Why should regular people care? The answer is that they shouldn’t — they should only care that the bickering be allowed to continue in a constructive manner until some possible resolution is reached. Next question: how can the back-and-forth be done more constructively? Sadly there are so many ways…. That’s one regular Joe outsider’s perspective, anyway.

The Comments by von Storch and Huybers were submitted long before Barton. Both Comments have serious flaws, which realclimate doesn’t want to hear about. I’m not in the least worried about the final outcome of these studies, if anyone reads the Replies as well. What is pathetic is the excessive readiness of so many climate scientists to grasp at such straws.

As to discussing other studies, this is something that I’ve been working on for a long time and have been posting about all year at climateaudit. I wrote about MBH98 initially because it was the most prominent study. People have said that errors in MBH98 don’t “matter” because the various other studies confirm it. People have challenged me on this for some time. I would like to have been further along in these studies by now, but each one is time-consuming because of the poor traditions in the discipline of archiving data and methods, making each analysis take more time than should be required. Any close examination of these other studies shows many problems with each study individually. The fact that this has not been observed publicly to date is simply because no one has gone through these studies carefully.

Your suggestions as to my motives are completely off-base. I became interested in MBH because it seemed promotional (as you point out) and I was simply interested in how the promotion worked. I did it entirely for personal interest without any plans or expectation of writing academic papers.

I am not personally advocating any alternative theory. At some point in the future, I might, but, for now, I’m trying to completely analyze the existing offerings – something that no one else seems to have done. I would have thought that this would be viewed as a worthwhile undertaking by people in the field, rather than being resented.

I am absolutely not attacking the “entire field of paleoclimatology”. I think that there are many substantial and valuable studies in the field and I find the discipline very interesting. I happen to be very unimpressed with the writings of one small subgroup in the field – sometimes known as the Hockey Team – and it is grandiose to identify their output as being equivalent to the entire discipline.

My big-picture perspective, FWIW: Multi-proxy climate reconstructions are difficult and necessarily involve some degree of interpretation. The fact that arguments arise about any particular study is thus not surprising. Indeed, the fact that there have been multiple additional reconstructions subsequent to MBH, and that this work continues, is proof that nobody in the field believes that any of these studies are perfect or definitive. That said, the fact that all of the studies draw broadly similar conclusions seems significant, and in my semi-informed amateur opinion conclusive.

Steve M.’s work has gotten vastly more traction than it deserves simply because MBH was identified by the skeptics/contrarians as the “weak spot” in the TAR. If it hadn’t been MBH, it would have been something else. As is very obvious from some of the comments above and elsewhere, the attacks on MBH are simply a stalking horse for those who are predisposed to want to believe that the current warming is a result of solar forcing (or natural cycles, or whatever).

It’s important to not forget why the IPCC decided to feature MBH: That nice flat shaft punctuated by the sharply rising blade was graphically effective with the public, the media and policy-makers, even though the flatness itself never meant much in a broad sense. If the result had been a bit bumpier (as with one of the more recent reconstructions), it still would have been featured, although perhaps less prominently. In any case, being featured at all inevitably meant attack.

Bringing things back to the present, Steve M. finally got the scientific hearing he’s been clamoring for (probably as a consequence of the crap from Barton and the WSJ earlier in the year), and it didn’t work out to his liking. Now he has resorted to attacking the entire field of paleoclimatology. I suspect I know what sort of reception he’ll get.

Pss. glad that there is some person who can bridge the gap between the camps. However, I see most of it as a form of haughtiness from the stickers which is not justified based on their math abilities versus Steve. Also, I share more the take of the guy in the anti-creationist blogosphere who said “you lose!” when he was prepared to back Mann as expert but found out that the sticker response was based on refusing to share methods. I think you should move into this view of the stickers too. Enough time has gone by.

“A point about Huybers’ Comment, to which we had a very precise Reply not discussed in the head post.

“In our GRL article, we pointed out that the MBH reconstruction failed important cross-validation tests (such as the R2 test, but not only the R2 test) and that these failures were unreported.

“There is no benchmark theory for RE significance. We argued that the seemingly high RE statistic in MBH98 was “spurious” – using the term “spurious” in the statistical sense of Granger and Newbold [1974] and Phillips [1986], not in an argumentative sense and showed that the biased PC1s could be used to create “reconstructions” which had high RE and low R2 statistics.

“Huybers argued that this model of a spurious RE mechanism did not replicate a re-scaling procedure, now known to be in MBH98 from the source code release. Huybers did some new simulations, purporting to show that the benchmark should be a low one, rather than the high benchmark that we had proposed.

“In our Reply, we pointed out that Huybers had not implemented other important aspects of MBH procedure. We re-did our RE simulations, applying information from the source code, and once again obtained a high RE benchmark.

“The most important point is the failure of the cross-validation R2 statistic. We have never argued (contrary to some characterizations of our work) that the cross-validation R2 statistic is sufficient for statistical significance; however, we do argue that it is necessary.”

This is not “trolls running amok”. This is the “serious discussion” that realclimate says that it is intended to foster, but seldom does. Surely it’s reasonable to question the honesty of the realclimate commitment to “serious discussion” without invoking snide comments. Aside from the censorship, simple equity demands that anyone being criticized be given an opportunity to respond – a policy practiced here at Prometheus and at climateaudit, but not at realclimate.

As to the importance of the fight over the hockey stick, I don’t think it is especially, and I don’t think it makes sense for Mike to take up your offer. That said, whenever there is activity on it that acquires a high public profile (as with the recent exchange in GRL), RC needs to update the issue. If in the future they do a proactive hockey stick post, I’d be real surprised.

http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/climate_change/000316the_uncertainty_trap.html

http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/climate_change/000317a_response_to_realcl.html