You’re Absolutely Wrong and I Agree With You

Despite loads of public scorn heaped on Steve McIntyre and Ross McKittrick for their criticisms of the Mann hockey stick, it turns out in private folks like the Hadley Center’s John Mitchell, the review editor for the relevant chapter of the last IPCC report, shared many concerns identical to those of M&M. The email at the link is pretty amazing – it is practically an outline of the section of my skeptic presentation dealing with the hockey stick.  But not a whiff of this uncertainty was ever made public or was included in the IPCC report.

Mitchell and the Hadley Center have tried every trick in the book to avoid FOIA of anything that would publicly reveal his true concerns about Mann’s study.  When we understand the incentives that are driving him to suppress his own scientific views, and to publicly ridicule those who share his private concerns, we will understand better what is broken in the climate science process.

8 thoughts on “You’re Absolutely Wrong and I Agree With You”

  1. Looking for motivation? … follow the money. Who stands to benefit most from cap and trade or other emission trading schemes? I suspect it is the traders. It seems no matter what befalls the markets and the economy, bonuses of the traders continue to rise. C&T and ETS are nothing more than on opportunity to pay a commision for the privledge of exhaling.

  2. It is certainly important to understand the world around us. To ‘pure’ scientists, the knowledge itself is a worthy end goal. To policy makers, there must often be a business case – in other words, the knowledge must be actionable, or at least have the promise of being actionable. In order to be considered actionable, there must generally be concensus. So any appearance of non-concensus must be filtered out (partially or completely) before it reaches the policymakers, or funds will likely not be allocated.

    The problem is especially apparent in the climate modeling community – supercomputers are expensive to set up and run. The catastrophic warming scenarios motivate the need for action (and ongoing research), accompanying need for concensus.

    So what’s broken is the underlying scientific grant process – it tends to reward concensus-based science. A contributing factor may be a lack of funding for basic research – that is, research that is not necessarily actionable and doesn’t have a preconceived outcome.

  3. What I got from reading the emails is that the public face of “consensus” is just that, a facade. The reality is that this consensus is a work in progress, a continuous hunkering down, a keeping out and disparaging of anything or anyone who dares speaks apostasy. This so-called group of scientists make up a true cabal of manipulators and have just been exposed as such. The effects their so-called consensus is a full attack on modern life and a propping up of massively financed ponzi schemes designed to fend off that which does not exist to any extent they have proposed. Since they sold their scientific souls for ideology and or money, I consider them evil. The waste of resources and loss of other opportunities that this garbage has already wrought on the world mind is truly staggering. And they are only getting started. That’s what is really frightening and why they must be stopped. Hopefully, this exposure will be the straw that breaks their grip on the world.

  4. Hopefully someone smarter than I will read this, but I wonder if as a government employee Dr. Mann is subject to the qui tam provisions of the False Claims Act. It seems to me that conspiring to suppress results that may put your research findings in jeopardy is as grave as manipulating data or falsifying data in a research program funded by the United States government.

    I just wonder what would happen to a pharmaceutical company that “invented” “new” “statistical” “techniques” in support of research into a new cough medicine the way Mann has played with the data in his climate studies. This seems to be on the order of “We’ll truncate out all the data on the patients that didn’t get better, then come up with ways to make the ones that did get better look sicker than they really were.”

  5. One way to perhaps fix this broken cycle is to require all source data and code to be available online prior to publication and to allow numerous experts (with both favorable and unfavorable views of the conclusions) the chance to scrutinize each paper prior to publication. Then you can require the authors to take the reviewers’ comments into consideration as they rewrite their submission.

    Where I come from, we call this “peer-review”… works pretty well!

  6. What I want to know is when someone will take on the question of why it took a ton of FOIA requests and finally a hacker to get released what should have been publicly available information which was stored on a publicly funded server and used to back very public conclusions of publicly funded studies with heavy implications for public policy that were performed by publicly funded so called scientists.

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