Willis, I see you are a real optimist:

My conclusion from this is that we should collect all of the unanswered questions and inconsistencies in the paper, polish them up, and put them on the Climate of the Past discussion site. That way, they will be part of the official peer review process.

How wrong you, me, and several other people were…

I don’t blame you for submitting your last comment. What a joke!!

But your comments Willis have too much negative “emotion” in them. Polite and scientific is the way to get results.

Of course, you are 100% correct. I get frustrated at the obstinance of these folks, many of whom are on the public payroll, regarding answering questions. Sometimes I feel like I’m talking to the wall. We’ve pointed out a host of problems with the paper, and have gotten evasion, silence, and insults.

But your path is 100% correct when you say:

I would politely and as scientifically accurate as possible and using scientific terminology, keep restating the problems in the data.

My thanks for your calm advice.

Francis, in #9 you say:

Come on, there is no obligation whatsoever for Juckes or anyone of his coauthors to reply to comments made on a blog!

I agree there is no obligation as you describe. However, I was not referring to them not answering questions made here at CA. I was referring to them not replying to comments at the CoP discussion site, which is their online peer review site. As the Editor of CoP indicated, he expects those questions to be answered.

And while there is no obligation for them to answer questions here, it is certainly in their best interest to do so … as you know from asking some of them, the questions here tend to be serious, substantial, focused, and aimed at very real problems in the work in question. If I had a paper in hand that I wanted to publish, I’d be overjoyed to have the CA auditors take a look at it here before I possibly made a fool of myself in public …

w.

Eventually, someone (the editors probably) will make the call that these concerns need to be addressed.

And if they aren’t, the paper will be dropped. These are serious enough errors that they can’t be ignored.

But your comments Willis have too much negative “emotion” in them. Polite and scientific is the way to get results.

Come on, there is no obligation whatsoever for Juckes or anyone of his coauthors to reply to comments made on a blog! Don’t overestimate the importance of CA in the scientific community! They can just ignore you completely if they want to. But they would be (professionally) obligated to give at least some sort of reply to a detailed comment posted on Climate of the Past.

The common convention in paleoclimatology is that “BP” refers to before AD1950.

So temperature rises in the last twenty five years must be “After Present”. It may explain why some proxies have not been updated.

There’s nine authors on the paper, for goodness sake. Two threads per author. If they were serious about this, you’d think they would find it simple.

But they’re not serious about any of this, as far as I can tell. The reason there’s 17 threads on this question is that they’ve written a paper with a lot of holes in it, and then refused to answer questions about it. The more they refuse to answer, the deeper people have dug, so we have 17 threads.

If they would ANSWER THE QUESTIONS, we could CLOSE THE THREADS …

w.