Stanford's David Ritson: "the climate field is losing and has lost a great deal of credibility over the years as to whether it is serious science...In the MBH instance virtually all the simple internal consistency checks. one should expect to find, are missing"

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[Stanford's David Ritson, 2005] I appreciated your candid reply. My context is a belief that the climate field is losing and has lost a great deal of credibility over the years as to whether it is serious science. Practically any of my colleagues in the physics department would say that things are so politicized that they wouldn't know what to believe, but that, at some point, if you keep adding greenhouse gasl s you are going to have a problem. The handling of millenium temperature records certainly lends support to this cynicism. In the MBH instance virtually all the simple internal consistency checks. one should expect to find, are missing....I give M&M lots of credit for stirring things up but poor marks for their basic understanding and objectivity on many of the issues, and the same goes for MBH. What is so damaging about the current debate as to whether current temperatures exceed anything in the past millenium is the poverty of the work and, by inference, the refereeing of it. Final scientific answers seem out of current reach.

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Mike, Good triumphs over bad - eventually! It does take a long time though! Maybe Ray P. wants to do something. He is more up to speed on all this - and reads French! Cheers Phil At 14:33 15/01/2008, Michael Mann wrote:

Phil, thanks for sending on, I've sent to Ray P. The Passoti piece is remarkably bad for a Science "news" piece, it would be worth discussing this w/ the editor, Donald Kennedy who is quite reasonable, and probably a bit embarrassed by this. ... Keep up the good fight, the attacks are getting more and more desparate as the contrarians are increasingly losing the battle (both scientifically, and in the public sphere). one thing I've learned is that the best way to deal w/ these attacks is just to go on doing good science, something I learned from Ben...