Sorry for the additional commentary, but reading "Quark Soup" on this issue is too interesting. The blog provides a link to this figure:
The orange line is from a paper authored by Crowley and Lowery in Ambio in 2000. The red line is Mann et al.'s analysis, the one that is under the gun in the audit paper. The other lines are analyses are from this Web site:
The evolution of climate over the last millenium
One comment: if McIntyre and McKitrick really wanted to scare the h*ll out of the climate science community, they should have published their paper in a climate science journal, not Energy and Environment, which is making a specialty out of publishing papers written by the community of global warming skeptics. Now, the editorial slant of a journal is the right of its editors, but as long as Mann and his cohorts are publishing in Science, Nature, Journal of Climate, etc., and the skeptics are all publishing in one little "place", they won't get their case heard by the wider scientific community. It doesn't serve the cause to aim low in terms of publishing, if the aim is to influence the viewpoint of the scientific community. If the aim is to influence public opinion, then they can publish wherever they want and let the media run with the story.
If the aim is to influence public opinion, then they can publish wherever they want and let the media run with the story.
Actually it is public opinion that needs to be addressed. The UN/IPCC "Global Warming" folks placed this in the political arena making it everybodies football.
I have no probs with anyone presenting their papers where they can be published and put into the debate pot, unfortunately Nature etc. are known to take their own license in what they allow to publish and have their own axes to grind.
As provided by M&M, their approach of publishing in Energy and Environment is consistant with who they are. Neither are in the Climate community and they do not claim to be doing original research, merely auditing the data and methods of Mann to determine reproducibility of Mann's result using Mann's dataset. They have provided exposure of both their papers, data used, methodology to the world via the internet, anyone may compare Mann's methods, results & data against M&M's claims. That seems sufficient to me.