http://thelukewarmersway.wordpress.com/2013/03/07/can-you-dig-it/comment-page-1/#comment-2458

“6. Is tree ring data fit for purpose for establishing temperature records at that fine a level of detail?”

Tree rings are among the very best of proxies in terms of their temporal resolution (1 year, and very accurately dated). The problems arise due to confounding effects on the LONG TERM trend (multi-decadal to multi-century) estimates. These effects arise from geometric and biological issues, combined with sub-optimal field sampling practices. There are historical roots to the latter.

You cannot take a process (tree growth) that has more than one input (i.e. climate, tree age/size, internal biological processes), attempt to remove (“detrend”) the effects of one of those inputs (tree age/size) by statistical curve fitting, and know with confidence that you have in fact removed the effects of only that factor. You can’t do it, it’s mathematically impossible. This is one of the two fundamental problems. The second one has to do with the field sampling and is too complicated to get into here.

From what I understand, Mann is a superstar at garnering funding. I get the impression that he has a say in who gets it and who doesn’t. So, if that is true, he gets to hold that over their heads. The way Briffa caved on the “hide the decline,” it appears that they have all had a dose of Mann holding the funding over their heads.

It is much like most of us do when our bosses lean on us – we go as far as we can, and then we back down when it comes to push and shove. It isn’t that Mann is their boss, but money talks.

If I am wrong, I’d like if someone corrects me on it, but I am certain I’d read several times about Mann’s ability to get huge amounts of money, and it seems like it is much more than climate science has ever gotten before. So, now they are in the big leagues, and they don’t know how long they will be on the gravy train – but Mann is the funnel, so they have to supplicate on the altar of Mann.

I have come to the conclusion that you are a troll.

You 100% discount every exposé of Steve M and those who side with him, while playing the “Poor little me, I don’t really know anything about this subject” card over and over again, and 100% giving the benefit of the doubt to the Hockey Team.

You are skeptical of what you hear here, but accepting of everything the scientists say. You “explain away” every Team mendacity as something anyone would do. Your balance is non-existent. Playing the “little old me” card while claiming to be sitting in the fence has gotten tiring. Then evidence has been presented ad infinitum to you, and you still play the “independent thinker” role – either because you are a troll or because you are slow. After several gives and takes with you, I conclude that you HAVE made up your mind (in favor of the Team) and are just stroking all of us here.

Please. Go troll somewhere else.

All the above make the reluctance of dendros to fully archive the data and methods for extracting the temperature signal and to fully investigate issues like the divergence highly problematic.

Why are you so sure that the dendros are ‘reluctant’ to archive data and methods and fully investigate issues?

You are, like many others here, including the blog owner, suggesting that these people are lazy and/or mendacious. I think the narrative on this comes not from any deep knowledge of the time, money, pressures, staffing, managerial directives etc that these people work with, but on the disaffection of critics willing to turn any snippet of an email and problems with data into an accusation.

IOW, I think you (and others) are making sweeping statements with very little knowledge of the facts on the ground. This has been amply demonstrated on particular matters where I’ve pointed out work done in the literature that critics assumed had not been done – above and at other venues. This happens regularly. The picture I’m seeing is a kind of self-reinforcing groupthink amongst a milieu that are drawn, for whatever reasons, to repudiate various of the scientific factors connected with the issue of anthropogenic global warming, and they do this with conviction despite knowing little of the work done in the field they are discussing.

One of the mental habits that I retained since childhood is to invert every statement into its negative and see if the reverse could be true. It is as automatic as breathing. As I got older I became better at weighing the likelihood of either. I think some of the emails I’ve read are potentially dubious. But I’m much more convinced that the skeptical narrative surrounding them comes from fitting their interpretation to a predetermined view of the issues and the emailers.

(caveat – I cannot say this for certain about Steve McIntyre, who is far more knowledgeable than me about these issues, although some posts I’ve read suggest to me he is not a neutral commentator – I’m speaking of interlocutors here who are demonstrably not knowledgeable about the issues they are discussing)

I read half of the emails you noted (I would have read them all if you’d provided links). I’m not sure why disagreement amongst scientists is news. Did you assume that these people agreed with every tittle of each other’s work? I’m not convinced from the post you nominated that there is anything mendacious going on. The quality of the work choices made during those exchanges is a different matter, and there may be good cause for criticism (I don’t know).

More generally,

One of the reasons given that these emails should remain private is that it allows researchers to fully express themselves in ways that are inappropriate or potentially damaging in a public forum. Others argue that all emails within government funded institutions should be public property, but if the researchers operated under that assumption then they would be less open, for reasons that are not nefarious. Private beefs around the water cooler should not be annotated and put on a notice board, obviously. I think those arguing for the surrendering of private communications have not thought through what that means for the working environment. You’d get access, but then the workers would stop being candid. It’s a lose lose scenario.

Thanks. I hadn’t seen that email.

Right. Cook’s speculation isn’t science, just a scientist’s speculation. As such it carries validity, but only as a direction for further research, and not till the research is done can it be put out as an explanation. And if that research isn’t done, it is intellectual laziness, at best. I’ve seen several speculations, even within peer-reviewed papers. This begs the question of why they never followed any of these ideas up. And it suggests that they were afraid of finding out the “inconvenient” answer.

But Cook’s “explanation” is a vacuous argument, another “blame everything on CO2″ catch-all. I’ve seen this kind of argument/explanation/speculation in archeology a lot, where any unexplainable artifact or structure is termed “ceremonial,” with the same phrasings and tales of ancient peoples huddled under the skies, seeking to propitiate their gods. It is also common in geology and evolution, where “time” is the answer to any unanswerable question: with vast amounts of time nature can do anything. But they aren’t science; they are only empty speculations.

So possibly a fuzzy truth value could be associated with it. So each proxy could have a truth value and the combination of these could be weighted by each’s contribution the reconstruction such as in 3.5 +/-0.1 with a truth value of 0.7 or likely. As proxies come in and out of the reconstruction, the truth value would vary. Each point in the reconstruction would have a truth value and this would be a measure of the faith that can be placed in each estimate.