Mike Mann doesn't do work with satellites - he's a paleoclimatologist and there aren't many satellite data sets for the C10th strangely. Neither does Phil Jones for that matter, he works with surface data from the met agencies.

The big screwups with satellite data have mostly been down to Christy, who is on the anti-AGW side of the argument (although he seems to be moderating his position of late).

Regards
Luke

The point at issue is whether serious scientific papers have been kept out of the peer-reviewed literature by 'warmist' gatekeepers. The evidence you cite does not address this point for the following reasons:

Firstly the email quote you offer concerns two papers which had already been published in peer-reviewed journals, so the alleged gatekeeping you are pointing at is whether to keep them out of a summary of the field, rather than the literature itself.

Secondly, the papers in question were in fact cited by the summary report being discussed, so the gatekeeping that you allege occurs did not actually happen in this case.

Thirdly, as Abies Bracteata says below, the papers were in fact utter crap. The sentiments in that email show a lead author actually doing his job, because they should never have got into the research summary (indeed they should never have got past review and been published - one of them was sufficiently bad that half of the editorial board of the journal in question resigned in protest over it).

The fact that these papers got into the summary is actually evidence against your contention. In this case it would appear that contrarians are actually being coddled by the gatekeepers - since a paper that bad on the warmist side of the fence wouldn't have got anywhere near the IPCC WGI.

Regards
Luke

Really? Exagerate for effect much? They don't have seasons where you live or something?

Nope - there has been polling on this topic. Among scientists who are actively publishing in the field the pro/anti ratio runs something like 32:1.

Again, nope. Greenhouse effect was first postulated in the mid-C19th and a first attempt at calculating it from first principles was done in 1896. Even if you restrict the field to its modern era (once the mistake about CO2 absorbtion spectra being saturated by water vapour that stalled the topic for fifty years had been corrected), then there has been a serious, sustained programme of research since the International Geophysical Year in 1958.

Eppur si calda. The agenda is science and just because a modern day papacy is uncomfortable with the facts that scientists discover, it doesn't stop those facts being true.

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. The reality is that the earth is getting hotter and the only particular reason we have so far found for it getting hotter is the industrial-era increase of GHGs in the atmosphere.

Regards
Luke

Yup. We've just had one installed in the utility space next to our bathroom. We previously got no usable natural light in there and now even on cloudy days (which aren't in short supply in London) it's as good as having a light on during daylight hours.

We're going to be putting a shower room in on the floor below later in the year, so we'll get another one for there I think.

Regards
Luke

The UHI is known about and has been discounted as a material effect for years.

The fact that you are willing to tout such long debunked nonsense means that you are either woefully ignorant of the field or you are knowingly spouting misinformation.

Regards
Luke

It's more than the same thing, it's the same goddamned people. Pretty much all of the initial movers and shakers behind the the anti-science campaign against AGW made their bones doing anti-science for Big Tobacco.

Regards
Luke

There is nothing fraudulent about not using part of a temperature proxy when you know it is incorrect.

There is also nothing fraudulent about using another part of the same proxy when you know it is correct.

There is even nothing fraudulent about using another part of the same proxy when you have good reasons to believe that it is correct.

Regards
Luke

Except (i) the emails in question were complaining about work that had already been published so they don't seem to have been very good at coercing the journals and (ii) the papers they were complaining about went on to be cited in the IPCC 4AR, so they weren't very good at corrupting the IPCC process either (even though Phil Jones was a lead author for the chapter in question).

Regards
Luke

Well for the instrumemtal era, you can compare the proxy against measured temps. The proxy agrees very well with these records for the 100-odd years we have prior to 1960.

Before the instrumental era then you can cross-compare with other proxies. If you have several different proxies that rely upon different physical processes to derive the temperature signal and they all report the same signal (where 'same' means within acceptable error ranges obviously) then you can be reasonably confident that the currently divergent proxy hasn't done a similar excursion in the past. This is why Keith Briffa said in his original work that publicised the problem that the proxy was, on the balance of evidence, still good prior to 1960.

Of course if you can figure out what is causing the divergence then you can go hunting for signs of this causal factor in the past as a belt and braces measure. This is why getting to the bottom of the divergence problem is a topic of ongoing research.

Regards
Luke

Said raw data are still available you know. The station logs they got them from are still there. All you have to do is go and ask for them again.

Of course the reason CRU 'lost' these data, was because they originally concluded that they weren't good enough to use and then a few years later someone decided to free up some storage space by getting rid of copies of unused data from their archive.

Regards
Luke

Q: Can we see the data?
A: No, we deleted some of it after concluding that it wasn't good enough to use. You can go to the station logs and get it if you want. Knock yourself out.

Q: Can we see the algorithms?
A: Sure. They are in the methods section of the dozens of papers published in the peer reviewed literature dealing with this area. We have links to these papers on our website.

Regards
Luke

The proxy *may* be fundamentally flawed and the modern divergence from instrumental records *may* be a clue to that flaw, but you do not know that.

What you do know (if you were Keith Briffa, rather than some guy on the internet second guessing him over a decade later) is that the site was carefully selected so that the growth of trees there would be temperature constrained, that the proxy matches well to instrumental temperature records prior to the divergence point, that outside the instrumental era it matches well to other proxy reconstructions going back for hundreds or thousands of years and that these other proxies *do not* diverge with modern instrumental temperatures in the way that this proxy does.

So a reasonable conclusion is that there is a confounding factor which has superceded temperature as the limiting factor on tree growth from 1960 onwards.

Now it's possible that the confounding factor is one that is 'naturally occurring' and thus could have polluted the record at random intervals going back throughout the entire duration of the data series rendering it useless as a proxy, but if that were the case you would expect to see declines in this proxy which don't match other proxies (unless those other proxies are also affected, but then that begs the quesion why aren't these other proxies affected today?).

A more parsimonious explanation is that the confounding factor is modern in origin and that the data series is perfectly fine as a proxy up until the modern era. Given that we know that modern industrial civilisation has had massive impacts upon the biosphere, the idea that there is something about the modern world that has hit these trees in the last few decades and rendered them useless as proxy thermometers isn't especially outrageous.

But what do you do whilst you try to figure out what the confounding factor might be? Do you sit on the data even though you have good reason to believe that it's OK prior to 1960? Or do you publish it with appropriate caveats and warnings?

Keith Briffa took the second approach and I, for one, think that it was both eminently reasonable and the scientifically proper thing for him to have done.

Regards
Luke

No, they published a dataset which had known flaws (which were and are being actively investigated) because there is no such thing as perfect data, it is better to have some data than no data and, by publishing, they make it more likely that the underlying causes of the flaws will be discovered and accounted for by subsequent work.

Similarly, just because one line of evidence in a multi-proxy reconstruction isn't 'good' (for whatever you mean by that), that doesn't inevitably mean that the overall work is irretrievably flawed - multiple sources of data help to constrain the flaws of any suspected 'bad' series. This is demonstrated by doing multiple reconstructions where you leave out various lines of evidence and see what happens.

This sort of defensive analysis has been done of course (because the scientists in question aren't the idiots that denialists seem to think they are) and leaving out tree ring proxies doesn't have any material effect on the final reconstruction.

Regards
Luke

It doesn't have to be an either/or you know. It may not be a trivial thing, but I don't think we're so dumb as a civilisation that figuring out a way to internalise a newly recognised externality without collapsing into an Orwellian hellhole is entirely beyond us.

Of course the longer we leave it, the less time we'll have to fine tune as we go and the more likely it is that we'll get landed with half-cocked or unnecessarily severe mitigations.

Regards
Luke

The next stade (which is when orbital parameters are such that an ice age could get started) isn't due for at least 20,000 years, so your 2a and 3a scenarios aren't reasonable.

Regards
Luke