Well, the “Second Public Review Draft of the Unified Synthesis Product Global Climate Change in the United States” has been published for comment (due February 27), and we see how they decided to deal with the embarrassment posed by their insistence on calling co-lead author “Dr.” Tom Karl: they dropped such honorifics from . . . everyone. How. Pathetic. That must’ve been a fun one to sit through.
Of course, a quick search for his name to confirm this also manages to remind us how the drafting team has chosen to plow ahead with their highly questionable practice of citing their own and each other’s work to support their supposed independent assessment.
So the answer, Dr. Wegman, is that no, these people did not learn from your assessment, e.g., this passage slamming the same community and practice in the process of debunking the “Hockey Stick”:
In our further exploration of the social network of authorships in temperature reconstruction, we found that at least 43 authors have direct ties to Dr. Mann by virtue of coauthored papers with him. Our findings from this analysis suggest that authors in the area of paleoclimate studies are closely connected and thus ‘independent studies’ may not be as independent as they might appear on the surface. This committee does not believe that web logs are an appropriate forum for the scientific debate on this issue.
It is important to note the isolation of the paleoclimate community; even though they rely heavily on statistical methods they do not seem to be interacting with the statistical community. Additionally, we judge that the sharing of research materials, data and results was haphazardly and grudgingly done. In this case we judge that there was too much reliance on peer review, which was not necessarily independent. Moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that this community can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility.
The same condition plagues this product. We noted this in our original comments, and will again. All previously commenting parties should check this thing out and weigh in as appropriate.