We seem to be having occasional success in getting things archived. CSIRO was shamed into providing the data for their Drought Report and David Stockwell has now reported on this.

Earlier this year, we reported a form of academic check kiting by Ammann and Wahl, where they had referred to Supplementary Information for key results, but failed to provide the Supplementary Information. Flaccid peer reviewers and flaccid editors at Climatic Change either didn’t notice or didn’t care. Given that RE significance had been a major issue both in the original MM articles and in the twice rejected GRL submission by Wahl and Ammann, you’d think that someone would have spent a couple of minutes checking out whether the argument in the SI actually worked. But, hey,…

The editors of Climatic Change didn’t have any information about the SI. When I contacted Caspar Ammann for the SI, he replied early this year in the typically ‘gracious’ Team style:

why would I even bother answering your questions, isn’t that just lost time?

So this became one more issue on the blog. Some readers get tired of the litany of non-compliance. Look, I get tired of the non-compliance too. Ammann’s case was particularly egregious because the article actually referred to and relied on the SI, which was then withheld. In some cases, sunshine works. CSIRO grudgingly archived their drought data and, a couple of days ago, I noticed that Ammann had grudgingly put up his Supplementary Information (without notifying me despite my outstanding request.)

I’ve been criticized for not replying to Wahl and Ammann, but, unlike, say, IPCC section authors considering this material, I actually like to be able to examine the Supplementary Information and this has only been available for a couple of weeks (and, in my case, effectively only a couple of days.)

Some of the results in this SI are simply breath-taking. I hardly know what to say or where to begin.

For now, I’ll assume that readers are aware of the issues involved in RE significance and why this has been a battleground issue. MBH asserted that an RE statistic of 0.0 was “99% significant”. In MM2005a (GRL) and MM2005c (GRL-Reply to Huybers), we observed that very high RE statistics could be thrown up merely by red noise handled in MBH style, noting 99% percentiles of 0.54 in our Reply to Huybers (which improved the simulations of MM2005a, where the issue was first raised.) We didn’t argue that these particular benchmarks were written in stone, merely that “great caution” needed to be used in interpreting RE statistics - a point that I’ve further amplified recently by observing the very high RE statistics associated with classical spurious regressions.

Both Ammann and Wahl and Wahl and Ammann cite a benchmark of 0.0. I’ve been keenly awaiting their “proof” of this benchmark. Ammann and Wahl had said:

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