If it took an economist to “break” the hockey stick analysis, wouldn’t that be a case of extremely sloppy climate science? Seriously, this was my first observation upon hearing about the Mann hockey stick: that a layman exposed its flaw so easily. Even more disturbing is that the whole initial Kyoto campaign rode upon it and that IPCC (to relax my earlier statement) included it in its earlier reports.
“So there, gotcha” is sufficient in sending a paper back to the drawing board. Again, the burden of proof is upon the author, especially when it comes to trillion-dollar policy making.
Your dependence on realclimate.org is also disturbing. That’s an advocacy site that parrots anything IPCC. Its bias is nauseating. (I’m also turned off by knee-jerk anti-AGW bias also.)
Of course people make mistakes. That’s no excuse for forever ignoring all sides of the issue, which seems to be what you would prefer to do. (People do not like to be given data that conflicts with belief, and people who can’t handle that shouldn’t be scientists.)
Thanks for the list. It may come in handy someday. I have a feeling that in 5 years or so–however long it takes for IPCC’s credibility to fall apart from its own weight of inconsistencies and false predictions–that several of these authors are going to have difficulty looking for a job.
