Once the data become publicly available, Jones wants McIntyre to produce a global temperature record. “Science advances that way. He might then realize how robust the global temperature record is”, says Jones.

Robustly homogenized temperature. I’ll be more interested to reproduce Brohan’s uncertainties once the data is available. Slightly on topic, there was interesting article in IEEE Xplore Top 100,

Reproducible research in signal processing
Vandewalle, P.; Kovacevic, J.; Vetterli, M.
Signal Processing Magazine, IEEE
Volume 26, Issue 3, Date: May 2009, Pages: 37-47
(see also http://www.reproducibleresearch.net/)

We distinguish six degrees of reproducibility:
5: The results can be easily reproduced by an independent
researcher with at most 15 min of user effort, requiring only
standard, freely available tools (C compiler, etc.).
4: The results can be easily reproduced by an independent
researcher with at most 15 minutes of user effort, requiring
some proprietary source packages (MATLAB, etc.).
3: The results can be reproduced by an independent
researcher, requiring considerable effort.
2: The results could be reproduced by an independent
researcher, requiring extreme effort.
1: The results cannot seem to be reproduced by an independent
researcher.
0: The results cannot be reproduced by an independent
researcher.

MBH98 seems to be of degree 2 (extreme effort of few years), MBH99′s grade is clearly 0 until script to reproduce CIs is available.

BTW given the topic, I’m a little surprised Nature doesn’t appear to have received more posts on it.

50 comments on one thread is equivalent to an avalanche for the Nature blog. They’ve been in operation for more than two years and only have a total of 1145 comments.

They had a couple posts with 30+ comments in May 2007 when they started. Their slant on what was acceptable for discussion was made clear very early and people left in droves.

Nature Blog Withdraws Invitation

I tried posting just now and got this message….

I got the same message today at about 16:00 GMT (approx 5pm London Summer Knocking-off Time). My previous post had been about 15 hours prior to that. I closed and ‘flushed’ my browser in case it was just some simple glitch, waited 10 minutes and tried again. It worked, or seemed to, but the post has yet to be put up. It was similar yours in some respects. It wouldn’t hurt to try again.
.

BTW given the topic, I’m a little surprised Nature doesn’t appear to have received more posts on it.

Comment Submission Error
Your comment submission failed for the following reasons:
In an effort to curb malicious comment posting by abusive users, we have enabled a feature that requires a weblog commenter to wait a short amount of time before being able to post again. Please try to post your comment again in a short while. Thanks for your patience.

I submitted two comments to two different posts last weekend that finally got published on Tuesday. I guess three in one week have fingered me as an “abusive user”. We’ll see if BCL gets another one published.

Anyway, for the record, here’s my rejected post to the Nature thread on Steve Mc.

In defending the tight-fisted approach to data hoarding, Olive Heffernan said:

“Let’s be fair to Jones here; as a scientist, your data is invaluable; if you give it to someone else without knowing that they will give due credit to the source, then you’re effectively giving away your work for free. Why should scientists have to do that? No-one in the private sector would be asked to do this.”

I guess that would depend on who paid for the data collection, where the work using the data was published, and what the rules of the funding and publishing entities require, wouldn’t it? Also, if regulatory agencies (such as the US EPA) are guided by the data in their decision making process, the data also need to meet certain requirements of availability and quality control.

What is Nature’s policy on data availability and description of methods for work published in your journal?