Singhing about the decline
May 19, 2011
Bishop Hill in Climate: MWP

Andy Russell has a report from the Royal Meteorological Society AGM, which was addressed by John Mitchell and Simon Singh. This bit was particularly interesting

There was also an interesting question for Simon about the similarities between the “hide the decline” episode and an edit Simon showed us that he had made to one of his own documentaries (substituting “primes” with “numbers” in an interview with a mathematician to make it understandable for a wider audience). Simon argued that they were quite different situations as the removal of unreliable proxy data was done for scientific reasons whereas his edit was done for communication reasons. I wonder if there isn’t more of an overlap, though. I’m not sure we’ve properly acknowledged the needs of different audiences and how scientists decide to summarise their work for them.

Removing the bit of data that shows the rest of the series to be unreliable is not a "scientific reason". It's called "cheating".

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