Personae non grata

If you want to know how “scientific consensus” is cooked up, look no further than the speaker lists at climate change conferences. Actually, do look further: to who doesn’t get invited to such shindigs.

Last week, the American Statistical Association sponsored a workshop on climate change. The goal, according to David Marker, one of the organisers and facilitators, was to “delineate a statistical science perspective on understanding climate change and to develop a consensus statement on the areas of clear knowledge, as well as those areas in which great uncertainty remains”.

Of course, developing a “consensus statement” is easy if you neglect to invite people like Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, who famously broke Michael Mann’s infamous hockey stick temperature chart (right). Showing Mann’s methodology to be so badly broken that it turns even random data into a hockey stick, is one of the more significant statistical contributions to climate research in the last decade. Considering that the question of how to use proxy data to reconstruct a historic temperature record, and whether this record does or doesn’t show warm and cool periods corresponding to solar activity, remains a hot topic of discussion within the ASA (PDF newsletter), this on its own would appear to qualify them for invitations to such a workshop.
McIntyre has also been swimming against the tide of obstructionism and even secrecy by government scientists to audit US temperature measurement stations. Though the focus of the research is the siting of these stations and how “bad data” gets “corrected”, a surprise discovery forced James Hansen, who heads the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies, to correct the benchmark temperature record which — like Mann’s Hockey Stick — the politicians on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change use to scare us into give them more powers to tax and regulate. Again, the significance of McIntyre’s work on the statistical treatment of climate change data appears to be substantial. His comments on some of the topics raised at the ASA workshop show insight and familiarity with the issues.

This isn’t the first time that McIntyre and McKitrick have been omitted from speaker lists. Shortly after McIntyre’s discovery that NASA GISS had been cooking the books, a conference on integrity in scientific research likewise overlooked the Canadian, even though he’d raised red flags over the secrecy with which NASA GISS treats its data collection sites and its statistical methods.

Understanding climate change requires the combined skills of atmospheric scientists and statisticians, said Marker. The former understand the physical relationships being investigated, while the latter know how to determine which hypotheses are strongly supported and which are still subject to uncertainty.

And here I thought the consensus of the people that get invited to consensus-development workshops is that the science is settled.