Treemometers and scientific scandal...

...global warming/climate change sceptics like myself are enjoying the public expose of some of the shonky science used by the green left to further their political agenda. The stories in this post and below and the links they contain will no doubt one day make a book. (And maybe a film...Dan Brown could really get into it, the religous mumbo jumbo, apocalypse scenarios and skullduggery is all there.) The heroes and leading figures in this saga deserve public accolades...let's stay on the trail...

...A scientific scandal is casting a shadow over a number of recent peer-reviewed climate papers. At least eight papers purporting to reconstruct the historical temperature record times may need to be revisited, with significant implications for contemporary climate studies, the basis of the IPCC's assessments. A number of these involve senior climatologists at the British climate research centre (CRU) at the University East Anglia. In every case, peer review failed to pick up the errors...Controversy has been raging since 1995, when an explosive paper by Keith Briffa at the CRU asserted that the medieval warm period was actually really cold, and recent warming is unusually warm. Both archaeology and the historical accounts, Briffa was declaring, were bunk. Briffa relied on just three cores from Siberia to demonstrate this.

...Mann too used dendrochronology to chill temperatures, and rebuffed attempts to publish his measurement data. Initially he said he had forgotten where he put it, then declined to disclosed it. (Some of Mann's data was eventually discovered, by accident, on his ftp server in a directory entitled 'BACKTO_1400-CENSORED'.)

...The scandal has serious implications for public trust in science. The IPCC's mission is to reflect the science, not create it...As the panel states, its duty is "assessing the scientific, technical and socioeconomic information relevant for the understanding of the risk of human-induced climate change. It does not carry out new research nor does it monitor climate-related data." But as lead author, Briffa was a key contributor in shaping (no pun intended) the assessment. A small group was able to rewrite history...When the IPCC was alerted to peer-reviewed research that refuted the idea, it declined to include it. This leads to the more general, and more serious issue: what happens when peer-review fails - as it did here?
The scandal has only come to light because of the dogged persistence of a Canadian mathematician who attempted to reproduce the results. Steve McIntyre has written dozens of letters requesting the data and methodology, and over 7,000 blog posts. Yet Yamal has remained elusive for almost a decade.
Footnote:
The Royal Society's motto from the enlightenment era is Nullius in verba. "On nobody's authority" or colloquially, "take nobody's word for it". In 2007, the Society's then president suggested this be changed to "respect the facts"....more here...