Well then, let’s just say that there are lots of astounding and very important things happening in tne world that are going unpublicized.

As amazing as the climate story is, there are other shenanigans happening, other peas being shifted around, and other sleuths digging and tracing.

Not to in any way diminish what Steve is doing, because it’s aswesome, and I appreciate this blog so very much.

Back in December 2008 the good Professor was offering Ben Santer some advice on dealing w/FOI/EIR requests:

“When the FOI requests began here, the FOI person said we had to abide by the requests. It took a couple of half hour sessions – one at a screen, to convince them otherwise showing them what CA was all about. Once they became aware of the types of people we were dealing with, everyone at UEA (in the registry and in the Environmental Sciences school – the head of school and a few others) became very supportive. . . . The VC is also aware of what is going on – . . .”

And further on Phil adds:

” . . . About 2 months ago I deleted loads of emails, so have very little – if anything at all.”

http://foia2011.org/index.php?id=294

The point stands that putting in random data frequently generates hockey sticks. Had that been previously reported ? No. Should it have been caught in peer review ? Yes. What does that say about climate study peer review ? A lot.

An SkS user called “caerbannog” said on 31 Dec that McIntyre doesn’t know how to interpret the results of SVD.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/MichaelMann.html#70788

He says:

The bottom line is, unless you look at the singular values, you can’t say *anything* about your data. You can’t simply look at the principal components (aka singular vectors) without considering the associated singular value magnitudes and draw any reasonable conclusions about whether your data vectors contain a “common signal” or are just random noise. Without the information provided by the singular values, you simply can’t tell (no matter what your principal-components look like).

But that’s exactly what skeptics did when they attacked Mann by claiming that his procedure generates hockey sticks from random noise. They never bothered to compare their “noise hockey stick” singular values with Mann’s “tree-ring” singular values.

Could McIntyre respond, perhaps by saying whether this is a red herring argument about the validity of the temperature hockey stick, or whether caerbannog actually has a valid point?

Here’s what I mean.

In the financial industry all outgoing and incoming email must be archived for a period of 5 years. If (let’s say) a stock broker uses his personal email account to send a business email -no matter how insignificant- he can be fined and lose his license. This archiving is done at the server level and there is no way the user can circumvent it.

Of course I realize this is the UK… But in general, maybe it is time to start lobbying for such reforms both here and abroad.

If these guys knew they were leaving a paper trail, maybe they would be a bit more honest in their endeavors.