Whatever happened to the Bona Churchill data?

An excerpt from Steve McIntyre's blog here:

In 2002, Lonnie Thompson drilled a 460 meter ice core in a col between Mounts Bona and Churchill in Alaska. As of October 2003, they had analyzed over 5600 samples and concluded that the core covered approximately 2500 years. A presentation was made at AGU in December 2004. The data was not discussed in IPCC AR4 or even in Thompson’s 2006 PNAS article. Actually, not only is the data completely unarchived, to date, there is no journal publication whatever of these results (funded by the National Science Foundation’s Office of Polar Programs grant OPP-0099311).

In mining promotions, whenever results are delayed, you can be 99% sure that they are not good results. Promoters can delay results a little bit hoping that more drilling will get a good hole, but there’s not much discretion. For some time, I’ve noticed the non-reporting of Bona Churchill (which I’ve compared to a similar situation at Sheep Mountain) and surmised that the results were not “good” for Thompson’s viewpoint: otherwise we’d have heard about it.

Check out the related comment here:

“…Does anyone think it perhaps more likely that data is withheld (or at least hidden) by scientists not because they are part of some big conspiracy, but because they wish to maintain exclusive access to that data for future papers and/or discoveries?…”

I think it more likely that they are ‘riding the tiger’. They did well out of pinning their reputations on the Global Warming hypothesis early, before it was able to be verified, and then the world’s media and politicians followed them. That left them ‘forced’ to keep the ball rolling.

There is now too much at stake to simply turn around and say ‘Whoops, I was wrong!’. Indeed, much of the push now is in media, political and commercial areas where scientists do not have much influence. All Mann et al can do is hang on tight, and hope that when the inevitable crash comes, people will be too busy blaming Gore, or trying to hide their own unthinking suport, to descend on those who started it.

If I were a ‘Warmist’ now, I would be trying to suppress any indication that I was wrong, and trying to get other people to join in supporting the thesis, while quietly saying a few things which could later be quoted to show that I didn’t ‘really’ support it unquestioningly….