I was very glad to see this editorial in the WaPo, which I excerpt below:

Steve McIntyre Posted May 27, 2011 at 9:55 PM | Permalink | Reply

I try to be accurate in my commentary, If you think that my commentary has been inaccurate, I’d appreciate it if you would direct me to specific errors so that I can make appropriate corrections.

My criticisms of the proxy reconstructions here have been detailed and technical. My opinion on the lack of worth of the canonical reconstructions is based on my assessment of their technical and statistical defects, not on “innuendo and smear”.

Here’s a small start at responding to his post. I invite others to add to it.

Steve, just looking at your post on the Nursery, I see lots of evidence. Here, for example:

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Readers around the climate-o-sphere will be familiar with the great work done by Deep Climate and John Mashey back in 2009/2010 pointing out questionable scholarship in the Wegman Report (W06) and in Wegman’s subsequent work with Said and others.

As DC points out, and DeSmog details, a paper by Said, Wegman et al 2008 has been pulled from the journal Computational Statistics and Data Analysis.

From DC:

The study, which appeared in 2008 in the journalComputational Statistics and Data Analysis, was headed by statistician Edward Wegman of George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. Its analysis was an outgrowth of a controversial congressional report that Wegman headed in 2006. The “Wegman Report” suggested climate scientists colluded in their studies and questioned whether global warming was real. The report has since become a touchstone among climate change naysayers.

This development might, as DC points out, spur George Mason University to conclude its “endless” investigation into Wegman’s scholarship.

The skeptics are denying that this discrediting has any import — surprise surprise surprise! It doesn’t matter. It’s of no significance. Move along, nothing to see here…

DC and Mashey’s discrediting of Wegman et al matters because Wegman’s work is held up by deniers as evidence that paleoclimate is flawed, and that climate science is a junk. Wegman is trumpeted as an authoritative expert on statistics, a true scholar, who is of the stature that his word and work holds real weight. Wegman’s 2006 report to Congress is held up as a credible refutation of the MBH paleoclimate reconstruction, ergo the IPCC TAR, ergo climate science in general, ergo the need for policy action to halt global warming.

These “pillars” of the AGW theory are thus destroyed, Samson style, as is the foundation for policy action on greenhouse gasses.

Here’s Barton on Wegman and the report:

Dr. Edward Wegman, a prominent statistics professor at George Mason University who is chair of the National Academy of Sciences’ (NAS) Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics, agreed to independently assess the data on a pro bono basis. Wegman is also a board member of the American Statistical Association.

About the Wegman committee: Dr. Wegman assembled a committee of statisticians, including Dr. David Scott of Rice University and Dr. Yasmin Said of The Johns Hopkins University. Also contributing were Denise Reeves of MITRE Corp. and John T. Rigsby of the Naval Surface Warfare Center. All worked independent of the committee, pro bono, at the direction of Wegman. In the course of Wegman’s work, he also discussed and presented to other statisticians on aspects of his analysis, including the Board of the American Statistical Association.

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I came across this article that is relevant in light of Dr. Curry’s recent post on the Harry Potter Theory of Climate:

Mysterious Source of Global Warming Identified:

For decades, scientists around the world have been puzzling over the source of recent anomalous warming of the planet otherwise known as anthropogenic global warming or AGW. The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was created to sort through the mountains of research and summarize it so that governments could plan to deal with the increase in temperatures, melting of glaciers, sea level rise and droughts.
However, in light of recent revelations about shenanigans at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) brought to light by hacked emails and all the “gates” linked to the IPCC, enough questions about the theory have been raised that an independent team of experts has begun its own investigation.

“We opened the science up to everyone who’s interested in helping out,” said Professor Lance Donnegal of the UK’s Bureau of Skepticism (BS) as we walked across the verdant British countryside to a site near an old stone castle.

“Tons of tips and hints have been flooding in since we invited the public to contribute their ideas. I’ve been astonished at their insights into the causes of global warming.”

As we talked, crowds of black-caped children milled around us and the camera crew, their cheeks apple-red in the chill February air. It was a picturesque winter afternoon in the English countryside.

“We came here after some particularly intriguing claims were made about the real cause of global warming. Believe me, what we found is a bombshell!”

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This is an open thread to discuss whatever your heart desires. I am preparing for a road trip and will not be able to do much blogging for a couple of weeks, although I will check in daily to see what is up and check for spam.

I did want to post a link to an article from DeSmog on PNS which claims that Climate Denial is not Postmodern.

Here’s an excerpt:

If our goal is to do something about the ever-growing problem of climate change denial, I believe we must first understand it—its forms, its motivations, its arguments.That’s why I recoil every time I hear the argument—made over the weekend in theNew York Times magazine by Judith Warner—that science denial used to be a left wing thing, centered on the so-called “postmodernists” of academia, but now things have flipped. Now it’s located on the right—witness climate denial. Or as Warner puts it:

That taking on the scientific establishment has become a favored activity of the right is quite a turnabout. After all, questioning accepted fact, revealing the myths and politics behind established certainties, is a tactic straight out of the left-wing playbook. In the 1960s and 1970s, the push back against scientific authority brought us the patients’ rights movement and was a key component of women’s rights activism. That questioning of authority veered in a more radical direction in the academy in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when left-wing scholars doing “science studies” increasingly began taking on the very idea of scientific truth.

This analysis is so wrong that one barely knows how to begin.

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This is entirely yours. Post whatever Skeptic, Denier and Contrarian Faux Pas you find with appropriate citations of course.

Have at it! Let’s get it on record.