The article comes across spectacularly lazy which bodes ill for the veracity of its contents.
Just look @ how our "researcher" (ahem) "researches" the only known-to-him example of raw data being given out:
- supposedly "Peter Webster" has (a subset of) the "raw data"
- no other "researchers" aside from the data originators have the "raw data" (at least insofar as is known to Michaels as revealed in this article)
- supposedly Michaels is interested in obtaining the "raw data"
Is there any evidence in the article that, you know, Michaels tried calling Webster up and asking for the "raw data"? The kind of thing you'd do if you were, you know, seriously interested in getting your hands on this data?
Not really:
- there's no explicit mention of (attempting to) get in touch with Webster
- there's a half-hearted attempt to strew fear and doubt based on the fact that Webster's findings (about hurricane and warming correlation) are apparently at variance with what others have found, but it's half-hearted b/c:
-- it doesn't examine whether the different findings are due to methodological differences or due to "raw data" differences (only the latter of which implicates the "raw data" as perhaps suspect)
-- as per usual it's not like Michaels tried calling Webster and being like: "do you think your results are different b/c the data has been mangled?"
So just with respect to Michael's actions with Webster there's a rather transparent pattern of some mix of incuriousness or laziness.
Which (quite apart from any think-tank connections) is why he ought to come across as not all that credible: he's lazy or incompetent or both.
I mean really: say you were to read an article wherein the author:
- is supposedly searching for some holy grail
- identifies a source that has it
- makes no mention of trying to get it from that source
...would that not raise a red flag as to the author's sincerity and/or general competence? Would you be more or less likely to take his other claims at face value after seeing that?