I ran across a link to a letter from Michael Mann to some magazine or website on CA. It sent my blood pressure through the roof. Those who come visit my site know the fallacy of the hockey stick well by now. This is the link HERE.
What gives me some peace though is everyone who has looked, knows his work will fall the way of the flat earth in time. He will be remembered not as a great intellect of our time but rather as a sloppy scientist who had a huge impact on world government.
I deleted the post because I agree with Chris H, Demesure and the others below. Besides this guy is going to discredit himself, I don’t need to help him. In the future I will redouble my efforts to keep my irritation in check but trust me, it’s still there.
the Air Vent 
It occurs to me that if there are objections to using red noise to show that the procedure almost always produces hockey sticks, then why not simply take the existing proxy data – but do something to it so that you would not expect a hockey stick.
For example, reverse the proxy’s time (so oldest is newest), or perhaps better, simply chop-off the last 100 years (where the hockey stick is supposed to be). If you still get a hockey stick after that, then bzzzt, game over!
P.S. Jeff, try taking some deep breaths & counting to ten 😉
Good advice, count to ten.
I toned it down a touch this morning.
I will work on your suggestion today just to demonstrate it again. Don’t forget though that in their latest paper these guys pasted on a hockey stick on the end of 90% of the proxy data before applying the algorithm which finds hockey sticks in anything and de-amplifies historic data.
Mann isn’t really a “government researcher”; he’s a faculty member at Penn State who happens to be funded by research grants from the US federal government. He doesn’t work directly for a US government agency like NASA, NOAA. He’s like most faculty in universities, except that he’s got more funding than most. 🙂
He probably gets a decent paycheck because he’s got so much government funding. But, that’s doesn’t really matter. What really matters is his “research”.
It’s too bad he’s not officially a federal scientist. He might be held to a different standard! See the American Society of Public Administration Code of Ethics.
http://www.aspanet.org/scriptcontent/index_codeofethics.cfm
In fact, someone should call Jim Hansen on this. 🙂
The arguments Mann makes (e.g., “No one else but a paleoclimatologist can even begin to fathom the complexities of what we do, therefore you can’t take the word of anyone who doubts us.”) are childish. They are an appeal to authority and ad hominem attacks. He can’t argue the issues, so he attacks what he can.
I would suggest taking the high road. One could engage in name calling, but that’s pointless. My suggestion: publish your findings. It’s the only way to get the word out to others in the paleo community and elsewhere in a manner that will be acknowledged by other scientists. It’s hard to shout, “But he’s not a paleo guy!” when you have something (many things that you’ve demonstrated at this site could be published!) published in an appropriate journal. Then you take away the effectiveness of the ad hom and appeal to authority attacks.
Course, that’s easy for me to say… I’m not the one that would be doing the work. 🙂
Keep up the good work!
Bruce
Jeff I understand you’re going off the chart but I think it’s not appropriate to do it publicly.
Your work deserves to be published and I remember you wanted it. So it would be so bad to let your mood loose because it may be interpreted and and probably used as a sign of lack of neutrality.
That’s no problem for warmers (especially to land a paper in Nature) but for skeptics, that’s a clear liability.
Demesure,
I deleted my post. You are right but I’m only 40 so I still have that youthful streak if you know what I mean.
BTW: I don’t really ‘want’ to publish anything in Climate Science, it is such a wasteland. I feel that I must though just to counter the math. I work in optics and it is a much more interesting and challenging field.