[Yelling]

Well, lets take a look at where we are. You stated that the methodology of Soon was sound. I have presented numerous errors in it. From errors in how he interpreted data, to errors in how his methodology was established and finally to just plain wrong errors (i.e. saying someone said one thing when they clearly said the opposite). Any one of these is enough to doubt a paper. Taken together all three are devastating.

However I agree that he shows some papers that are legitimate attempts at reconstruction. If you want to look at these, great but that is another discussion.

You raise some very good points about stalagmites. Now, did the papers that Soon use follow this?

In regards to research on Cioccale, OK, what is your interpretation of it? I'll dig up a copy tomorrow and we can compare notes.

[palmer]

It's a great time to see where we are. You have poked various holes in the science mentioned in Soon's paper. From there you have decided the paper doesn't pass muster. Your critiques revolving around the use of precip changes to imply support for warming and cooling was pretty good and you had some good specific critiques. Unfortunately nobody was really able to answer those since we all lack the scientific basis to evaluate proxies and especially to control for other factors, notably precip.

However, your decision that the paper has a "devastating" number of errors is meaningless. Unless you have suddenly become a scientific reviewer in the field which doesn't seem to be the case. The purpose of this thread is to attack the hockey stick. That has been successful as you have done little to defend it. You have (to reiterate) raised useful concerns about Soon and others who attack the hockey stick, but you have presented little to support the hockey stick except some repetition of Mann's statistics.

The "complexity" of those statistics (which you first used as a sword and then as a shield) makes it impractical to critique them. But there are two ways in which Mann has been critiqued here:

First you have cast doubt on the use of temperature proxies by everyone but Mann and Mann's use is the weakest of anyone's (let's not get distracted by the 98 paper, it only looks at LIA and the 99 paper is sorely lacking in data).

Second we have presented ample evidence from temperature oriented proxies that the MWP was at least as warm as today. You have poked a few holes in that assessment but have not come close to refuting it. You have yet to provide an indication that there was cooling during MWP to counterbalance the substantial warming observed in N America and Europe. That warming greatly exceeds today's climate and with the addition of other global warming evidence clearly breaks the hockey stick.