More Unraveling

So the current hot trend in the climate debate is to rip people blogging about the subject, particularly those who are skeptical of AGW.  Case in point, an unnamed author in the Economist's blog section rips a post by Willis Eschenbach.  The author titles the HTML page, "Trust Scientists" which is laughable given the emails leaked and the lack of trust and openness fostered within them.  Mr. Eschenbeck replies here.  The unnamed attacker (which is curious as he is in essence peer-reviewing Eschenbeck's work but fails to divulge his name for some reason) makes a number of assumptions about Mr. Eschenbeck's and others' abilities to comprehend the math related to the climate issues.  I doubt they know Mr. Eschenbeck well enough to assess that.  But most concerning is the following quote from the author:

So for the time being, my response to any and all further "smoking gun" claims begins with: show me the peer-reviewed journal article demonstrating the error here. Otherwise, you're a crank and this is not a story.

Really?  Obviously, he is referring to the well-behaved peer review process that Phil Jones and others in the leaked emails talk about.  I'd pull the same quote from Phil Jones' email that Mr. Eschenbeck pulls in his response:

I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!

What is most galling, however, is the fact that these "scientists" fail to address solar activity which has been shown to have a high degree of correlation to the Earth's weather patterns (as well as corresponding weather changes on other solar system planets).  Instead, they take a very "so let it be written...so let it be done" approach to their findings - denying any criticism or interest in their data for checking.

In the end there is so much that we don't know about the climate and all the variables involved that I find it hard to believe that these knuckleheads have it all figured out.  As an example, it appears that there's plenty of naturally caused events that have contributed to major climate changes.  Maybe with a bit more openness and honesty from the scientists involved we can actually advance human knowledge about the climate.  Then again, maybe we need to wait for a new crop of scientists.