Latest climate "Hockey Stick" paper - scientific misconduct?

Wow:

However, here I document the gross misrepresentation of the findings of a recent scientific paper via press release which appears to skirt awfully close to crossing the line into research misconduct, as defined by the NRC. I recommend steps to fix this mess, saving face for all involved, and a chance for this small part of the climate community to take a step back toward unambiguous scientific integrity.

The paper I refer to is by Marcott et al. 2013, published recently in Science.

Just, wow.  Pielke's post is long, and detailed, and very damning.  And remember, Pielke is a "luke warmer" - believing that temperatures are rising and it's partially the fault of CO2.

Marcott's paper was a reconstruction of the climate over the entire Holocene - the last 11,000 years.  It showed a rise to a maximum around 500 B.C. and then a slow cooling until a warming spike during the last century.   Steven McIntyre (the man who shredded Michael Mann's original hockey stick paper) has a further shredding of Marcott's late and weak FAQ response to the many criticisms of his paper:

Marcott et al have posted their long-promised FAQ at realclimate here. Without providing any links to or citation of Climate Audit, they now concede:

20th century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes, and therefore is not the basis of any of our conclusions.

Otherwise, their response is pretty much a filibuster, running the clock on questions that have not actually been asked and certainly not at issue by critics. For questions and issues that I’ve actually raised, for the most part, they merely re-iterate what they already said. Nothing worth waiting for.


They did not discuss or explain why they deleted modern values from the Md01-2421 splice at CA here and here. Or the deletion of modern values from OCE326-GGC300 as asked here.

Nor do they discuss the difference between the results that had (presumably) been in the submission to Nature (preserved as a chapter in Marcott’s thesis).

Nor did they discuss the implausibility of their coretop redating of MD95-2043 and MD95-2011 as discussed here.

Instead of dealing with actual questions, for the most part, their “FAQ” filibusters about questions that no one was asking in connection with this study.

Other than that, it's awesome.  I for one would love to know the names of the scientists who participated in the Marcott paper peer review.  It would be interesting to ask them their opinions. Remember, this paper was published in Science, ostensibly the most prestigious Scientific Journal in the world, and it was the blogosphere that found the problems, not the scientists.

One wonders if there is none so blind as him who will not see.  OK, one doesn't wonder, actually.