Despite me already pointing this out, Harry's most recent post still ignores this one? An oversight? Inconvenient? It's okay for some? To be clear, I think this whole discussion is juvenile, but even juvenile discussions could be consistent.

Harry and Phil, you both started well, but soon slipped back into old ways. Rather than pick on either of you, let me instead consider Mark Hodgson,s 9.03am interesting contribution, not out of any animosity but simply because it illustrates well a point I wish to make. Mark presents a rather plausible explanation why Mann should have claimed he was a Nobel Prize recipient. However, I don't believe there is EVIDENCE for this explanation, it is speculation, granted informed speculation, but speculation nonetheless. Even I with no legal training whatsoever can concoct several other speculations.

There is fact here, however,; Mann did make his claim, and it is also true, as Mark has written, that such a claim, if accepted by the courts, would have certain implications. What we need in this whole discussion is to separate what both Harry and Phil accept as facts, from their speculations about what those facts mean. Then the rest of us can form our own, informed judgements.

Phil you have cast aspersions on McIntyre's integrity. I have found it difficult to separate any factual content from your interpretation of what you perceive as supporting factual evidence (this could, I acknowledge, reflect my own prejudices here) but perhaps you could be more factual in defence of your views on this subject, which has obviously upset many other contributors to this thread.

What I would like from everyone contributing is more fact, less interpretation. Surely I cannot be alone?

Harry -

So you're on Donna's naughty list forever even if:

- Somebody else made the claim or
- You've corrected the reference

And this yields a grand total of approximately 0.6% of contributors honoured by the IPCC?

Desperation. But, as ATTP points out, Donna could easily increase her roll call of shame: Where is FAKE LAUREATE Richard Tol?!

Phil you have cast aspersions on McIntyre's integrity [..] perhaps you could be more factual in defence of your views on this subject.

Well, there was the Hantermirov data incident where Mr Mc accused scientists of withholding raw data, even though it had been supplied earlier and was in his back pocket, and the reconstruction he published which that professional dendrochronologist described as 'slipshod' and the work indicating 'carelessness, grubbiness, dishonourableness'

In his defence he claims that he had no way of knowing that the supplied data were the same as those used for publication. In which case he could have (a) simply asked, or (b) used his famous expertise to produce his own plot from the data. But that would have shown a hockey stick.

He's too bright to tell an outright falsehood, however there are many examples of quote-mining, and not being exactly meticulous about presenting a complete, balanced picture. I would provide links, but referencing certain sites on this forum seems to result in posts being disappeared ....

... but try Googling a site named 'Deep Climate' and posts tagged 'Steve McIntyre'

As I suspected, posting a direct link causes the post to be rejected.

Phil,

what part of "more fact, less interpretation" did you not understand?

In your response to my last post you offer two facts 1) in the form of a previous BH thread, and 2) McIntyre's explanation of his actions. with the rest being your interpretation or invective.

Is this as good as it gets? If Harry responds in the same manner, I'll give up, and a plague on both your houses.

Alan,

If you don't look, you will not see. And you can't look from here 'cos some sites are censored. (Why?)

https://delayedoscillator.wordpress.com/2009/10/05/yamal-emulation-i/
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/05/yamalian-yawns/

Phil, my experiences of the sites you suggest are that they are significantly heavy in interpretation and impoverished in factual material. In my earliest days researching climate change I did find many "facts" spurious or highly debatable, and conclusions reached from such material equally suspect.

I asked for facts that you would wish considered in your arguments, you respond by offering links to other sites, in other words passing the buck. I do want to look and see what facts you consider important. But you do not oblige.

I respectfully disagree; I have presented many facts to chew on that should cause one, for example, to question whether McIntyre is always a completely dispassionate and objective commentator. This is a blog and some of the issues are quite technical and time-consuming and have already been usefully summarised elsewhere.

If you're not just a concern troll, spend a few minutes over at Deep Climate. He backs up his assertions with all the facts and quotes you could possibly want.

Then ask yourself why BH prevents direct linkage to there.

That is not a link.

I stand corrected; just noticed that BH has a link in his blogroll; must be some 'feature' of the spam filter that prevents embedded links in posts.

so, try this

https://deepclimate.org/tag/steve-mcintyre/

or

But the present review also demonstrates that many of the emails present in the “climategate” archive have been conveniently ignored in favour of a meagre selection of cherrypicked quotes marshalled to present a scenario diametrically opposed to the truth. To say the least, one should take the climate auditors’ version of “Climategate” with a huge grain of salt.

https://deepclimate.org/2010/05/14/how-to-be-a-climate-science-auditor-part-2-the-forgotten-climategate-emails/

Phil, do you always end up insulting someone who disagrees with you? A control troll - what alliteration.

"Some of the issues are quite technical", meaning and you're too thick or lazy to understand them?

I genuinely was asking for the evidence, shorn of interpretation, that makes you think the way you do. But if you're too thick or lazy to respond......

In actual fact I have admiration for you: I know how difficult it is to stand virtually alone on this site, and despite brickbats being hurled at you from all sides, you keep coming back for more. Respect.

Phil Clark: With regard to Richard Tol - unless you have an earlier version of this I feel you may need to do some apologising. The University of Sussex has this on his biog page:

He is an author (contributing, lead, principal and convening) of Working Groups I, II and III of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, shared winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007

Oooh, that's subtle. Good spot Harry, I stand corrected for the second time today. Though its the semicolon(s) that makes the difference.

Only 12 fake Laureates, then.

ask why is Climate Depot on BH's blog roll on the home page

Erm, is it?

Though I think I get what you're saying.

Or there again ...

http://www.ivm.vu.nl/en/people/researchers/environmental-economics/tol/index.aspx

Under 'Awards'

This is getting silly.

Phil Clarke, if any mining company needs new employees for hole digging, and then making holes bigger and deeper, I expect many from this Blog would give you a favourable reference.

The easy way to think of a semi-colon, as GB Shaw once said to TE Shaw (of Arabia fame) is that it can replace 'and' or 'or'. It tends to be used to link/join two ideas. A comma is sufficient in Tols' biog.

As they used to say, 'Know your Onions' - but I rely on my Fowler, which suggests: "Never use a semi-colon when the expressions so separated form a group that is to be separated by nothing more than a comma, or even not separated at all, from another part of the sentence; to do it is to make the less include the greater, which is absurd."

Phil, my experiences of the sites you suggest are that they are significantly heavy in interpretation and impoverished in factual material.

I respect your opinion. What would be your top five facts?

The Phil who's Jones, deep in his bones
Wishes he could but atone;
The Mann, Piltdowned, of sad renown,
In history will stand alone.
=================

Phil Clark, not sure if your 10.54 post was directed at me, but you do begin quoting from an earlier post of mine.

I have no axe to grind in this thread, and have revealed my prejudices already. To be perfectly honest I do not have the inclination to spend endless amounts of time researching matters that I have already made my mind up upon, and certainly have no intention of consulting sites that previous experience has demonstrated considerable bias.

Why then have I followed your discussions with Harry Passfield? The answer is that I have always striven to put myself into other people's shoes. In this current debate I find it exceedingly difficult. From my own experiences with CRU personnel and from what I've read (admittedly from what you might consider biased sites) I find it difficult to near impossible to believe other than that CRU did not adequately store much of its original data or that Mann has repeatedly blocked access to his data and methodology. But I am very much interested in how someone like yourself can reach very different conclusions. I am not particularly interested in your opinions as such as the specific facts that led you to those opinions. Thus I am dissatisfied with your passing the buck to other sites. That doesn't address my interest.

I fully recognize that you are not compelled to address my particular interest but I thought 1) the current discussion seemed to be going nowhere and I was suggesting an alternative, 2) you yourself might find it of interest to re-examine your beliefs and re-establish the factual basis on which they are based, and 3) by doing this allow others more knowledgeable than me to challenge them. Do note that I was making the same request/demand of Harry; I want to know what evidence he has that he would use to defend his position and counter yours. As I have already stated, I have found it extremely difficult to separate facts from opinion. I also note that there has been no response yet from Harry.

Therefore I have no intention of suggesting five facts. I'm not really in this discussion. I am an interested observer only.

On the topic of the thread, my opinion is that the data disclosed alongside Mann, Bradley and Hughes' 1998 and 1999 Northern Hemisphere reconstructions, which came to be known as 'The Hockey Stick' studies was no worse or better than standards of the period, that these were groundbreaking studies that used novel statistical methods -they did not get everything 100% right (and admitted as much), however subsequent analyses found that less than optimal methodological choices did not have a material effect on the outcome. Claims that the conclusions that recent warmth is unprecedented disappear with different dataset selection do not stand up to scrutiny. Few academic papers have subject to such intense interest, up to and including a Congressional investigation. These conclusions have been confirmed by virtually all subsequent studies.

The claim that Jones 'lost all his data' is absurd on its face. The only evidence provided was a reference to the Wang Chinese station data affair, which while regrettable, has no impact on the global temperature data series, which is surely the relevant data product to the climate change debate. It is the case that the CRU could not and did not disclose around 5% of the weather station data (now 0% I believe) however the difference between the gridded reconstruction from 95% of the data and 100% was negligible, and one of the many panels set up after the UEA emails were stolen was able to reproduce the curve using public domain data in a few days - something none of their critics had attempted for some reason.

This is not to say that the behaviour of the scientists was always whiter than white, they escaped a prosecution for evading FOI law only because the offence expired before it could be prosecuted and there is evidence of a 'bunker mentality', they seemed to feel justified in not sharing data with critics in a way totally contrary to scientific best practice, only partially justified by the sometimes pretty disgusting accusations and tactics engaged in by their 'opponents'. I do believe however that there is more heat than light in the 'what were they hiding' , 'no smoke without fire' kind of trope. There were thousands of examples of good scientific practice amongst the mails, and hundreds of researchers not implicated in any mispractice. The science survives.

Facts and references.

Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries (aka MBH98)

http://www.meteo.psu.edu/holocene/public_html/shared/articles/mbh98.pdf

Quote: We use a multiproxy network consisting of widely distributed highquality annual-resolution proxy climate indicators, individually collected and formerly analysed by many palaeoclimate researchers (details and references are available: see Supplementary Information).

Supplementary Information for MBH98 - all the raw proxy data, verification and calibrations.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v392/n6678/suppinfo/392779a0.html

Corrigendum to MBH 98 and more SI

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v430/n6995/full/nature02478.html

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v430/n6995/suppinfo/nature02478.html

Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties, and Limitations (aka MBH99)

http://www.meteo.psu.edu/holocene/public_html/shared/articles/MBH1999.pdf

Robustness of the Mann, Bradley, Hughes reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere surface temperatures: Examination of criticisms based on the nature and processing of proxy climate evidence aka Wahl & Ammann 2007

http://nldr.library.ucar.edu/repository/assets/osgc/OSGC-000-000-011-900.pdf

Extract: Our examination does suggest that a slight modification to the original Mann et al. reconstruction is justifiable for the first half of the 15th century (∼+0.05–0.10◦), which leaves entirely unaltered the primary conclusion of Mann et al. (as well as many other reconstructions) that both the 20th century upward trend and high late-20th century hemispheric surface temperatures are anomalousover at least the last 600 years

US NAS Panel investigation into temperature reconstructions over the last 2K yr.

http://www.nap.edu/read/11676/chapter/1

Extract The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1,000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes the additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and documentation of the spatial coherence of recent warming described above and also the pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators described in previous chapters . Based on the analyses presented in the original papers by Mann et al. and this newer supporting evidence, the committee finds it plausible that the Northern Hemisphere was warmer during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period over the preceding millennium. 

Continental-scale temperature variability during the past two millennia (aka pages 2K)

http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v6/n5/full/ngeo1797.html

Extract There were no globally synchronous multi-decadal warm or cold intervals that define a worldwide Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age, but all reconstructions show generally cold conditions between AD 1580 and 1880, punctuated in some regions by warm decades during the eighteenth century. The transition to these colder conditions occurred earlier in the Arctic, Europe and Asia than in North America or the Southern Hemisphere regions. Recent warming reversed the long-term cooling; during the period AD 1971–2000, the area-weighted average reconstructed temperature was higher than any other time in nearly 1,400 years.

(many more, but don't want to trigger spam filter).

The Independent Climate Change E-mails Review

http://www.cce-review.org/pdf/FINAL%20REPORT.pdf

Extract Any independent researcher may freely obtain the primary station data. It is impossible for a third party to withhold access to the data.

It is impossible for a third party to tamper improperly with the data unless they have also been able to corrupt the GHCN and NCAR sources. We do not consider this to be a credible possibility, and in any case this would be easily detectable by comparison to the original NMO records or other sources such as the Hadley Centre.

The steps needed to create a global temperature series from the data are straightforward to implement. The required computer code is straightforward and easily written by a competent researcher.

The shape of the temperature trends obtained in all cases is very similar: in other words following the same process with the same data obtained from different sources generates very similar results.