Climate Bloodhounds

Steve McIntyre is blogging again. This time it is about a little noticed Climategate email where Dr. Raymond Bradley disses skeptics as being too unsophisticated to be able to figure out what was withheld.

I agree with Steve, when he says it is rather “repugnant”.

Here’s the relevant passage from Bradley

…in the verification period, the biggest “miss” was an apparently very warm year in the late 19th century that we did not get right at all. This makes criticisms of the “antis” difficult to respond to (they have not yet risen to this level of sophistication, but they are “on the scent”).

Commenter “Baa Humbug” quips:

What they failed to realise is that the “antis” are like bloodhounds. We only need a few molecules per thousand to pick up the trail.

The issue is that MBH98 withheld vital R^2 goodness of fit data which could have alerted most anyone with a basic understanding of such a problem where the proxy data “missed” replicating an entire year, but as we’ve seen time and again, they chose not to let such adverse information become publicly available then.

Even Bradley has doubts,  as Steve points out in a second post, here’s more from the same Climategate email by Bradley:

Furthermore, it may be that Mann et al simply don’t have the long-term trend right, due to underestimation of low frequency info. in the (very few) proxies that we used. We tried to demonstrate that this was not a problem of the tree ring data we used by re-running the reconstruction with & without tree rings, and indeed the two efforts were very similar — but we could only do this back to about 1700.

Yet, even today, we have people who defend the hockey stick as truth, and say that people like Mr. McIntyre are in error, or simply disingenuous.

It is truly amazing to see people defend such behavior by the team. Repugnancy is in the eye of the beholder I suppose, rather like a choice of true faith.