Mark; I remember a saying by Ralph (SAM) Wherry
in regards to references; ” A paper with 39 references in it NEEDS EVERY DAMN ONE OF THEM.”
(Penn St. Business grads will remember.)

I can attest to the difficulty (bordering on impossibility) of injecting any skeptical notions into the Wikipedia climate change articles. And there is some good material there: see (eg) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record.

Unfortunately, Connolley is hardly the worst of the warmer cabal there. In fact, my (few) dealings with him have been cordial (but unproductive of change). Some of the others seem utterly impervious to reason.

Regards,
Peter D. Tillman
Consulting Geologist, Arizona and New Mexico (USA)

In a typical way, they twisted the point about non-independence. The Mann number was amusing, but irrelevant to the common sense point that Briffa, Jones et al 2001 is not “independent” of Jones, Briffa et al 1998 or Bradley and Jones 1993 or Mann and Jones 2003 in any sense of “independent” familiar off the Island.

BTW my Erdos number probably is 4 or 5. McIntyre – McKitrick – Essex (and Essex will surely have a low Erdos number of no higher than 2). So if CA readers did a paper with McKitrick (or McKitrick AND Essex), you’d lower your Erdos numbers.

Now the story on “other scientists” and being incorrect is supposedly from when he and Bohr were fighting, maybe something surrounding the EPR paradox perhaps, or maybe even dating back to the mid 1920s. Nothing sourced (like his answer to Born’s question if God approved of gambling in a 1926 letter that “I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice.”) and nothing as eloquent. His step daughter Margot was on the subject of the constant annoying discourse between the two and their supporters, and thoughts it might destroy Einstein’s reputation. She asked something like “Daddy, are you afraid Niels will show you wrong?” to which he replied along the lines of “Right, wrong, eh. He’s only one man…. Eff that guy anyway.” He then patted her on the head and said “Now go make us some noodles dear.”

Steve: Let’s have a moratorium on discussing the Einstein quote. The point is fine, but it sounds grandiose in the context of anything being discussed here.

we’ll have CA commenters:

Roman ( E# 4)

Hu ( E# 5)

And we can compare these with

% multivariate calibration
Sundberg, R (4)

Brown, P J (4)

% signal processing

Kalman, R E (4)

Shannon, C E (3)

Viterbi, A J (3)

% others
Wiles, A J (3)

Einstein, A (2)

Don’t you mean a “pretty teleconnected bunch”?

Mark

I find very unfair that the work made by the experimental scientists who spent long hours/months doing the tedious and hard field work and the work made by these co-signers of a review article are regarded to worth the same. Or even less if you start comparing impact indexes and numbers of citations your papers get.