The "contrarians" behave as if Mann's original paper is absolutely fundamental to climate science and critical to establishing the reality of a serious enhanced green house effect, but it is not. There are many other lines of evidence.
Oh yeah, I've seen some of the swivel-eyed blather based on this. As you say, there are many lines of evidence across a huge range of disciplines.
The US National Research Council at the request of the US Congress investigated Mann's work. Their conclusion backed Mann but said that his statistical methods could have been improved but it made little difference to the findings. The NRC is THE go to organization for scientific advice to the US government. Wegman or the NRC? - I'd take the NRC any day.
From memory, I don't think Wegman describes himself as a sceptic or denier. But on that specific area, surely Wegman would be more knowledgeable?
In any case, as I said, multiple other studies using different statistical techniques arrive at very similar conclusions.
I've seen other studies showing basically the same things, although again from the Wegman report (just Wikipedia again, sorry):
Many of the same proxies are reused in most of the "independent studies" so these "cannot really claim to be independent verifications."
Thanks for the replies, you sound well informed (unlike a lot of people on this topic). Sorry for chopping your post about a bit, just wanted to put things in the order in my head, so to speak.
I still can't find a direct answer in your posts though. I appreciate all the points you've made, but this one does seem to be quite important nonetheless:
In this type of work, statistical competence is extremely important. To my mind, it's worrying if the people who produced what is after all a massively significant piece of work lack this competence.
Worse still would be if they deliberately engineered the hockey stick shape to make their case, although of course this fact alone would not alter the truth or otherwise of their case. That aside, it would surely be appalling if it were the case. It would also surely be very reasonable grounds for being very suspect of their work - after all, integrity is vital in science.
Following on from this, if the accusation that their famous model produces a hockey stick 99.99% of the time (or whatever it is), why did they not investigate this and honestly admit and attempt to account for the error? Surely a scientist would be grateful for somebody exposing such a glaring mistake?
The problem is that unless such questions are addressed they (not unreasonably) taint the whole business in the eyes of the public. After all,
if (deliberate emphasis) someone has lied about something so vital, people will naturally wonder what else they might be lying about.
This then feeds into all sorts of areas, like people questioning the temperature record. The reasoning goes that if one set have lied, why might another set not have lied and manipulated the way they compile the record, for example.
That's why I think it's so important to address these issues. I've seen it said countless times that the hockey stick emerges no matter what - I can't believe that any reasonable person would think that this point is not important.
But is it your opinion that this accusation is false?
Nice to have a civilised and informed discussion on this subject by the way - makes a refreshing change
🙂👍.