Connolley Endorses Upside Down Mann

by Steve McIntyre on October 29th, 2009

Kaufman’s grudging acknowledgement (see their draft Corrigendum) that they used the Tiljander proxies upside down has not convinced the Team that the identical orientation of the Tiljander proxies in Mann et al 2008 was also upside down.

There has been an active new round of debate in the blogs, with William Connolley endorsing Upside Down Mann. It seems that we are facing not simply an Upside Down Mann, but an Upside Down Team.

Roger Pielke Jr had opined hopefully that this concession would finally settle at least one small point in paleoclimate. Pielke said that “it looks like this dispute will in fact be resolved unequivocally through the peer-reviewed literature, which for all of its faults, is the media of record for scientific claims and counterclaims”. Pielke was obviously aware of the role of blogs (both Climate Audit and in Finland) in this dispute and was here focusing more on the fact that Kaufman was admitting the upside down use in a formal venue, rather than the role of the journals in extracting the admission from Kaufman. This point was misconstrued by Ben Hale here who interpreted Roger’s post as evidence that the Kaufman error had been detected and resolved by journal peer review and due diligence, when that’s not what happened at all. (I posted a comment at Hale’s to this effect.)