Ohio State Climatology Professor's Results found "Irreproducible"

Lonnie Thompson is a professor of geology at Ohio State and also a member of the Ice Core Paleoclimatology Group of Ohio State's Byrd Polar Research Center. He is famous for being cited in Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth" (AIT) that won Al a Nobel prize and an Oscar. In his vita, he boasts:

In 2006, I served on the Science Advisory Board’s for both IMAX Film “The Ice Age” and on Al Gore’s Film “An Inconvenient Truth,” in which our NSF-funded research is highlighted.

In AIT, Gore presents a graph he calls "Dr. Thompson's Thermometer" which purports to confirm the Mann et al "Hockey Stick" showing only small fluctuation in global temperatures going back to 1000 AD and a huge increase in recent years. But there are two problems with the graph:

(1) The graph that Al was showing in the movie was not Thompson's results, but rather Mann's hockey stick. In other words, Gore is claiming that Mann's hockey stick confirms Mann's hockey stick.

(2) Thompson's research only provides a graph of oxygen isotope ratios for six ice cores going back to 1000 AD. There was no attempt to show how these ratios correspond to temperature.

On January 11, 2008, Hu McCulloch, a professor of economics at Ohio State, asked Thompson if a public correction to Gore's movie should be made:

He stated that he recognized the error right away, and even sent Gore (and Mann, as I recall) an e-mail pointing out the mistake.
When I pressed him if it wouldn't be appropriate to make a more public announcement, given the high-profile nature of the error, Ellen Mosley-Thompson, his wife and co-author, stood up and offered that it was Gore's error, not theirs, so that they had no responsibility for it, and that in any event there was no forum in which to make a correction.

How ridiculous. Since Thompson is on Gore's science advisory board for the movie, he has an obligation to point out any factual errors, especially those that concern his own research.

To make matters worse, Thompson has failed to release the complete data he used in his research, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science in 2006. Thompson has lied to the editor of the journal, falsely claiming that all the data has been provided. Here you can read about Steve McIntyre's attempts to get the data.

Now, Hu McCulloch has determined, from the limited amount of data that Thompson has released, that Thompson's results are irreproducible.

This is the kind of crap that passes for 'scientific consensus' among the researchers that are being cited by Al Gore and other global warming alarmists. As an alumnus of Ohio State, I am not going to allow Thompson's academic misconduct to go unchallenged.