You hit the nail on the head with your #3.

But, to choose one example, Joe Barton’s calls for investigation of Michael Mann started with testimony to a joint congressional committee by Tim Ball and Ross McKitrick, both Friends of Science advisors, along with a screening of the Friends of Science film “Climate Catastrophe Cancelled”. The trip was apparently arranged by lobbyists APCO Worldwide and paid by the “Climate Change Research” fund at the University of Calgary. This is only one example of the use of this film to attempt to directly influence public policy in North America, albeit one of the more successful.

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- I have never testified to a “joint Congressional committee” whatever that is, with Tim Ball or anyone else. My testimony to EQA in June was the first time I have testified before Senate or HoR. That was a subcommittee of the House.
- I am not an advisor to the Friends of Science, APCO Worldwide, Joe Barton, etc. I am sure these are all fine people, but I don’t work for them or hold any affiliation with them.
- I have never been on a panel or presentation with Tim Ball. I only had the pleasure of meeting him for the first time earlier this year.
- Joe Barton’s decision to request Mann’s source code came after the WSJ article in which Mann refused to reveal his source code. I knew nothing about it until after the requests went out and had become public.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_data_archiving
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_sharing

….
* The NTSB

It’s not that I object to the NTSB. They’re civil, competent and professional.

The reason I don’t want the NTSB finding a problem is that they only go looking when there’s been a real-world consequence.

No matter how much someone fears Steve McIntyre or anyone else looking for faults in their work, he’s not the one they should really fear.

Steve,

Western Australia’s Geological Survey demands (insists?) that data are supplied in ASCII using ASCII based templates. As usual, geophysical stuff has to be submitted in Geosoft and other “standards”.

As an aside, Microsoft’s Excel has some odd behaviour as well. I was given some drill hole location data using a complex Excel spreadsheet with look ups etc. The spreadsheet I was given was created by pasting from a complex spreadsheet to one with no behind the scenes, formatting etc.

The derived spreadsheet (not having any embedded look ups) changed the numerical accuracy in a subtle way – changed the geographic position of the drill holes by some 50 metres from true position.

Cause? No idea – but I suspect a change in the 3rd decimal place of the lat and long of the position. Apparently copying some cells which in the original are referenced to some look ups and pasting into a new sheet with no look ups causes an internal soft crash, and some novel change to the numbers.

In the mineral exploration industry data is in CSV or Tab or not at all.

So nice to see that the climate people are a few decades behind.

Newton didn’t report his findings on gravity until he’d written down all his data and methodology for scrutiny by other scientists in Principia. It’s the way scientists should work and isn’t optional if they want to be believed.

Steve: Let’s not get into discussing Newton.

People who do not allow access to data and/or method are not
scientists. People who are negligent about storage of their data and mnethod for posterity are not scientists.

However their products, being non-reproducible artefacts, are definitely works of art. Produced by artists.