Jones wants criticism delivered within the comfortable confines of the peer review process because he is skilled at how the game is played and knows who to talk to to get papers he does not like killed. Seriously, this is a man who should be sentenced to having his words quoted in every mention of him for the rest of his life.<p>Example: Professor Jones, who once wrote to a colleague "I will keep them out if I have to redefine what the peer reviewed literature is", criticized bloggers for "hijacking the peer review process."
<i>Why don't they do their own [temperature] reconstructions? If they want to criticise, they should write their own papers</i><p>Didn't Jon Graham-Cummings just publish an article about having done just this, and finding an error in the data?<p>Of course, people like JGC couldn't do so before, because Jones and his colleagues kept the raw data secret.<p>Edit: here's JGC's posting about his article: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1128782" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1128782</a>
Fun thought experiment: What if this was an epidemiologist criticising the blogosphere for spreading non-peer-reviewed doubts about vaccine safety? Or an evolutionary biologist attacking intelligent design bloggers?<p>I'm guessing that most people on hacker news have pre-existing opinions on both of those issues in favour of the scientist; while for climate science it's significantly more split. However, if you leave aside personal judgements about the underlying truth, the situations are quite analogous.