JohnDakota

Reviewer responsibilities are generally volunteer hours insofar as the peer reviewing the article isn't getting paid, or compensated in any way for the many hours/day(s) it will likely take to properly vet a piece of work. Therefore reviewers eventually blow off some articles, choosing instead to do a quick analysis and hope the other reviewers perform a more thorough analysis. Apparently, in the case of this paper, all the reviewers blew off their jobs.

The student is now a Postdoc in Brazil and the PI has since moved to Western Australia for another position. These moves happened in 2011 and 2012 respectively, according to their linkedin profiles. So unless they're still working on the project, it's unlikely the phrase 'just make up' means to put together.. rather it's more likely that it means to fabricate.

Basic elemental analysis is very easy to fake, and very hard to demonstrate it was faked.

You do, actually. We only have non-thermometer data for the preceding 11300 years, so it is important to establish that the thermometer data correlates with the non-thermometer data, so as to fully understand the trends in the data. Imagine if MMTS stations greatly over/under estimate temperature values relative to the non-thermometer methodologies. That would mean the preceding 11300 year baseline for the trend would be a misrepresentation.

This correlation of data acquisition appears to have been done until the conversion of recording stations to MMTS stations. The correlation stop, at that point, and we are now entirely dependent on thermometer data. Coincidentally this is is also the 'hockeystick blade' time frame.

>Following that logic, we might as well continue trimming along the x-axis until nothing is left.

The data is still useful in determining the statistical confidence of the set, but not reliable for representation as its representation completely changes the understanding conveyed by the data set. So the data stays in, and the X-axis doesn't get trimmed. Only the data point, as represented in the last, non-robust interval, gets trimmed.

While you're right; the article did mention that the statistical confidence of the Marcott blade, during temperature spike, isn't robust, it's naive to believe that the spike didn't play a major part in getting published in Science, or the media attention the article received.

In fact the authors have used the instrumental record of the last 130 years to justify the incorporation of the statistically uncertain data from the last two centuries. From this we can understand their scientific model. They know their conclusions first, and then prove their conclusions. Good science is developing hypotheses and testing them.