It's not my field either, and I have a private theory (extrapolating from nonsense promulgated in my own field) that non-specialists have no chance to reasonably judge the merits in a specialized field.
That said, Monckton's supporting materials cite an article by McIntyre and McKitrick in Environment and Energy that supposedly debunks revisionist claims of temperature history published in Nature by Mann et al (Mann et al revise earlier U.N. graphs which, by claiming significant both warm and cold periods 200-600 years ago, had tended to contradict part of the case for global warming).
I'm sure I couldn't critically follow either article if I read it, but I think we nonspecialists can reasonably comment on this question: Why didn't M&M publish their rebuttal of a Nature article in Nature? Not only would it be logical to rebut in the journal of publication, but Nature is a hugely prestigious journal and anyone with a shot to publish there would do so in preference to a low-impact specialty journal which Environment and Energy surely is. The obvious guess that occurs to me is that they tried and were rejected. Indeed, a bit of Googling turns up the claim that they were rejected by Nature. From my own experience I know that these top journals referee very carefully whereas it is quite easy to get slipshod work into lesser journals.
If Nature rejected them so do I.
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It's not my field either, and I have a private theory (extrapolating from nonsense promulgated in my own field) that non-specialists have no chance to reasonably judge the merits in a specialized field. That said, Monckton's supporting materials cite an article by McIntyre and McKitrick in Environment and Energy that supposedly debunks revisionist claims of temperature history published in Nature by Mann et al (Mann et al revise earlier U.N. graphs which, by claiming significant both warm and cold periods 200-600 years ago, had tended to contradict part of the case for global warming). I'm sure I couldn't critically follow either article if I read it, but I think we nonspecialists can reasonably comment on this question: Why didn't M&M publish their rebuttal of a Nature article in Nature? Not only would it be logical to rebut in the journal of publication, but Nature is a hugely prestigious journal and anyone with a shot to publish there would do so in preference to a low-impact specialty journal which Environment and Energy surely is. The obvious guess that occurs to me is that they tried and were rejected. Indeed, a bit of Googling turns up the claim that they were rejected by Nature. From my own experience I know that these top journals referee very carefully whereas it is quite easy to get slipshod work into lesser journals. If Nature rejected them so do I.