Neverending Audit

[John Hunter shows how to introduce background information without having to cry “oil shill!”]

I find it interesting that Michael Mann, in his letter to the House Committee, describes Steve McIntyre as a “mining industry executive” and McIntyre’s own biography (www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/stevebio.doc) describes him as working “in the mineral business”. Both descriptions are pretty euphemistic. Around the time of the writing of McIntyre and McKitrick (2003; the Energy & Environment paper) and of the above biography (dated in October 2003), McIntyre was actually a “Strategic Adviser” to CGX Energy Inc. who describe their “principal business activity” as “petroleum and natural gas exploration” (cgxenergy.ca/investors/CGX_AR03_part2.pdf). CGX Energy Inc. occupy the same Canadian address given for McIntyre in McIntyre and McKitrick (2003), an address which is also occupied by Northwest Exploration Company, another business which apparently engages in oil and gas exploration (or at least a company with the same name does). McIntyre was also President of Northwest Exploration Company.

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(Source: realclimate.org)

[faustusnotes suggests why the auditors’ misdemeanours are not helping their avowed rationale, while pointing out the neglected relationship between data and code.]

I meant that lots of journals don’t provide formatting or publication advice – which suggests that they’re not interested. In the epi/medical field this is largely because code is irrelevant without data (the code, too, could be faked, if you don’t have data to check it on).

While I agree that transparency is a good thing in science and all fields should be pushing for more of it, the approach taken by the skeptic crowd is not the way to get this. Calling people frauds and incompetents, hacking their computers for emails and then publishing irrelevant personal stuff just to smear them, making loud claims of incompetence as soon as you can’t reproduce someone else’s work without thinking about the possibility that you’ve missed something, continuous freedom of information requests for the smoking gun of fraud and collusion, sneering phrases like “pal review,” these don’t get you more transparency, they get you a reputation as a problem.

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(Source: faustusnotes.wordpress.com)

[D. Karner provides a sensible interpretation, which illustrates perfectly why I still believe in Steve’s bona fides.]

I’m going to limit my post to just one, since this could be a huge time drain. A lot of what you write about Steve McIntyre differs from what I remember when I interacted with him in 2003. He deserves more credit than you give him.

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(Source: deepclimate.org)

Dear Dave,

Here is why I am sceptical of your skepticism. I should add that I’m a ninja. I mention this not as a spurious appeal to authority argument, rather that it puts my points in a better context. I spend my time reading comments with all the salesman (h/t BartR) techniques like the serie of comments you just wrote.

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(Source: judithcurry.com)

[faustusnotes has some interesting things to say about arrogance and verbal abuse.]

RomanM, if you want me to drop the arrogant and abusive manner, try associating yourself with a blog that doesn’t accuse other people of f*** and incompetence. A well-mannered post saying “I don’t understand what Lewandowsky did” is very different to a vicious post saying (and I quote)

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(Source: climateaudit.org)