"Along with other IPCC authors, he was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his work attributing global warming to human influences."

Not exactly: He was not awarded the prize and in fact had to ammend his pleadings in his ongoing case because he mistated that he was awarded the prize. Here is what the IPCC said

"IPCC STATEMENT

Statement about the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize

The IPCC was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for its work on climate change, together with former US Vice-­‐President Al Gore.

In its citation, the Norwegian Nobel Committee said that the IPCC and Mr Gore shared the prize “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-­‐made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change”. In its announcement the Norwegian Nobel Committee stated that through the scientific reports it had issued over the past two decades, the IPCC had created an ever-­‐broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming, and that thousands of scientists and officials from over one hundred countries had collaborated to achieve greater certainty as to the scale of the warming.

The prize was awarded at the end of the year that saw the IPCC bring out its Fourth Assessment Report (AR4).

The prize was awarded to the IPCC as an organization, and not to any individual associated with the IPCC. Thus it is incorrect to refer to any IPCC official, or scientist who worked on IPCC reports, as a Nobel laureate or Nobel Prize winner. It would be correct to describe a scientist who was involved with AR4 or earlier IPCC reports in this way: “X contributed to the reports of the IPCC, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.”

At some point perhaps I can detail how the "approval" of others can be turned into an "economy" of sorts.. need to think on that some more..

"William's observation and the reaction to it is interesting and revealing. "

It's also wrong. MOST of what she writes is not wrong. Some of what she writes may be wrong. But when you say MOST, I think journalistic ethics and common decency require you to support your contention. Otherwise you just jack the thread into discussions like this. Say something provocative. old dog. old trick.

"Journalistic ethics says we cannot say somebody is "wrong". This is why conventional journalism is useless in a controversy. "

Journalistic ethics say nothing of the sort. Suggest you google "bush was wrong." Now, if your point is that journalists have an ethical standard that commits them to fairness or telling both sides, even where one side is highly likely to be wrong, then we can agree. That is one of your talking points I believe.

"Now I don't agree that Lucia is consistently "wrong" at the blog posting level. I do think she (like most of the naysayers) pays attention to the wrong things, which is a higher order judgment and one that the scientifically informed community has utterly failed to convey. "

Lucia, pays attention to what INTERESTS her and her readers. Your higher order judgement is not a higher order judgement. It is rather an ethical judgement that you think Lucia should be interested in other things.

"But there is nothing intrinsically wrong with someone, like William, who has a reputation stating that a source is more or less valuable or reliable. That person may or may not choose to spend the time to back it up, and the reader may or may not choose to believe it. But this is exactly the sort of judgment that has to be made if we are to make progress on substance and move away from style."

Seriously. William has a reputation and the reputation of working with others is documented and not that admirable. His claim was MOST of what she wrote was wrong. When he adds that he hasnt been there in a while what does that tell me. he sampled a stream of argument sometime ago. He hasnt sampled it recently. On the basis of a limited sample he makes a statement.
MOST of it was wrong. I can be pretty sure that this is false on its face. Its quite difficult to be wrong most of the time ( some skeptics of course defy the odds)

" And this sort of judgment is necessary to the progress of science; there is far more noise than signal, and we must rely on people we trust to act as useful filters. "

Yes. This is why the mails give me a good clue as to who to trust and who not to trust.

On the other hand, I think Lucia is performing a very useful service.

"I think Lucia's is emerging, along with this site, as the closest we have to neutral ground. I said so on my blog recently, along with the gloss that both sites are frequently wrong on matters of substance. I ruefully noted that this tendency to error seems a requirement for neutral ground from the point of view of those of us who have some grasp of how the climate system works. "

"But nobody regards a doctor or a plumber or an auto mechanic as arrogant for being able to solve a practical problem that they themselves cannot. This claim of "arrogance" makes no sense. What they imply is that we are "deluded"; that in fact we have no more expertise than, say, homeopaths or palm readers. But this doesn't fit in with the facts; homeopaths are not defended by the NAS, the AGU, the Royal Academy, etc. And they usually aren't accused of "arrogance". "

I have no issue with well placed arrogance. I do have an issue with falsehood. When for example, Jones argues that he shouldnt release to
people because of IP, I know that is BS. When the mails confirm why he really refused, then my expert judgement on these things is confirmed. When non experts argue that you don't NEED to share data or NEED to share code, I have to endure their ignorance. When, as a expert in data analysis I argue that truncating a proxy series and grafting on a temperature series for smoothing purposes is NOT good practice, I have to endure people who argue that it is. The issue MT is that climate science encompasses a whole host of disciplines, programming, archiving, analysis, writing, presentation graphics. I don't trust Jones to archive data. He doesnt trust himself. I do trust the NOAA guys to archive data. Let me put it a different way. There are no climate science experts. Or let me put it a different way. William connelly is NOT an expert in reading blogs and determining if most of the content is right or wrong. In fact, he has demonstrated failures in reading comprehension.
NOT in science, but in reading comprehension. he may very well be a good scientist, but he has no demonstrated expertise in determining whether a blog is most right or mostly wrong.

We've talked about this before. MT is two different people.. one in public and the other in private email. I MUCH prefer the private MT. I don't want to characterize his public persona.. I've already done that except to say this. His public persona is deeply flawed. And I say persona because I want to seperate that from the person I senses in our private mails.

Bart, in some cases scientists are looking at the accuracy of reconstructions. In our book, for example, we noted that Briffa didnt even consider questioning the temperature record of Jones for Siberia. That option, a logical and scientific option, was off the table. When proxies diverge there are cases where researchers have done there own reconstruction and ignored CRU
( Wilscon comes to mind) FWIW.

JAN ESPER*w, DAVID FRANK*, ULF BU¨ NTGEN*, ANNE VERSTEGE*, RASHIT M.
HANTEMIROV z and ALEXANDER V. KIRDYANOV. 2010. Trends and uncertainties in Siberian indicators of 20th century warming. Global Change Biology (2010) 16, 386–398, doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2486.2009.01913.x
Abstract
Estimates of past climate and future forest biomass dynamics are constrained by
uncertainties in the relationships between growth and climatic variability and uncertainties
in the instrumental data themselves. Of particular interest in this regard is the borealforest
zone, where radial growth has historically been closely connected with temperature
variability, but various lines of evidence have indicated a decoupling since about the
1960s. We here address this growth-vs.-temperature divergence by analyzing tree-ring
width and density data fromacross Siberia, and comparing 20th century proxy trends with
those derived from instrumental stations. We test the influence of approaches considered
in the recent literature on the divergence phenomenon (DP), including effects of tree-ring
standardization and calibration period, and explore instrumental uncertainties by employing
both adjusted and nonadjusted temperature data to assess growth-climate
agreement. Results indicate that common methodological and data usage decisions alter
20th century growth and temperature trends in a way that can easily explain the post-1960
DP. We show that (i) Siberian station temperature adjustments were up to 1.3 1C for
decadal means before 1940, (ii) tree-ring detrending effects in the order of 0.6–0.8 1C, and
(iii) calibration uncertainties up to about 0.4 1C over the past 110 years. Despite these large
uncertainties, instrumental and tree growth estimates for the entire 20th century warming
interval match each other, to a degree previously not recognized, when care is taken to
preserve long-term trends in the tree-ring data. We further show that careful examination
of early temperature data and calibration of proxy timeseries over the full period of
overlap with instrumental data are both necessary to properly estimate 20th century longterm
changes and to avoid erroneous detection of post-1960 divergence..

WRT the 'error" you claim in the second post. Sorry you are wrong.
how's that for a Monthy Python skit.

The UAH post is not dull to people who are BETTING on the temperature. William, one of the fun little things we do at Lucias to amuse ourselves, AND keep things civil is we engage in a somewhat social activity of betting game.
So what is INTERESTING to us may be dull to you. But its not WRONG. your claim was

"Most of her blog was wrong." You cite two examples. One of which you criticize for being dull.

You're right. I visited your blog maybe two years ago and everything was wrong. Me saying so, makes it so. Because I'm right.

Education does not seem to help those on either side. The over reaction to short term events that confirm global warming are just as ill informed as the over reaction to short term events that dis confirm global warming. If for example, we saw 10 really hot years do you honestly think people who believe in AGW would say it was just the weather. Or would they say "its worse than we thought, do more drastic action. IF you believe the science, the n the science says you wont see the feedback signal from your actions for DECADES. It's not a process that will respond in measurable ways over the political term of those making the decision. And politican like to take credit for making things better

A while back I made a similar argument to Lucia's about the difficulties of implementing actions to thwart climate change from a control theory standpoint. When the system you are trying to control has long lags and your feedback is noisy and occassionally out of phase with your control input, then tendency to over control or under control is ever present. In simple terms, As we make changes to GHG levels, it's almost certain that the short term feedback will most certainly be at odds with that control input. People and politicians act and think on a short term basis, a political cycle basis. If we, for example, impose draconian cuts in GHGs and if by chance of weather the climate warms suddenly, how will people react? If it by chance cooled suddenly how would people react? Tough problem