This follows on from my post below in which I rolled around on the carpet, clapping my hands, drumming my feet on the floor and howling with laughter at the antics of the Hot Air Fanatics (HAFs) and the fact that due to their own overweening arrogance they had taken a step too far and published a paper with The Royal Society who, unlike virtually every other scientific publisher, actually lived up to its insistence that authors archive their basic data and make it available to others so that it might be tested. The mug who fell into this bear trap was a certain Keith Briffa, a 'scientist' who earns a tidy sum from me and you working for the Hadley Centre which is based at the Met Office. One is tempted to describe him as a 'tree-hugger' because he is one of those who pursued the chimera that tree-rings would provide accurate data for temperature conditions back into several centuries. His work, and others like him, was the basis for the infamous 'hockey stick ' graph which purports to tell us all that global temperatures were nice and even up until the late 20th century when suddenly they took a running jump upwards. As I told you below, poor old Briffa has just had all his trees chopped down by that quiet, persistent but deadly investigator, Steve McIntyre, who with the help of The Royal Society (give 'em a bonus, your Maj!) managed, after several years of trying, to extract some of the basic data which showed nothing like the results claimed by Briffa et al. Now,however, Briffa has responded. You can read the whole thing here, but I would suggest to you that buried in the text is one, critical, crucial sentence, and it goes like this:
My colleagues and I are working to develop methods that are capable of expressing robust evidence of climate changes using tree-ring data.
'Isn't that a beaut'? 'Don'cha just lurve it'? In one sloppy bit of grammar this buffoon has blown the gaffe, because his sentence can only mean that the methods he and his colleagues have developed so far are not robust! In addition it implies that his s0-called 'scientific' endeavours are not aimed at following where the evidence leads, but are intended to find evidence for his conclusion, that is, climate change.
Should you wish to depress yourself, you may go here and count up the hundreds of thousands of pounds that Keith Briffa has accrued over the years by way of grants, most of them via government Quangos, straight from H. M. Treasury, or, me and you, as I like to think of it!
My thanks to Anthony Watts and several of his commenters.
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