[In a post attacking (for a rare time) James Annan, Arthur Smith notices that the Auditor hopes to discuss at an engineer-level a very different beast.]

Automatically assuming someone has read through several years worth of conversations and should understand the local shorthand is a bit presumptuous. Actually I do know many of the people frequently mentioned here, including Ms Ababneh, and have worked with some of the material that is the subject of various discussions, have visited a number of the specific collection sites, etc.

As I said above, if the participants of this blog/journal/whatever, including specifically Mr McIntyre, are mostly engaged in turning over pebbles looking for evidence to support their latest pet notions there really isn’t much to say.

The truth about the scientific work that is the main subject of the tree-ring related discussions here is both more boring, in some respects, and more interesting than you would believe. There is a reason that some things make it through to peer reviewed papers and others do not. There is a reason that this type of research takes time to bear fruit. These reasons have nothing to do with conspiracies or attempts to cook up specific results – sorry to disappoint, but it just isn’t so. The work is hard, time-consuming, careful and meticulous. It requires funding – meaning the process of getting proposals written and submitted………and……waiting to see if they are funded (many are not). Recruiting and then helping students get through their academic program and writing the results of their work up as thesis, dissertation, papers, etc.

The work on the bristlecone has been ongoing for more than 50 years and has involved the work of a large number of people over this period. Every question that I have seen raised here has been thought about, discussed, debated, fought about, both amongst those doing the primary research and within the interested scientific community that debated the published papers.

One of the most personally amusing things to read here (hilarious really) is the use of ‘Team’ to describe a certain group of researchers. You people really have no clue. Many of the criticisms raised here are very naive, or simply stupid. Red herrings and a complete waste of time.

The fact that people have cited Hal Fritt’s work in discussions says nothing at all about their understanding of his large body of research.

As for “recent events” let me say this. I came across an incident described and discussed on one of the threads: Mr. McIntyre was attempting to get some data from The Tree-Ring lab at the University of Arizona. He had difficulty and assumed his IP was specifically being blocked. Rather than contacting the sys admin for help to resolve the issue – or simply inquiring regarding the nature of the problem – he assumed nefarious intent, managed to get the data he desired via other means and brought legal action against the University for withholding data. It was a technical problem that affected others as well, took some time to track down and resolve, and had absolutely nothing to do with him. What an egotistical dolt.

You all might do well to consider that many of your dearest assumptions are simply wrong, unfounded, totally without merit. Rather than assuming the worst about people and their motives, people whom you know very little about – and since you have clothed them with your own misperceptions you couldn’t see the truth if it was spelled out in front of you – if you took the trouble to step back, take a breath, and examine the evidence for what it is (a good long look in the mirror might help a bit) without the terrible dark glasses you all seem to be wearing you might get a completely different perspective.

[Doug McNeall's second instalment hits the right spot.]

/7. Be heard

Demand that your opponent reads everything that you ever wrote, on any subject. If they haven’t, or they won’t, chide them for being ignorant or narrow minded as appropriate.

/8. Victim Bully

Victim bully. Use claims that your opponent has wronged you to gain leverage over them. This works especially well if you have harried or frustrated them into being robust with their language.

/9. Flat out hypocrisy

Accuse your opponent of the very thing that you are doing right now to gain advantage over them. It doesn’t matter what it is.

Ans: Our report does not include the recalculation of MBH98 and MBH99. We were not asked nor were we funded to do this. We did not need to do a recalculation to observe that the basic CFR methodology was flawed. We demonstrated this mathematically in Appendix A of the Wegman et al. Report. The duplication of several years of funded research of several paleoclimate scientists by several statisticians doing pro bono work for Congress is not a reasonable task to ask of us.

And yet, he had reviewed MM05E&E. He had access to your code. He claimed to have run, at least, the GRL code, and should surely have looked at the EE code. He should have been aware that he did not need to duplicate several years of funded research. It didn’t take me long to get it running. But he said nothing. And so the talk went on to Wahl and Ammann

The Wahl and Ammann paper came to our attention relatively late in our deliberations,…

When you yourself spoke to the Committee you gave a presentation which included a five page prepared statement, and 14 slides. Your gave a two-page introduction. But you did not once tell them that you had actually emulated, with and without decentering, the results of MBH, the work in question. Nor did you say anything about it in your responses for the record, despite questions relating to difficulties that you had had in being able to replicate Mann’s work. Your response to one earlier question from Mr Whitfield [And I would ask Dr. Crowley and Mr. McIntyre or anybody else that wants to comment: the Wall Street Journal that has been referred to many times today says that Dr. Mann's methodology could produce hockey sticks from random trendless data. Is that a correct statement or is that incorrect statement?]:

MR. MCINTYRE. Well, let me answer that. That is true, and that is the one specific item that was verified by both panels, and both the NAS panel and the Wegman report specifically confirm that his methodology would produce a hockey stick from random data.

No qualification that you were talking about PC1, rather than a reconstruction, and no context to suggest that. You had already reproduced the actual reconstruction that was the well-known hockey-stick result that they would have believed you were referring to, and shown that the result was no more HS-like than with centered PCA. In your second address to the committee, you even managed to talk about Wahl and Ammann, and to say that your code reconciled to theirs, without making the obvious connection that both reconciled, or at least related, to MBH. The nearest it came was in this late exchange, which followed Wegman’s statement about not having done the calculation without decentering. It goes:

MR. STEARNS. Well, you know, I just want to give you your due here. We have heard in testimony that Drs. Wahl and Ammann have reproduced Dr. Mann’s work and shown your criticism to be invalid, and I guess–is this true and were your criticism erroneous? I will give you an opportunity to respond to that. MR. MCINTYRE. Well, a couple of points. First of all, the code that we used to emulate Dr. Mann’s work reconciles almost exactly with that of Wahl and Ammann. And so any conclusions that differ are not because of differences in how we have emulated the reconstruction. They think that certain steps are fine, we don’t. They have in my opinion not carefully considered the implication of bristlecones. Our codes reconcile so right now I am confident in our conclusions that if you remove the bristlecones you have a major impact on the final results. Last December, I met with Ammann in San Francisco and suggested to him that since our codes reconciled so closely that it would make sense if we co-authored a paper in which we set down the points that we agreed on, set down the points we disagreed on in an objective way so that we didn’t seem to be launching missiles at one another and creating more controversy. I said that we could declare an armistice for 6 weeks until we accomplished this, and if we didn’t get to conclusion everybody would go back to square one and that each of us could write separate appendices, say where we disagreed.