Also wrong.
As you stated about one of the surveys you quoted:
http://www.pbl.nl/en/faq-for-the-article-scientists-views-about-attribution-of-global-warming
You've already admitted there is a consensus and that the IPCC projections are accurate.
Top scientist resigns admitting gobal warming is a big scam!
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As you stated about one of the surveys you quoted:
You've already admitted there is a consensus and that the IPCC projections are accurate.
Your claim is dishonest.
You are trying to associate an answer about the percentage of warming attributed to anthropogenic sources as if it were a question on the very acceptance of the theory of anthropogenic climate change.
Its a dishonest and cheap arguing tactic used by those who have nothing else.
Your claim is bullshit.
As I said previously AGW is not backed up with experiments and observation, it does not have explanatory powers, it lives and dies based on it's predictions so those predictions better be accurate. Now if we do not even have accurate predictions or demand accurate predictions across broad time scales then what is the utility of AGW as a scientific theory?
AGW needs to fit into the family or scientific theories, it can not be some sore thumb that is treated differently, because if you start making exceptions for AGW then it has no contribution to other scientific fields. Science is a foundation that is broad, it is not a narrow plank of wood in some isolated forest.
If AGW takes the bulls by the horn and commits to rigorous methods, it contributes to all other fields of science. My opinion is that we need better and faster technology to simulate chaotic systems, if AGW makes a headway into this then it's ramifications to other fields like medical science that solely rely on trial and error would be revolutionized, any field from the very big to the very small is positively effected by real AGW progress. And the vice versa is true, if AGW utilizes the same methods that other real sciences use then any progress in those other sciences will contribute to AGW.
AGW needs to fit into the family or scientific theories, it can not be some sore thumb that is treated differently, because if you start making exceptions for AGW then it has no contribution to other scientific fields. Science is a foundation that is broad, it is not a narrow plank of wood in some isolated forest.
If AGW takes the bulls by the horn and commits to rigorous methods, it contributes to all other fields of science. My opinion is that we need better and faster technology to simulate chaotic systems, if AGW makes a headway into this then it's ramifications to other fields like medical science that solely rely on trial and error would be revolutionized, any field from the very big to the very small is positively effected by real AGW progress. And the vice versa is true, if AGW utilizes the same methods that other real sciences use then any progress in those other sciences will contribute to AGW.
AH,...but you see,...if your statement that humans caused "global warming" from 1910 thru 1945,...although highly unlikely,...why did it stop,...and actually decline for the next 35 years,...you can't have it both ways.
The UNEMPLOYABLE don't have an answer for the "global warming" for the 35 years from 1910 thru 1945,...but they magically have an iron clad answer for "global warming" for the last 35 years,...???
FAST
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You are confusing the validity of a theory with the power of modelling software.
Those are two separate issues.
The theory is quite sound, its based on the greenhouse effect which is really quite easy to prove.
The models get better and better each year, but even those that made projections 20 years ago did quite well, as moviefan noted:
How the f*ck do you know the theory is correct if you do not have standard for benchmarking it? The only output of AGW is the predictions, if that is all it has to offer then it has to offer predictions in abundance while being accurate for it to even stand a chance against scientific scrutiny.
AGW is not that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, it is that man made CO2 is the driver of climate change.
If all you are saying is that CO2 is a greenhouse gas then there is no debate, I f*cking agree with that and I have always agreed with that. You can not sneak in AGW ontop of a sound theory that CO2 is a greenhouse gas like that way politicians sneak in pork barrel BS inside a bill that has merits.
Have some f*cking god damned standards for once in your life.
Michael Mann would be proud of the way you spliced together my quote with the environmental zealot's nonsense.
In hindsight, though, I can't help but think you could have been clearer that the quote that followed my quote has no basis in reality.
The entire AGW hypothesis is based on a 20-year time spam (from the late 1970s to the late 1990s). In case you've forgotten, in the mid-'70s the same climate researchers were predicting we are headed towards another ice age.
Here's a Newsweek article from April 1975: http://denisdutton.com/newsweek_coolingworld.pdf
Similar nonsense appeared in the New York Times and other mainstream publications. In the mid-'70s, climate researchers were looking at the same data and concluded we are headed towards another ice age.
So much for "thousands of years" of evidence.
Indeed. In its 2013 report, the IPCC reported that 111 of the 114 computer model runs got it wrong.
The only three model runs that got it right were the ones that predicted stagnant temperatures in the 21st century. See pages 768 and 769 of Chapter 9 of the IPCC's 2013 report:
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Chapter09_FINAL.pdf
Excerpt from "A Disgrace to to his profession by Mark Steryn".....Here another sample what his fellow climate scientist think of the Mann Fraudent Hockey stick.
“We now know that the hockey stick graph is fraudulent.”
DR MICHAEL R FOX, PHD (1936-2011) Nuclear scientist, Professor of Chemistry at Idaho State University and researcher at the National Engineering Laboratory. Chairman of the American Nuclear Society’s Public Information Committee. In 2008, in evidence submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency, Dr
Fox said the following : The hockey stick is a name given to a graph of reconstructed temperature data… The “handle” of the hockey stick graph is intended to portray rather flat, constant global temperatures extending from about 1000 AD to about 1900. At this time the global temperatures turn sharply upward indicating the “blade”… The overall message is/was that after about a 900 year period of constant temperatures, the global temperatures rose sharply upward beginning around 1900, allegedly. This is often assumed to be the beginning of the industrial age, and therefore the presumed beginning of significant man-made CO 2 emissions. This is incorrect… This hockey stick graph has been featured prominently and globally in a major scientific journal…
It has been given pivotal importance in several of the IPCC assessment reports, and featured prominently in Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth , which now is discredited too. This section of Dr Fox’s remarks is a useful précis of how the hockey stick was wafted up on ever wider circles of deceit: It is useful to list some of theapproval processes which led to this global deception . The authors, scientists themselves, obviously approved of their own creation. The peer reviewers assigned by the science journal approved it, the editors of the science journal who reviewed, checked, and approved it, and the reviewers of the IPCC reports, the editors of the IPCC documents. The producers of Gore’s documentary approved it, presumably Mr Gore himself, and the thousands of school teachers around the world who required millions of students to view and analyze it. The extent of global fear inspired by the educational systems around the world is incalculable.
We now know that the hockey stick graph is fraudulent. How should we treat those who approved it? What should the EPA do now proposing to adopt rule making for CO 2 mitigation? To do so they must embrace the underlying fraudulent science , and the terrible harm it will bring. EPA action seems simple: do not proceed with the rule making for greenhouse gas mitigation. Have the courage not to mitigate man-made CO 2 and avoid joining with the scientific deceptions. Close analyses of the hockey stick scandal are essential for policy makers, educators, media, and many scientific institutions and their PhD staffers. All of them played a role in creating and/or spreading the deceptions. It has shaken the pillars of institutional science to its foundation and undermined the public trust science once had. We are either dealing with willful scientific deceptions or woeful and lazy scientific mediocrity from PhDs
“We now know that the hockey stick graph is fraudulent.”
DR MICHAEL R FOX, PHD (1936-2011) Nuclear scientist, Professor of Chemistry at Idaho State University and researcher at the National Engineering Laboratory. Chairman of the American Nuclear Society’s Public Information Committee. In 2008, in evidence submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency, Dr
Fox said the following : The hockey stick is a name given to a graph of reconstructed temperature data… The “handle” of the hockey stick graph is intended to portray rather flat, constant global temperatures extending from about 1000 AD to about 1900. At this time the global temperatures turn sharply upward indicating the “blade”… The overall message is/was that after about a 900 year period of constant temperatures, the global temperatures rose sharply upward beginning around 1900, allegedly. This is often assumed to be the beginning of the industrial age, and therefore the presumed beginning of significant man-made CO 2 emissions. This is incorrect… This hockey stick graph has been featured prominently and globally in a major scientific journal…
It has been given pivotal importance in several of the IPCC assessment reports, and featured prominently in Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth , which now is discredited too. This section of Dr Fox’s remarks is a useful précis of how the hockey stick was wafted up on ever wider circles of deceit: It is useful to list some of theapproval processes which led to this global deception . The authors, scientists themselves, obviously approved of their own creation. The peer reviewers assigned by the science journal approved it, the editors of the science journal who reviewed, checked, and approved it, and the reviewers of the IPCC reports, the editors of the IPCC documents. The producers of Gore’s documentary approved it, presumably Mr Gore himself, and the thousands of school teachers around the world who required millions of students to view and analyze it. The extent of global fear inspired by the educational systems around the world is incalculable.
We now know that the hockey stick graph is fraudulent. How should we treat those who approved it? What should the EPA do now proposing to adopt rule making for CO 2 mitigation? To do so they must embrace the underlying fraudulent science , and the terrible harm it will bring. EPA action seems simple: do not proceed with the rule making for greenhouse gas mitigation. Have the courage not to mitigate man-made CO 2 and avoid joining with the scientific deceptions. Close analyses of the hockey stick scandal are essential for policy makers, educators, media, and many scientific institutions and their PhD staffers. All of them played a role in creating and/or spreading the deceptions. It has shaken the pillars of institutional science to its foundation and undermined the public trust science once had. We are either dealing with willful scientific deceptions or woeful and lazy scientific mediocrity from PhDs
Excerpt from "A Disgrace to to his profession by Mark Steryn".....Here an sample what his fellow climate scientist think of the Mann Fraudent Hockey stick.
Mann of the past ONE TREE-RING TO RULE THEM ALL . It is difficult to avoid the impression that the IPCC uncritically accepted scientific work that “repealed” the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age because these two well-known features of the climate record placed Global Warming Theory in doubt, at least for the global public.
DR JEFFREY E FOSS, PHD BEYOND ENVIRONMENTALISM: A PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE (2009) THE HOCKEY stick is what’s known as a “proxy reconstruction”.
There’s only two things wrong with it the proxies and the reconstruction. Other than that, you can take it to the bank. First, the proxies: The hockey stick is generally believed to show global (actually Northern Hemisphere) temperatures for the last millennium. But Mann does not, in fact, have any temperature readings for, say, the year 1143. That’s because your average medieval peasant village did not have a weather station, and neither Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit nor Anders Celsius had yet been born.
So Mann has to divine his 12th century thermometer readings from “proxy data”. What is a proxy? Well, it’s something like an ocean coral or an ice core or some lake sediment from which one can “reconstruct” the temperature history. In Mann’s case, it was mostly tree rings. Much of the world isn’t terribly forested, and most of the parts that are can’t tell you the temperature for 1143. For a shot at that, you need a thousand-year-old tree, and there are only a few of those around, here and there in Siberia, in parts of Canada, in California. That was his first mistake:
His proxy reconstruction uses the wrong proxy. To a kid, a tree ring is simple: Jack counts in and finds out whether his tree is older than Jill’s. But, if you’re trying to figure out the temperature, it’s more fraught. “The original ‘hockey stick’ graph figured strongly in the IPCC 2000,” Professor Anthony Trewavas told the British House of Commons. “But it is an artifice… The size of the tree ring is determined by everything that affects all aspects of plant development. These are: soil nutrients and structure; light variations; carbon dioxide; competition from other trees; disease; predators; age; rainfall; previous developmental activity as well as temperature. Temperature, for which it supposedly acts as a proxy, is just one contributor amongst many and of course reflects local conditions only. Mann’s ‘hockey stick’ failed,” he continued, because “tree rings on their own are not a reliable proxy.” Oddly enough, boreholes and other proxies disagree with tree-rings when it comes to the temperature record. Mann had a few alternative proxies in his mix, but just a soupçon , so he could claim to have included them if anybody asked. And then he further refined the process:
Having chosen the wrong proxy trees he took the additional precaution of using the wrong kind of tree. Those ones in the American west, for example, are bristlecone pines. They’re certainly old: There’s a bristlecone pine in California’s White Mountains that has been precisely dated 5,064 years old in 2015 and is believed to be the oldest tree on earth. Unfortunately, the guys who know bristlecones including the very scientists who collected the data Mann used say they’re unreliable as thermometers. Those California bristlecones are sensitive to higher atmospheric CO2 concentration, regardless of whether the temperature’s going up or down. Mann knew this. As Hans Erren observed, Mann’s North American trees did not match the North American temperature record. Yet he decided that, even if they couldn’t reliably tell you the temperature for the bit of sod they were planted in, they could reliably tell you the temperature for the entire Northern Hemisphere. Even the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences bristled at the cones:
For the earliest part of the 1999 analysis, Mr Mann’s group relied heavily on bristlecone pines from western North America. The original study noted that there were some difficulties in using such trees because of peculiarities in their recent growth, but Mr Mann and his group attempted to quantify those problems and to work around them.
The National Research Council suggested that researchers avoid using trees that are the most difficult to interpret . The NRC can “suggest” all they want: for years, Mann and his Hockey Team continued to rely on bristlecones as failsafe treemometers. Yet, even when you decide to apply the wrong example of the wrong proxy to the wrong part of the planet, repealing the Medieval Warm Period is harder than you think. So Mann additionally decided to apply the wrong weighting to his wrong example of the wrong proxy to the wrong part of the planet by giving tree-ring data that produced a hockey-stick curve over 300 times the value of tree-ring data that didn’t. Wrong proxy, wrong tree, wrong location…
But what else do we need? Ah, yes, the wrong method. Put aside the bristlecones in MBH98 and Mann’s hockey-stick curve for the entire Northern Hemisphere up to 1421 comes from just one tree, and from thereafter to 1447 from just two trees both from Québec’s Gaspé Peninsula . (And from 1400 to 1403 from zero trees: he just extrapolated the 1404 reading.) By contrast, reputable dendrochronologists won’t use data sets with fewer than five trees on the grounds that one or two (never mind zero trees) might not be that representative. But Mann did and then he made them even more mega-representative by double-counting that pair of Gaspé trees in two separate data sets.
And suddenly you can’t see the Little Ice Age or the Medieval Warm Period for the trees or tree. Wrong proxy, wrong tree, wrong location, wrong method = right answer: LIA( liitle ice age) equal to MIA( Missing in Action) . MWP( Medieval Warm Period) becomes RIP ( Retired in Peace).
Mann of the past ONE TREE-RING TO RULE THEM ALL . It is difficult to avoid the impression that the IPCC uncritically accepted scientific work that “repealed” the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age because these two well-known features of the climate record placed Global Warming Theory in doubt, at least for the global public.
DR JEFFREY E FOSS, PHD BEYOND ENVIRONMENTALISM: A PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE (2009) THE HOCKEY stick is what’s known as a “proxy reconstruction”.
There’s only two things wrong with it the proxies and the reconstruction. Other than that, you can take it to the bank. First, the proxies: The hockey stick is generally believed to show global (actually Northern Hemisphere) temperatures for the last millennium. But Mann does not, in fact, have any temperature readings for, say, the year 1143. That’s because your average medieval peasant village did not have a weather station, and neither Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit nor Anders Celsius had yet been born.
So Mann has to divine his 12th century thermometer readings from “proxy data”. What is a proxy? Well, it’s something like an ocean coral or an ice core or some lake sediment from which one can “reconstruct” the temperature history. In Mann’s case, it was mostly tree rings. Much of the world isn’t terribly forested, and most of the parts that are can’t tell you the temperature for 1143. For a shot at that, you need a thousand-year-old tree, and there are only a few of those around, here and there in Siberia, in parts of Canada, in California. That was his first mistake:
His proxy reconstruction uses the wrong proxy. To a kid, a tree ring is simple: Jack counts in and finds out whether his tree is older than Jill’s. But, if you’re trying to figure out the temperature, it’s more fraught. “The original ‘hockey stick’ graph figured strongly in the IPCC 2000,” Professor Anthony Trewavas told the British House of Commons. “But it is an artifice… The size of the tree ring is determined by everything that affects all aspects of plant development. These are: soil nutrients and structure; light variations; carbon dioxide; competition from other trees; disease; predators; age; rainfall; previous developmental activity as well as temperature. Temperature, for which it supposedly acts as a proxy, is just one contributor amongst many and of course reflects local conditions only. Mann’s ‘hockey stick’ failed,” he continued, because “tree rings on their own are not a reliable proxy.” Oddly enough, boreholes and other proxies disagree with tree-rings when it comes to the temperature record. Mann had a few alternative proxies in his mix, but just a soupçon , so he could claim to have included them if anybody asked. And then he further refined the process:
Having chosen the wrong proxy trees he took the additional precaution of using the wrong kind of tree. Those ones in the American west, for example, are bristlecone pines. They’re certainly old: There’s a bristlecone pine in California’s White Mountains that has been precisely dated 5,064 years old in 2015 and is believed to be the oldest tree on earth. Unfortunately, the guys who know bristlecones including the very scientists who collected the data Mann used say they’re unreliable as thermometers. Those California bristlecones are sensitive to higher atmospheric CO2 concentration, regardless of whether the temperature’s going up or down. Mann knew this. As Hans Erren observed, Mann’s North American trees did not match the North American temperature record. Yet he decided that, even if they couldn’t reliably tell you the temperature for the bit of sod they were planted in, they could reliably tell you the temperature for the entire Northern Hemisphere. Even the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences bristled at the cones:
For the earliest part of the 1999 analysis, Mr Mann’s group relied heavily on bristlecone pines from western North America. The original study noted that there were some difficulties in using such trees because of peculiarities in their recent growth, but Mr Mann and his group attempted to quantify those problems and to work around them.
The National Research Council suggested that researchers avoid using trees that are the most difficult to interpret . The NRC can “suggest” all they want: for years, Mann and his Hockey Team continued to rely on bristlecones as failsafe treemometers. Yet, even when you decide to apply the wrong example of the wrong proxy to the wrong part of the planet, repealing the Medieval Warm Period is harder than you think. So Mann additionally decided to apply the wrong weighting to his wrong example of the wrong proxy to the wrong part of the planet by giving tree-ring data that produced a hockey-stick curve over 300 times the value of tree-ring data that didn’t. Wrong proxy, wrong tree, wrong location…
But what else do we need? Ah, yes, the wrong method. Put aside the bristlecones in MBH98 and Mann’s hockey-stick curve for the entire Northern Hemisphere up to 1421 comes from just one tree, and from thereafter to 1447 from just two trees both from Québec’s Gaspé Peninsula . (And from 1400 to 1403 from zero trees: he just extrapolated the 1404 reading.) By contrast, reputable dendrochronologists won’t use data sets with fewer than five trees on the grounds that one or two (never mind zero trees) might not be that representative. But Mann did and then he made them even more mega-representative by double-counting that pair of Gaspé trees in two separate data sets.
And suddenly you can’t see the Little Ice Age or the Medieval Warm Period for the trees or tree. Wrong proxy, wrong tree, wrong location, wrong method = right answer: LIA( liitle ice age) equal to MIA( Missing in Action) . MWP( Medieval Warm Period) becomes RIP ( Retired in Peace).
We need to remember what science is it is not a compilation of facts. Rather it is a set of processes used to gather relatively reliable information about the world we live in, our societies and ourselves. It is the formality of these processes that gives science its privilege and validity over other claims to knowledge about our world that can only come from belief, received wisdom, or anecdote. When this formality is broken whether by unsupported claims , hidden biases , lack of reproducibility , and inadequate peer review public trust in science is harmed and its privilege is undermined.
PROFESSOR SIR PETER GLUCKMAN, ONZ, KNZM, FRS, FMEDSCI, FRSNZ ARTHUR E MILLS MEMORIAL ORATION TO THE ROYAL AUSTRALASIAN COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS, MAY 18TH 2014 P ETER GLUCKMAN is the Chief Scientific Advisor to the Government of New Zealand, and broadly supportive of the general line on "climate change”. His emphasis on the formality of scientific processes is not contentious, and his list of breaches in that formality and their harm to public trust is worth considering with respect to Michael E Mann and his work:
1) Unsupported claims In the Summary for Policy Makers of its Third Assessment Review, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change made the single most dramatic assertion in the history of the global-warming movement: The increase in temperature in the 20th century is likely to have been the largest of any century during the past 1,000 years. It is also likely that, in the Northern Hemisphere, the 1990s was the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year. The only evidence offered in support of this statement was Michael Mann’s hockey stick. Does it, indeed, support such a claim? Not according to many of the scientists in these pages. The Danish climatologist Bo Christiansen examined nine Mann “hockey sticks” and says it is “almost impossible to conclude” from any of them that “the present period is warmer than any period in the reconstructed period”. Professor David Legates writes that “one can have no confidence in the claim that the 1990s are the warmest decade of the last two millennia” (by then Mann had extended his flexi-shaft back another millennium.) Almost every other serious reconstruction shows much greater natural climate variability, and the 1990s within the bounds of that. And, as Professors McShane and Wyner point out, most of these reconstructions look nothing like hockey sticks. Indeed, it remains an open question whether what his oeuvre purports to divine a “global temperature” is in a scientific sense “supportable”. In the absence of reliable tropical data, says Dr David Rind, “we have no way of knowing how cold (or warm) the globe actually got”. So unsupported claims: yes.
2) Hidden biases Later in this book, Nobel Prize winner Ivar Giaever reminds us that “in pseudoscience you begin with a hypothesis which is very appealing to you, and then you only look for things which confirm the hypothesis”. Mann began with a hypothesis that the global temperature record had been pretty stable for 900 years and then in the 20th century it soared up and out the roof. And so he looked for “things which confirm the hypothesis”: As Mann put it, “one set of tree-ring records” was “of critical importance” in conjuring his stick .So his hypothesis that it looks like a hockey stick is confirmed only because a tree ring that produces a hockey-stick shape is given 390 times the weight of a tree ring that does not. That tells you nothing about what the temperature was in the 15th century, but a lot about Mann’s biases. He chose a statistical method that, as the US National Research Council noted rather primly, “tends to bias the shape of the reconstructions”. Furthermore, the scientists who actually collected the tree-ring data that Mann cannibalized insist they’re primarily an indicator of CO 2 fertilization, not temperature. At the IPCC level, he maintained his bias against anything that contradicted his hypothesis. As Professor John Christy testified to Congress, Mann “misrepresented the temperature record of the past thousand years by (a) promoting his own result as the best estimate, (b) neglecting studies that contradicted his, and (c) amputating another’s result so as to eliminate conflicting data”. Hidden biases: yes.
3) Lack of reproducibility Is Mann’s work “reproducible”? They gave it a go in Berlin. “She came to the conclusion that she cannot reproduce his diagram,” says Professor Ulrich Cubasch. “The real problem in this case, in my view, is that Michael Mann does not disclose his data.” Except for a small trusted coterie, Mann declined for years to release the elements needed to reproduce his stick. In evidence before the House of Commons in London, Professor Darrel Ince noted Mann’s refusal to cough up his computer code, and said that he would “regard any papers based on the software as null and void”. His stick could be neither proved nor disproved and, as Professor Vincent Courtillot reminded European climatologists, if “it’s not falsifiable, it’s not science”. Lack of reproducibility: yup. So three strikes, he’s out. No, wait, that’s another sport entirely.
For hockey, you need four.
4) Inadequate peer review “The hockey stick is an extraordinary claim which requires extraordinary evidence,” wrote Oxford physicist Jonathan Jones. Nature never asked for any and, when it fell to others to demonstrate the flaws of the stick, the journal declined to share their findings with its readers. Mann and a few close allies controlled the fora that mattered, and banished any dissidents. “It’s a completely rigged peer-review system,” concluded CalTech’s Dr David Rutledge. Fourth strike. The unsupported claims, hidden biases, lack of reproducibility and inadequate peer review of Mann have surely harmed “public trust in science”. What follows is one scientist and his science, by those who know both the work and the man.
PROFESSOR SIR PETER GLUCKMAN, ONZ, KNZM, FRS, FMEDSCI, FRSNZ ARTHUR E MILLS MEMORIAL ORATION TO THE ROYAL AUSTRALASIAN COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS, MAY 18TH 2014 P ETER GLUCKMAN is the Chief Scientific Advisor to the Government of New Zealand, and broadly supportive of the general line on "climate change”. His emphasis on the formality of scientific processes is not contentious, and his list of breaches in that formality and their harm to public trust is worth considering with respect to Michael E Mann and his work:
1) Unsupported claims In the Summary for Policy Makers of its Third Assessment Review, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change made the single most dramatic assertion in the history of the global-warming movement: The increase in temperature in the 20th century is likely to have been the largest of any century during the past 1,000 years. It is also likely that, in the Northern Hemisphere, the 1990s was the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year. The only evidence offered in support of this statement was Michael Mann’s hockey stick. Does it, indeed, support such a claim? Not according to many of the scientists in these pages. The Danish climatologist Bo Christiansen examined nine Mann “hockey sticks” and says it is “almost impossible to conclude” from any of them that “the present period is warmer than any period in the reconstructed period”. Professor David Legates writes that “one can have no confidence in the claim that the 1990s are the warmest decade of the last two millennia” (by then Mann had extended his flexi-shaft back another millennium.) Almost every other serious reconstruction shows much greater natural climate variability, and the 1990s within the bounds of that. And, as Professors McShane and Wyner point out, most of these reconstructions look nothing like hockey sticks. Indeed, it remains an open question whether what his oeuvre purports to divine a “global temperature” is in a scientific sense “supportable”. In the absence of reliable tropical data, says Dr David Rind, “we have no way of knowing how cold (or warm) the globe actually got”. So unsupported claims: yes.
2) Hidden biases Later in this book, Nobel Prize winner Ivar Giaever reminds us that “in pseudoscience you begin with a hypothesis which is very appealing to you, and then you only look for things which confirm the hypothesis”. Mann began with a hypothesis that the global temperature record had been pretty stable for 900 years and then in the 20th century it soared up and out the roof. And so he looked for “things which confirm the hypothesis”: As Mann put it, “one set of tree-ring records” was “of critical importance” in conjuring his stick .So his hypothesis that it looks like a hockey stick is confirmed only because a tree ring that produces a hockey-stick shape is given 390 times the weight of a tree ring that does not. That tells you nothing about what the temperature was in the 15th century, but a lot about Mann’s biases. He chose a statistical method that, as the US National Research Council noted rather primly, “tends to bias the shape of the reconstructions”. Furthermore, the scientists who actually collected the tree-ring data that Mann cannibalized insist they’re primarily an indicator of CO 2 fertilization, not temperature. At the IPCC level, he maintained his bias against anything that contradicted his hypothesis. As Professor John Christy testified to Congress, Mann “misrepresented the temperature record of the past thousand years by (a) promoting his own result as the best estimate, (b) neglecting studies that contradicted his, and (c) amputating another’s result so as to eliminate conflicting data”. Hidden biases: yes.
3) Lack of reproducibility Is Mann’s work “reproducible”? They gave it a go in Berlin. “She came to the conclusion that she cannot reproduce his diagram,” says Professor Ulrich Cubasch. “The real problem in this case, in my view, is that Michael Mann does not disclose his data.” Except for a small trusted coterie, Mann declined for years to release the elements needed to reproduce his stick. In evidence before the House of Commons in London, Professor Darrel Ince noted Mann’s refusal to cough up his computer code, and said that he would “regard any papers based on the software as null and void”. His stick could be neither proved nor disproved and, as Professor Vincent Courtillot reminded European climatologists, if “it’s not falsifiable, it’s not science”. Lack of reproducibility: yup. So three strikes, he’s out. No, wait, that’s another sport entirely.
For hockey, you need four.
4) Inadequate peer review “The hockey stick is an extraordinary claim which requires extraordinary evidence,” wrote Oxford physicist Jonathan Jones. Nature never asked for any and, when it fell to others to demonstrate the flaws of the stick, the journal declined to share their findings with its readers. Mann and a few close allies controlled the fora that mattered, and banished any dissidents. “It’s a completely rigged peer-review system,” concluded CalTech’s Dr David Rutledge. Fourth strike. The unsupported claims, hidden biases, lack of reproducibility and inadequate peer review of Mann have surely harmed “public trust in science”. What follows is one scientist and his science, by those who know both the work and the man.
Ok, this should be fun.
Where in that document does it say that 111 of 114 models got it wrong.
A few more damning quotes from Steyn's book:
"Keith [Briffa] didn't mention in his Science piece but both of us think that you're on very dodgy ground with this long-term decline in temperatures on the thousand-year timescale." - Phil Jones email to Michael Mann, May 6, 1999.
"At the very least, MBH (Mann, Bradley, Hughes) is a very sloppy piece of work -- an opinion I have held for some time." - Tom Wigley email to Phil Jones, Oct. 21, 2004.
"If you really believed in your data, you wouldn't mind someone looking at it." - James Lovelock, interview in the Guardian, March 29, 2010.
"Keith [Briffa] didn't mention in his Science piece but both of us think that you're on very dodgy ground with this long-term decline in temperatures on the thousand-year timescale." - Phil Jones email to Michael Mann, May 6, 1999.
"At the very least, MBH (Mann, Bradley, Hughes) is a very sloppy piece of work -- an opinion I have held for some time." - Tom Wigley email to Phil Jones, Oct. 21, 2004.
"If you really believed in your data, you wouldn't mind someone looking at it." - James Lovelock, interview in the Guardian, March 29, 2010.
