Notwithstanding the outrageous cost (which ought itself, perhaps, to
be the subject of an inquiry), Blair's misapprehension that a report commissioned just as the peace
process was bearing fruit would, a
dicey twelve years on, bring «closure»
was hopelessly naive.
«Rigorous
processes» may help avoid a hockey - stick fiasco, but there
are still two very basic problems: a) the proxy data themselves
are often
dicey, especially when the time scale
is large, and b) the interpretation of the data
is based on an «argument from ignorance» (i.e. «we can only explain this if we assume...»), where unknown factors
are simply ignored and it
is falsely assumed that we have the knowledge of all factors that could possibly have
been involved; if these studies
are used to provide evidence for a preconceived hypothesis, I think they
are next to worthless.