A challenge

In the comments on the Collide-a-scape thread, Judy Curry has issued a challenge to mainstream climate science:

I am laying down the gauntlet, [The Hockey Stick Illusion] really needs to discussed and rebutted by the paleo researchers and the IPCC defenders.

Most of the responses are fallacious so far - along the lines of "a bad person liked this book". Let's see if anything more substantial appears.

Comments

[Pascvaks]

As implied in an earlier comment, Climate Science* (aka - swagamatology or agwology or chickenlittleology) is in the same position today that psychiatry/psychology was two hundred years ago. Don't put too much into the mumbling and arm waving of today's practitioners and advocates, it's barely even worth the effort of looking for any progress in this new area, from a decade-to-decade perspective, for the next hundred years. And, no matter what they say, please just smile and kindly ignore their pleas for billions or trillions of dollars or euros to reverse global warming. They think that giving you, me, and Mother Earth a labotomy will reverse the CO2 trend. Don't believe it!
PS: We can clean up things -but that's a different story and has nothing to do with 'Climate Change'.

[SimonH]

Working back up the list of recent comments...

Pascvaks - PS: We can clean up things -but that's a different story and has nothing to do with 'Climate Change'.

Quite so! We're all supportive of environmentalism. Giving a damn about the environment is how we come to examine the science behind the AGW hypothesis in the first instance. Being sceptical is not, despite claims from "the other side" to the contrary, the same as "drill baby drill, screw the environmental cost". You're not alone, here, in caring about the environment.

Scott B - The thing that strikes me the most is, in an environment where making any statement that is contrary to the "consensus" can jeopardize their funding and possibly their job, how can any climate scientist really expect the public to believe them.

Roger Pielke Jnr has posted a very disconcerting piece this evening, with much to parallel Dr Curry's recent observations at her faculty. The "black list", as Roger unapologetically calls it - alluding directly to McCarthyism - is very worrying indeed.

It's almost tempting to regard it as another laughable warmist exposé - and I think many sceptics are doing so - but I'm deeply concerned about waving this off jokingly because I don't believe this is something that will just cease, now that it's coming to light. This purposeful encroachment by political pro-activists into scientific academia is a cancer. I describe it as a cancer because it's grown largely unnoticed and nobody yet knows how far it's spread. We simply don't yet know what will be required to remove the "infection" - politically infected science IS science diseased. In terrible hospital drama fashion, "it's worse than we thought."

Don Pablo de la Sierra - She will turn a few, and those a few more. And in time, your prediction will come to pass.

Given recent revelations, I fear only the tenured will speak out.