I love it; Mann '08 he cries. There was the confirmatory deceit.

Pages 2K is a blatant attempt to find data to support the alarm, and yet, by golly, there is earlier warming rearing its unwelcome presence.

Ian Jolliffe, and plenty more.
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Ian Jolliffe indeed declined to endorse MBH's use of de-centred PCA, calling it 'dubious statistics' however Wahl & Ammann showed that the effect of the technique on the reconstruction was tiny.

Jolliffe also said, quite correctly 'I am by no means a climate change denier. My strong impression is that the evidence rests on much much more than the hockey stick'

Amen to that.

But Phil the initial hockey stick was (even by your admission) confined to NH data, yet was taken up by the IPCC, by climate advocates and by politicians as if it were a representation of global climate. I don't remember Mann et al, or CRU at the time protesting too loudly that the "study" was being misused or misapplied.. No it was the new gravy train and was ridden for all.it was worth. It was the new poster child of the IPCC.

First hand I recall Jones and Briffa both implying to students and ENV staff that the interpretation could be treated as global although on another occasion (if I remember correctly a report on their IPCC meetings) Briffa detailed all the problems associated with their palaeoclimate reconstructions - something that fed my growing scepticism and my admiration of Briffa.

What was wrong with Wegman? Are you so well versed in statistics that you can offer informed criticisms or dispute my designation of the committee's members? Or are you again accepting other people,s views from well-known websites?

Nobody but a fool is a climate change denier; the question is attribution, and that is unsettled.

It's also the Sixty-four Trillion Dollar question, and defending disinformation like the Crook't stick is dangerous to improved understanding. This is important stuff, Phil.
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I can't remember now, was it Wahl or Ammon who was urged in an email to destroy evidence?

You trust the sorriest people, Phil; but I don't trust you.
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Alan Kendall, whenever I hear people extolling the virtues of Hockey Stick science, I take steps in another direction and have fun conversations with others who have arrived at the same place.

I have a brother who does get some work abroad out of other peoples genuine fears about the impacts of climate change, or changeable weather as I would call it. Those countries up around the Arctic circle, Iceland, Greenland, Canada Russia, Scandanavia are not bleating too much about the dangers of a warmer climate. A bit like Mann's Bristlecone Pines, their biggest threat to survival is cold weather, and being assaulted by climate scientists.

Observing the close knit circles of climate science, becoming ever tighter, smaller, constricted and knotted, is amusing, but sad and pathetic.

I agree with Kim (above) It is becoming Climate Scooby Do. Climate science might have got away with it, if it hadn't been for Mann and his pesky Hockey Stick.

It's all kind of beside the point now. Even the Crook't Stick's blade has been debunked by the pause. The error, Phil, was mistaking warming from an oceanic oscillation for the effect of CO2.

More CO2 will warm the Earth, and warming is always net beneficial. The warming from AnthroCO2 is gradually being understood to be mild, and, of course, the greening from it is practically miraculous, now feeding an extra billion people. The externalities of fossil fuel use are almost all to the positive, the net is beneficial, and will eventually be so recognized.

The error has been in stampeding the herd with false alarums, to its harm. The exaggeration has been a fabulous pyre, now becoming a heap of ashes.
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Heh, gc, ruh robusted.
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I was not interested in climate change in 2001 so I cannot comment on whether or not the Hockey stick was over-used. I think the IPCC over the years have turned it into too much of an icon, FWIW, and I also regret that some people seem to forget about the error bars, which are substantial especially in the early years. Dr Mann has also said 'I always thought it was somewhat misplaced to make it a central icon of the climate change debate,'

Wegman was presented as an 'expert', yet was found to have copied large chunks (over c 35 pages) of the background material to his report, and later a paper based on it, out of textbooks and wikipedia without attribution. Strange behaviour for an 'expert' and misconduct in an academic - for which he was officially reprimanded by his University.

But that was indeed, background. Wegman's committee was only tasked with assessing whether the criticisms made by McIntyre and McKitrick (in their 2005 GRL paper mainly) had statistical merit, and he found that some of them did - though note the lack of diligence documented in the Deep Climate blog post above, which perhaps reflects the fact the the Wegman Report was not peer-reviewed, unlike the NAS panel report.

But nobody actually took issue with M&M's calculations, as opposed to the implications drawn from them, and their conclusions about the use of PCA. What Wegman was not asked and did not do was to evaluate the magnitude of the effect of the centring choice. Others did, and found it to be minimal. Here's a graph showing the reconstruction with no PCA step.

Red = original MBH98 multiproxy+PCA reconstruction, Green= raw data used directly.

In other words even if Wegman had been a co-author on MBH and they had taken his advice on PCA, the effect on the final reconstruction would have been nil.

Lot of noise around here.

Kim,

Which dataset shows a pause, and how does it 'debunk' an historical reconstruction?

Puzzled.

A marvelous irony is that the government of Ontario was so stampeded by the fear that it sent a copy of the Crook't Stick to every household in the province, amongst whose was Chez McIntyre.
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Omigod, a 'pause denier'.

Phil, the Crook't Stick's shaft was a hoax, and its blade is now blunted. You wanna look at the history since.
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I can't remember now, was it Wahl or Ammon who was urged in an email to destroy evidence?

That was Gene Wahl, on the very unwise and perhaps illegal request of Phil Jones. Though it was mail rather than evidence per se. Wahl did delete some correspondence with Keith Briffa, I think he was the only one to do so, however ironically, it resurfaced in the stolen CRU mails, and was totally innocuous.

The noise is getting louder.

Kim, the correct answer is 'none'.

Heh, 'too much of an icon', and you defend it diligently and disingenuously.

If you want the Crook't Stick to assume its proper importance, let it die. It has tremendously warped understanding.
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Son, why were they up to all that stuff, illegally advising, foolishly deleting, covering up? At long last, have you no curiosity?

Amusing that you consider email not evidence per se.
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I can say this about some of those characters; they were honorable enough to have guilty consciences.

It's been warmer in the past, there is simply too much evidence for that. So the question of recent warming is attribution. Sure, some of it is probably anthropogenic. But by what ever amount man has warmed the earth it would be that much colder without man. If sensitivity is high enough to be frightening, then we've already avoided cooling, which is the real danger out there.
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You've been very helpful, Phil. 'Too much of a central icon'. 'Dubious statistics'. 'Illegally advising'. 'Foolishly deleting'.

By Gaia, Phil, you would be a skeptic if you could be.
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Your 'queen' is unprecedented modern warming. It ain't so. Your queen has crossed the board and become a pawn.
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Phil Clarke, when did Mann say that his world famous Hockey Stick that shot him to fame and fortune, was given too much prominence by the IPCC? Did he not get proper repeat fees for its widespread use, and status in the headlines of reports?

Why has he now changed his mind about his Hockey Stick, when he is still pursuing Legal Action to defend his reputation?

Laydeez and Gennlemen, Phil Clarke in a nutshell.

Mann, Jones and rest of the self-style Hockey Team are always right, and have never ever at any time behaved in a way that could be seen to be sleazy, disingenuous, unpleasant, dissembling, downright stupid or dangerous for the future of mankind or the planet.

Anything that hints at that is absolutely the fault of a third party - lawyers, PR consultants, over-zealous editors - or the dog ate their homework.

Every single one of those who disagree have been adequately categorised already by Prof Lew as conspiracy theorists and - if your name happens to be Watts, Mckintyre and a selection of other prominent sceptics however well qualified and thoughful - are also proven to be out-and-out liars.

And naturally all of the above is entirely credible.

So there you go, Phil Boy, there's your schtick, done and dusted.

Now how about some original thought?

Me 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

JerryM is making stuff up.

Phil Clarke at 4:46, 31/03:

"Amen to that".

It is a religion, isn't it?

Jones' request was to delete mails relating to IPCC AR4, probably to pre-empt a future FOI request.This is against the spirit if the not the actual letter of the law and I certainly don't defend this action, however provoked he felt.

But these were personal emails, not data, or even draft papers, Wahl's mails were recovered - did they reveal a great scandal or conspiracy? They could have been deleted or lost by the researchers just tidying their inboxes. I don't believe the final report was affected one jot by this, the point is, was it an accurate review of the science and has it stood the test of time? My answer is yes.

I think you lack a sense of proportion, Kim.

You've been very helpful, Phil. 'Too much of a central icon'. 'Dubious statistics'. 'Illegally advising'. 'Foolishly deleting'.

You're welcome, Andrew Montford could take those quotes and spin up a whole blog post. No bother.