My kingdom for a +1 Insightful!

Heh, try being a meteorologist (not even a climate scientist), and those people come out of woodworks. I had one guy trying to argue against it based on (his understanding of) the laws of thermodynamics. Another trying to claim that because it couldn't accurately forecast the temperature outside his house, it must be wrong.

No LOL... you claimed that I said that there were so many problems that I wouldn't know where to start. That is not what I said, and I even provided a starting point. I pointed out a problem with your dependence upon using the press as the bona fide source of scientific consensus. Others have pointed out errors in other statements you made. Furthermore, you still fail to understand the distinction between a press release from a single scientist or scientific entity (be it a journal article or an article in a newspaper) as opposed to true scientific consensus. Just because it was published doesn't make it a part of the scientific consensus. As I stated, subsequent vetting of some of those ideas have resulted in finding flaws in the research, but you almost never hear of those articles in the press. Meanwhile, the vetting of other articles have yet to find significant flaws and the information has been subsequently been used in other research and proved valuable.

Of course, just because someone publishes an article claiming to find a flaw in someone else's research does not necessarially mean that the original research was flawed, either. That article has to be vetted as well. Science is slow, tedious, and a lot more ambiguous than the media has made it out to be.

Were you quoting me? To what are you referring?

Actually, that was a result of a misunderstanding of the Italian word "canali" that resulted in a translation into English as canals. *Some* English-reading scientists then made the logical leap that the canals must be made by intelligent life. As soon as better telescopes became available, it was found that the original observed canali were an optical illusion, and the scientific community as a whole dropped the false canals idea.

Emphasis mine. There are a bunch of other issues with what you have said, but I wish to focus on this: "in the press".

Academic discourse does not take place in the press. Just because a researcher publishes a single article in a scientific journal does not make it automatically a part of the consensus. It takes years of subsequent vetting to verify or refute the claims made in the article. I will tell you that in the current scientific discourse, we have found several of these claims to be bogus or unsubstantiated, but other claims have so far stood the test of scrutiny.

Huh? Ctrl+g in Firefox means "Find Next", because 'g' was "next to" 'find'.

I totally agree with you about the Damocles sword over NASA's budget, but the one thing that needs to be pointed out is that NASA had nothing to do with this study: http://paleblueblog.org/post/9110304050/some-important-points-of-clarification

The Guardian got it *very* wrong. NASA had nothing to do with this study: http://paleblueblog.org/post/9110304050/some-important-points-of-clarification

Actually, he is. These sort of large-scale projects are funded through authorizations by Congress. He has to work with the budget he is given, and when an authorization bill says that such-and-such will be purchased, he can't go ahead and say no. Specific details are often left up to the Executive branch, but the president can not unilaterally decide to build a hundred datacenters without having the money approved by Congress.

By and large, most of the active scientists and researchers directly in the climate field and those in the periphery (like myself) are like this (including Dr. Mann). We often have to call out BS publications (on both sides of the argument) that uses shoddy statistics and methods. However, because most of the scientific discourse is within the community, the few things that catches the attention of the general public and "armchair scientists" provides a highly skewed picture of the active debate. Add in that the media loves a good drama, and things go hell in a handbasket.

For the raw data that was freely (as in gratis and libre) available already, several other research groups have taken their published methods for quality-control and duplicated their results for that data. For the data that was not freely available, there were some groups that purchased the data themselves (much of this data was always available for purchase) and reproduced and published results as well.

On top of that, there were other research groups that performed "quality-control and analysis" on completely different sets of data, and their results agree well with results published by others. Note that I said the results "agree well" with each other. They are not perfect matches, and where there are differences, subsequent research and analyses have yielded refined methods and results. Think of it as a large bootstrapping problem.

Now, you ask that how do we know that the analysis was done in a fair and objective manner in all places? Well, we could never be 100% sure until each and every single datapoint has been vetted and doing this is now easier than before (not that it was impossible to do before). However, analyses and research on the published datasets have not revealed any such tampering so far, therefore *I* am fairly confident that it didn't happen. If you are not convinced, then feel free to take these datasets and others and perform the analysis yourself. Just remember to publish your findings whether they are for good or naught.

That is a separate discussion. This data release is about weather station data. This was something I am much more familiar with. How the tree ring data was collected and used is outside my field of expertise. If the data was strictly from a single tree, then that would be a severe problem. However, since I generally work from scientific publications and correspondance and not "The Telegraph", I hope you would excuse me from immediately vilifying Dr. Mann and his associates.