reports of methods, data, and findings; all expressed in ways that allow others to replicate the work so they can disagree with the findings if they can support the disagreement.
Tom P (01:07:06) :
The Hockey Stick is gone.
During the Medieval Warm Period, the World was much warmer even than today.