[mista science]

The first publicity I saw about the Canadians work was in MIT's Technology Review. Was this an independent report or one based on these articles, if you know?

The Technology Review article was dated October 15, 2004. The two National Post articles by Marcel Crok seem to have been written this year. (The Jan 27 and 28 dates are the dates of appearance in The National Post)

[DaveTesla]

http://www.uoguelph.ca/%7Ermckitri/research/fallupdate04/update.fall04.html

Reluctance on the part of Mann et al. and Nature to produce the results for their "experiments, " and in particular for the AD1400 step, would be one thing if the source code that generated them were available; but the refusal to provide either one is completely unjustifiable, especially since Nature based its decision against our paper, in part, on claims about the RE statistics that can only be verified by looking at the "experiment" results. We surmise, based on our implementation of the methodology, that the R-squared and Coefficient of Efficiency (as this is defined in paleoclimate studies) statistics fail to reach statistical significance for the AD1400 step. It may also show that there are other problems in MBH98 besides the ones that we have described already. We already know that the adverse results from the bristlecone pine sensitivity study were not disclosed.

[DaveTesla]

Tech Central Station, Dr. Roy Spencer :
It took two non-climate people -- the global warming debate's equivalent of internet bloggers -- to do what should have been done by an independent paleoclimate research group. Both are Canadians: McIntyre is a consultant for mineral exploration, and McKitrick is a professor of economics. They received no outside funding for their work, so they can not be accused of being bought off. It surely won't help the IPCC's reputation that this latest development follows on the heels of the recent resignation of the IPCC's leading hurricane expert over editorial bias in the IPCC leadership.

Reaping the Hurricane (leading expert withdraws his name from U.N. report on global warming)

Tech Central Station, Dr. Roy Spencer :
The IPCC leadership can always fall back on the claim that they were only using published research, which is true. The criterion for scientific results to be included in governmental reports has usually been publication in the scientific literature, or in some cases the work only needs to be accepted for publication. But it now appears this is not sufficient. Unusual claims in science should be met with unusual skepticism, and this did not happen with the Mann et al. study. An increasing number of researchers have anecdotal evidence that the science tabloids, Nature and Science, select reviewers of some manuscripts based upon whether they want those papers to be accepted or rejected. In other words, it seems like the conclusions of a paper are sometimes more important that the scientific basis for those conclusions. Since those periodicals have profit and popularity motives that normal scientific journals do not, maybe the time has come to downgrade the scientific weight of publications in those journals, at least for some purposes."

I quit reading Nature and Science and Scientific American
years ago when they became leftist apologists.