Here at Prometheus we have for years closely followed the controversy over the so-called temperature reconstruction “hockey stick.” So it was with some interest that I saw this blog post linked from Climate Audit, apparently written by a Scottish libertarian blogger called Bishop Hill. Hill writes of the recent years of the hockey stick debate:

The story is a remarkable indictment of the corruption and cynicism that is rife among climate scientists, and I’m going to try to tell it in layman’s language so that the average blog reader can understand it.

And indeed Hill’s post is well-written, and accurate as far as I can tell. Of course, such stories have as many sides as there are participants, so if any of those involved including Steve McIntyre or Caspar Ammann would like to post or comment here, they’d be welcome.

Long-time readers (do we have any?;-) will recall that in the fall of 2005 we issued a challenge to Steve McIntyre and Michael Mann, the lead protagonists on either side of the debate, to explain to us policy-oriented folks why we should care about their very public squabbling.

Steve McIntyre took us up on our challenge (as did his collaborator Ross McKitrick). Michael Mann declined the invitation. McIntyre explained that the debate over the hockey stick mattered not because of its direct relevance to the debate over what to do about global warming, but because of matters of what we call around here “science policy“– peer review, public confidence in science, and simply getting this right rather than wrong. McIntyre explained that if he were the head of the IPCC,

I would be particularly angry at being placed in a position where I used this logo and wasn’t fully informed about adverse information pertaining to it. I also wouldn’t be leaving it up to some probably adversarial committee like the Barton Committee to sort this out. I’d be all over the problem so that my community, the community of climate scientists, was not further embarrassed and so that government institutions would be able to rely confidently on the opinions of IPCC. . .

If our very logo for IPCC TAR blew up on us, then something was wrong with our procedures for review. I wouldn’t go around patting ourselves on the back and telling everyone that this was the most “rigorous” review procedure in the history of science, since we’d goofed on such a prominent issue. I’d want to know why we goofed and how to avoid it in the future, or at least, how to minimize the chances of a recurrence. So when some redneck tried to use the Hockey Stick fiasco against IPCC, I’d at least have an answer.

While I am not in a position to evaluate the merits of the technical arguments of McIntyre’s criticisms of the Hockey Stock (the NAS and Wegman Reports weighed in on that), his complaints about the science policy aspects of the issue have stood the test of time.

In response to the Bishop Hill piece McIntyre writes:

There’s a definite foolhardiness and contemptuousness of the public by the IPCC and, in particular, the core of the Hockey Team. . . Every step of the process has been publicly documented. You’d think that they’d have been extra diligent in their reviewing. Instead, what we see is one thing botched after another and one sly manouevre after another.

If this is representative of how climate articles are written and how climate peer reviewing is done, what a pathetic performance. They might say – well, this is a bad example. To which I’d say, well, you knew that it was in the public eye, it should have been a good example, why wasn’t it?

I’ve compared the issue to the WMD argument, which was also a cheap way of arousing the public; and, myself to an analyst who observes that an aluminum tube is sometimes just an aluminum tube. That doesn’t mean that other arguments for the war couldn’t be made or that the war was right or wrong; just that it was justified based on the aluminum tube argument. In that case, some effort was made to understand why they got the WMD intelligence wrong.

I agree. Having collaborated a bit with Steve McIntyre in recent years, and seen how the community reacts to him in the peer review process, I have seen some of the frothing and irrationality that he stirs. Further, as a long-time observer of this debate, how the more vocal climate science community has dealt with the criticisms of the Hockey Stick and McIntyre’s determined efforts is really an embarrassment to all of the hard-working and brilliant scientists who work out of the limelight trying to advance knowledge in a rigorous manner. The problem is that the behavior of the few reflects upon the community as a whole.

McIntyre may never get the recognition that he deserves from the climate science community (though some, like Peter Webster and Judy Curry have shown leadership by recognizing Steve’s legitimacy, and apparently taken their lumps for it), but within science policy circles it is becoming increasingly clear that has made a significant contribution to upholding the integrity of climate science, and for this he should be applauded.