My impression was different. This was a retreat just about as far as Nature could go given its prior stands.

Which reminds me of a comment I made a while back to the effect of that the NAS report was bad, very bad. They used the pretense of investigating the dendros to open up on everything to push anthro. AGW. Each of the names on the report will get carbon credit lobby/Brit. Petroleum “study grants” in the future. Just a wild “guess.”

But as I said before maybe the report isn’t so bad for mankind after all. Because it was so, so bad and so public no scientist not directly on the BP dole could endorse it. Whatever you think of the dendro studies at least more than one was analyzed. How others like glacier studies? Just one was used. For the glacier studies, like the NAS’ selective others, all showed AGW, NAS used these to confirm each other and used descriptive writing that sounded like professional lobbyists wrote – or perhaps the lobbyists’ language has worked itself into scientific writing styles on the topic.

I’m interested in the glacier studies because they’re the most comical. Retreating glaciers? Heat melts ice therefore AGW. Advancing glaciers like in Greenland? AGW melts ice at rock edge faster which sinks between rock/ice interface lubricating and pushing glaciers fasters. Or something like that. I would really like to see the NAS resolve conflicts like that! Might have to defer the writing of the study 100% to the professional spinmeisters supplied by the lobbies.

That is interesting; Wegman sounds like a real statistical heavyweight. I’m surprised that Steve hasn’t heard from him as yet. Does anyone have any further info on when (or if) Wegman’s findings will be released, and in what venue?

Regards;

I’ll check the preprint. It’s also interesting to look at the contemproary press release which I’ll link up to. It was pretty lurid – a worthy example for climateprediction.net.

Anyhow, your abstract quote in #17 comes from the SUBMISSION version of MBH99 (there is no such a thing as MBH98 in GRL), which seems to be anymore only available (according to Google) from Google Scholar cache. I find it curious that out of the 17 (according to Google Scholar) copies of MBH99 available, you were able to locate the only one with the outdated abstract. Anyhow, thank you for leading me to this copy (pdf can be recovered through Wayback Machine from here), I did not know existed. It will be interesting to compare that to the final article. I already find this original conclusion (compare #22) interesting:

Reconstructions of NH mean annual temperature prior to about AD 1400, based on the sparse network of proxy indicators that exist that far back, are associated,
with considerably expanded uncertainties, and some important caveats. Nonetheless, even if these uncertainties and caveats are taken into account, certain important conclusions are possible. While the early centuries of the millennium approach 20th century levels of warmth, the late 20th century still appears anomalous: the 1990s is almost certainly among the warmest few decades, if not the warmest decade this millennium. Several recent years are almost certainly among the few warmest, if not the warmest. More widespread high-resolution data which can resolve millennial-scale variability are needed before more con dent inferences are possible in hemispheric, let alone regional, temperature reconstructions.

“almost certainly” Hmmmm….