Comments on: Hometown Coverage

By: Skip Smith

Skip Smith — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 06:31:37 +0000

What I meant is that I don’t think you’re an inside player at all.

By: L.T.

L.T. — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 04:37:32 +0000

And neither of those are ones I have personally gone over. I wouldn’t be surprised if no one on my team even had. I am surprised they passed the peer review process. And it should come as no surprise, given my job, that I tend to avoid the scientific journals outside of the office and outside of whatever papers my team is responsible for.

I’ll have a look over them. Give me a few days. I’m not exactly lacking in work at the moment; though, I guess my two-day absense speaks to that well enough. Whether or not they’re scientifically correct is not exactly my field of expertise, but I can tell you if they’re spinnable or a paper I would recommend be dumped/entirely rewritten. Just remember, I’m no scientist, so I do have to look up a lot of the terminology and sometimes even skip over parts of the paper that deal with science items I am just not educated enough to understand.

By: L.T.

L.T. — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 04:26:13 +0000

I didn’t say I wasn’t being paid to spin online. Just not on this blog. I don’t spin for free. Too much hassle when you don’t have the money to back you up when you’re called on it.

By: Thomas Black

Thomas Black — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:51:05 +0000

The whole Globe and Mail article sounds like it came out of realclimate.org, the quotes from Gavin Schmidt, etc.
plus so many pro AGW comments, you dont see that as much anymore.

I sent the above and below to the comments

“Remember Gavin Schmidt is part of the problem as per the CRU e-mails

“Gavin and I are going to be careful about what comments we screen through, and we’ll be very careful to answer any questions that come up to any extent we can.”

If anyone is unfamiliar with realclimate.org, they have a robust history of censoring posts.

My skepticism just keeps increasing day after day.”

By: Tom P

Tom P — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 07:56:47 +0000

Nathan,

A response would good, but it looks like Steve may have “moved on”.

By: hengav

hengav — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 07:02:01 +0000

Donatello, is that you?

By: ianl8888

ianl8888 — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 05:33:26 +0000

Agreed – ad homs are really borig

By: Dean Boulding

Dean Boulding — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 02:41:00 +0000

To be fair, there is no science on the front page of CA these days. None at all today. I just checked, and RC has only one article, not much better. It’s a shame the *gates, poor reporting and so on have caused both sides to degenerate into this state. I’d like to get back to the science, and drop the ad-hominem attacks, conspiracy theories and snide comments.

Anybody else interested?

By: Keith Herbert

Keith Herbert — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 23:37:46 +0000

Steve M,
You are described as an “amateur” in the article. It is not clear if the author got that description from you or conjured it himself.
If you referred to yourself as an amateur, meaning you are not paid for your work, I suggest you not describe yourself that way. Amateur also means unskilled and the tenor of the article alludes to that definition.

And furthermore I have never found you to refer to yourself as a climate scientist despite what the author seems to claim. It is my understanding mathematics and statistics were your realm of study and practice and that is the general focus and strength of this blog.

The article gives the impression you emerged from a coal mine, pick in hand, with no background in science and starting harrassing climate scientists.

By: AMac

AMac — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 17:33:16 +0000

Re: TJA's note (Feb 22 at 10:34 AM) that Chris Mooney is soliciting questions for his upcoming interview with Dr. Mann for Point of Inquiry (scheduled for this Friday). Comment #21 in the Center for Inquiry's Discussion Forum, "Announcing My Next Point of Inquiry Guest: Climatologist Michael Mann (Ask Your Questions Now)" -- Background In September 2008, Dr. Mann’s group published an important paper on Earth’s temperature history for the past 2,000 years in the prominent peer-reviewed journal Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA. Temperature signals were extracted from many long-term data series, such as tree rings and ice cores. The paper has been strongly criticized for its inclusion of the lakebed sediments characterized by Finnish geologist Mia Tiljander. Critics claim that the four Tiljander proxies are uncalibratable due to contamination of the temperature signal by local activities, from the 1700s to the present. Critics also claim that the PNAS paper mistakenly uses two of the Tiljander proxies in an upside-down orientation, such that “warmer” information is added to the paleotemperature reconstructions as “colder”, and vice versa. In his Response published in PNAS in February 2009, Dr. Mann called these criticisms “bizarre,” but he did not explicitly rebut them. Questions 1. Can the four Tiljander proxies be calibrated to the instrumental temperature record that spans 1850 to 1995? 2. Do the PNAS paper’s reconstructions use the temperature information in the “tiljander-2003-xraydenseave” and “tiljander-2003-lightsum” series in a manner that is consistent with the interpretation offered by Mia Tiljander in her 2003 paper?