The Death of the Hockey Stick?
People who have been following the climate debate closely know that one of the most controversial and key elements of the controversy is the so-called “hockey stick” — a graph of supposed global temperature over the past centuries that ostensibly shows a dramatic increase in average temperature in the last century or so (the upward swoop of the graph at that point is the business end of the stick, with regard to the puck). It vaulted its inventor, Michael Mann of Penn State University, to climate stardom, with associated acclaim and government grants, when he first presented it in the late ’90s. It was the visual basis of much of the hysteria in recent years, from Al Gore’s Oscar-winning crockumentary to bogus reports from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Unfortunately for those promoting the theory (and the potentially economically catastrophic policy recommendations supposedly supported by it), recent events indicate that the last basis of scientific support for the hockey stick may be crumbling. But to understand this, a little background is necessary.
Ultimately, in addition to Mann’s claim for the dramatic recent uptick (which we are supposed to presume was a result of the late industrial revolution and equally dramatic increase in carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as a result of the liberation of carbon from burning long-buried fossil fuels), Keith Briffa of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in England controversially declared, based on Eurasian data, that the well-documented Medieval Warm Period (MWP), from around 950 to 1250 CE — the European Middle Ages — didn’t actually exist.
This claim was important, if not essential, to Mann’s thesis, because his initial formulation only went back to 1400, the beginning of the so-called Little Ice Age. Critics of the theory thus argued immediately upon its presentation that it shouldn’t be surprising that the earth was warming now, given that we are still coming out of it, and that the medieval warming in the absence of late Carolingian SUVs and coal plants argued that the climate naturally cycled, with no need to invoke Demon Carbon. That is to say, to the degree that the hockey stick has a blade in the twentieth century, it would have another a millennium ago.
The theory has continued to take blows over the years since it was first presented. About a decade ago, a paper was published by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunis claiming that there was good evidence that both the (still extant) MWP and current warming were driven by solar activity rather than carbon emissions. But these initial attacks were beaten back by the climate mafia (as we now know from the leaked emails between Mann and his partners in crime in East Anglia from two and a half years ago). The real damage came when a retired Canadian mining engineer, Steve McIntyre, and a professor at the University of Guelph, Ross McKitrick, started digging into Mann’s methodology, and found flaws in both his statistical analysis and data interpretation, and published a paper describing them in Geophysical Research Letters in 2005. They showed that Mann’s methodology would generate a hockey stick almost independently of the data input, by feeding it spectral noise. Later, Internet satirist (and apparent statistician by day) Iowahawk provided a primer on how to create a hockey stick at home, using a standard spreadsheet program.
Defenders of the theory have long claimed that even if there are problems with Mann’s method or data set, we have independent results from other research, such as that at the CRU, that confirm it. But this was a point of contention. In addition to the unscientific behavior in attempting to silence critics and keep them from publishing, we also know that the climate “scientists” had been withholding data that would help to resolve the controversy (more unscientific behavior, because it makes it difficult or impossible to replicate claimed results, and behavior that continues to the present day by the University of Virginia), even in the face of numerous Freedom of Information requests, on both sides of the Atlantic.
To no avail, McIntyre had been requesting data for years from Briffa, who had claimed to have independent Eurasian tree-ring analysis that confirmed Mann’s results, from a data set called the Polar Urals (Mann’s work was based on ancient California bristlecone pine trees). Unfortunately, paleoclimatologists had discovered that the Polar Urals data didn’t actually support the disappearance of the MWP, so they were in search of another Eurasian data set that would, and they found one called Yamal, gathered and published in 2002 by two Russian scientists.
“Ultimately, in addition to Mann’s claim for the dramatic recent uptick (which we are supposed to presume was a result of the late industrial revolution and equally dramatic increase in carbon monoxide……”
By all means, stick it to the warmistas.
But get the basics right.
It is carbon dioxide, not monoxide.
Thanks – my first thought as well. Any AGW advocate will get to the word “monoxide” and say “ignorant boobs” and move on…
Maybe the “problem” is methane. I’ve seen an supposedly serious article stating Dinosaur farts were the cause of their demise. When my German Shepard farts it’s unbelievably foul, so just imagine a Brontosaurus. These “scientists” need to get off Campus a little more, get some fresh air not polluted by marijuana fumes and unpolluted by Federal Grant money demanding a liberal result in order to get more Federal Grant money. The Federal Grant clearing house became a whorehouse about 20 yrs ago.
Next thing you know, Obama’s EPA will demand removal of all red beans from grocery shelves, and NASA will develop a tiny catalytic converter suitable for attachment to our buts when outside the house.
I hope Nasa doesn’t make it one size fits all, perhaps they can work with the Isalamic terroist networks, I hear they are doing remarkable things with the new technological designs of underwear.
Hey, if it will power my smartphone, I’ll go along with that.
Dinosaurs were either saurian or bird hipped. Now do Chickens and other birds fart? How about alligators and lizards?
Do Komodo dragon’s pass gas?
How does anyone prove from multi-million year old fossilized bones that dinosaurs farted?
Are their farts preserved in amber?
Are farts preserved in tree rings, ice cores and soil samples?
perhaps when fossilized dino dung is broken open the fart is released.
The interesting thing about the dinosaur farting “science” is their methodology.
First they worked out how many of the appropriately farting dinosaurs roamed the Earth back then. Then they worked out how much Methane they would produce to maintain their size eating plants.
They multiplied the Methane by its greenhouse effect comparative to CO2 to give the effective CO2 that they would be producing. This they concluded was equivalent to our current rate of anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
Then they assumed that since climate scientists believe that current emissions will have us all extinct in a few hundred years they concluded that dinosaur farts killed off the dinosaurs.
Simple logic really! And in doing so, they have killed off climate catastrophism, since their last assumption must be wrong. We all know dinosaurs are extinct, but we are also certain, through the fossil record, that they lived abundantly for millions of years.
So if the managed to fart the equivalent of current emissions, and survive for millions of years, these scientists have proved that the rate of current emissions isn’t dangerous.
Able to guzzle more energy than dozens of normal men! Producing more hot air than a locomotive!! Able to pile up carbon credits higher than a tall building in a single bound!!! Look UP in the sky! It’s ChickenLittle! It’s FlyingSnakeOilSalesman! It’s the Sultan of Hanging Chads! It’s the Ayatollah of Heat! It’s the High Priest of the Inquisition! It’s the Doctor of Doom! No, it’s CarbonMan in a private jet painted green! And now following in the tradition of other great men such as Jimmy Carter and Yasir Arafat, he is the proud recipient of a Nobel Prize!!! CarbonMan, strange visitor from an alternate reality who came to Earth with claims and scary predictions far beyond those of any sane and honest man, disguised as Fat Albert, and now joined by other members of the Royal GreenLeague such as BioFuelHummerMan and EcoCleaningWoman, they all fight a never ending battle for science-fiction, hypocrisy, power grabbing, money grubbing and the Hollywood way!
Yes Al is Our Super Hero, able to leap tall mounds of money in a single bound, But we should feel sorry for Al, he was only able to afford an $8.8 million dollar villa at 25′ elevation on CA coast line, had the Carbon Exchange gone thru he could of purchased the $50 million estate he really wanted
He bought a villa at 25′??? Why, that clever scoundrel! He knows full well that it will be beachfront property when the ocean rises in just a few years, and he’ll be able to sell it for 5 times what he paid for it!
And all this time I thought he was rather stupid! Silly me!
Of course, since it’s on the California coast, he’s probably going to get mudslided into the ocean before he can sell it.
P.S. Mudslided. I just made that word up. Hmmm. Maybe it should be “mudslid”?
Either way, it will be a real let down when it goes.
Just to mention, Rand, Bristlecone Pines are terrible proxies, as they are so uniquely sensitive to various environmental factors.
They crossed the streams.
yes, penn state, or should i say perv state.
produces pedophiles and science fraud.
mann and sandusky should share a cell in the real penn state pen!
however, in lala land pennsylvania, these men were towers of the elite university and everyone, that really knew about these two turned their eye.\
our universities need cleaning up, bad!
watch where you send your kids to college!
Badly. Not bad. Adverb. Makes the case for college.
Obsessive-compulsive internet grammar pedantry. Makes the case for therapy.
Makes the case for having the big picture, and thus understanding the importance of language, and how easily it is lost by the unthinking.
If you havn’t learned English grammar by the time you graduated from “grammer” school, (5 thru 8), it’s too late.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMqc7PCJ-nc
What more can we say?
Although irrelevant to the argument, the part of the hockey stick that swoops up is the shaft, not the blade.
That would make it a 1 degree shaft and a 1000-year blade… I’ve only ever heard it described as presented.
No. Lay the stick on its side, with the shaft flat. The blade points up and to the right. This is the “hockey stick” that the AGW propagandists say the temperature records prove is global warming in the late 20th century.
You seriously don’t know hockey, eh, Richard?
I guess you’re right. I never knew I was supposed to skate holding the shaft flat against the ice. Should I be holding the blade and hitting the puck with the shaft or swiveling the shaft along the ice to hit the puck with the blade end?
You’ve got the orientation wrong. It’s laying on the shaft, and the blade is up in the air.
You’re just wrong, so quit while you’re behind.
When you’re in a hole, stop digging.
You still don’t get it, do you? Perhaps an illustration will help, if my ASCII art doesn’t lose its formatting when posted:
/
/
===================/
In the above plot of temperature versus time, the “=” signs form the shaft. The “/”s form the blade. (Paste into an editor and change the font to Courier if the above does not look right.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick
Ice hockey
Main article: Ice hockey stick
Sticks are approximately 150–200 cm long, composed of a long, slender shaft and a flat extension at one end called the blade.
It’s a lazy hockey stick, just like Mann
Mr. Simberg: In a sane world, the findings of Mann et al., would be dismissed, both for its being wrong and for its being fraudulent. But we do not live in a sane world. Leftists have jumped all over this issue to assert control over business (at least manufacturing and transportation), and they won’t let it go. For the US the only way to shake free of this control is simply to abolish the EPA and define very carefully any and all clean-air acts.
Perhaps we can start talking about why Greenland is called Greenland. Greenland is currently primarily covered by ice. Why would anyone call it Greenland? Because it was discovered during the Medieval Warming Period. The land mass was green then. The colony died out during the LIttle Ice Age, since it became impossible to farm with ice covering the land.
Climate change has been occurring for millions of years. Since before man even existed, much less was producing significant carbon dioxide.
These folks have been promoting their careers by promoting the concept of AGW. They cherry picked data to support their contention. Then they hid their data and methodology so no one could figure out what they did. In most fields, such people would be fired and banned from further participation. Don’t hold your breath on Al Gore calling for that.
It was also called Greenland to coax people to leave overpopulated, over-grazed, over-cut Iceland to take a chance in the icy Greenland, which was still mostly ice cap, but did have a wider green border during the MWP. I try to follow the data on when the new melting will stop uncovering Viking remains, indicating that the ice has receded past the MWP levels. My understanding is that it varies from one location to another, but Viking artifacts are still being newly exposed.
Yeah, I understand that the last Viking Super Bowl rings date from the MWP and that’s one of the artifacts they’re hoping to find there.
Fran Tarkenton and Chuck Foreman are funding just such an expedition. They may have to settle for planting purple-(to be)people-eaten potatoes in the newly greened areas.
No, it was named after the Viking legend that discovered it – Eric the Green.
I thought those guys didn’t play on grass but on artificial turf inside a dome . . .
The Iceland Sagas say that Leif Eriksson named it Greenland because people had been put off from settling in his father’s colony, Iceland, because of the name. IOW, it was a real-estate agent’s name for the island.
The Sagas were not contemporary, they were written several centuries after the events they recall, based on oral traditions. So were the Ilyad and the Odessy. They certainly contain a good deal of verifiable facts, but how much surmise and conjecture is anyone’s guess.
Quite so. Also, at the same time that people in Greenland were farming and herding, the area known today as the American southwest became so hot and arid that it was uninhabitable. The last few people living there resorted to cannibalism.
Since many of these “leading lights in climate research” are part of the progressive establishment in their universities, they will never be held accountable for thier misdeeds. Many of these “scientists” have gone so far as to exclude data that doesn’t fall in lin with their predetermined data sets. Thus they had to hide the decline…
Paragraph 3–should read “carbon dioxide” not “carbon monoxide.”
Already addressed above….
Hockey stick is a good way to get it all wrong. Probably people mistakenly thinking of the hockey PUCK of the fakegreen movement ALGORE.
Great article. One problem. Please stop using the absurd “BCE” or “CE” to place dates.
The entire “Common Era” gibberish is a sop to political correctness, and merely displays the idiocy and absurdity of same.
“Common Era?” Common to what?
A fern that grew in Israel? A copse of trees growing in South American?
We mark time by the birth of Christ for a simple reason. The West has cultural hegemony because of its wealth, power, and influence. It also marks time based upon the birth of Christ.
This does not “prove” Christ’s divinity or resurrection. It merely means that the dominant culture on the earth uses the date as a starting point. Deal with it.
Switching to BCE/CE is doubly stupid because it uses the exact same starting point, but creates the moronic pretense that it is “common” independent of the actual reason we use the date.
It’s a sop to a class of whiny atheists can’t even bear to live in an era marked by a religious figure. If these folks want to stop using Christ’s birth as a reference point, let them argue for using the Chinese calendar. If they want to be really avant garde, perhaps they could start a new age marked by Nietzsche or Darwin’s birth.
Would you be happier if we called it SR (for Standard Reckoning), GC (for Gregorian Calendar, which it effectively is since 1582 CE), or “ISO date”?
BCE/CE is actually a bit of creative ambiguity. Christians can read it as “before the Christian Era” and “of the Christian Era”, while the rest of us can read it as “before the common era”/”common era” (as in: commonly used for dating).
I don’t have an issue with BC, but using AD (anno domini=in the year of our lord) for dates forces non-Christians like myself to, in effect, recognize (G-d forbid) the divinity of Jesus. As a Jew, this is something I cannot and will not do as it effectively amounts to violating the most central commandment of Judaism (“The L-rd is our G-d, The L-rd is One/Alone/Indivisible”). We are not allowed to do this even to save our own lives, let alone that I would do so for some “PC other than the usual PC” purposes. I don’t know Rand Simberg’s affiliation but it is not just atheists and agnostics who avoid AD for dating, but also professing members of other faiths.
So, in short, if you have a problem with the use of BCE/CE, “bless your heart”.
Well, for centuries the business world has been using the Christian calendar. So even in the business markets of Iran, today is May 17, 2012 as it is in Jerusalem and Malaysia and Timbuktu.
Indeed. A dating system must have a stated origin. An old joke is much to the point:
The origin of the Western calendric system is the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. You needn’t concede His divinity to recognize that.
Francis – much as I appreciate your intellect, you missed something crucial. While your formulation covers BC it has no bearing on AD, which clearly states the divinity of Christ
It’s BC and AD. Always has been (well, for 2000 years) and always will be. We do not and will not acknowledge that other thing silly people use to mark time.
And here we go with the Left Wing Islamophile moonbat atheistic war on Christianity. Much the same as the Homosexual war on Marriage, Heterosexuality and Christianity and performed by much the same people. As for the Green NAZI’s they are beyond moronic and beyond parody.
I spent a year working in a tree ring lab a couple of years ago at a large university, you guys have no idea, its all about the money, thats it. Trees are great for mass movements and fire history, because there is solid evidence that something happened right there on the on the sample, but trees are terrible thermometers, and its to easy to play with inputs to get the answer you want. Its hard to base a couple of billion years of weather on a 4000 years of tree data, all about the cash cow nothing else
Exposing my lack of knowledge in the field of botany, the tree rings would only capture the warmth during the 3-6 month growing season, so even if the tree rings were accurate proxies, we still would have no proxy for the other 6-9 months. Pleae provide commentary. Thanks
Trees have a resolution of exactly one year. Each ring represents a year. The fact that most of the growth happened in the summer is just a detail.
Understood. But aren’t there factors other than temperature that affect the width and other characteristics of growth rings? I mean, can a tree-scientist look at a growth ring and say “Ah, yes! This narrow ring was definitely caused by high global climatic temperatures.”
I suppose he’d have to compare the ring to rings for the same year from trees all over the world. But again, how/why would temperature be the culprit? Couldn’t it also be solar radiation, changes in oxygen or CO2 levels, or just an unusually dry or wet period?
Long story short, what is it about a tree ring that specifically tells us what the temperature was that year?
Yes. Here’s a quick summary of some of the other things.
http://climateaudit.org/2012/05/16/schmidts-conspiracy-theory/#comment-334039
Not all trees.
true, not all treas have rings that are easily seen, maples dogwoods etc, There are so many factors in ring width, rain, light, exogenous disturbances(fire, bugs, disease, man, other trees). As the growing season goes on the cell structures change, so you can tell the different seasons from cell structure, but it is still vague. Also, lets say you have 10,000 trees in the sample area, you might get 200 samples, and those might not even be good samples or reflect the nature of that stand. Most of these samples would be cores, that are like 5mm wide or so, so you might take a core from a bad spot, its a crap shoot really. The best samples are cross sections, but then you have to get samples from dead trees, or cut a bunch of living ones down. Like i said, great for fire history or mass movements that leave a scare on the tree, butt climate is just a crap shoot, i mean a dog pissing on a tree could cause a small ring….
Turd,
Thanks for sharing your insider experience.
There is a whistelblower program that rewards people such as yourself.
If the lab you worked in received federal grants, you could be rewarded generously for sharing details of the fraulent activities in the lab.
Drop me a note: kent@cameronhalifax.com
The people in the lab are fine, good people, i just dont agree with using tree rings for climate data, trust me, if i thought they were doing anything wrong i would have blown it open a long time ago. I am merely just trying to show that there are all kinds of places to introduce errors that can skew the heck out of results
This is just so sad. When the Green Energy mandates finish bankrupting the Spanish Economy the Spaniards won’t be able to say “Well, at least we prevented Carbongeddon”. Once they could have prided themselves on destroying their country for the greater good, now they’ll just sit huddled freezing in the dark wising for Global Warming. I can see it now… “Huddled Masses are the new Green Energy”.
Ha! Maybe we can all wear cardigans like Jimmy Carter.
So, this so-called scientist went to a remote peninsula in Siberia to examine tree rings, knowing what results he wanted before he arrived. He examined over 150 trees, and found 22 trees which supported his theory of a hockey stick of warming in the second half of the 20th century. He then threw out the data from the other 130 trees that showed no such warming, and published his phony claim, ‘The world is undergoing a “hockey stick” shaped rise in global temperatures!’. It’s all a deliberate lie.
Meanwhile, we are observing one of the lowest levels of sunspot activity of the solar cycle in modern times. The last time this happened, back in the 1600′s, the world went into a mini ice age that lasted four decades.
Pretty much, yes.
Actually, he didn’t go anywhere. He collected other people’s data, and ran it through his algorithm of abuse. Many trees went in, only a few came out.
The smart solution is to make all the raw (not standardized) temperature readings available online and the interested parties can re-evaluate the data. If man made global warming can be demonstrated then appropriate action can be taken based on the actual rate of warming. If man made global warming is shown to be disproved, incidental, or inconclusive the information can be used in the political arena.
Bu that would be actual science, which is anathema to the Climate Fraud Deniers and their fellow watermelons.
And the money river for “research funding” would dry up.
Ah, but the raw data has also been massaged. The reported temperature stations have been changing over time. Rural stations are being dropped out, little by little, year after year, and urban stations are being retained. Basic weather science knows that urban stations report higher temperatures than rural stations, due to the presence of lots and lots of nice, heat absorbing concrete and asphalt.
Most of them are now in airports. Our weather reports all name National and Dulles temperatures – but you step outside and it’s ALWAYS colder.
Let’s not confuse tree ring data with temperature data. Apples and oranges. Although the temperature data is used to calibrate the tree ring data, small errors in the temperature data aren’t the main issue with the hockey stick.
The bogus part of the hockey is the flat line. Even if it represents an accurate reconstruction of the last 1000 years, up to recent warming. Because natural climate variation never sleeps. It is always occurring. The often unstated belief that the flat part of the hockey stick represents some perfect natural balance that we sinful humans have disturbed is exactly on par with creationism. It’s a religious belief that lets people point at sinners and go one witch hunts.
The other thing to notice about these curves is that they’re never temperature vs time, they’re always “temperature index” or deviation, or some other statistical derivative, seldom going into detail as to what the baseline is.
See also Steve McIntyre’s site at
http://climateaudit.org/2008/11/23/cant-see-the-signal-for-the-trees/
where he rather conclusively demonstrates that the “hockey stick” was due to a single subset of the original proxy data. “… the hockeystick shape is entirely due to Tiljander proxies plus high-altitude southwestern US “stripbark” pines (bristlecones, foxtails, etc). When these are removed, the hockeystick shape disappears entirely.” Remembering that tree-ring width is due not only to temperature but also to rainfall, cloud cover, and other data that may be location-related and not just climate related.
“What does this all mean? First, let’s state what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean that we know that the planet isn’t warming, and it doesn’t mean that if it is, that we can be sure that it is not due to human activity.”
The burden of proof is on the ones claiming catastrophic warming. The fact that they lie means they do not have the data to back up their claims.
It’s also a set back for the overused buzz-phrase “peer review” which was systematically uttered like a 2 minute hate against anyone daring to challenge the politically accepted mantra of AGW. Peer review must be looked at more skeptically if government dollars are involved.
Peer review is over sold. Peer review means nothing if the facts do not stand up to external validation. Its like a civil engineer who designs bridge. His peers (other civil engineers) review the plans and aprove of design means nothing if the bridge is built to the exact specifications and falls into the river. Most likely if the bridges falls apart, the designer would end up looking for another line of work. Unfortunately, this climate alarmists are not subject to such validation. Even if the exact oposite happens, they will always be lauded and never be out of work.
Right, in the practice of real science, “peer review” was never meant to warrant that the conclusions of a published study are the ‘given truth’. In contrast, “mainstream” Climate Science’s [wholly anti-scientific] methods are intentionally the opposite of those of real science, because what “mainstream” Climate Science is actually providing us with is no more than a gigantic Propaganda Operation.
Peer review my ass ha ha, if i can get published for a dendro paper, than any knuckle dragging trogladyte can ha ha
It finally took the British High Court in 2007 to “peer review” Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” movie. All of the so-called “climate scientists” were too embarrassed to offer their opinions, or at least I’ve never heard of it. The Court found 9 “errors” in the movie for which Gore received a half share of the Nobel Peace Prize. The Court stipulated that the movie be designated as “political” in order to be shown to Britain’s school kids. In Britain, by law, it is forbidden to indoctrinate school kids. In America, there are no such restrictions. Our children are being indoctrinated and alarmed. There a total of 35 “errors” or questionable statements in Gore’s gift to humanity.
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monckton/goreerrors.html
Yes this is all well and good however it will not make a tinker’s damn bit of difference to our society and the world. The Left doesn’t care a whit about the truth or reality. They are on a suicidal mission to achieve complete power and control over all humanity. Orwell was right. Absolutely.
The cocktail circuit Left, the useful idiots, will never hear of this because they only read the new york times and it’s partners in deception. The slaves of the Left, those debauched and dependent, uneducated and criminal millions the Left have assembled as their minions will continue to vote as instructed.
You political thinkers, you non religious so called libertarian wing of conservative peoples, still think we can force the pendulum back the other way. We cannon and shall not. Western society has tipped over. The balance is irretrievably lost. We are as the Israelites after David passed. Sliding ever farther into corruption and debauchery. We were told this would happen.
Nueces… don’t be so negative!.. You see the demise of the Lame Stream Media because the public has had enough of the propaganda machines. You see the death knells for some of the liberal Cable news networks.. You see the biggest change in the political landscape in over 70 years in the 2010 US elections. I see the glass half full… Take a sip!.. Bill
The tragedy here is the alarmists’ message persisted unassailed too long, which, in turn, convinced governments worldwide to churn out economy killing “renewable” energy policies and mandates that are already costing producers (taxpayers) billions of additional tax dollars in subsidies and ongoing inefficiencies, e.g. wind power.
The obfuscations and flat out denials of the warmists enabled the proverbial horse to leave the barn.
The only hope now is that reasonable men and women in government will wake up to the truth, reassess policy and hard economics, and change direction. If they do not then economies will greatly suffer and power stability will be worse moving forward then it was eighty years ago.
If the greentards want to live in the Dark Ages, fine; go find a remote forest and live off the land. I’ll take the nuclear-powered 21st century please.
Unfortunately, this reverses cause and effect. The impulse toward government meddling came first, and seized upon AGW as a convenient excuse to do what they wanted to do anyway. If it hadn’t been AGW, it would have been some other boogeyman in the closet — asteroid impact, terrorism, solar flares/CMEs, or the like.
Bingo. Nobody cares about the science. Everybody cares about the policy. If not for the policy implications, these climate guys would be about as famous and influential as some guys studying the mating habits of the dung beetle.
The policy tail wags the science dog. Or more to the point, the policy tail wags the funding dog, and the funding tail wags the science dog. Welcome to Soviet science. Lysenko lives on government grants.
Yup.
And it’s crucial to understand which is wagging what. Otherwise, we’ll be fighting the wrong enemy.
hence why i refuse to donate to my alma mater.
what mann did was anti-science. he started with a conclusion.
The data doesn’t matter. Facts are typically non-persuasive as far as the general population is concerned.
Meanwhile, schools all over the nation and world have incorporated the false science into their curriculum, so it’s still being taught.
Add to that the fact that PBS et al continue to run outdated climate-warming-sky-is-falling programs on a weekly (daily? hourly?) basis with absolutely NO disclaimer or qualification to offset the presumption that climate science is settled.
Hence, the 20-somethings and younger have already been and continue to be completely brainwashed en masse. Mission accomplished.
…general reformation of academia itself
About as likely as a reformation in Islam.
Money and agendas have produced charlatans who have, in turn, done a lot of damage to the respect formerly enjoyed by science.
I would add to an essentially correct article. Mr. McIntyre is inaccurately called a mining engineer. He is in fact, an expert in forensic mathematics. He made his significant reputation by analyzing gold mine data, and exposing fraud, salted mines. (If a mine is played out, a shotgun loaded with gold dust, can “salt” the existing surfaces with imbedded gold shot and thus greatly increase its market sale price.) McIntyre revolutionized the gold mining industry by creating mathematical techniques which exposed fraudulent data, thus protecting massive investments. And sent people to jail.
It was this skill, that motivated him, to sniff around climate change reports. He exposed the bedrock analysis, the hockey puck, as mathematically impossible, by achieving the same curve regardless of input. When the legally required disclosure of hard data was repeatedly withheld, this British bull dog bit down hard, for years, demanding through authorities, that they do their duty.
They have not. There is much more behind the publically funded veil.
The policy lesson is clear, for climate change, tobacco – cancer correlations, for the dangers of Fukushima, or the BP well blow out, “Thous shalt not lie with nonlinear regression analyses.” Any unclassified technical paper which does not disclose its primary data, and source codes to all, upon request, must be promptly withdraw. If fairly implemented, large chunks or our governments documents would go in the trash. They rest on supposedly private property, research reports, funded by the taxpayer. I quote the late, and great Senator Patrick Moynihan: Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts.
On this our future will stand or collapse. Climate change is a direct threat to the survival of America.
Im quite sure Ol Mitt will do his best to totally ignore any real evidence AGW is a fools errand. And there is enough support in congress and the senate ,even without a majority of either party, to continue the gravy train of grants and such to whoever claims to be serious about finding the “truth” about this one way or the other.Repeat after me, “Its all about the money”.
Heh! Mann-made glow-bull worming
Buy hey, don’t dare ask a Northerner what kind of ‘climate change’ we’d prefer…
Because we’d vote for a warmer climate every time.
The BBC is STILL reporting the catastrophe that awaits us with Global W..Climate Change.
If it isn’t economic woes, Europe’s stubbornness regarding climate will surely finish it off…
It was never an issue of science, it was always one of pseudo-religious credulity closely tied to the mental hooks of all reveal religions.
“We are out of communion with the gods, we have strayed from the straitened way, what or who might we sacrifice to return to favor, to atone or our wrongs?”
Making small rational adjustments with short feedback loops is the way to go, but our culture prefers big noisy actions with a lot of posturing.
The key in selling the story was the hockey stick: we are near irreversible damnation if we don’t repent, or something. People love that sort of thing, like a child’s make believe: if you don’t snuggle with mommy earth (Gaia) the ogre will get you. Fits real well with the Precautionary Principle which Europe loves so well.
I am afraid thought and effort will profit nothing in the face of belief.
The AGW alarm may go away, but the larmists won’t. They will find a new “comming disaster if we don’t stop….” scenario. Already many of the same alarmist are bring back the over population/famine/peak oil/peak resources scare of the 1970′s. The scenario’s and statistics are ripped right from Alvin Toffler and Paul Ehlrich. What goes out of fashion comes back in fashion.
The “hockey stick” curve was exposed years ago as a hack in the computer code that generated it. That code will generate the same shape from random data. Why are you still talking about it?
Because AGW proponents were claiming the hockey stick curve was supported by other data. This is explained in the article.
If you have been keeping up, the standard reply from warmists now about hockey stick deconstruction and other skeptical inquiries is: “OK, you may have a point, but in the end it doesn’t matter.” Whatever… they still don’t provide reasonable answers to the questions about proxies and their methodology for deciding what goes into their final data set and what doesn’t. From here, they will probably resort to further hand-waving and obfuscation to muddy the waters and try to make it so no one really knows what the heck is going on. They are simply trying to salvage scientific reputations at this point.
It must be great to have a career where you can make up whatever you like and get wealthy doing it.
At least novelists and actors have to to it in a way that attracts fans.
Scientists don’t have to be believable, attract fans, or even follow the scientific method.
All they have to do is feed some criminal politicians the ammunition they want to get elected and rule the world.
criminal politicians
Oxymoron
No. I think the word you are looking for is “redundancy”.
“All they have to do is feed some criminal politicians the ammunition they…”
received HANDSOME “wealth redistribution” for.
Well there’s ‘science’ and then there’s ‘$cience’.
The Goracle doesn’t want to tell us how much he’s made on $cience. Must be an Alpha Male thing.
Briffa did enough wrong–but he didn’t disappear the MWP. In one of the Climategate emails he wrote that he believed that temperatures were just as warm 1,000 years ago as they are today. Of course, he didn’t exactly shout that from the rooftops…
You brilliant wits have absolutely no idea of how science works. Really… you shouldn’t let your hatred of Gore get in the way of clear thinking. Read Donals Prothero’s article in latest issue of Skeptic, please.
Its not science, its about making money, no one hates al gore, most feel sorry for his pathetic ass, MANBEARPIG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
“You brilliant wits have absolutely no idea of how science works.”
Well, when your CO2 = CAGW “hypotheses” have a 100% relevant prediction failure rate, your “science” is completely dead to the world of real science’s empirical reality. But when your “mainstream” Climate Scientists ignore the complete predictive and explanatory failure of their own “science” anyway and just keep on going with their same old anti-scientific methods – “consensus”, “peer review”, “models as reality”, massive PR campaigns and other propaganda tactics, etc. – they are obviously doing something other than real science, and they have another agenda. Right?
Those of us who make our living through science in the real world know better than anyone how to spot bad data, it really is that simple.
What is this mysterious discipline you call science, and where can I learn more about it? Can it be studied in Chris Mooney’s nether regions?
I’m pretty sure that it doesn’t work by silencing opposing views, hiding contradictory data, and falsifying supporting data.
Computer programs with no way to calibrate them against reality are also a bit suspect when it comes to “how science works”.
Now with real science!
http://www.skepticalscience.com/broken-hockey-stick.htm
It’s nice to see the climate trolls still shout “Science!” and paste links to SS. Hey! Look! Here’s a link to climateaudit!
http://climateaudit.org
Yay! I win the debate!
Mr. Simberg, You are connecting Keith Briffa to the CRU in Britain, I think he worked the IPCC at the UN. Phil Jones headed the CRU. I have been studying AGW for about six years, and you are right on .
Briffa works for Jones at CRU. The actual staff of the IPCC is tiny. Most of the authors have day jobs.
Paul I so love how Cook and company truncate the boreholes right at the little ice age when the actually full record shows a strong medieval warm period. How can you trust these liars.