They upped the ante by stonewalling Steve and others, and then when they circled their wagons. Heck, if they’d just given Steve their data, a lot of this would have never happened – IF the science was supportable by the statistical treatment, and pre-statistical adjustments and non-adjustments. My impression has been that they were VERY insecure about it all, especially if they’d Googled Steve’s CV early on. And with Mann’s propensity toward bullying (as witnessed in the “hide the decline” emails), he thought he could bully an auditor like Steve. I don’t think auditors take too kindly to attempts at intimidation…

I didn’t notice traditional “skeptics” picking up those few molecules (nor do I particularly associate myself with their issues). My interest did not arise by discerning the problem that Bradley withheld here. I picked up this point rather late in the process.

Since December, I’ve looked at the 1,000+ files and wondered if anyone had really gone into all of them. I had put it on a back burner myself, hoping to mine something good out of it. It’s a lot of files! At 1-3 pages per email/file, that is a good 2,000 pages to read – a fairly daunting task.

So even though Steve seems to be dismissive of the skeptics since they/we haven’t found things, I don’t fully agree that we missed the boat on finding more “crimes” having been committed.

Perhaps a collective effort could have spread the reading around and sped things up. At the same time, such an effort might be construed as a conspiracy to display their dirty laundry.

At the same time, at least SOME of the five panels that found no evidence of wrongdoing should have looked into the files thoroughly before coming to such a conclusion. So, IMHO, Steve should be pointing an especially harsh finger at the panels. They, unlike the skeptics, had a mandate to do so. (BTW, I assume that by “traditional skeptics” Steve meant those non-credentialed skeptics like myself.)

It baffles me that in this case they wouldn’t have just pointed out that single year – the “biggest miss” – and just say their work is not of fine enough resolution to have seen that. I’d have accepted that, myself.

Science is, after all, a continuum from knowing nothing to knowing it all, and no one at the present time can pretend to have it all figured out, at least not without expecting a big round of laughter.

Sometimes I think these people simply take themselves too seriously and don’t allow themselves the “out” of “we are just humble scientists, trying to understand a complex system.” They seem to have put themselves on a very high pedestal (why? perhaps too much need to pontificate for politicians), from which the only direction is down.

If I am interpreting that wrong, could someone correct me?

But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science. That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school–we never explicitly say what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific
investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty–a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid–not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked–to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.

Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can–if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong–to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.

From the email Steve is dissecting:

…there are many/some/tree ring sites where there has been a “decoupling” between the long-term relationship between climate and tree growth, so that things fall apart in recent decades….this makes it very difficult to demonstrate what I just claimed.

This is, of course, supportive of the Briffa “problem” that Mann addressed in the “hide the decline” email – that when they have had both instrument data and tree ring data, the “relationship” that is behind tree-rings-as-temperature-proxies seems to have fallen apart. Amazingly, they don’t see the underlying disconnect – that tree rings may not, after all, be good proxies for temperature. This is so fundamental to their work, it seems they fear to face it. When someone does face it, it is increasingly likely that it will show their work to go down as cargo-cult science.

The thing these people do, in hiding ANYTHING that they themselves find that is not “on message” – it just isn’t good science. First off, they should be beating on their own hypotheses and trying to prove themselves wrong and should not be needing someone else to point out flaws and weaknesses. They should be trumping their skeptics on finding these.

From about 1980 to 1998, Hansen’s predictions seemed to be the one thing the warmers had going for them: as long as the post-CRU-processed global average was seen to increase, they looked like solid scientists, because their predictions seemed to be coming true.

Seemed to be.

But when their predictions didn’t continue to “come true,” what is the world – and them – to take from that? They don’t have any good explanation for it themselves, as we know. Objectively speaking, it would at least tend to weaken their arguments, and the longer the temperatures fail to rise, the stronger the tendency to declare it a failure. Predictions that fail and continue to fail should be declared to be adequate falsification. Hansen, MBE and CRU are not going to be the ones who declare their own predictions failures, so someone else has to. We on the skeptics side may be jumping the gun when we do. Each year that passes, though, makes us look smarter and them look dumber. Winters like 2009-10 and 2010-11, plus the SH summer of 2010, in a year declared to be the 2nd or 3rd warmest of all time, certainly make them open to be the butt of jokes and should be the source of much stress at EAU and NASA.

It is just awful science that they hide “inconvenient truths” and hope no one else discovers them. Feynman for one would not approve. Nor should anyone else.