It's pretty obvious that the answer to my question is a resounding "no!"

I've read a couple of the papers that Mann was all worked up about.

And you know what, those papers were garbage. Freshman f***up garbage. As term papers, they would have earned an undergraduate a grade south of a "C-" at any respected university.

The papers in question are:

1) "Proxy climatic and environmental changes of the past 1000 years", Soon, W., Baliunas, S. (2003)

2) "Influence of the Southern Oscillation on tropospheric temperature", McLean, J. D., C. R. de Freitas, and R. M. Carter

Google them up, download them and read them.

If you cannot identify "showstopper" blunders in each paper (they both contain whopper errors), then you have no business participating in this discussion.

Does the term "ensemble average" mean anything to you?

...that *everyone* should watch: http://www.agu.org/meetings/fm09/lectures/lecture_videos/A23A.shtml

The video is of a lecture given at the American Geophysical Union 2009 Fall Meeting. The lecture was given by a professional scientist, for an audience of scientists -- so you get the straight scientific scoop (not the dumbed-down Al Gore version).

The lecturer (Dr. Richard Alley) is an AGU Fellow and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Highlights:

Shortly after the beginning of the lecture (a little over 3 and 1/2 minutes into the video), Dr. Alley shows an email cc'd to him by a Penn State alum who is demanding that he be dealt with severely for "crimes against the ... the citizens of the world". Just a little taste of the looniness that climate-scientists have to put up with.

There's a nice debunking of the silly "CO2 lags warming, therefore CO2 cannot cause warming" talking-point, starting at about 35:30.

The "cosmic ray" hypothesis is very nicely taken apart starting about 42 minutes into the video.

Starting at about 45:40 is the "money-quote" recap -- a quick two-minute-ish summary of why CO2 *must* be the primary driver of the Earth's temperature.

During the Q&A session, Prof Alley was asked where we might end up if we burned up all the economically recoverable fossil fuels. His reply included the word "Cretaceous". "Cretaceous" means sea-levels 250+ feet higher than today's, no polar ice-caps, and 100F sea-surface temperatures. We are talking about the potential of 65+ million years of climate-change compressed into a few centuries here. And all this was delivered straight from the lips of a leading scientist (not a Gore/Greenpeas type). That's a sobering thought, folks.

But in doing so, they've removed the global-warming signal (the long-term trend)!

OK, why don't *you* give it a shot?

Please explain the misapplication of the derivative operation in a manner that an 8th-grader could grasp.

And better yet, why don't you actually try to *convince* some people who reject climate science with this explanation?

Get back to me with your results.

The papers that Mann and Co wanted to "censor" really are complete garbage (I've personally read a couple of them).

But to understand *why* they are garbage, you need to have an undergraduate-level understanding of science and math (Earth science, some calculus, some statistics, etc.). The papers in question had *no* business being published in a professional journal. They wouldn't even make the grade as undergraduate term papers!

Here's a link to the first paper: http://www.int-res.com/articles/cr2003/23/c023p089.pdf

Anyone with an undergraduate-level "common-sense" understanding of Earth-science and statistics should be able to flag several major "show-stopper" problems with this paper's methodology.

Here's a link to the second paper: http://climatedebatedaily.com/southern_oscillation.pdf

This paper contains a blunder that someone who understands calculus at the freshman level should know better than to make. Hint: What does the time-derivative operation do to long-term trend information (i.e. the global-warming signal) in temperature data? Another hint (and this one's giving away the store): The time-derivative operation acts as a high-pass filter.

And here's an excerpt from the paper that should have any upper-division EE major howling with laughter:

To remove the noise, the absolute values were replaced with derivative values based on variations.

This is global-warming-denier science at its finest, folks: Using a derivative operation to remove noise!

The real scandal is that this paper actually made into the Journal of Geophysical Research!

Is it any wonder that Mann and Co. were pissed?

But how do you explain all this to your average Sarah Palin follower? That's the scientists' conundrum here.

It is fortunate that CRU is not the only organization computing global temperatures.

NASA/GISS has an independent global-temperature program, and they've been much more open with the general public than CRU has. All of the information you need to replicate (or "audit" if you prefer) NASA's work is available at http://data.giss.nasa.gov./ They use publicly-available raw temperature data, homogenize it with their open-source code, and compute global average temperatures. Their global temperature computations show a bit more warming than CRU's computations do.

This shows the value of having multiple, independent organizations performing the same (or similar) work. If one organization's credibility is in doubt, then its results can be cross-checked with the other organizations' results.

CRU definitely did "step in it" in their dealings with "gadfly" skeptics. Had they taken NASA's approach ("here are all the data and code -- knock yourselves out"), this would not have blown up as badly as it did.

There's lots of climate-model source-code available on the web. Much of it has been publicly available for years.
Examples:

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/modelE/
http://www.ccsm.ucar.edu/
http://www.mi.uni-hamburg.de/Projekte.209.0.html?&L=3
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/317/5846/1866d/DC1
http://geoflop.uchicago.edu/forecast/docs/Projects/modtran.html

Now for all the skeptics out there -- those of you who have downloaded and tested any climate code, submitted patches, constructive suggestions, etc. to the code developers, please stand up and give us a shout-out!

Don't be shy or modest -- even if you've done nothing more than submit a one-line change to a makefile, let's hear about it!

Beta version of Karmic: Two upgrades (HP, Vaio), one fresh install (Dell) went almost without a hitch.

There was one very annoying issue: Obnoxious "clicking" sounds coming from the HP's speakers (Intel sound hardware). A quick google search led to a quick fix (mind you, this would most likely have stumped someone new to Linux). That being said, I *did* upgrade to a beta version of 9.10 -- hopefully the problem was fixed for the final release.

Overall, very happy. After upgrading the HP machine (Intel video hardware), graphics performance improved dramatically (9.04 had performance issues with certain Intel video hardware).

Wireless worked "out of the box" on all machines.

The Sony has only 512M memory -- performance (including the Compiz goodies) is quite satisfactory on that laptop.

Anyway, that's my experience: OMMV.

Ubuntu's *almost* ready for the average end-user. What it needs most is the type of vendor handholding available to Windows and OSX users.

If all Windows users had to install their own OS, then you'd probably see plenty of complaints/problems there too (even a 99 percent success rate would make for large absolute numbers of unhappy users).

This is a flat-out right-wing lie. Let's see you back up your accusations with some real evidence. And if you think you are going to try to pull a McKitrick on me by citing this paper (http://www.climateaudit.org/pdf/mcintyre.grl.2005.pdf), I'm ready to take you on.