Gosh, intention, dreadful news! Your point by point rebuttal of Kimstu’s excellent post in the GD thread has been suppressed by the evil hamsters, it has totally disappeared. One would think that you hadn’t even made it!
And the poor dear did such a good job, too, bringing you precisely those lists and things that you so loudly demanded! Would it help if I cut and paste it, bring it here? Would that help? I know that someone as devoted to intellectual honesty as yourself must be anxious to respond, but must be thwarted by some unknown force. Is it Gore and his $300 million dollars, is that it?
The pity of it is, of course, that to the untrained eye, to someone who is not familiar with your intellectual rigor and forthright honesty…well, it looks like you buggered off when presented with the evidence you demanded. Scarpered. Bailed out, hit the silk.
We can’t have that, now can we? Your many, many admirers here would be tempted to think you’re a bit of a weasel, demanding a huge investment of time and effort to rebut you, and when that effort is made, you scamper away. Can’t have that, now can we?
So, let us know how we can help you restore your dignity! Would you like me to bring it here, would that help? Tell us what we need to do to help you out, here!
The evil hive mind over at Daily Kos has produced an interesting insight into all of this, especially as regards “Mikes trick”, which may soon take on the cultural significance of the “grassy knoll”.
(Daily Kos is, as you may know, rather thoroughly partisan. Those concerned with maintaining their intellectual purity might well wish to proceed with shield power on maximum. Sniveling weasels, of course, are best advised to dismiss it out of hand…)
Um, because their own e-mails state that they convinced UEA to bin any FOIA request, as seen up thread. My post wasn’t about the number of requests, it was about who was handling them.
Sure. What counts as a crank? Somebody requesting information on the data used for publications? I’d have thought all data would be made public, and freely available, as a matter of form. That’s how it happens in my field, when empirical investigations are made (by the way, can anybody propose why this isn’t the case here? Is this standard practice in the climate sciences?).
Well, the crank part is when they tell their diminishing peanut gallery that the data was **still **hidden regarding the latest new paper supporting the so called “Hockey stick”. McIntyre and others at Climate Audit claimed that the recent new supporting evidence regarding the “hockey stick” had data that omitted evidence that showed that there was no unprecedented warming happening recently.
Only to find later that McIntyre had all of the data and cherry picked himself to get his evidence for his “points”:
Isn’t wishful thinking to assume that any climate researcer will be convicted for any alleged wrongdoing in this case? The evidence was obtained thanks to a crime.
Not to mention that IMHO any groups doing the cherry picking of quotes are helping and abetting the crime.
intention may have been asking for further information than what is publicly available like personal emails, financial reports, etc. I.e. things which aren’t part and parcel of actual research.
I don’t know what is or isn’t expected to be released under the FOIA nor what he was asking for. If he was asking for something that is required by the FOIA and they didn’t do so, even though it might not be strictly relevant to actual research, they still have no legal standing on which to refuse. In this, they would certainly be in the wrong.
But of course, it’s entirely possible that intention et. al. were asking for stuff that isn’t required, and the one e-mail follows after years and years of refusing requests for information that is legally private.
So the fuck what? A person doesn’t need to be fending off FOI requests in order to be plagued by assholes. Jerk plagues come in many forms, and you cannot know whether there was a problem at the CRU or not.
Jeez, elucidator, get a life. I last posted on that thread at 4 pm on the 21st. Twenty six whole hours go by without me posting, and you accuse me of being a coward and running away? Twenty six fucking hours?? Get real …
Meanwhile, as you might imagine, I’ve had a few other things to do, including trying to analyze the hacked CRU emails as they impact my FOIA request, and discussing their implications with other people who were involved.
However, my apologies, elucidator. I am deeply sorry that I have been so thoughtless as to go a whole 26 hours without mentioning your name, dear. I hope your feelings of abandonment are assuaged. Now run off and play …
(For those not following the thread, Kimstu posted a list of the “Most cited authors on climate”, in order by number of citations. Unfortunately, the “most cited” authors are not cited for their work in climate, but in other fields. I have more Google Scholar citations for my publications on climate (10) than the second “most cited” guy on Kimstu’s list, who has … well … none.)
I asked for the data and the station list. Not for emails. Not for financial reports. Not for stuff that isn’t required. Not for stuff that is legally private. Temperature data and a list of the stations. Period.
Oh, wait, I miscalculated. Now I understand why elucidator was so upset. It wasn’t 26 hours between my postings on the other thread … it was 29 hours. Now it all makes sense …
You know, I am very certain that all scientists in the world have to respond to every request that they get personally because there is no way a scientist would have, like, secretaries or administrative assistants. Yep, them damned scientists insist on doing everything themselves so the data they use must remain secret because they are too busy saving the world.
The big thing here, that you seem to be missing, is that no one can evaluate if the guys who are writing these report are correct. What if the guys writing the reports are the morons? How could we tell? Well, since they won’t release the data, there is no way to tell. We just have to rely on them.
I have never heard of any scientific field in which hiding data while publishing the conclusion is acceptable except for the AGW crowd. The whole point of science is that you publish your data, how you got your data, how you evaluated your data and have others check it to see if is correct.
If some group of scientist came out and said that a huge meteor was going to smash into the earth destroying all life but wouldn’t tell anyone where this meteor was, how they found it, how they determined it was going to hit the earth, etc , do you think we ought to just say ‘Ok’ and do whatever they suggest?
Slee
On a side note, I know a couple people who really want to review this data themselves. One is a guy with a PHD in math (4.0), ran a nuclear reactor safety division for the government for ~30 years. During that time he did huge amounts of modeling. The other is a guy with a PHD in Physics, was a full professor at BYU then went on to work for a national lab. After that he built a contracting business doing physics for anyone that wanted to hire him and his staff. Most of his business was modeling various complex systems. Oh, and he worked with Richard Feynman. They are both experts at modeling, they both want the data and they are both extremely qualified.
Well, now, hoss, that’s a mite thin. For two-three pages, you’re all over it, its the **Intention **Show, starring Intention. And then Kimstu comes up with a heckuva post. And one that clearly shows the fruits of much labor, the sort of labor that is well respect in these parts, Google-slogging. All of that to deliver to you what you claimed to need.
And suddenly, in a thread you couldn’t keep out of, a thread where your word count rivals War and Peace…you’re gone. Poof!
And your response? To ignore the bulk of the posting to take up a sniper position on a couple of scientists, as if they comprised the bulk of Kimstu’s effort. Weak gruel.
No doubt you regard popular opinion with Olympian disdain, but those sure look like weasel-tracks.
Ah, yes, the historical revisionism begins, and elucidator is the first to fall for it …
For those who would really like to understand “Mikes trick”, there is a very clear post by Jean S. (a statistician in real life) at Climate Audit. It loading slowly right now, because as you might expect this whole thing has lots of people accessing CA to find out what us evil people are doing to cause all of this fuss. See here for another example of this phenomenon. But I digress …
The problem was, the most recent data of a proxy reconstruction of temperature was trending down, down, down. This was very inconvenient, because the reconstruction ended in 1980 and the temperatures were rising. How could we believe a proxy that was dropping while temperatures were rising?
So to “hide the decline” in the proxy reconstruction, they spliced instrumental (thermometer) data on to the end of the proxy data. Now this is very shonky in and of itself. Michael Mann (who wrote the original "Hockeystick paper) was asked about this practice over at realclimate, viz:
to which Mann replied
Bullshit, as usual, from the Mann, honesty is not his long suit …
But that was not the “trick”. If you have a proxy trending downwards, and you add on data that is trending upwards, you end up with an ugly “knuckle” in the resulting graph, and this knuckle is an obvious giveaway that you have “grafted the thermometer record onto a proxy temperature record”.
So the “trick” was to then smooth the proxy to instrumental splice, in order to conceal any visual evidence that the instrumental data had been grafted on to the reconstruction. And of course, none of this was mentioned in the paper.
Mann and others (Daily Kos) have claimed that “trick” means an easy way to solve a hard problem. And they are correct, it can have this meaning, the dictionaries are clear on that.
But when you splice instrumental data on to proxy data (which Mann himself correctly says is a no-no), smooth the result to hide your fingerprints, and don’t mention it in the paper, that’s the other meaning of dictionary meaning of “trick”. From Merriam-Webster, very first definition:
That’s not “a couple of scientists”. That’s their stars, the first two people on their list. If I have more citations on climate science than their top two people have combined, it doesn’t say much for their list.
And yes, I know this is hard for your ego to take, but I found (and still find) Climategate much more interesting than discussing your rantings and Kimstu’s bogus list … so sue me.
Huh? Are you saying that the most recent data of that proxy reconstruction was going up? I said nothing about other proxies, they have their problems, but we weren’t discussing them, were we?
Right. I’ve started reading and clicked the emails at random. Most of them so far are the usual chit-chat and paint the Hadley people in a positive, normal light, but there are others which are at best infelicitously phrased. For instance, I’ve found the message about ‘hiding behind’ the Data Protection Act. I found another where they realise they’re going to dump an Italian (?) contributor.
I also found one which appeared to be both trying to be correct and suggesting that they lie with statistics:
This can be taken very poorly, but since English is not Dr Solomina’s first language, I suggest that allowances must be considered.
You might be shocked by this, but scientists don’t typically have chauffeurs and bevys of secretaries and stuff. That sort of excess is usually reserved for the captains of industry, whilst scientists run lean organizations where they actually do end up looking at much of their fan mail.
We could tell because they published their crap in shitty journals that don’t take peer review seriously. Heck, we could read the articles and decide if they make any sense, or not. Of course, when I say ‘we’ I am referring only to the subset of the population that posesses a general scientific literacy. Those of you who thought freshmen chemistry was the hardest course ever are just plain SOL.