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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Alastair McIntosh who wrote (7032)	7/14/2006 7:10:36 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 36917

I know it's off-topic, but what are RC's views on the newly-published Wegman, Scott and Said report (highlighted on Climate Audit, not surprisingly)? [Response: This is probably an unavoidable off-topic, so I'll paste in the text of Mann's released comment on the issue, but I'm actually pretty bored of this subject by now, and I think most everyone else is too. - gavin] The un-peer reviewed report commissioned by Rep. Barton released today adds nothing new to the scientific discourse on climate change and is a poor attempt to further personalize and politicize what should be a matter of scientific debate not politics. The impartial and independent National Academy of Sciences convened a panel of experts in climate science and statistics and performed a far more extensive review of the science, confirming the key conclusions of our earlier work, as well as numerous more recent supporting studies. Namely that late 20th century warmth is likely anomalous in the context of the past 1000 years and cannot be explained by natural variability. The scientific evidence for human influence on current climate comes from a large body of independent lines of evidence of which paleoclimate data is but a small part. Barton's report, written by statisticians with no apparent background at all in the relevant areas, simply uncritically parrots claims by two Canadians (an economist and an oil industry consultant) that have already been refuted by several papers in the peer-reviewed literature inexplicably neglected by Barton’s “panel”. These claims were specifically dismissed by the National Academy in their report just weeks ago. Barton's report also reveals that his panel collaborated closely with the two Canadians, yet made no attempt to contact me or my collaborators at any point. The panel makes the odd claim that there is "too much reliance on peer-review" which goes against every principle of current scientific practice. Barton in his ‘factsheet’ goes further and suggests that the anonymous peer reviewers themselves are in some way biased, a claim that he cannot possibly support since peer reviewers are in fact anonymous and this was not studied in the report. Climate science, like many multidisciplinary fields, requires broad collaboration with researchers across many areas. Any well published scientist would show a wide-ranging pattern of connection with other researchers in the field. While I am flattered that the committee seems to think that I am at the center of the field, the same analysis would have shown a very similar pattern for any researcher engaged in widespread interdisciplinary research. My colleagues and I continue to work on reducing the uncertainties in past climate reconstructions and understanding the mechanisms of past and current climate change. Policy-makers should more constructively focus their attention on the consensus findings on climate change as presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the National Academies of all G8 countries, rather than on pursuing politically-motivated attacks against individual scientists. Hmmm... So Wegman had access to all the peer reviews and who did them for all of the relevant studies then did he? I don't think so. He just looked at co-authorship - which is not the same thing at all. Statements about who the peer reviewers were are just speculative with no actual facts to back them up. - gavin] & First, how can I (or Wegman) possibly know who any paper's anonymous reviewers are if I didn't review it? Second, what part of 'anonymous' don't you understand? and finally, where can I join this 'mutual admiration society'? Wegman doesn't mention it all, and certainly doesn't give a contact number...- gavin] realclimate.org