[palmer]

there's no point in my pursuing the arcania of centered or non-centered PCA

It's not just arcania of centered or non-centered PCA. It's Briffa's Yamal series Think we'll see corrections to the dozens of papers using the series?

[palmer]

If anyone clicks into this thread wondering why it has been resurrected yet again, it's because this time instead of naive (at best) and incorrect application of statistical techniques to automatically select hockey-stick shaped "temperature" proxies (some of which are clearly preipitation proxies and some may be CO2 proxies), we have a clear and undeniable case of proxy selection based on nothing more than human selection bias (or at best for some of the faulty reconstructions, they blindly followed the biased scientists out of misplaced trust).

In red above subset of data used to create the hockey stick used as part of dozens of other hockey stick papers. In black, the full set of data known to the researcher.

[cogitator]

Think we'll see corrections to the dozens of papers using the series?

Yes, if they are necessary. Now, the reason I say yes is that the large-scale process of scientific peer-review, i.e., publishing new analyses, is ponderously self-correcting. If the time-series was used (or constructed) erroneously, and this bears out under scrutiny, then there will be new analyses that update and improve the old incorrect analyses.

Be that as it may, McIntyre has a specialty. I think he's doing a good job of keeping the practitioners on their toes and accelerating some necessary introspection. If he's finding errors that need to be corrected, I hope to h*ll they are corrected, ASAP.

Quoting Robert Procter: "The tobacco industry started responding particularly in the 1950s with propaganda. That’s when they started their doubt campaign—the manufacturing of doubt, the manufacturing of ignorance. It was really rather new, certainly on the scale at which they pursued it. It was a new way of using science as an instrument of deception. And that’s become important recently. Franchised down into the global warming issue are the same techniques. Demanding ever-greater precision, invoking doubt, questioning the physical methods. Raising alternate possibilities. The whole realm of smoke screens and distractions."

Now, I am not quoting Procter to indicate that legitimate scientific concerns about data accuracy, interpretational bias, methodological misapplication, experimental cross-checking, instrumental calibration (et cetera, et cetera, et cetera) should not be entertained. They should be; and as I said, science is ponderously self-correcting, it takes time to move a heavy weight if a heavy weight needs to be moved. What I am saying is that the "throw everything against the wall without applying cognitive or quality filters to see if anything sticks", just to create a perception of doubt, IS disreputable.