Culture thing: this tendancy for secretiveness is probably more of a Euro thing. You know: Herr Doktor Professor up on his lofty perch.

that anthropogenic NATURAL effects are minimal

I point this out because it seems like it’s being kept relatively quiet.
Perhaps this is a development since the TAR?

It’s covered in the TAR, see here http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/450.htm#fig127 .

Of course, you have to believe the models and the assumptions therein are correct. If you assume that anthropogenic effects are minimal and that GHG emissions are to blame, then you program accordingly…and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This ties in to two battleground issues: solar impact – if solar irradiance is highly positive, as implied by either Solanki or Muscheler versions, not only does this undermine the negative variability, but it reduces the empirical climate sensitivity. The other battleground issue is satellite versus surface – there’s a knock-on issue that’s as important as the effect itself: if you apply satellite temperature changes since 1980 (either version), then there’s even less sensitivity available to CO2 after you allow for solar impacts, which either hits the tuning of models directly or calls into question the parameterizations in the GCMs.

Michael Jankowski states (this is tangential to the thread):

“Yes, you can say that there’s an extremely remote possibility that natural climate variability tried to cool us in the 20th century and that CO2, etc”

It may be of interest that RealClimate says that this “remote possibility” is actually the case.
They say in their recent response (June 22) to the WSJ editorial

“Secondly, the argument that the climate should have naturally “rebounded” with warming during the 20th century defies the actual peer-reviewed scientific studies which, as discussed earlier, suggest that the climate should have actually cooled during the 20th century, not warmed, if natural factors were primarily at play. Anthropogenic greenhouse gases are required to explain the observed warming”

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=167

I point this out because it seems like it’s being kept relatively quiet.
Perhaps this is a development since the TAR?

For minor work, important maybe in its own way, but not particularly earthshaking you might well have a different attitude. However if such a result became important later, and your original data and code (say) were not available, and a new paper contradicts or challenges your conclusions, then you are not in a strong position to support you own conclusions, are you ?

If on request you made an honest attempt to salvage what you could, I suggest you would not be faulted for the lack of retention unless you had ignored requirements for retention. However you are still in the position where your original conclusions cannot be given as much weight as you might like. An example here is the Gaspe Cedar data. The data used is a subset of a larger data set, however the full data set is no longer available. There are credible reasons for believing that the extant data is not a representative subset of the original data, and hence is not reliable for continued use. Therefore I contend the value of that data is degraded, and it should be excluded from climate reconstructions. If sufficient data had been archived, tests could be made to substantiate or disprove the selectivity hypothesis. The solution now is to repeat the data gathering process and find new verifiable data which could be used.

I suggest that any experimental scientist, from almost any field, could point to examples where non-random selection of data (or biased selection) has led to incorrect conclusions.

Steve: There have been U.S. federal policies mandating archiving of NSF funded work for almost 15 years. If NSF enforced their policies, that would make a big difference. I’ll get away from the negativism as someone else commented: I’m not really “trawling”. The only people that I have any intention of looking at re compliance are Hockey Team members: MBH, Briffa, Jones, Jacoby, Cook and Thompson and the reasons for these are all both obvious and consistent with what I’m doing. Surely it’s at least ironic that Hockey Team advocates of public intervention and public policy are not compliant with NSF data archiving requirements (and that NSF is co-opted in the non-compliance).

“Gerald Machnee (#12): I took a look at the SO&P site. I see nothing unusual. Some links are protected by passwords, others are not. I’d make the following observations:

1. The study is funded by the European Union. I myself have found that it is often not easy for scientists from non-EU contries (e.g. Australia) to participate directly in EU-funded projects. This is no surprise — it is entirely up to the funding agency. That being said, I can understand that SO&A would not make all their data (in whatever form) available to everyone.

2. I guess the data on my own website is generally the property of the Australian Government. Non-Australians certainly have no rights whatsoever to that data. However, I often get requests from scientists for information that may be, say, in one of my presentations, in which case I willingly give them password access. This provision carry some conditions — for example that permission would be sought from me prior to showing any images at a presentation.

3. However, if Steve asked me for password privileges to my site, I would most probably say “no” — he has no right to that data and I would strongly suspect that he would use it in a way that would be unhelpful to my work (I have never seen him show any desire for collaborative research with other climate scientists).

4. If I wanted to access the SO&P data, I would have to give the SO&P scientists some reason why I wanted the data. I do not at present want the data for my own research (if I did, that would be a different matter). If I gave as my reason the fact that Steve McIntyre was using this as a test …… well what do you think their answer would be, or should be? For my own part, I am not prepared to waste these scientists’ time.”

showing that the HS is wrong (not done yet) might infact show that climate variability is higher than we think and that, thus, the climate system is perhaps more sensitive to changes like a 30% increase in CO2 plus a slug of other ghg’s land use changes and the rest

Showing that the HS is wrong would show that so-called “natural” climate variability is higher than is currently attributed. This would lead credence to the idea that even more of the 20th century warming was natural than has been proposed (and, as Hans suggests, that CO2 has less of an influence than is currently proposed).

Yes, you can say that there’s an extremely remote possibility that natural climate variability tried to cool us in the 20th century and that CO2, etc, has more of an influence than we think and more than compensated for that cooling. Thus, once natural climate variability swings back into a warming mode, then we’ll really get hot with those two acting together intstead of counter-acting each other. But talk about leaping from one end of the spectrum to the other, Peter!

Regardless, I still maintain that the spatial lack of coverage and the lack of proxy precision and accuracy renders estimates of average global temps of hundreds to thousands of years ago to nothing more than educated guesses with error ranges much higher than the multiples of standard data deviations presented in the publications. The NCDC site is working again…take a look at the proxies used by Mann and Jones (2003) http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/mann2003b/mann2003b.html . Even if you could accept the proxies to correlate well and precisely with temperature, do you really think you could take these few locations and estimate the average global temperature of 2000 yrs ago within plus or minus 0.3 deg C (which, as described in the caption under Fig 1, is only twice the standard error)?