Climate science: Green View: Could temperature be less intemperate? | The Economist

The website (surfacetemperatures.org) set up in preparation for the Exeter meeting is hardly a hotbed of activity. On the blog Dr Thorne has set up to allow people to provide feedback on more than a dozen draft white papers, dealing with everything from data interpolation to project governance, it’s a rare post that manages to attract as many as two comments. “It’s disappointing,” says Ian Jolliffe, a statistician on the Exeter meeting’s steering committee. By way of contrast, the top post on Mr Watts’s blog at the time of writing, which deals with a new paper on the ever popular topic of the shortcomings of using tree rings and other proxies (a subject on which, as it happens, Dr Jolliffe has made contributions of which sceptics approve), has over 1,000 comments.

This is in part Dr Thorne’s own fault. While surfacetemperatures.org has been publicised on a number of mailing lists and the like within the scientific community, Dr Thorne decided not to tout his wares directly to bloggers, on the basis that he would inevitably be seen as playing favourites in some way and polarise the issue unhelpfully. As a result Mr Watts, for one, says that he first became aware of the project when asked questions for this column. Apprised of it, he says that while “a noble effort, it is a reaction to a series of data transparency blunders rather than a proactive approach to open replication”. If Dr Thorne had accepted the risk of making direct contact, he might have established more dialogue, or at least a better record for proactivity.