I just want to highlight a few passages that I found irritating. The article is: "Global Warring: In Climate Debaste, The 'Hockey Stick' Leads to a Face-Off: Nonscientist Assails a Graph Environmentalists Use, And He Gets a Hearing: Defenders Call Attack Political" by Antonio Regalado.
As I say, I'm going to take some comments out of context to point out how annoying they are. If you want the context, you'll have to buy or borrow the paper copy if you don't have a subscription.
The player's:
Stephen McIntyre, "a semi-retired Toronto minerals consultant," who spent "two years and about $5,000 of his own money trying to double-check the influential graphic," and says "he has found significant oversights and errors. He claims its lead author, climatologist Michael Mann of the University of Virginia, and colleagues used flawed methods that yield meaningless results." McIntyre also "won math contests in high school and a math scholarship to the University of Toronto..." [What I elided might be useful for anyone seeking an ad hominem.]
Michael Mann... The article apparently doesn't feel he needs further introduction - it's about his famous model, after all - so here's his blog. (Not his alone, actually.)
McIntyre's attack is "that Dr. Mann's mathematical technizue in drawing the graph is prone to generating hockey-stick shapes even when applied to random data."
What is it that I find irritating?
Mr. McIntyre, e-mailed Dr. Mann requesting the raw data used to build the hockey stick After initially providing some information, Dr. Mann cut him off.
Dr. Mann says his busy schedule didn't permit him to respond to "every frivolous note: from nonscientists."
Well, I guess that's the key thing that irritated me, other than "Think tanks backed with funding from from the energy industry have waged a wide campaign to castdoubt on key scientific results." That's the reporter, Mr. Regalado, not Dr. Mann. And this line, "A variety of critics appear to be 'on some kind of witch hunt,' Dr. Overpeck says."
Because I do care about context, Dr. Jonathan Overpeck, a climate specialist at the University of Arizona, also says, "The main punch line still appears in many other studies."
And the fact is that the article comes out pretty balanced. It doesn't leave you believing either that McIntyre is a crackpot, whether he is or not, nor that Mann is an arrogant socialist. RealClimate.org appears quite reasonable:
RealClimate is a commentary site on climate science by working climate scientists for the interested public and journalists. We aim to provide a quick response to developing stories and provide the context sometimes missing in mainstream commentary. The discussion here is restricted to scientific topics and will not get involved in any political or economic implications of the science.
An important counter to McIntyre's point is made here:
However, this discussion needs to be conducted in a sober and unexcited manner; it does not help to overburden the "hockey stick" with symbolic meaning. In some media reports, the "hockey stick" has even been hyped as "a pillar of the Kyoto protocol" (which was agreed in 1997 and thus predates it) or as "proof that humans are warming the Earth". This is a serious misunderstanding of the scientific meaning of these data.
But the problem remains that it's what happens when the scientific data are used by politicians that causes the trouble. I'm a big fan of non-governmental solutions. Societies can be, and usually are, stifling in one way or other, but as long as societal taboos aren't killing, maiming, imprisoning or impoverishing you, in the most literal sense, the stifling can be ignored or overcome.
