Which proxies are sound?

That’s all fine and good…but, the site should (1) make the purpose very clear up front; make this blindingly obvious to the general interested reader, (2) put up a list of the papers and studies that are currently being audited; for example, what does ‘other climate science work’ include, (3) put together and outline of all the papers where CA has demonstrated inadequate mathematics, and (4) comment on the significance of said inadequacy.

a) firstly about the primary purpose of the blog seems to be to bring a knowledge of mathematics and statistics to the issue. This is knowledge that is perceived to be sorely lacking in the climate science community. The fist issue addressed by Climateaudit was the infamous Mann hockey stick curve. Climateaudit showed that the derivation of this curve was based on the use of incorrect mathematics with the use of proxies that did not contain any valid temperature information. The whole area of paleo-temperature extraction was shown to be rife with ignorance of the appropriate mathematics and the use of unsound proxies

b) secondly the contributors of Climateaudit are not restricted to statisticians and engineers. There are quite a number of self-identified economists, physicists and geologists who contribute. Economists contribute because there is a large body of mathematics that has been developed in econometrics to discern the same sort of trends that climate scientists are trying to discover. Climate scientists instead of taking advantage of this knowledge and have insisted on attempting to develop their own techniques. Climateaudit has shown this to be unsuccessful due to the lack of mathematical skill in the community and the refusal to take advantage of knowledge outside of the their own small numbers.

c) Thirdly, the suggestion for an engineering document refers to the inadequacy of the current IPCC AR documents. These documents rely on the per-reviewed literature of the climate science community. It has been demonstrated that his community is small and lacking in the necessary mathematical skills. Thus peer review in this community is relying on those lacking in necessary skills reviewing the work of each other.

The purpose of auditing surface temperature measurements is to make sure hat they do not suffer from the same inadequate mathematics and mistakes that have affects the hockey stick and other climate science work. The recent discovery of a simple programming blunder that rendered the US surface temperature record incorrect from 2000 to 2007 illustrates this point. This was an inexcusable blunder that was made worse by the fact that it went undetected for seven years and had to be discovered by an outside party.

This does not inspire confidence in the climate science community’s skills and the effectiveness of their peer review process. To trust this community to develop knowledge on which to base policies to manage the world economy would be a foolish and incorrect thing to do.

2) Chris Mooney’s “The Republican War on Science”: look up Data Quality ACt and how it has been often abused to raise the bar so high for inconvenient results as to keep them from being used.

3) You might want to ask yourself: Steve McIntyre is Canadian, so one might expect that the first priority might be to audit Canadian data, especially since:
a) Canada is (slightly) larger than the US (total, including Alaska, which probably would make more sense if aggregated with Canada).
b) Consensus results expect it to warm faster further North.

For both of these reasons, if there is global warming, Canada (& the Arctic, and Greenland, and Russia) would contribute substantially more to the warming than the US, which is not expected to warm so much.