Yes, but in that case he had a truly noble cause, whereas in the Mann-SkS case we get only the Noble Cause Corruption.

I think that’s a tactical blunder. I think Dana Nuccitelli and John Cook will likely benefit from the additional publicity, but by grouping themselves together, I think this group will polarize itself too much. Anyone who shuns the behavior of SKS, Mann or Lewandowsky et al will now (basically) be forced to shun all of them. None of them behave well, and if this keeps up, it’ll be seen as reasonable to smear them with the failures of each other. I believe Benjamin Franklin said something to the effect of:

We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.

That seems to apply to what we’re seeing here.

…However, there is a wealth of other sources of information that scientists have used to try to constrain climate sensitivity (see for example this discussion at the site RealClimate). That evidence includes the paleoclimate record of the past thousand years, the specific response of the climate to volcanic eruptions , the changes in global temperature during the last ice age, the geological relationship between climate and carbon dioxide over millions of years, and more.

When the collective information from all of these independent sources of information is combined, climate scientists indeed find evidence for a climate sensitivity that is very close to the canonical 3°C estimate. That estimate still remains the scientific consensus, and current generation climate models — which tend to cluster in their climate sensitivity values around this estimate — remain our best tools for projecting future climate change and its potential impacts….

http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2012/12/19/climate-sensitivity-is-low.html

from

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/05/bayes_formula/;

Or at least, it shouldn’t be relied upon as it has been in recent years: according to the judge, before any expert witness plugs data into the theorem to brief the jury on the likelihood that a defendant is guilty, the underlying statistics should be “firm” rather than rough estimates.

Apparently from here;

http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2011/oct/02/formula-justice-bayes-theorem-miscarriage?INTCMP=SRCH

In this case we know something about the distribution, based on the paleo reconstructions. As CO2 levels have gone up and down, earth’s average temperature has kept within a narrow band of 11 – 22 C.

With current temperatures at 14.5, if you are going to use a uniform prior, then it should be in the range of -3.5 to 7.5. Not 1-18.5 as chose, That would have the effect of skewing the estimate towards an unrealistically high value.

In any case, using the paleo data, one can build a distribution for CO2 and temperature that makes no assumption about uniform distribution. Once that is established, the appropriate statistical treatment will be obvious.