Steve McIntyre has a new post up at Climate Audit – see http://climateaudit.org/2013/09/11/ipcc-and-the-end-of-summer/ … following a long spell without posting. He has been busy working for the IPCC as a reviewer. What he says is extremely interesting. I won't repeat it verbatim but suffice to say the caucus of climate scientists responsible for most of the CAGW hype and caught out nobbling proxy data are still at the same old tricks -as we await publication of the 2013 AR5. No matter how many times proxies are discredited as bad practise they are still resurrected and re-used – because they achieve the results the particular scientists wish to make. They are continuing to fuel the CAGW alarmism when global temperatures are really at a standstill and the world is not actually warming. Are these people incurable?
Likewise, when it comes to ice cores, from the Poles as well as mountain glaciers, the isotope evidence is jealously guarded and is not released for other, rival scientists, to confirm or reject. Hence, scientists are forced to accept what a small group of climate scientists say – without being able to check it out. Needless to say, the people hanging on to their data are the people shouting the loudest about CAGW – and collecting the plum research fees which seem to be a never ending money stream from a pot of gold that emanates from taxpayers in the developed world. You and me.
Other scientists are unable to use the isotope data in their own reconstructions of past climate – even fairly recent history (the medieval period) which is why nobody could argue too strongly against the Hockey Stick (until Steve McIntyre gave it his attention). Sounds absurd – but apparently climate graphs showing temperatures across hundreds of years do not have actual evidence of what the temperature was in Antarctica or Greenland. They were projections from temperature stations much further afield – sometimes hundreds of miles away from the Poles. The reason for hanging on to the isotopic information can only be embarrassment – and perhaps negates most of the claims regarding the scale of modern warming (in the 1990s and early 2000s). It was clearly not as exceptional as portrayed by loose jawed journalists and slack jawed politicos – and they are still convinced global warming is a threat. That is what is so stunningly comical.