(Moved this part of the thread to the bottom to un-nest it.)
@David Young in climate science the data is so noisy and the effects are so small, that statistics becomes much more important than in other fields.
For the several centuries prior to 1850 you may well be right. That period is beyond my ken, and I wouldn’t want to come down strongly on either side of this extraordinarily passionately fought debate. I’ve deliberately limited my own studies to the period since 1850 where the data is nowhere near as noisy as in say the 16th century. It would be stupid of me to work on the earlier hard-to-interpret data because I would be opening myself up to the sort of legal actions with which Mann has been threatened.
Had McShane and Wyner limited their remarks to before 1850 I would not have objected, the strong political slant of their paper notwithstanding. However they seemed to feel their statistical analysis is just as applicable to the past century or so as to half a millennium ago. I strongly disagree: the greatly increased reliability of instrumentation technology since 1850 allows us to pass from dubious statistical reconstructions of very imperfect data to much more reliable data. The role of statistics decreases in inverse proportion to the reliability of the data.
On the question of whether there are errors in Mann’s analysis, I am utterly unable to accept the legalistic approach to science in which the way to attack your opponent is to accuse him or her of illegalities. If you seriously believe that bringing legal action against Mann is the way to settle scientific differences then we have nothing further to discuss. You talk about my arguments being stupid: I say that threatening scientists you disagree with with legal action is the ultimate in stupidity. This is how the Tea Party works, which is anti-intellectualism at its worst!
The Tea Party of course will say that it is the scientists that are stupid. On that point the Tea Party and science will have to simply agree to disagree.