Many of my numerate readers will have read the account by Rick Trebino of Georgia Tech of trials and tribulations of responding to an error in the public record of the peer-reviewed literature, and have ideas of their own on what they would like to see.
Record ideas for what you would like to see below. (I am on vacation on the Great Barrier Reef right now, so excuse the brevity, typing this from the resort.) My wish list is below.
1. Code and data allow replication
2. Reviewers can act as coaches, where appropriate
3. Journals dedicated entirely to review of others’ studies
First, they have not come up with any plausible alternative culprit for the disruption of global climate that is being observed, for example, a culprit other than the greenhouse-gas buildups in the atmosphere that have been measured and tied beyond doubt to human activities. (The argument that variations in the sun’s output might be responsible fails a number of elementary scientific tests.)
This is a funny story about getting monthly mean Australian temperatures from the Bureau of Meteorology. I hope for happy ending, but we have yet to see.
The online magazine CO2 Science has published a review and update on the massive extinction theory, featuring a large section on my guest editorial they graciously hosted back in 2004. This is where I lost my virginity, so to speak, so the treatment is a little more exuberant than I would use now, but not too much. I remember I was so disgusted that anyone could seriously propose an analysis that would show a high number of species extinctions from global warming even if the rate of species extinction decreased. I have seen a lot more now and such bias no longer surprises me.
