Comments on: A Belated SI for D’Arrigo et al 2006

By: Robin Edwards

Robin Edwards — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 12:42:00 +0000

I hope Manfred does not think that I am “not critical” or “are supposed to be in one’s “camp”. By this no doubt he means believing in the tenets of ardent AGW believers. I am most certainly not. I am very strongly critical of the pseudo-arguments put forward by such deluded people. In general I am sceptical of climate analyses until I have made my own analyses of any data that my software can handle, which I have done since 1992 on a very regular basis. I have examined literally more than a thousand time series of many different types, and have no doubt at all that “the consensus” has been sadly but effectively conned by self-seeking climatologists.

Robin

By: Skiphil

Skiphil — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 17:26:45 +0000

Not specific to D’Arrigo but I recommend to all this prior CA thread on ‘flaccid’ journal reviewing and policies related to SIs:

http://climateaudit.org/2008/04/11/supplementary-information-and-flaccid-peer-reviewing/

By: Tom Gray

Tom Gray — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 13:50:33 +0000

Perhaps, it is also pertinent to note that for patents, an inventor must submit all prior art to which he/she is aware. This includes prior art that comes to their attention after the patent has been submitted. Failure to do this is very serious. It is deemed “inequitable conduct” and will result in the patent being unenforceable or, to all extents and purposes, cancelled.

By: Tom Gray

Tom Gray — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 13:45:30 +0000

From the NIH site, the applicable compliance requirement:

t this time, FDAAA requires the responsible party to submit summary results information (including adverse events) no later than 1 year after the primary completion date (see Definition) for registered applicable clinical trials involving drugs that are approved under section 505 of the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act (FDCA) or licensed under section 351 of the PHS Act, biologics, or of devices that are cleared under section 510k of FDCA. However, NIH encourages results reporting for all NIH supported clinical trials registered in ClinicalTrials.gov, regardless of whether or not they are required to do so under FDAAA

This would seem applicable with modifications for papers that are used in major reports such as the tPCC ARs. If authors wish their paper to be considered for assessment within an AR, this would seem to be a desirable prerequisite.

By: tty

tty — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 12:44:40 +0000

Re Mann’s views on ”underestimation of volcanic cooling” there is an interesting paper in the latest issue of Climates of the Past with the somewhat cryptic title “Constraining the temperature history of the past millennium using early instrumental observations” (http://www.clim-past.net/8/1551/2012/cp-8-1551-2012.pdf). It is actually about the digitalization of weather data from 900 English East India Company ships logs from 1790 through 1830 which give rather good coverage of the tropical and temperate parts of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The most interesting result is probably that the extremely large eruptions of 1809 (unknown) and 1815 (Tambora) apparently had a quite subdued effect over the oceans (on the order of 0.5 degrees).
Otherwise oceanic temperatures in 1790-1830 seem to have been very slightly warmer than in 1961-1990 and barometric pressure significantly and mysteriously lower.

By: Duster

Duster — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 08:04:42 +0000

Craig, in post-normal science details don’t really matter because you can make them up. You’ll note that a recent study found that 2/3s of withdrawn articles were due to outright falsified data. And that was I believe mostly in biology and medicine. That latter is chilling.

By: Robin Edwards

Robin Edwards — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 22:33:46 +0000

What I wrote was “This seems to be an example of a very courteous and friendly attitude…” refering to the specific response that I received from JE. Can’t see anything wrong with it so far.

Actually, the data contain some oddities in their formating, with what I take to be some missing separators and the occasional use of “labels” that seem to change case for no apparent reason. Not a big deal, of course. What is more trouble for me is the names of the data groups, which are numbers with an alpha suffix – usually a or b, but which is in some case missing altogether. Some of the last 50 or so lines (out of around 8500) also have c or d as their suffix. What this means I have not been able to work out yet. Perhaps it will all become clear when I can read the Excel file.

By: Manfred

Manfred — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 21:10:29 +0000

Providing information only to those who are supposed to be in one’s “camp” or not known to be critical is, in my view, more disturbing than not giving information to anyone.

What would such behaviour imply, when it comes to reviewing another person’s work, or deciding about employment etc. ?

By: Frank

Frank — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 20:35:34 +0000

Rob: Thanks for taking the time to communicate with the skeptic community. I hope that Steve will a correction for “non-archiver” above, that accurately reflects for both your comment and his reply. However, the standards for disclosure of data should be the same no matter what Esper’s work concludes about the MWP. Even small efforts like yours provide some hope that the politicization of climate science won’t tarnish the integrity of science indefinitely.

May I suggest that you look to the rules that have been adopted for archiving the results from clinical trials in response to the suppression of data showing that drugs don’t work?

http://grants.nih.gov/ClinicalTrials_fdaaa/at-a-glance.htm

Steve: Rob has not given any reason to change my statement. Rob arm-waved to a site at which Esper has, to my knowledge, not archived a single data set.

By: theduke

theduke — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 19:48:56 +0000

Perhaps he supplied the data because he sensed “your aim is to [not] try and find something wrong with it?”

When you say he’s “an excellent example to other scientists,” are you implying that other scientists should rudely ignore Steve’s requests for data?