Outrageous behavior

In this entry, one is told that two outsiders have been discredited as shown in a recent peer review publication. The outrageous behavior is not the fact that there is a controversy, nor the fact that mentionning somebody's occupation is clearly irrelevant when it comes to scientific discourse but rather that the authors state the following outrageous comments:

It should be noted that some falsely reported putative errors in the Mann et al.(1998) proxy data claimed by McIntyre and McKitrick (2003) are an artifact of (a) the use by these latter authors of an incorrect version of the Mann et al. (1998) proxy indicator dataset, and (b) their misunderstanding of the methodology used by Mann et al. (1998) to calculate PC series of proxy networks over progressively longer time intervals.

For argument a)

If they are using an incorrect version of the proxy indicator dataset, does it mean that this data is not freely available ? Do these people mean to say that major climate modeling issues decided on a worldwide policy level are dependent on data that are properties of some researchers ?

For argument b)

How can a methodology be misunderstood if it is clearly published in the first place? How come the algorithm used to obtained these data is not freely available ?

If treaties are being negociated with every nation on this earth, one should at least make sure that the data from which these policies are developed follow the principles of reproducible research. As Donoho and Buckheit point out when they developed the Wavelab toolbox:

An article about computational science in a scientific publication is not the scholarship itself, it is merely advertising of the scholarship. The actual scholarship is the complete software development environment and the complete setof instructions which generated the figures

The outrageous behavior is not the criticism of datasets dating back to 1998 but rather the inability for a mining industry specialist and an economist to have access to the initial data and the means of producing the data of the paper.

Now, I will not comment on the fact that neither side of the issue seem to be addressing the fact that none of them can explain HOW components found through the PCA technique are indicative of an actual physical phenomena.