Comments on: Replicating the Briffa et al 2001 MXD Reconstruction

By: Simon - presentation skills trainer

Simon - presentation skills trainer — Wed, 28 May 2008 07:28:11 +0000

I’m with Francois on this one, big time! I spent 24 years as a research scientist at University and now I train people in presenting their work at conferences and so on. I’m perhaps more inclined to be generous though: it’s not that “anything goes” perhaps so much as “anything is necessary” because (sadly!) the level of scientific education of “Joe Public” is so low.

Frankly it’s just not possible to provide a balanced argument to the public in one presentation or program or film: the issue is just to big and they gap between what Job Public knows and what they need to know is too big to be covered in a single bound.

By: Francois Ouellette

Francois Ouellette — Tue, 15 May 2007 03:44:43 +0000

Now let’s be clear. A TV documentary does not follow the same rules as a peer-reviewed scientific article. Actually, there are no rules when it comes to presenting “scientific” results to the public. Anything goes. This is true for pro-AGW as well as anti-AGW points of view. So you can’t criticize such documentary using the same criteria you would apply to a peer-reviewed paper. Well, you CAN, but in the end it’s a pointless debate. The fact of the matter is, it’s already difficult enough to determine, or even define, what is and isn’t scientifically sound in the peer-reviewed literature.

I think one should treat any scientific documentary for what it is: entertainment, with a more or less strong ideological message. It is NOT science. If you chose your camp based on Al Gore or TGGWS, thinking that you are basing your opinion on scientific facts, you’re just fooling yourself. Dig deeper and go to the source, that’s really the only way. In an ideal world, scientists would be expected to be ojective. In the real world, unfortunately, you can’t even count on that. Objectivity becomes just another rhetorical argument.

So I fully agree with Steve that the kind of manipulation he finds in the peer-reviewed literature is much more relevant to the debate than any single error in TGGWS.

By: John Nicklin

John Nicklin — Mon, 14 May 2007 22:17:45 +0000

If I read the graphs correctly, it looks to me that there was a peak in the middle of the last century and that we are rebounding from a dip in the middle of the last 1/2 century but its not as warm as it was in say 1940? The more of this stuff I look at the more I get confused. Help!