I found Norwig's little experiment interesting. Even more interesting is the response it raised with our local HN deniers who seem more interested in discrediting global warming and climate change than in building our understanding of the current state and the climate. They are the moral equivalent, in my opinion, of the folks who dispute evolution.

The denier culture is sociologically interesting. Those interested in the process should a look at John Mashey's report

The current(185-page) PDF, has a much higher production quality and a lot more information on funding and activity patterns than earlier versions. The current version is at:

http://www.desmogblog.com/crescendo-climategate-cacophony John suggests that you read the first 4 pages, and, then, if you want to read more, do the following:

a) Print pages 2-4, the navigational aids

b) Download the full PDF, and for on-screen reading, open a second window (Acrobat: Window>new). Use one window to read the mainline narrative, and the second for rummaging the Appendices. Different people are familiar with different subsets, so I know of no way to linearize it that makes sense.

A few highlights:

p.167-168 on plagiarism:

Not just the tree-rings, but a big chunk of the “social network” part of the Wegman Report seems plagiarized from the Wasserman and Faust(1994) textbook. Deep Climate’s 4-page side-by-side is:

http://deepclimate.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/wegman-social...

That one is interesting because it seems unlikely to have originated with McIntyre and/or McKitrick.

DC is doing a further piece on that, but after that, I may look into letting those authors know.

See Figure 2.1, p.10, for the overall flow of anti-science memes and money-laundering “cloud”

See Fig A.2.2, p.46 ExxonMobil & Foundation Chronological Funding for Some Think Tanks

That identifies only visible funding for (Annapolis Center, CEI, CFACT, GMI, and Heartland), which leaves ((84%, 78%, 53%, 36%, 87%) unidentified, but it is certainly enough to be interesting. Someone with subpoena power could find out more, as there are many potential funding routes.

For amusement, see Fig A.3.1 p.50 “What’s in a Name?” to see how often names like “Institute” and “Science” pop up in entities that basically do PR and lobbying, despite mostly being tax-free 501(c)3s. I don’t know the (murky) 501(c)3 law enough to understand whether the amount of lobbying they do is OK or not …

However, here’s an interesting GoogleMap:

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&msa=0&#...

Hint: zoom in and see how many of these are located within one block of a Washington’s K Street. Not every organization located there does lobbying, but I doubt that it is a low-rent district.

See Table A.6.2, especially p.96-99 which lists active people versus visible anti-science activities, more or less chronologically from 1990 to now (Climategate), including continuing attacks A.Santer, A.Oreskes (on those folks), A.GATE (the current climategate etc, might be called A.Jones), and then shows organizational connections. I’d guess someone might do some more social network analysis.

At point, I was going to do PeopleXpeople … but in that group, no one was more than 1 hop away

The attacks on the hockey stick (which could also be called A.Mann) are now split:

A.Hockey is the 2002-current visible use of attacks on the hockey stick as a pillar of climate anti-science, basically used by almost everybody in Figure A.6.2(a).

A.HOCKX is my label for the 1998-2006 effort culminating in the Wegman Report, much of which was behind the scenes.

That’s the part that may well be investigated for 18USC1001 (misleading Congress) and 18USC371 (conspiracy) as per A.14, Possible Legal issues, p.184.

This was possibly interesting ... before the leak of the emails that made it crystal clear that the "consensus" group systematically kept the other side out of the peer-reviewed literature.

I'd also note that "consensus" is not a word you find in real science; one inconvenient fact can destroy the position of a consensus, although as Kuhn says (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Rev...), grossly oversimplifying, you might have to wait until enough of the members of the consensus retire or die.

It would be interesting if some topic in the field of software got as much public attention and debate by non-practioners as does climate change.

On one side (because there have to be two sides, and presented in a "fair and balanced" way, of course), you'd have the vast majority of working programmers all agree with the position that, say, writing software in a high level language is much more productive and useful than writing everything in machine language. And on the other side you'd have some non-programmers who are "skeptical" and coming up with all kinds of arguments why machine language is best. The skeptics would point out what they say are flaws in the reasoning, gaps in the data, etc.

This line of thought is not meant to argue that man-made global warming or catastrophic climate change are true and urgent, but rather to argue that perhaps that it doesn't make sense for non-scientists to take a stand on this issue -- especially taking a stand against the position of those who have vastly more knowledge and experience with the topic. Might they be wrong? Of course. But they are probably way more likely to be right than the average bloke on the street.

I don't have the time to double check this hypothesis, I'd feel fairly confident that after reviewing the titles of the journals that these articles were published in, that the bulk of the authors are not climatologists, but rather have expertise in other fields such as biology, meteorology, or agronomy. And that their work speculates on the impact of "climate change" on their respective fields, and that they rely heavily on the work of a few select climatologists.

I think it is also very important to remember that we're likely seeing a very large selection bias with respect to what kinds of papers get published. There are very few institutions that will give research money to a scientist who thinks that everything "will be ok". The people who are yelling that we're all gonna die and the earth will be destroyed (unless you give them money), are the types that get funding.

Would be super cool to see the articles about Sun going around the Earth. Probably 99.9% of articles from the XV century would say that the Sun goes around the Earth. The mere 0.1% would say that the opposite true. So the consensus would be that the Sun goes around the Earth.

Democracy in science doesn't work. 2+2=4 and I don't care what the consensus is.