Bishop Hill Bob's response
Sep 10, 2010 Climate: HSI Here's Bob Ward's quickfire response from the previous thread, interspersed with my comments
So you have responded to my critique of your book with an ‘ad hominem’ attack on me – how very hilarious and predictable. You obviously cannot rebut or justify the inaccuracies that I have drawn attention to, so you resort to desperate tactics instead.
Well, I actually posted a pretty detailed rebuttal to each point you made and I provided a link in the Guardian piece to the blog post in which I did so. How unfortunate that you missed it!
What a shame - you could have explained how the errors occurred, or apologised for them. Or you could even have come clean about the other errors in your book. For instance, I pointed out that you falsely claimed that a paper by Shaopeng Huang and colleagues “never appeared in print”.
Well this is very interesting, because in fact it is not me that claims this, but David Deming. I would have thought it impossible to read the book without taking this on board - it's a blockquote, after all. What an unfortunate mistake you have made there (another one!).
What I did not have space to mention was that the alleged source of this inaccurate claim, a paper by David Deming, actually acknowledged that the paper by Huang and co-authors was published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
Hold on, I thought you said I made the claim. It's excellent that you now say that it was Deming who said this, but I must say you seem a little unclear about all this.
But you decided not to quote the relevant part of Professor Deming’s paper which contained this information, hence giving a misleading impression of his views. You attempt to portray these multiple errors as “peripheral to the Hockey Stick story”.
Your answer on these two sentences lies in the fact that they are related - I didn't mention the fact that Deming said that Huang got his findings into print elsewhere because I was merely trying to illustrate the point that sceptics said it was difficult to get into the scientific literature. (see the extract from the book here). You keep (accidentally) telling everyone that I'm trying to prove a case of journal bullying re Huang, but as I don't actually say this, imply it or believe it...well, people can draw their own conclusions.
Yet your book’s erroneous account of the fate of the Huang et al paper invites readers to “compare it to later events in this story” and makes explicit reference to it elsewhere in his tale.
Correct! I do say this. I think the similarity of Huang's handling by Nature is very similar to what happened to McIntyre and McKitrick. The story of the M&M submission to Nature is presumably the other "explicit reference to it elsewhere in [the] tale" that you mention, isn't that right? It is, after all, the only other reference to Huang in the book, as I'm sure you know.
Which is very odd, because there is no mention of journal bullying when I discuss the M&M Nature submission either. And you must have known this, because you have read the book, right? How on earth are you managing to connect both the M&M and the Huang Nature submissions to journal bullying when I suggest nothing of the sort on either occasion? What an unfortunate series of errors you have made, Bob!
In the concluding paragraph of his book, you warn readers of “the powerful, relentless forces of corrupted science”,
Yes?
but the fundamental problem with your account is that it displays clear evidence throughout of confirmation bias – however, I am happy to accept that this was completely unintentional rather than deliberate.
You'll need to explain.
It remains to be seen whether your report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation also suffers from the same fundamental flaw.
The problem with claiming flaws without any evidence is that we're all none the wiser.
Is there anything else?
