Comment on debate with Tim Ball

Here's a comment left on AlGorelied.com about my debate with Tim Ball. It's so classic that I just have to include it here. Naturally, the author didn't have the cojones to sign his real name to his opinions:

Author: Daryl M

Comment: Mr. Appell,  I listened to the debate with Dr. Ball and if I were you, I would be embarrassed and humiliated. As a supposed scientific journalist, you have a remarkable lack of understanding of the issues. Your claim that we should listen to journalists who "talk to experts" rather than blogs is the height of arrogance. After listening to you dodge and evade legitimate questions raised by Ms. Taft and Dr. Ball, you have zero credibility as a journalist and given you apparently have written articles for Scientific American, I guess that is one rag that I will skip in the future.  WRT your claim that you have spoken with many scientists about the hockey stick and none of them agree with the M&M analysis, that further emphasizes my point. The hockey stick was thoroughly debunked, not just by M&M, but also by Wegman. It is a proven fact that if red noise is fed into Mann et al's algorithms it will produce a hockey stick. Further to that, Mann et al did their best to withhold their data and algorithms, obviously trying to obfuscate their claims. More recently, with Briffa finally being forced to disclose his Yamal data years after the fact, we can see that he cherry picked tree cores to utilize only the ones that supported his claims. In fact, some of the proxies were inverted to further support the claim that recent temperature changes are "unprecedented". Your claim that no one agrees with M&M's claim leaves me frankly stunned.  Jones is on the record as having refused to release his data and now it is claimed that the data are lost. How convenient.  Hansen at GISS is widely known to take liberties with the data, again we can thank heros like Steve McIntyre who take the time to audit and attempt reproduce their work, usually uncovering gross mistakes in their methodology.  Anthony Watts has also tirelessly reviewed the surface record and proven beyond any question that it is fraught with inconsistencies that contribute to a gross overstatement of the surface temperature. Do you not think it is significant that in the early 1990s, a large percentage of the surface stations (e.g., from Siberia) were taken off-line?  I really laughed at your deflection to Dr. Ball that he should write a paper about the issues he raised. The peer-review process that underlies the IPCC report as well as the hockey stick is clearly a joke. It is widely known that of the supposed 2500 scientists who back the IPCC report, many submitted comments in disagreement that were ignored by the editors. The claim that 2500 scientists back the report is scandalous. The reality is that a small cadre of editors, many of whom are not even scientists edited out comments that did not support the desired conclusion that global warming is caused by man-made CO2. The reality is that the supposed peer-review process of papers like Mann et al is a case of you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours, rather than a broad support.  If you had any balls as a journalist, you would write about the peer review process, or M&M's work or Anthony Watts' work, or the blatant withholding of data by Mann, Briffa and Jones, yet you hide under the protective wing of the supposed consensus. All I can say is that you are in good company. You are no less a fraud than Mann, Briffa, Jones, Hansen and Al Gore, and the rest of the cowards who accepted the Nobel. You should be ashamed.  See all comments on this post here: http://algorelied.com/?p=3044#comments