I found some intriguing information on one of the main climate skeptics, Steve McIntyre, who runs the ClimateAudit blog. He has gotten lots of press and is starting to appear on CNN as a climate pundit. IMO, he is trying to assume the role of a Nate Silver -- playing the skeptical statistician.
As an appetizer, the following story in WSJ came out right before the climate science email controversy broke. At the time, I noticed that the mainstream media suddenly started to treat "amateur science sleuthing" and opinions of laymen with a bit more respect. Just like the Wall Street Journal editorial writers became impressed by McIntyre's rigor :
Revenge of the Climate Laymen
Mr. McIntyre offers what many in the field do not: rigor.
I present a few items questioning McIntyre's "rigorous" agenda and his spotty, possibly phony, credentials.
According to a recent article from The Weekly Standard on the climate controversy
McIntyre is not a climate-science insider, with peer-reviewed articles in journals that the hockey team firmly controlled. He's an amateur with mathematical chops, with a serious track record for spotting statistical funny business. McIntyre, who spent decades in mineral exploration, was involved in exposing the Bre‑X fraud in Canada several years ago. Bre‑X was a gold mining company promising fat profits on a new proprietary technology for ore deposits in Borneo; McIntyre smelled a rat and demanded the raw data. Bre‑X collapsed shortly after.
My emphasis added.
Laherrere recently had a TheOilDrum.com post describing Bre-X
A series of high profile resource stock scams took place in the 1990s, which culminated in the huge Bre-X scandal in 1995. Bre-X’s stock collapsed after its much-touted Busang gold project – thought at the time to contain more than 70-million ounces (2.1 kt) of gold - turned out to be a fraud; core samples from the drills had been tampered with and expertly "salted" with gold dust.
I have studied this "Bre-X" fraud a fair amount and some people think the fraud was abetted by a questionable technique from the field of geostatistics called kriging. This presents a huge potential for bias by re-sampling from a few holes and not understanding the statistical independence of spatially separated data. I have worked on this problem in a different subject area and can see how they can get it wrong. I wrote a bit about it here, and may do more on it if I find something significant.
So although the Bre-X fraud was real, see also, something really funny about how this ties into McIntyre.
Actually, I don't think that McIntyre had any role in uncovering the fraudulent aspects, apart from him being aware of Bre-X since he was formerly a mineral company executive. None of the sources on Bre-X mention him or his company. I have no idea who is involved in making out McIntyre to be some sort of one-man crime fighter. There are some very strange things going on here.
Besides that, if McIntyre is such a smart man, why isn't he involved with the Peak Oil debate at all? (or peak coal, or oil shale, or oil sands, or anything else relating to mining non-renewable resources) He should be in there demanding all the production data from all of the oil and energy and mining companies in existence. He surely understands how oil interests might want to deceive the public. Why does he then concentrate on climate science?
"Climategate shakes trust in scientists: Saudi"
Talking about the pot calling the kettle black. The Saudis who are the least amenable to opening up data for public view are jumping on the pile and hypocritically accusing scientists of misdeeds. Why doesn't McIntyre get in to the middle of this and demand data from Saudi Arabia? We all know at TheOilDrum that they overstate their reserves and play games with the data. Let us give money to McIntyre and let him figure out what is going on if he is that smart a guy.
McIntyre claims not to have an agenda, and won't say whether he actually believes in AGW. This is all so bizarre.
So like clock-work, the media buildup on the climate science emails is perfectly synchronized to the Copenhagen meeting.
Look closely at the Y-axis, which is the number of news posts as reported by Google (these are separated since I have been monitoring Google since the original story broke). Over the weekend the number of articles which mention "climategate" went up by ~ 10x. All the echo chamber starting at the end of November paid off, and the complaints of media not covering this story are now moot.
This has the appearance of a carefully planned strategy to marginalize climate science.
The "Hide The Decline" meme will next likely get recycled to portray Peak Oil as a discredited theory.
The study of Peak oil does have in common with the science of climate change in that no controlled experiment exists to test any theories against. The science only exists to be able to understand and predict the future. So scientists are left to their own devices to come up with their own approaches to evaluate how the theories are progressing. It will forever follow an iterative process and it will never end, since unlike some controlled experiment with preconditions and postconditions that approach simply does not exist. If they so badly want to get rid of the science, then we would have nothing left to make projections against.
The more I watch how this is playing out the more I think it is all about marginalizing and suppressing the quest for an objective truth. In the end, it has nothing and everything to do with climate change. Climate change is just a way for them to pick away at the "credibility of science". McIntyre is just another phony scientist leading the charge.
UPDATE: Some missed the lie about McIntyre's credentials. If the claim is that you exposed a fraud when in fact you didn't, that qualifies as presenting false credentials. So the fact that McIntyre supposedly exposed the biggest mining fraud in history (Bre-X), when in fact he didn't is presenting false credentials. I don't mind that he is an amateur, but if he is an amateur and doesn't continue to report his (previous and current) ties to an oil and gas exploration company, that is also presenting a false front.