
Tree-ring patterns are intellectual property, not climate data - chaostheory
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/may/11/climate-science-tree-ring-data
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pook
" This means that the ring pattern of a tree-ring sample carries the
"intellectual fingerprint" of the dendrochronologist who measured it, every
bit as much as this text carries my intellectual fingerprint."

This is, as far as I can tell, insane. Error margins in measurement are not an
acceptable basis for restricting access to your data.

"Physics is the only real science. The rest are just stamp collecting," has,
unfortunately, significance here.

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drallison
Here we have a researcher, who has spent 40 years collecting data and building
a database of tree ring measurements, recanting the results of his work.
Shades of Galileo being forced to recant his view that the earth orbits the
sun under pressure from the Church. The deniers ought to be ashamed.

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DanielBMarkham
Look -- I have no desire to kick around global warming yet again, and I won't,
but in the category of "being a good defense of one's opinions" this is awful
tripe. Even supporters should be able to recognize that.

My alarm went off early with _I have no academic stance on human-caused global
warming except that, as a scientist reviewing the issue from an evolutionary
perspective, if humans are even partly the cause of the warming since 1990
then we are already doomed as a species_

So you have no academic stance, but as a "scientist reviewing the issue from
an evolutionary perspective" we're all going to die? Would this be as a non-
academic scientist? And wtf is a non-academic scientist, anyway? And although
as an academic you have no stance, you think we're all going to die as
somebody else? Still working that out.

He continues the barely cogent rambling for several graphs. Was there alcohol
involved with the creation of this essay?

Then his claim that by making a reasoned judgment on a fuzzy measurement,
somehow the measurement becomes intellectual property assigned to the
measurer? If this were true, umpires, anybody reading a meniscus, and makers
of fuzzy-logic thermostats could lay claim to vast swaths of intellectual
property overnight.

This is probably a brilliant man. My guess is that it was a hurried email more
than a well-reasoned polemic. This guy needed an editor, and in a bad way. I
think the Guardian let him down and did a disservice to the entire AGCC cause
by letting him go with this terrible, terrible essay.

