The Hockey Stick Debate as a Matter of Science Policy

August 13th, 2008

Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.

Here at Prometheus we have for years closely followed the controversy over the so-called temperature reconstruction “hockey stick.” So it was with some interest that I saw this blog post linked from Climate Audit, apparently written by a Scottish libertarian blogger called Bishop Hill. Hill writes of the recent years of the hockey stick debate:

The story is a remarkable indictment of the corruption and cynicism that is rife among climate scientists, and I’m going to try to tell it in layman’s language so that the average blog reader can understand it.

And indeed Hill’s post is well-written, and accurate as far as I can tell. Of course, such stories have as many sides as there are participants, so if any of those involved including Steve McIntyre or Caspar Ammann would like to post or comment here, they’d be welcome.

Long-time readers (do we have any?;-) will recall that in the fall of 2005 we issued a challenge to Steve McIntyre and Michael Mann, the lead protagonists on either side of the debate, to explain to us policy-oriented folks why we should care about their very public squabbling.

Steve McIntyre took us up on our challenge (as did his collaborator Ross McKitrick). Michael Mann declined the invitation. McIntyre explained that the debate over the hockey stick mattered not because of its direct relevance to the debate over what to do about global warming, but because of matters of what we call around here “science policy“– peer review, public confidence in science, and simply getting this right rather than wrong. McIntyre explained that if he were the head of the IPCC,

I would be particularly angry at being placed in a position where I used this logo and wasn’t fully informed about adverse information pertaining to it. I also wouldn’t be leaving it up to some probably adversarial committee like the Barton Committee to sort this out. I’d be all over the problem so that my community, the community of climate scientists, was not further embarrassed and so that government institutions would be able to rely confidently on the opinions of IPCC. . .

If our very logo for IPCC TAR blew up on us, then something was wrong with our procedures for review. I wouldn’t go around patting ourselves on the back and telling everyone that this was the most “rigorous” review procedure in the history of science, since we’d goofed on such a prominent issue. I’d want to know why we goofed and how to avoid it in the future, or at least, how to minimize the chances of a recurrence. So when some redneck tried to use the Hockey Stick fiasco against IPCC, I’d at least have an answer.

While I am not in a position to evaluate the merits of the technical arguments of McIntyre’s criticisms of the Hockey Stock (the NAS and Wegman Reports weighed in on that), his complaints about the science policy aspects of the issue have stood the test of time.

In response to the Bishop Hill piece McIntyre writes:

There’s a definite foolhardiness and contemptuousness of the public by the IPCC and, in particular, the core of the Hockey Team. . . Every step of the process has been publicly documented. You’d think that they’d have been extra diligent in their reviewing. Instead, what we see is one thing botched after another and one sly manouevre after another.

If this is representative of how climate articles are written and how climate peer reviewing is done, what a pathetic performance. They might say – well, this is a bad example. To which I’d say, well, you knew that it was in the public eye, it should have been a good example, why wasn’t it?

I’ve compared the issue to the WMD argument, which was also a cheap way of arousing the public; and, myself to an analyst who observes that an aluminum tube is sometimes just an aluminum tube. That doesn’t mean that other arguments for the war couldn’t be made or that the war was right or wrong; just that it was justified based on the aluminum tube argument. In that case, some effort was made to understand why they got the WMD intelligence wrong.

I agree. Having collaborated a bit with Steve McIntyre in recent years, and seen how the community reacts to him in the peer review process, I have seen some of the frothing and irrationality that he stirs. Further, as a long-time observer of this debate, how the more vocal climate science community has dealt with the criticisms of the Hockey Stick and McIntyre’s determined efforts is really an embarrassment to all of the hard-working and brilliant scientists who work out of the limelight trying to advance knowledge in a rigorous manner. The problem is that the behavior of the few reflects upon the community as a whole.

McIntyre may never get the recognition that he deserves from the climate science community (though some, like Peter Webster and Judy Curry have shown leadership by recognizing Steve’s legitimacy, and apparently taken their lumps for it), but within science policy circles it is becoming increasingly clear that has made a significant contribution to upholding the integrity of climate science, and for this he should be applauded.

38 Responses to “The Hockey Stick Debate as a Matter of Science Policy”

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  1. Sylvain Says:

    It looks like I’m one of the longest-time reader you have ;-) (about 2 years now) sorry if my comment aren’t always at the quality level a blog host would like to have.

    I think it is sad to see the reaction that Steve McIntyre’s received and the toll that you and your father have begun to receive. If Peter Webster and Judith Curry are included in it has well then the situation is getting ridiculous.

    Steve McIntyre is frequently labeled a denier yet to my knowledge he his still undecided on the question. Is integrity is it seems affected by the people posting on his blog (meaning that some should be silenced).

    Yourself, you are frequently labeled as a skeptics/deniers for only questioning some part of the science and being quoted think tank, all this, even though you made your position very clear that you support the IPCC report and favor strong mitigation and adaptation.

    Being a layman, I’m unable to judge the technical merit of the debate when it rely heavily on math. Even though sometimes the issue are difficult to understand there are some signs that do not lie.

    The first of them is the confidence of the scientist in their own work. When a scientist, or group of scientist, are not up front about sharing their method, data and code, then one can question the confidence of those scientist in their own work. If they are not confident about it, it then becomes a good reason to not be up front and have some fault found in what one may have taken years to achieve. But in doing so the value of the work is automatically diminished because of the doubt surrounding it.

    On blog, another signs is the blog roll that the host recommend. When a blog host has no shame in putting the the link to the people who are very critical, it demonstrate how open and confident one his about his work and the information he put.

    On the other side, to not even mention the name, blog link and even deleting any link in comment that mention that blog shows the incapacity of dealing with criticism. Such position make me very suspicious of the quality of the blog hosts.

    It is no wonder that following these rule Climate Audit and Prometheus rate very high and Realclimate rate very low.

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  3. Willis Eschenbach Says:

    Roger, first, my thanks to you for all of the varied and interesting work you have done, including this post.

    I have to respectfully disagree, however, when you say:

    Further, as a long-time observer of this debate, how the more vocal climate science community has dealt with the criticisms of the Hockey Stick and McIntyre’s determined efforts is really an embarrassment to all of the hard-working and brilliant scientists who work out of the limelight trying to advance knowledge in a rigorous manner. The problem is that the behavior of the few reflects upon the community as a whole.

    The problem is not the behavior of the few. A few people will always do wrong. The problem is that the behavior of the community as a whole has been just what you said. They have not stood up to oppose the bad science done in their name. They have not clamored for an investigation into the bad science. They have, in large part, done absolutely nothing in response to this abysmal situation. Nothing. No public statements. No behind-the-scenes maneuvers. Nothing. Zip. Zero.

    Instead, by and large, they have in your words “stayed out of the limelight” … and now you are claiming that they are the victims in this case?

    In my opinion, they have no one but themselves to blame for the fact that they are being tarred with the same brush as the miscreants. I have been astounded at the silence about these matters from the scientific establishment, both inside and outside climate science. Where is the outrage that M. Mann was able to sell a bill of goods under the highest IPCC imprimateur? Where is the outrage that the NSF, and Science Magazine, and Nature Magazine, all routinely ignore there own requirements for data archiving?

    So I’m sorry, but I have absolutely no sympathy for those poor, brilliant, benighted, hardworking scientists who are staying “out of the limelight”. They have no one to blame but themselves.

    The problem is not that the actions of the few are reflecting on the community as a whole.

    The problem is that the actions of the community as a whole, in dealing with the few, have been weak, ineffective, pathetic, or non-existent.

    The problem is not that Michael Mann and a bunch of others have been gaming the system. That happens in every system, people will try to game it.

    The problem is that the other “hardworking and brilliant” climate scientists haven’t had the [*snip] to police their own backyard, and in that regard, staying “out of the limelight” is not a noble act, or even a neutral act.

    It is an invitation to a self-created disaster of the type we are embroiled in right now, and there is no-one to blame for it but the “hardworking and brilliant” scientists who make up the “community as a whole”. Your sympathy for them is misplaced.

    All the best,

    w.

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  5. solman Says:

    Willis has it exactly right.

    MBH is the inevitable consequence of a community that placed environmental advocacy over scientific integrity.

    The significance of this fiasco is that it indicts the work of the climate science community as a whole.

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  7. Michael Strong Says:

    Thanks to both Pielkes for their courage in this. The very scariest outcome is if the most alarmist long-term fears of Hansen turn out to be true, but that by the time there really is an urgent need to take action, the climatology community has so destroyed its credibiliity that no one takes them seriously anymore. To see mainstream gatekeepers (Science, Nature, etc.) of the scientific community continue to avoid addressing these issues is shocking. Pielke Jr., Pielke Sr., Judith Curry, Wegman, Lucia, and all of those who realize that MacIntyre’s analyses cannot be ignored are heroes of the scientific ethos. MacIntyre, of course, deserves a special place in scientific history for his relentless analyses despite all obstacles.

    Quite aside from the validity of MacIntyre’s analyses, the issue of transparent access to data and methods for the purpose of replicability is so essential to the core ethos of scientific integrity that it is difficult to respect those scientists who do not, at a minimum, support MacIntyre’s efforts to obtain access to data and methods, even if the moral stakes were not so high. In fact, the moral stakes are extraordinarily high.

    Progress on the U.N.’s Human Development Index is statistically indistinguishable from GDP per capita (see Miles Cahill, “Is the Human Development Index Redundant?”). Economic growth is the only realistic means of increasing GDP per capita for billions of human beings. Thus reducing rates of economic growth in the developing world through policies premised on alarmist AGW (e.g. threatened carbon tariffs) makes an ongoing audit of AGW science a moral imperative in the simple sense of the potential unnecessary deaths of hundreds of millions of children (rates of infant mortality decrease rapidly as GDP per capita increases to about $10K per year, then it plateaus with further increases in GDP per capita).

    If we knew that global catastrophe was an inevitable result of increased carbon emissions, perhaps we would have to make such a tragic choice. But it appears as if some AGW partisans, including many climate scientists, have decided that legitimate scientific concerns about elements of alarmist AGW (the hockey stick being a key piece of alarmist evidence) are not to be discussed. They should reconsider.

    Brad de Long calculates that Indian rates of growth since the 90s, if sustained, will lead to a U.S. standard of living in India around 2066, whereas at the rates of growth under Nehruvian socialism India would have reached a U.S. standard of living in 2250. If harsh carbon tariffs were imposed on India and China, and reduced their growth rates significantly, we care, in effect, sentencing two billion people to two hundreds years of unnecessary poverty. I really don’t think that the ardent alarmist AGW partisans quite understand this moral calculus. The policy issue is not merely about greed and SUVs.

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  9. Ron Cram Says:

    Roger, thank you for this post. I agree with Willis to a great degree but believe the criticism applies mainly to the field of dendroclimatology (perhaps Willis thinks so as well). Science is supposed to be self-correcting. But there is no correction unless scientists agree to police themselves. Dendroclimatologists have not done this. In fact, they have gone out of their way to defend the indefensible because it progresses their agenda. After the many failures of MBH were made public, the authors should have suffered a figurative “public dunking” at the hands of his fellow dendroclimatologists.

    Of course, I believe there are climate scientists in other specialties who push an agenda, but I can think of several who do not – including your father. I am very thankful for men like him, Petr Chylek, Stephen Schwartz, Roy Spencer and John Christy. These men are not afraid to publish their results even if they go against the “consensus.”

    I have come to the opinion that dendroclimatology does not deserve the name ’science.’ The way it is currently practiced is not scientific. It is a pseudoscience. Until they archive their data, results, methods and code and aggressively police their own work, they will not enjoy the respect accorded real scientists.

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  11. EJ Says:

    I also agree with Willis.

    That this paleo nonsence is still currently promoted by the mosts recent ?CCSP? and IPCC reports, without a peep from an unusual suspect (sincere scientists) is a tragedy.

    I contend that climate science is still a ’soft’ science.

    I also contend that Mr. McIntyre’s writing style raises many hackles. Finding what the “cat dragged in, the rat’s nest of data, etc.” His witty and almost playful posts are usually a joy to read even if the stats are over my head.

    The silence from “The Team” is deafening. That they don’t immediately log on to his blog to refute McIntyre’s conclusions, let alone with calcs and data, is telling enough for me. That they don’t even respond to the man ’silence’ who requests a collaboration on a project is very disrespectful at the least.

    That the masses, including our politicians, have swallowed hook, line and sinker, … well you know what happens to the fish who swallowed the hook.

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  13. Jon Says:

    I don’t quite know what to say. I think the comments (number 5, paragraph 2 especially) speak for themselves. I do believe that you’ve finally found the readership niche you’ve been moving towards for quite a while now.

    Please don’t take that as criticism or some sort of crypto-push at censorship. Best of luck with all that, and I mean that sincerely.

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  15. cah95046 Says:

    Why don’t climate scientists police their own house?

    Total climate science funding (now $2B in the US?) would go down if AGW is not a crisis.

    Dendro scientist would be out of work if their if any of them admitted the truth about the value of their research.

    Simple self interest at work.

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  17. sherro Says:

    I, too, agree with Willis. It is deja vu from anti-nuclear days. More good scientists should stand up.

    Re # 4 Michael Strong, the arguments about using AGM to make poor countries better off is dealt with in most impressive manner by Hans Rosling of Holland in two 15-min presentations at

    http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4237353244338529080&sourceid=sea

    and

    http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/hans_rosling_reveals_new_insights_on_poverty.html

    These woke me up with a start. Like the Pielke comments often do. Thank you.

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  19. David Holland Says:

    There are no bad soldiers only bad generals.

    One key problem in climate science is that those who are in charge of, and pay for it, exercise only political, rather than administrative or strategic control over it. Ultimately these are our governments who collectively set up the IPCC under the auspices of the UN, a body not widely praised for its probity and management skills.

    In the UK, and I suspect elsewhere, government does not even bother to acquire and examine the documentation of the assessment process that is clearly available to it. In December 2007 under the UK Freedom of Information Act and Environmental Information Regulations I asked to see the Review Editor’s report of John Mitchell, the Met office Chief Scientist, on the Palaeoclimate Chapter 6 of the IPCC WGI report and all the working documents in the possession of Defra, the IPCC “focal point” in the UK. Defra is short for the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs – a name that suggests muddled thinking to start with.

    By law Defra should have replied within 20 working days. They did not and I obtained the Review Editors’ reports elsewhere as is detailed at ClimateAudit. In May this year Defra finally replied. They had no working documents, and to quote verbatim they said they had “no right of access to such information”. This is of course nonsense on stilts.

    The British Government along with other governments set up the IPCC to assess climate change on a “comprehensive open and transparent basis”. This is written into the mandate they gave the IPCC as is the entitlement of all reviewers, which includes the governments, to have copies of all written expert comments. Also written into the mandate is that Review Editors must ensure that the assessment is done properly and that they must report in writing to the Working Group or Panel on which government representatives sit.

    WGI Review Editors, with one exception, did not write any reports but at the bidding of Susan Solomon simply signed a statement that she sent to them. John Mitchell alone added a brief comment to his statement. These paper statements were hand carried to the IPCC Paris meeting in February 2007 and were “available for inspection”. I have asked if any one looked at them or requested copies but have had no reply.

    I have also asked for the working documents of Chapter 6 Lead Author, Keith Briffa, at CRU. They have admitted to having relevant correspondence with Caspar Ammann which is clearly “expert comment” and under the IPCC mandate should be disclosed. It is also, in my view, ‘environmental information’ and subject to the more powerful Environmental Information Regulations which CRU refuse to consider. Instead they claim to have a Ministerial dispensation under the Freedom of Information Act not to disclose “as it would be likely to inhibit the free and frank exchange of views for the purpose of deliberation.” This directly contradicts the “open and transparent” basis of the IPCC mandate and is clear evidence that in the UK, at least, Climate change is now primarily a political issue.

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  21. glacierman Says:

    Willis and #8.

    Your points are dead on. Some soul searching is required when it is realized that there is no self policing going on….and the reasons why.

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  23. Gunnar Says:

    In reponse to Sylvain. There is a false premise that there is some virtue in remaining on the fence, rather than following the scientific evidence and logical argument. Should scientists have stayed neutral on the consensus for eugenics or lysenkosim?

    Anyone who uses terms like “denier” is allowing emotion to cloud their intellectual judgement, which poisons the debate. Anyone who won’t take a position, because they are afraid of being called a denier does the same.

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  25. Francois Ouellette Says:

    I wholeheartedly agree with Willis.

    I have followed Climate Audit from a few months after it started. At the time, I was getting interested in the AGW issue, and was annoyed by the talk about “scientific consensus”, and was looking for whatever dissenting voices there were, in the scientific community, just to see what they had to say.

    At first, I thought “Wow, what this guy is doing is really impressing”. He was an amateur, but his points were clear and entirely valid. Most skeptic sites at the time were just rehashing simplistic and tired arguments, but there was someone going at the details in a rigorous way.

    Initially, I thought that the paleoclimate community would quietly distance themselves from Mann and his close associates. His behavior would have, in any other circumstances, been found reprehensible. I thought that the cracks would start appearing in the scientific literature.

    But none of that happened, even after the NAS panel and the Wegman report.

    Maybe if Steve Mc had tried harder to publish his results, things would have started to move. He chose not too, and maybe rightly. For any newcomer in a field, the publishing barrier is always higher. In his case, even though he had sympathizers in the field, he would still have faced hostility from most anonymous reviewers, and his papers would have been endlessly delayed. Why wait months when you can just publish instantly on a blog? So we end up with this strange dialog, because, let’s face it, Steve’s findings are the tacit benchmark for all who publish centennial reconstructions. His shadow is ever present. But that leaves everyone the latitude to confront him with the silliest arguments, because like a ghost, he does not respond directly, only through his blog, and as far as the “official” scientific literature goes, blogs, like ghosts, do not exist.

    But all this points to one thing. The academic world is not equipped to deal with the challenge of the policy response to AGW. But somehow, the world governments have entrusted the academic system in giving them answers, by creating the IPCC, and asking it to rely solely on the peer-reviewed literature. The peer-review system is both good and bad. It has many flaws that are well-known to all who use it. But for most purposes, it is good enough, simply because scientific publications are not expected to be engineering-like documents. The focus is on originality and relevance, and that is mostly what the peer-review is all about. Relying on that system for policy advice (indirectly through the IPCC reports) was an invitation to profit from its flaws to push everybody’s agendas. When the stakes are high, the peer-review system is just too easily corruptible, or just too plain weak, to resist.

    Blogs are no alternative yet. No rules at all is not better than inadequate rules. Governments should have been more creative, and created a body of experts that is independent of the peer-review system, and that would operate on much stricter and more transparent criteria. One does not really need thousands of academic scientists scattered in innumerable institutions around the world, all striving for public attention, and trying to survive the next round of grant applications, to find a suitable scientific advice about AGW. But that’s another problem…

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  27. Gary Says:

    Tahnk you for your continued excellent and thought provoking blog. I have been following the exploits of Steve McIntyre for some time now. As a physician it has continued to amaze me that there is such resistance to providing data sets and statistical analysis by authors of published works in the climate science field. How else can any scientific work be adequately evaluated. The idea that authors should not share their data because some one may be looking for mistakes in it is not reasonable in my mind. Openness and transparency would serve the feild much better

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  29. Pages tagged "diligent" Says:

    [...] bookmarks tagged diligent The Hockey Stick Debate as a Matter of Science Pol… saved by 5 others     ShmittyShmit bookmarked on 08/14/08 | [...]

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  31. Pat Michaels Says:

    This is my third attempt. FWIW, if you navigate away from this page, your draft does not come back!

    At any rate, I have to agree with Willis. I do so because I have just finished my (24,000-word) review of the CCSP Synthesis Product. In 30+ years in this profession, having reviewed dozens of documents in this genre, I must say that this one is the absolute worst. It is rhetoric, not science. It ignores swaths of the scientific literature so broad that I a left to accuse its authors of one of two things: blatant subservience to a political agenda, or blatant stupidity. And, given that we all know the latter can’t be true, the former is truly discouraging.

    In fact, here’s the last paragraph of my introductory comment:

    “Let me say that, knowing many of the individuals involved, I am deeply saddened by what this document says about my profession. It is in that state that I must tender the rest of my review”.

    In case anyone thinks that the so-called leaders in my profession have learned anything from the Mann/McIntyre affair, they have not. The hockey stick is there for all to see. So Willis is right.

    I know that few, if any of my comments will provoke a change in the document. There is simply no way it could have arrived in the state that it did unless the “leadership” was determined to produce such an agenda-colored document long before the draft was released.

    How all of this happened won’t be sorted out by historians of science for another fifty years, but for my two cents worth, President Dwight Eisenhower feared precisely what this document represents in his Farewell Address on January 17, 1961:

    “The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholers by federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present–and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must always be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become a captive of a scientific-technological elite”.

    I have always feared that it was climate change that would bring Eisenhower’s fears to fruition. Willis is right. My profession stinks because it has become completely subservient to the political agenda of its leaders. Truth does not matter. Read the CCSP draft for yourself, and you will be forced to agree with Willis.

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  33. Ron Cram Says:

    I am a little surprised by the number of comments from people here who seem to be unaware that Roger Pielke Sr has criticized the IPCC and CCSP for bias. If you are one of those in the dark, please read

    http://climatesci.org/index.php?s=ipcc+bias&submit=Search

    Pielke Sr. has focused his criticism on his areas of expertise, not dendroclimatology (as far as I know). But Pielke’s criticism has been significant, thorough and very well stated. No one can read his posts without agreeing that the IPCC is pushing an agenda over the interest of science.

    Other climate scientists have also spoken out against IPCC bias. Richard Lindzen and Christopher Landsea come to mind and I’m certain there are others. Unfortunately, criticism alone does not win the day and the Warmers continue to advance their agenda in complete disregard of the science.

    Frustration with the current situation is clear in the posts here. But it is better to present a clear and accurate picture of the situation than one of complete doom, gloom and frustration. While dendroclimatology is a pseudoscience, honest, hard-working, even brilliant scientists do work in climate. They are just a minority.

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  35. Willis Eschenbach Says:

    Ron (and others), you are correct that there have been honest voices raised, and you name them well. I respect what they have done, the Pielkes pere et fils, Lindzen, Steve McIntyre, and the rest, they have followed the data.

    However, as you say, “Pielke Sr. has focused his criticism on his areas of expertise, not dendroclimatology (as far as I know).” Unfortunately, this has too often been the case.

    It is unfortunate because the issue is not dendroclimatology, and never has been. It is scientific laxity, and scientific malfeasance, and scientific double-dealing. It is deliberate concealment of adverse results. It is refusal to reveal data. It is abuse of power and betrayal of trust. It is made-up math. It is Science and Nature and the NSF not enforcing their own archiving requirements. It is scientific check-kiting. All plain. Out front. Even boasted about at times. I couldn’t get the HadCRUT data from Phil Jones, even by way of a very public FOIA request … where is the outrage? You don’t need to be a dendrochronologist to recognize a scientist refusing to reveal his data, and to form reasonable conclusions based on that behavior. To quote from Dylan et al. (1966), sometimes “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” …

    As I said above, the silence on these matters from the majority of scientists of all disciplines has been deafening. The placid acceptance of this behavior threatens the credibility of science as a whole. Where are the elders thundering about transparency and replicability being the foundation of science, and publicly urging these mountebanks to come clean and archive their data? Where are the scientists with the backbone to call a spade a blasted digging implement? The Hockeystick was deliberate scientific fraud. Mann knew about and concealed adverse results. He knew the whole thing rested on the bristlecones. He knew that if you remove the bristlecones the hockeystick disappears, and he hid that, and published anyway. Now we have Bishop Hill’s lovely summary of Wahl and Amman and the Jesus paper. There is scientific crime going on, the perpetrators are concealing the evidence, and almost everyone is whistling and looking at the sky, or talking about problems with paleodendroclimatic reconstructions, talking about anything but deliberate scientific malfeasance, oh, no, couldn’t be that, and if it were, I couldn’t possibly comment on that, it’s just not done, and besides I’m sure it was well meaning, he only wanted to help the poor earth survive her fever …

    John Stuart Mill is rumored to have said “For evil to succeed, it is only necessary for good men to do nothing”. But heck, in an era when the Royal Society, that historical bastion of independent scientific inquiry, sees fit to decree which science is not to be funded, in an age where a state climatologist can get fired for independent scientific thought, in a time like that … what’s a poor boy to do?

    My best regards to everyone,

    w.

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  37. Gunnar Says:

    To the extent people are blaming scientists, I have to disagree. It’s really not a scientists responsibility to express outrage over the behaviour of other scientists. The problem is political. The very recently initiated massive funding of science at universities is the problem. We can complain all day long about certain scientists, but if they were removed, more would appear. Complaining about the scientists themselves is futile and irrational.

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  39. paulmaynard Says:

    This is a comment I have posted over at CA in the past.

    Surely the true scandal of the Hockey Stick debate is that when the fist paper by MBH appeared arguing that temps had been flat for a 1,000 years only to rise in an “unprecedented” fashion in the past 50 odd years, is that the IPCC and literally millions of scientists and other supposedly intelligent people managed to overlook or forget the historical record.

    There are many, perhaps hundreds, of sources that gave a clear indication that temps in the Roman WP and MWP were comparable or warmer than today. That the Vikings colonised Greenland only to be driven away by the LIA. That the River Thames froze as late as the 1820s and so on and so on.

    These sources are available worldwide and also refuted the MWP was a NH event.

    PS, I am always interested in finding speakers on climate topics for the lecture season of the Insurance Institute of London.

    Paul

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  41. Promethius (the science policy blog) comments on Bishop Hill « The Libertarian Alliance: BLOG Says:

    [...] Here. I referred to the earlier Bishop Hill major post here. [...]

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  43. TrevorH Says:

    I am not a scientist – but I like to think I am compos mentis.

    I am disgusted by the scientific attitude to the issue of ‘global warming’.

    Its clear from what I have read that the hockey stick is a lie, its clear that scientist have allowed themselves to be politicised

    Its also clear also to anyone who has looked into the aactivities of Maurice Strong that global warming is a scam.

    ‘Science’ hs been compromised — its a shocking disgrace. The end result is that I refuse to believe anything anymore that politicised scientists say. GM = good. Global warming iminemt. Embrayo reaserch necessary. DNA = relaiable etc etc etc — compuers safe et al … Cynicism is more reliable than scientific ‘certanty’.

    ‘Scientists’ ?? ‘Scientists’ … !!! Don’t make me laugh.

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  45. Ron Cram Says:

    I agree with Willis that one does not have to be a dendroclimatologist to be outraged over the scientific misconduct by MBH. If readers disagree with the term scientific misconduct regarding this case, then they do not know the facts or I misunderstand the meaning of the term.

    Willis is absolutely right. Steve McIntyre caught these guys red-handed. Yet Mann, Bradley and Hughes are still discussed and their works defended by people like Wahl and Ammann. It is shocking.

    I still maintain that the greatest outrage should come from the scientists whose field is put in jeopardy the most, the dendroclimatologists. Not seeing the outrage makes me think they lack confidence in their science.

    I disagree with Gunnar completely. The history of science is full of scientific controversies, disputes and outrages. If the scientists are not outraged, how will the public become so?

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  47. PaddikJ Says:

    “. . . the silence on these matters from the majority of scientists of all disciplines has been deafening.”

    I was going to post something to that effect, but Willis beat me to it. For me, this is the most disturbing aspect of the IPCC/Hockey Stick debacle – it would be easy enough to adapt a cynical “But hey, it’s climate science” attitude, except that climate science seems to be dragging all of science down with it. The debasement of science by scientists is too depressing to contemplate.

    Thank Gaia for the other Climate Science, ie: Pielke Sr’s blog, and a few others like this one.

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  49. TerryB Says:

    regarding Roger Pielke Jr’s previous question/challenge to Steve McIntyre about the relevance of the hockey stick debate to policy:-

    Surely this latest Casper Ammann episode doesn’t just highlight lousy peer review processes & brings discredit on this area of science?

    Surely a fundamental point of AGW proponents is that the recent warming trend is unprecedented & unique in the modern era. Weren’t the Ammann papers supposed to be a re-assertion of that point, and hence help prove the anthropogenic influence on climate, and drive home the need for immediate action?

    But as it’s turning out, scientists still don’t know for sure whether it’s warmer now than in the previous 2000 years. It might be – but if it isn’t, then that still leaves the door open for natural factors.

    Taken in isolation that might only cover a small area of the science – but together with Steve McIntyre’s unsuccessful search for an “engineering quality” peer-reviewed proof of how 2xCO2 is supposed to produce 3 degrees of warming; AND together with the observational evidence showing warming to be lower even than Hansen’s Scenario C; AND together with recent papers by Spencer & Schwartz suggesting lower climate sensitivity to increased CO2; AND the continued growth of the southern icecap….

    Take them all together and this surely must set some bells ringing for some policy makers. Surely? And if not, then why?

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  51. Michael Strong Says:

    “Take them all together and this surely must set some bells ringing for some policy makers. Surely? And if not, then why?”

    Because Hansen, Schneider, Gore, the IPCC leaders, and others have successfully marginalized anyone who questions the “consensus.” This is why the courage of each scientist with serious academic credibility who insists that the scientific issues are still open is crucial.

    And courage is precisely the right term: as we have seen, a scientific reputation that has taken a lifetime to build can be damaged over-night by the alarmist AGW lynch-mob. Pielke Sr.’s scrupulously careful, academically rigorous blog, with guest columns by other credible scientists who also question elements of alarmist AGW, has very delicately managed to keep the lynch-mob from completely lynching him, as they have Pat Michaels, Richard Lindzen, and others.

    Pielke Sr. is the Atticus Finch of this drama.

  52. 27
  53. Mark Bahner Says:

    “It is unfortunate because the issue is not dendroclimatology, and never has been. It is scientific laxity, and scientific malfeasance, and scientific double-dealing. It is deliberate concealment of adverse results. It is refusal to reveal data. It is abuse of power and betrayal of trust. It is made-up math. It is Science and Nature and the NSF not enforcing their own archiving requirements. It is scientific check-kiting. All plain. Out front. Even boasted about at times.”

    It’s not even scientific laxity. It’s pseudoscience masquerading as science.

    An absolutely fundamental aspect of science is that it can be used to falsifiably predict future events, e.g., “If I drop this apple, it will fall to the ground with an acceleration of 9.81 meters per second per second.”

    The “projections” made by the IPCC are quite simply unfalsifiable. This is not an esoteric matter.

    As Kevin Trenberth pointed out on Nature’s “Climate Feedback” blog, the IPCC’s four assessments have never made any predictions of future temperatures:

    http://blogs.nature.com/climatefeedback/2007/07/global_warming_and_forecasts_o.html

    Therefore, the IPCC has spent more than 10 years performing pseudoscientific “projections,” and pretending they were scientific predictions.

    I am not am aware of any scientific fraud of greater magnitude than the IPCC’s “projections,” in terms of dollars spent and people involved.

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  55. Gunnar Says:

    >> The history of science is full of scientific controversies, disputes and outrages. If the scientists are not outraged, how will the public become so?

    It seems like a straw man response to my argument. Yes, there have been many previous scientific controversies, but they were not dangerous, because they were mostly internal squabbles between scientists.

    I would venture to guess that more has been spent on science by the US government recently than all previous human history. It went from 100 billion in 1962 to more than 500 billion in 2008.

    So, sorry to burst your bubble, but I can’t see how you can blame scientists. It’s like blaming the employees of a big auto maker for not speaking up about how their vehicles don’t have good gas mileage. It’s the buyer’s responsibility to choose a vehicle that meets their needs. Almost all of the scientists are in the role of “employee”, and/or work for firms that are completely dependent on government grants.

    Everyone with critical thinking skills that has taken high school science can understand that the scientific method is the only way that science can advance. The public should be outraged that large amounts of money was extracted from them and spent on scientific activity to advance an agenda, almost none of which uses the scientific method.

  56. 29
  57. Ron Cram Says:

    re: 27,

    Mark,
    I agree with your assessment of IPCC projections as unscientific. You may or may not know about an emerging a discipline called “Scientific Forecasting.” It has been working for 25 years or so now. It sounds a little like “Scientific Crystal Ball Reading” but they have developed a respectable body of literature now in four different peer-reviewed journals. One of the leaders of this emerging field is J. Scott Armstrong. He and Kesten Green audited the IPCC projections and found it wanting. http://forecastingprinciples.com/Public_Policy/WarmAudit31.pdf

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  59. bobby b Says:

    A. Yes, you have long-time readers. Quiet ones. Sometimes-intimidated-as-our-long-forgotten-undergrad-science-whimpers-rolls-over-and-surrenders ones. Admiring ones, too.

    B. In response to “Anyone who won’t take a position, because they are afraid of being called a denier does the same.”:

    This is probably – maybe – semantics only, and we’re really on the same page, but . . . No one should be taking a “position.” “Positions” are what got us here. No one should be doing anything except watching and reading those assertions and reports and measurements that are declared to be accurate and valid and useful in drawing conclusions within those areas in which you – YOU! – are qualified to comment, contribute, and critique . . .

    . . . and when you see something you know to be wrong, or sloppy, or overreaching, or . . . c’mon, we all know what I’m saying here . . . . you have a duty to delve into those wrongnities (new word – might be on the next quiz – I’d take notes, people) and either confirm your sense of disquiet, or learn why you were off, and if you have confirmed that your disquiet was warranted – that there has been wrongness spread in your own field of expertise, and whose wrongness will thus become a reflection on you and your profession – THEN you have a duty to speak. Loudly.

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  61. TokyoTom Says:

    Roger, while it appear that Steve McIntyre hasn’t commented directly here, allow me to note that he said the following at comment 27 on the “Bishop Hill: Caspar and the Jesus Paper” blog post at Climate Audit that you linked to:

    “As I’ve said over and over, I don’t think that concerns over AGW stands or falls on the Stick; as I’ve also said over and over (and as bender says above), I think that AGW advocates over-rely on the Stick and its cousins as a cheap promotional tool and that they should work much harder at proper public expositions of their “real” arguments. I’m even willing to grant the possibility that this issue should be of concern to the public even if the Navier-Stokes type problems mean that GCMs are ultimately not particularly helpful. I think that it should be possible to think through the underlying physics and feedbacks and present it and that it would be salutary to do so.

    “People have argued – if the Stick is wrong, then the situation is much worse than we think it is. My answer to that is simple: well, if it’s wrong, then we should know and govern ourselves accordingly; if it means policy action is more urgent, then so be it. But we should not thank the authors whose withholding of data and obstruction has made it so much harder to detect the error than it should have been. And if this is a risk, other people besides me should have taken some initiative in vetting the Stick. …

    “I’ve compared the issue to the WMD argument, which was also a cheap way of arousing the public; and, myself to an analyst who observes that an aluminum tube is sometimes just an aluminum tube. That doesn’t mean that other arguments for the war couldn’t be made or that the war was right or wrong; just that it was [not] justified based on the aluminum tube argument. In that case, some effort was made to understand why they got the WMD intelligence wrong.”

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  63. Gunnar Says:

    >> in which you – YOU! – are qualified to comment, contribute, and critique . .

    I was thinking that it might be semantics too, but when I got to this, I realize that it’s not. I think the problem is not that people take “positions”, but that they aren’t taking enough positions.

    People aren’t using their critical thinking skills to judge wild claims with common sense. They are blindly accepting the assertions of so-called “experts”, because they don’t feel they are qualified. Just like when the scientific consensus said that racism was moral, people blindly accepted that assertion.

    If someone told you that the Mississippi was flooding because humans are driving too many barges on it, everyone can use their common sense to determine if that’s likely or not. If someone told you that legally requiring that 25% of corn crops be dedicated to making ethanol is not the cause of higher food prices, everyone can use their common sense to determine if that makes sense.

    And if someone told you that adding one more molecule of plant food per 10,000 air molecules can someone heat the planet, everyone can use their common sense to determine if that’s likely or not. It’s like saying that we can heat the lake up with a hair dryer.

    So, my view is the opposite of yours. Less blindly following the elites, and more critical thinking skills.

    >> whose wrongness will thus become a reflection on you and your profession – THEN you have a duty to speak. Loudly

    Ridiculous. I’m an electrical and software engineer. I do NOT have the duty to go out and find wrongness in other EEs and other software engineers and speak out about it. If a software engineer tells you that the Y2k bug will destroy the whole economy, and you believe him, shame on you. If he tells you that the moderate functionality you want will cost you millions, and you pay him, it’s your fault, not mine.

  64. 33
  65. Willis Eschenbach Says:

    Gunnar, thank you for your post. Regarding the responsibility of scientists to police their own backyards, you say:

    Ridiculous. I’m an electrical and software engineer. I do NOT have the duty to go out and find wrongness in other EEs and other software engineers and speak out about it. If a software engineer tells you that the Y2k bug will destroy the whole economy, and you believe him, shame on you. If he tells you that the moderate functionality you want will cost you millions, and you pay him, it’s your fault, not mine.

    When it gets to the point in your analogy when the reputation of the software engineering community is totally ruined by the scientific malfeasance of the other software engineers …

    When it gets to the point in your analogy when software engineers have cost the world billions of dollars through unsupported and unsupportable claims …

    When it gets to the point in your analogy when you say “I’m a software engineer” and people reply “well, I guess we know who not to believe, then” …

    … at that point, will you still be standing by silently, and claiming “the death of responsible software engineering is not my problem, it’s all the client’s fault for listening to those folks”?

    Because that is assuredly happening in climate science, the large and increasing numbers of “scientists” who are driven by politics and making unsupportable claims are incrementally destroying the reputation of the responsible climate scientists, the ones who actually practice science. And to blame that on the gullibility of the public, to say “shame on you”, misses the point entirely.

    For those good scientists to speak out is not their duty, as you point out … but only because it comes from a much more basic urge than the urge to duty.

    It is simple self-defense, to protect their own good names and reputations.

    w.

    PS – You say:

    If a software engineer tells you that the Y2k bug will destroy the whole economy, and you believe him, shame on you.

    It seems you have a curious view about the advice of experts. Would you say that “If a doctor say you need to take penicillin and you believe him, shame on you.”?

    We generally believe scientists and doctors and engineers and the like because a) they are experts in the particular field of interest and b) we are not. It’s not clear what your preferred option to this would be. Distrust all experts? Laugh when they try to warn us of possible future dangers? Refer all questions to you, and you can decide? What is your preferable plan?

  66. 34
  67. George W Says:

    Related to Pat Maichaels’ comment #16, this seems relevant and timely:

    http://www.reuters.com/article/vcCandidateFeed2/idUSN20412636
    Scientists urge US to protect economy from climate
    By Timothy Gardner
    Wed Aug 20, 2008 4:57pm EDT

    NEW YORK, Aug 20 (Reuters) – Eight scientific organizations urged the next U.S. president to help protect the country from climate change by pushing for increased funding for research and forecasting, saying about $2 trillion of U.S. economic output could be hurt by storms, floods and droughts.
    “We don’t think we have the right kind of tools to help decision makers plan for the future,” Jack Fellows, the vice president for corporate affairs of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, a consortium of 71 universities, told reporters in a teleconference on Wednesday.
    The groups, including the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society, urged Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and Republican rival John McCain to support $9 billion in investments between 2010 and 2014 to help protect the country from extreme weather, which would nearly double the current U.S. budget for the area.
    . . .
    The investments would pay for satellite and ground-based instruments that observe the Earth’s climate and for computers to help make weather predictions more accurate.
    John Snow, the co-chairman of the Weather Coalition, a business and university group that advocates for better weather prediction, said improved computers would help scientists forecast extreme weather events more locally, which could help cities better prepare for weather disasters.
    . . .

  68. 35
  69. Gunnar Says:

    >> When it gets to the point in your analogy

    In general, you make a good point. I do agree that these scientists have a responsibility to understand the scientific method, educate the public about it, and use it themselves. And I also agree that integrity require that people who know better should speak up.

    However, given that the entire scientific establishment have become pseudo employees of the state, and that in a free democracy like the US, the responsibility for that lies with the people, it’s hard for me to blame the pseudo scientific advocates. They are just doing their job.

    The root cause of this problem is political philosophy, in that I don’t believe the federal government should be using tax dollars to fund scientific activity, other than that required to defend the country. We could remove the pseudo scientific advocates, and more would spring up in their place.

    >> at that point, will you still be standing by silently

    Actually, because the world of software is still largely a free market, it didn’t happen, and it can’t happen. After the Y2k era, CFOs came to judged by how many IT projects they could cut. Much profit draining IT spending was reduced. There was no bottomless pit of tax dollars going into IT advocacy. Most of the massive government IT projects failed, because someone actually wanted to use the software, which is the equivalent of the scientific method.

    The bottom line is that the problems are (in order of importance): 1) political philosophy knowledge in citizens, 2) critical thinking skills in citizens, 3) knowledge about scientific method in citizens 4) integrity of scientists

    >> It seems you have a curious view about the advice of experts. Would you say that “If a doctor say you need to take penicillin and you believe him, shame on you.”?

    No, I don’t really. I regularly listen to my doctor and my lawyer. The point is that I use my critical thinking skills to make sure that what they are telling me makes sense. For example, what if over the years, I go into the doctor for 10 different things, and in each case, he tells me that I need to take drug X for it. I get suspicious because the 10 things are quite different, and it seems like no matter what the ailment is, he has the same solution.

    To make it worse, the doctor starts calling me on the phone and coming over to my house, and desperately tries to convince me I don’t feel well, and his solution is always the same drug X. And then I find out that the drug company is paying him to push it, and that if he doesn’t, he’ll be out of a job.

    So, should I use my critical thinking skills, or should I complain about why other doctors aren’t going out of their way to discredit this doctor, even though they are all working for the same drug company?

  70. 36
  71. Willis Eschenbach Says:

    Gunnar, thank you for your thoughful reply. You say, inter alia:

    In general, you make a good point. I do agree that these scientists have a responsibility to understand the scientific method, educate the public about it, and use it themselves. And I also agree that integrity require that people who know better should speak up.

    However, given that the entire scientific establishment have become pseudo employees of the state, and that in a free democracy like the US, the responsibility for that lies with the people, it’s hard for me to blame the pseudo scientific advocates. They are just doing their job.

    The root cause of this problem is political philosophy, in that I don’t believe the federal government should be using tax dollars to fund scientific activity, other than that required to defend the country. We could remove the pseudo scientific advocates, and more would spring up in their place.

    The bottom line is that the problems are (in order of importance): 1) political philosophy knowledge in citizens, 2) critical thinking skills in citizens, 3) knowledge about scientific method in citizens 4) integrity of scientists.

    Ultimately, as Talleyrand? said, in a democracy the people get the government that they deserve. So I’d agree with you about that.

    Within that most imperfect system, however, is where we live. Me, I think that (to take one example) when Science Magazine refuses to follow its own archiving policies (only, of course, for certain authors), it affects scientists and citizens alike. And I think that in cases like that, it is important that scientists and citizens of all stripes hold their feet to the fire. Me, I emailed Donald Kennedy to express my outrage that they would not require an author to archive his data, despite their stated policy.

    And yes, many scientists work for the government. But the government has very clear, stated policies that require the scientists getting grants to archive their data.

    The problem is that the NSF does not require that their grant recipients have archived their data. Like Science magazine, and Nature magazine, and the IPCC, the NSF also has clear archiving policies that it selectively ignores.

    What irks me is how easy this would be to clean up. If Nature, and Science, and the IPCC, and the NSF merely said “we’re not accepting anything new from someone until they archive any overdue data”, it would all get archived very quickly and we could determine what is real and what is not.

    None of this requires specialized knowledge. The issues are all things like transparency and honesty and adherence to stated policy and scientific norms. It’s not rocket surgery …

    Now you are right, there is no requirement that you do anything about any of those egregious actions by people in positions of scientific influence and power.

    It is also the case that for scientific malfeasance and back-hand deals to triumph, it is only necessary that good men do nothing.

    All the best, my thanks to you,

    w.

  72. 37
  73. bobby b Says:

    “I think the problem is not that people take “positions”, but that they aren’t taking enough positions.”

    You described situations where someone with intelligence, but without technical expertise, could still validly critique assertions. (I’m still up in the air on the barge example, though – what if they were filled with lead, and so of course sank?)

    It’s the assertions that simply cannot be judged based on analogy or common sense – those whose answers usually contain a long string of numbers, for example – of which I spoke. I see people from both sides roundly condemning people on the “other side” who have made assertions that are clearly beyond the ability of the condemnors to judge – but, the condemnors have taken a side – a position, as it were – and so they doan need no steenkin abilities or skills – because they have dogma.

    “Ridiculous. I’m an electrical and software engineer. I do NOT have the duty to go out and find wrongness in other EEs and other software engineers and speak out about it.”

    My poor word choice. Sorry. The duty you do have at that point is to yourself, and to your profession. If 358 serum biologists all tell me that WBCs are, in fact, embodiments of Satan, and you’re #359 in my path, my esteem for you will not likely be high. I’m simply saying that a critique of the “Satan as WBCs” school of thought right at that time increases our chances of dating immeasurably.

    And, if each individual watches over their own turf that way, then every little absurd assertion will be corrected, and it will be done out of the purest of motivations: self-interest.

  74. 38
  75. Gunnar Says:

    W, I also appreciate your thoughtful response. I agree with your posting.

    >> What irks me is how easy this would be to clean up

    It would be, if it were a simple matter of an oversight. I think it’s naive to think it is. Not that I’m comparing the US to Nazi germany, but it’s like thinking that one could change the course of Nazi funded research into eugenics by simply pointing out that a researcher failed to include the supporting data. There is an agenda. The problem is political, and that’s where the solution will come from, not in an abscure scientific journal.

    The purpose behind the Team’s activities was not to advance science, but to simply provide political cover for politicians attempting to advance the agenda. In a similar way, any work by scientists which counters the Team will not advance science, nor affect the Team in any way. It is simply material that may be used by a politician who may be inclined to thwart the agenda.

    >> I’m still up in the air on the barge example, though – what if they were filled with lead, and so of course sank?)

    It would displace a small amount of water, which might add up to a few millimeters on the bank. But if you told a resident of a flooded town in Iowa that it was a barge that caused this, and that the extra rain had nothing to do with it, it wouldn’t pass the laugh test. Just like saying that an extra C02 molecule per 10,000 air molecules is what is heating the entire earth, rather than the extra sunshine.

    >> It’s the assertions that simply cannot be judged based on analogy or common sense – those whose answers usually contain a long string of numbers, for example – of which I spoke

    I’m not aware of any important ones in that category. One may try to hide behind a long string of numbers, but in the end, if one is claiming that a hair dryer can be used to heat a lake up, one is bound to get laughed at sooner or later.

    >> If 358 serum biologists all tell me that WBCs are, in fact, embodiments of Satan

    Which is what they are saying about carbon, the foundation of life, and plant food in the form of C02.