That’s why the WDCP is there. Wouldn’t it be easier to log the data first at the WDCP and then do your calculations?

Seriously, it’s easy to lose data unless one is meticulous about archiving and few are that compulsive. Even if a P.I. personally has good habits, delegated work rarely gets returned in the same fastidious form. Source data and the meta-data describing it are less familiar to the P.I. and so may get misplaced in the rush to work up the information into a publication. Ultimately, sloppiness is easier to overlook than cleanup; you just hope nobody will notice and if they do you stonewall until they give up. As kids we learned we didn’t have to clean our rooms unless mom made us do it. Even if this is learned behavior and generally successful – although unexcusable in serious matters – only steady serious pressure will change it. It may be frustrating, but Steve is doing it the right way.

If the original data has been lost, that has got to be a corrigendum at least… Will that get into the AR4 ?
yours
per

Now Esper’s reconstruction has a somewhat elevated MWP so if you only had one foxtail series, you probably change the modern-MWP location. Whenever you have such knife-edge accounting, it’s hard not to be suspicious.

I’m going to post up some methodological responses from Esper. Again, they are very odd. All of these obfuscations merely make one more determined to run it to ground.

If people wonder why I don’t get more done with the other studies, I’ve been trying to get this data for almost two years now and didn’t progress one inch until the Hwang fiasco got Science to get off the dime.

In forensic work, there are concepts like “chain of custody” for evidence. You have to be able to show where the evidence was at all times to ensure that there was no mix-up, or adulteration of evidence.

So scientist A loses original data. Scientist B pipes up and says, “okay, I have a gray copy of the original measurements”. Already, I am having difficulty establishing that scientist B didn’t just make this stuff up, never mind the minor possibilities of data corruption, accidental manipulation, or even misidentification of the data set. In terms of quality control, this is an apocalypse.

Now if this data set should transpire to be the basis for a whole series of science and nature papers; well, it is very difficult to see how Science could take a relaxed view on this, given its recent Korean adventures.

yours
per

If Esper is holding back data, then I see three substantive possibilities: 1. He’s since lost that data, too, and is either ashamed to admit it or can’t be bothered to track it down. Or, 2., that single data set plays such a big part in the total reconstruction that releasing it would endanger the credibility of the final proxy. Or, the data set has been modified in some non-standard way that leads back to the outcome of “2.”

It could be as simple as laziness or lack of consideration. Or it could be serious. The only way to know is to get the series. One question, Steve: If you used Esper’s methods to reconstruct his proxy using all of the 13 series you have got, and then scanned Esper’s final proxy reconstruction, would their difference produce the shape of the missing series?

Wouldn’t it be amusing if hypothetically an IPCC lead author was using lost data?

Amusing, but not surprising….