I wouldn't exactly call it a "crusade" but the fact that McIntyre and company were able to find a fatal flaw within a few hours of its posting and this AFTER it had passed peer review I must confess I find a little shocking.
That being said, here is a link to the latest bit...I must beg your forgiveness for posting a link to a "denier" site but it is the fastest, easiest way to get you up to speed....
Below is a snip...
Michael Kottek writes in the comment section:
The results of my FOI request to the University of Melbourne can be seen here:
http://tinyurl.com/96ey5dt
I requested all correspondence between the authors and the journal regarding the paper. The referees reports were exempted as were documents relating to the resubmitted paper.
I also requested correspondence between the authors after the paper was accepted. Once again emails relating to the resubmitted paper were exempted, and personal material redacted.
I note that emails regarding the paper that were received by one author and not forwarded to the others would not have been covered by my request.
Despite the embarrassment of the withdrawn paper, the University is to be commended for their no nonsense approach to this request. As an alumunus, I am pleased that the response is far more sensible than the approach taken by the UEA and UVa.
Steve: Oct 28, 9 pm Eastern
Here is a more detailed commentary which raises questions about Karoly’s claim that they had “independently” discovered the screening error on June 5. [Note: times in the emails are in multiple time zones. In the analysis below, it is my understanding that in June 2012, relative to UTC, Melbourne time was +10, Switzerland +2, Eastern -4, CA blog time -5.]
As CA readers are aware, the issue of screening in Gergis et al 2012 was first raised in a CA post in a May 31 blog post, a discussion that directly quoted the following paragraph of Gergis et al:
Our temperature proxy network was drawn from a broader Australasian domain (90E–140W, 10N–80S) containing 62 monthly–annually resolved climate proxies from approximately 50 sites (see details provided in Neukom and Gergis, 2011)… Only records that were significantly (p<0.05) correlated with the detrended instrumental target over the 1921–1990 period were selected for analysis. This process identified 27 temperature-sensitive predictors for the SONDJF warm season (Figure 1 and Table 1) henceforth referred to as R27.
The CA discussion, and, in particular, the Name and Shame blog post, was referred to on numerous occasions in the internal emails among Gergis, Neukom and others over the next few days, commencing almost immediately with an email from Gergis to Neukom and other coauthors we follows:
We should all be aware that this is unfolding:
http://climateaudit.org/2012/05/31/myles-allen-calls-for-name-and-shame
In my original post, I had presumed that Gergis et al had used correlation screening against trending series (which I termed the “Screening Fallacy”), a topic discussed on a number of occasions at critical climate blogs (see references in original post.) Against this, Jim Bouldin and others argued that Gergis et al had employed detrending screening, thereby avoiding the CA criticism. The CA discussion quickly led to Jean S checking the correlations of the available series. On June 5 (blogtime 16:42; 07:42 June 6 in Melbourne), Jean S reported in CA comments here that Gergis’ claim by Gergis to have used detrended correlations was false (asking me and others to check). Jean S’ comment almost immediately (within an hour) attracted online notice from Hu McCulloch (blog 17:39) and Kenneth Fritsch (blog 18:19).
About two hours after Jean S’ post – by now nearly 2 am in Switzerland (June 6 09:46 Melbourne; 01:46 Switzerland; blog 18:46 June 5), Neukom urgently notified his Australian associates of the same problem that Jean S had reported at CA a couple of hours earlier. Neukom had a skype discussion with Gergis, followed up by an email (2Gergis, page 77) to Gergis, Karoly and others. Neukom noted that the mistake was related to the proxy screening (then under discussion at Climate Audit) and thus a “delicate issue”:
As just discussed with joelle on skype, I found a mistake in our paper in journal of climate today. It is related to the proxy screening, so it is a delicate issue. In the paper we write that we do the correlation analysis for the screening based on detrended (instrumental and proxy) data, but in reality we did not use detrended data.
Meanwhile at CA (blog time June 5 20:11; Melbourne 11:11), CA reader HaroldW reported that he had confirmed Jean S’ results. I checked in at CA with a question to Jean S (blog time 20:49 June 5; Melbourne 11:49)."
http://climateaudit.org/2012/10/28/gergis-et-al-correspondence/
Can anyone point me in the direction of some deconstructions of Steve McIntyre's crusade against Gergis et. al. (an Australian "hockey stick" reconstruction that was pulled from publication earlier this year after a discrepancy in the methodology was identified). McIntyre and his acolytes are claiming it as a scalp even though its been resubmitted for review
