Dr. Eric Steig Screws Up Again '" Real Climategate?

Professor Eric Steig of the University of Washington's grasp of reality may be worse than his expertise in statistical mathematics. A while back I poked a little fun at the good doctor's failure to understand the math required in his Nature magazine cover paper on antarctic warming. After climate blog denizen, Hu McCullum, checked Steig's math, it turned out that Steig had screwed up his estimate of the Antarctic continent. Not long after that, Dr. Steig issued a corrigendum, that in Latin is a correction, that stated that the minimum he was sure the Antarctic was warming was 0.02 degrees Centigrade per decade. That right science fans, a whopping two hundredths of a degree C! The good doctor absentmindedly forgot to mention Hu in the corrigendum, he amazing discovered his own error, by himself, without any help from Hu of course.

On another occasion I wrote a small article about how well the good doctor Steig could quote people out of context all the while his team is complaining about climategate emails that people were quoting out of context. Now if this was happening behind the scenes of one of the reality TV shows or say I knew in advance that Christina Aguilera was going to screw up the national anthem at the Super Bowl, I would be the buzz of the blogosphere. But it is not anything that important. It is just one of the climate scientists telling the world that we are all going to fry if we don't take a bicycle to work bending the truth.

Things do not end there though. The good Dr. Steig recommended that the bloggers that thought his paper was lacking write their own peer reviewed paper or shut up. A few climate blog types took him up on it and wrote a paper about his paper, showing that his paper sucked. I didn't write about that since I knew the paper sucked. The blog guys RyanO, Nic L, Steve McIntyre and Jeff Id's paper in the Journal of Climate was peer reviewed by the top brains of the climate science world and after a thorough going over, proved that the good doctor Eric Steig's innovative statistical methodology sucked. Okay, before you start getting down on me for my adjective. The goal of doctor Steig paper was to create data, where there was no data, to prove there was warming where no one could prove there was warming. You pick your own adjective.

The magnanimous Dr. Steig complimented the blog crew on their peer reviewed publication saying that their methods were better but they proved his point that Antarctica was warming. The blog crew's paper was not intended to prove anything other than the methods Steig used were not the proper methods to use should someone be compelled to create data where none existed. Dr. Steig basked in the glory of his non-existent victory for a while then he had to quit leaving well enough alone by publishing a blog post on the climate science blog realclimate, that the blog crew had screwed up. I guess he realized that blog crew's paper really didn't prove there was any warming in the Antarctica after all.

His blog post and his snipping comments by the blog crew, hacked a couple of the blog crew, RyanO and Jeff Id, off. So RyanO dumped most of Dr. Steig dirty laundry in the middle of the blogosphere's front yard. After pointing out Dr. Steig math inadequacies once again, RyanO dropped an academic bomb shell. The good Dr. Steig, per RyanO, was reviewer A for the paper the blog crew wrote. Reviewer A, again per RyanO, basically forced the blog crew to rewrite their paper and include other statistical methods that the blog crew did not feel was necessary. Then Steig, aka reviewer A, had the gonads to criticized the methods that he recommended the blog crew use if they wanted their paper published. Reviewer A generated 88 pages of comments for a paper about 9 pages long apparently to keep the paper from getting published. The Journal of Climate, per the blog crew comments, called in another reviewer to break the deadlock or the paper probably would not have been published.

A few of you that search the internet for things other than recent celebrity crotch shots might vaguely remember leaked scientific emails dubbed climategate previously mentioned. One of the leaked emails discussed subverting the peer review process to get papers they, the elite climate team, deemed unworthy not published in quality journals. All the world famous, Nobel Prize winning climate scientists associated with the people involved in that email blew it off as a misunderstanding. So it will be interesting to find out if it was a misunderstanding or if there is really a conspiracy by an elite team of climate scientists to censure dissenting opinion on climate change with pal review.

You can follow the action at climateaudit.org , whatsupwith that.com or rankexploits.com/musings. The action at the elite climate scientist blog realclimate.org is a little slow due to censorship.

This article has not been reviewed by Yahoo or reviewer A. Neither endorse this author's opinion.