This question is not only at the core of the continuing debate about the HS, but is central to the entire field of AGW. You know better than almost anyone, David, that M&M 2003 definitively showed the HS to be — in a word — bogus. After MM03, everyone should have known what your AIG article proves, namely that the output HS was pre-implanted in the methodology.

In ordinary science, the authors of a disproved study would have had to swallow hard, admit the mistake, and carry on to better work. I’ve seen this happen in chemistry a few times, and even once or twice when the mistake concerned what would have been a reputation-making result. Scientists with integrity back off when proven wrong.

But not the HS authors. They elected immediately to brazen it out, no matter that MM03 was, in and of itself, a definitive disproof. Not only that, but even von Storch and his collaborators could not bring themselves to completely accept that conclusion. And so now, more than four years later, we have you, David, writing an updated HS disproof in AIG. In normal science, that would not have been necessary. Nevertheless, the HS authors will probably brazen out your disproof, too.

This ‘long term insistence’ on sticking with an explicitly disproved result shows that the authors of the HS do not have the integrity of their claimed profession. They are, in short, dishonest; dishonest in a way analogously identical to the standards violations committed by the professionals of Arthur Anderson in the Enron case.

Likewise in the field of AGW at large, where claims of a CO2-imposed climate disaster are made on the basis of time-wise projections using GCMs that demonstrably have no ability to make accurate predictions of future global climate. Any reading of GCM literature shows this to be the case. Field-competent scientists who are climate catastrophists do not display the integrity of their claimed profession.

The only conclusion possible here is that these people have an irrational loyalty to a single view. That view is protected against exposure to definitive disproofs. Even highly intelligent people with highly trained mentalities are prey to this mistake. Privilege granted to intuitive inner certitude — the claim to know without benefit of knowledge — is rife among we humans. Our only escape from it is a conscious adherence to the standard of science.

AGW catastrophism is doubly dangerous because its proponents have abandoned, indeed subverted, our only protection against irrationality.

It’s as though a group of doctors were insisting, against all disproofs, on gourd-rattling as a viable substitute for childhood vaccination.