Thread: The “hockey stick” theory is now discredited: How fanaticism substitutes for science

Originally Posted by Windigo

Investegated by who? His own University. The University he brings in grant money to? The University that concluded he didn't inderectly take part in the destruction of E-mails when NOAA's own interview of his former Grad Student Dr. Wahl says that he in fact did? You do undsertand the term 'white wash' dont you.

The Rodney King trial was a trial? You know a real legal process. What Dr. Mann went through was his friends saying that he did nothing wrong. And as I showed in teh interview with Dr. Wahl his friends clearly where wrong in their conclusions.

I love this word "independent". Is his former grad student Dr. Wahl with whom he is in constant contact with "independent". Is his e-mail buddy Dr. Jones with whom he is also in constant contact with "independent". Is Dr. Briffa who said flat out in private e-mails that he believed that the medieval warm period existed and was warmer than the present but also understood the pressure to present a nice neat package "independent". Is Dr. Rutherford who used the same data set as Dr. Mann "independent". Is e-mail buddy Dr. Esper who is in private flat out afraid of crossing Mann "independent".

I don’t know how after Climategate we can honestly use the word "independent". These (*)(*)(*)(*)heads all work together and make sure that the are all on the same page. Its well understood in their e-mails that there will be hell to pay for anyone who doesn't tow the party line so I don’t know where you get the world "independent". They aren't independent. They are a team. Say what you want about the Climategate e-mails but they most certainly proved that.

Go ahead list any specific reconstruction you want I’ll blow it out of the water. They all make the same errors and/or use the same erroneous data like bristlecones, or Yamal, or upside down tiljander, to get a hockey stick.

Its been over 1000 days since a hurricane made landfall in the US. Longest such streak since the civil war.

Caused by a cooling pacific.

Rising at a rate that will make a difference long after we are all dead if ever.
What about it. Bore holes show a strong Holocene optimum and medieval warm period. Hockey stick reconstructions don’t get their shape from the borehole series.



Your mountian is a mole hill.

No I think he is a hack. The AR2 fell flat on its face because the IPCC couldn't show that the current warming was any stronger than the medieval warm period. That was until an unknown fresh out of grad school Dr. Mann somehow became a lead author despite having no qualifications for the IPCC AR3 and gave them the evidence they needed.

Great responses, Windigo.

Attempting to explain the facts to Kessy_Athena is a lost cause and an exercise in futility.

She has become a sycophant and an official “spokesperson” for the far left global warming crowd!

Originally Posted by James Cessna

Unfortunately, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) bought this fradulent sicence hook, line and sinker!

They just want someone elses money. Thats all. Thats it.

Gimme Gimme Gimme is the EU motto.

Originally Posted by James Cessna

Kessy_Athena, why mandate changes that are not necessary when the solution to global warming is right at our fingertips! You solutions will destroy jobs and force more people to join the unemployment lines. My solutions will create well-paying jobs and will put many highly-skilled people and their families back to work!

You know, James, saying that you have a solution to global warming implies that you both recognize that global warming is real and that it's a problem.

So far in this thread, we've mainly been discussing about whether or not global warming is real, not what we should do about it. That's actually a discussion I'd much rather have. What really concerns me about the persistence of climate change denial is that it's making it politically dangerous for any conservatives to contribute constructively to any discussion of a solution. We need the sort of business expertise that conservatives can provide. We need their contributions to make a better plan that will protect the economy as well as deal with climate. And we need the people with the most business expertise to not only prevent damage to the economy but to find and exploit the economic opportunities that new technologies and new techniques can afford. We desperately need the contributions only conservatives can make, but instead we're stuck in a debate about the existence of something that is becoming more and more blatantly obvious.

We need you. The nation needs you. Heck, the world needs you.

BTW, I happen to agree with you that a lot of the opposition to nuclear power is unreasonable, and rooted in an emotional response to the words "nuclear" and "radiation", not on a reasonable assessment of the risks and benefits.

Originally Posted by Kessy_Athena

You know, James, saying that you have a solution to global warming implies that you both recognize that global warming is real and that it's a problem.

So far in this thread, we've mainly been discussing about whether or not global warming is real, not what we should do about it. That's actually a discussion I'd much rather have. What really concerns me about the persistence of climate change denial is that it's making it politically dangerous for any conservatives to contribute constructively to any discussion of a solution. We need the sort of business expertise that conservatives can provide. We need their contributions to make a better plan that will protect the economy as well as deal with climate. And we need the people with the most business expertise to not only prevent damage to the economy but to find and exploit the economic opportunities that new technologies and new techniques can afford. We desperately need the contributions only conservatives can make, but instead we're stuck in a debate about the existence of something that is becoming more and more blatantly obvious.

We need you. The nation needs you. Heck, the world needs you.

BTW, I happen to agree with you that a lot of the opposition to nuclear power is unreasonable, and rooted in an emotional response to the words "nuclear" and "radiation", not on a reasonable assessment of the risks and benefits.

"BTW, I happen to agree with you that a lot of the opposition to nuclear power is unreasonable, and rooted in an emotional response to the words "nuclear" and "radiation", not on a reasonable assessment of the risks and benefits."

You are very correct, Kessy_Athena!

By the way, I also agree with you that global warning does indeed exist.

However, as I have said throughout this thread, the cause for global warming is very natural and not man-made.

The people who shout "anthropogenic (man-made) global warming!" are the very people who are wearing blinders and refuse to see or accept anything else!

For example, they ignore reliable satellite data that clearly show "global warming" is confined to the northern latitudes where many urban "heat centers" and very large metropolitan cities are in high concentrations.

They also ignore the fact that 75% of the earth's surface is covered with oceans and oceans are very effective at absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The other 25% of the earth’s surface includes a lot of plant life and vegetation that is also very efficient at absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and then converting and releasing it as molecular oxygen!

Would you care to render a guess as to what this very natural and very common process is called?



Global Satellite Data

The above figure shows a more recent satellite data trend from the RSS analysis 1979 - 2008 [http://www.ssmi.com/msu/msu_data_description.html]. The left-hand figure shows regional warming around the world, the right-hand figure shows the average warming by latitude – zero warming at 60 degrees S with increasing warming into the Arctic. This illustrates that recent warming is a northern hemisphere phenomenon.

Originally Posted by Windigo

Investegated by who? His own University. The University he brings in grant money to? The University that concluded he didn't inderectly take part in the destruction of E-mails when NOAA's own interview of his former Grad Student Dr. Wahl says that he in fact did? You do undsertand the term 'white wash' dont you.



The Rodney King trial was a trial? You know a real legal process. What Dr. Mann went through was his friends saying that he did nothing wrong. And as I showed in teh interview with Dr. Wahl his friends clearly where wrong in their conclusions.



I love this word "independent". Is his former grad student Dr. Wahl with whom he is in constant contact with "independent". Is his e-mail buddy Dr. Jones with whom he is also in constant contact with "independent". Is Dr. Briffa who said flat out in private e-mails that he believed that the medieval warm period existed and was warmer than the present but also understood the pressure to present a nice neat package "independent". Is Dr. Rutherford who used the same data set as Dr. Mann "independent". Is e-mail buddy Dr. Esper who is in private flat out afraid of crossing Mann "independent".

I don’t know how after Climategate we can honestly use the word "independent". These (*)(*)(*)(*)heads all work together and make sure that the are all on the same page. Its well understood in their e-mails that there will be hell to pay for anyone who doesn't tow the party line so I don’t know where you get the world "independent". They aren't independent. They are a team. Say what you want about the Climategate e-mails but they most certainly proved that.

Go ahead list any specific reconstruction you want I’ll blow it out of the water. They all make the same errors and/or use the same erroneous data like bristlecones, or Yamal, or upside down tiljander, to get a hockey stick.


Its been over 1000 days since a hurricane made landfall in the US. Longest such streak since the civil war.


Caused by a cooling pacific.

Rising at a rate that will make a difference long after we are all dead if ever.


What about it. Bore holes show a strong Holocene optimum and medieval warm period. Hockey stick reconstructions don’t get their shape from the borehole series.





Your mountian is a mole hill.



No I think he is a hack. The AR2 fell flat on its face because the IPCC couldn't show that the current warming was any stronger than the medieval warm period. That was until an unknown fresh out of grad school Dr. Mann somehow became a lead author despite having no qualifications for the IPCC AR3 and gave them the evidence they needed.

So you're saying that anyone who's ever had any sort of professional contact with Prof Mann is part of this "team"? Given that the scientific community works on the free exchange of information and ideas (well, at least after your work's been published) that's a really convenient way to dismiss the entire field of climatology without having to show there's actually anything wrong with any of the data. What about the 125,000 members of the AAAS, are they all part of this "team" as well? The 2,000 members of the NAS? The national academies of Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Russia, and the UK? The membership of every other professional scientific organization on the planet? The million strong readership of Science? The readers of every other journal that's published climate research? The leadership of companies like Alcoa, Chrysler, Dow, DuPont, Ford GE, Honeywell, Johnson & Johnson, PG&E, Rio Tinto and Shell Oil? The generals at the Pentagon who are taking climate change dead seriously? Are they all part of this "team"? Are they all afraid of the wrath of Micheal Mann?

You kind of need to make up your mind. Is Prof Mann a charlatan and a hack, or is he the mastermind of a massive conspiracy including millions of people at the highest levels of science, government, industry, and the military around the world? For that matter, what exactly would those millions of people have to gain from such a global conspiracy? Or has Prof Mann highjacked the CIA's mind control satellites or something?

The research supporting the science of climate change is publicly available - anyone who wants can pick up any of those journals and go over any of the papers with a fine toothed comb. The Mann - McKitrick dispute is actually illustrative of this. McKitrick is an economist by trade, not a climatologist, and not even a scientist. But he was able to not only go over Mann's work on his own, but he put together a sufficiently rigorous criticism that he was published in a journal himself. And Nature, which had originally published Mann's work, went back over it and wound up publishing a correction, pointing out that some of Mann's analysis was sloppy - although that did not change the over all conclusion of Mann's paper.

What the so called "climategate" affair actually showed was that yes, climatologists do generally view climate change as settled science (which it is), and yes, the do hold deniers in a fair bit of contempt (which is understandable, considering the blatant politicization of the denier camp and their habit of grossly distorting science to try to sow doubt in the minds of the public.) What it does not show is any sort of grand conspiracy. Most of the time, deniers cite a grand total of exactly one email out of more than a thousand (and thousands of other documents) that, when taken out of context, can be made to sound bad. The most I've ever seen cited anywhere is a grand total of six emails out of the lot.

If I'm wrong, and you think a real case for conspiracy can be made from those documents, then show me. You can access the entire thing here, http://www.climate-gate.org/ so show me the documents in full context, make your case.

And for the record, Prof Mann has been investigated by Penn State (twice), the US National Academy of Science, the Virginia Attorney General's office, and the US Congress. Also for the record, Penn State has a lot more to lose if it were found to be covering up misconduct by a faculty member then any grants Mann might bring in, notably being its reputation for academic integrity, alumni contributions, and government financial support.

And if you want a list of all the evidence saying that yes, we are in a period of rapid and unusual warming, NOAA has one for you here.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/paleo.html
Go ahead, I'd like to see you try to discredit every single data set they have there.

Speaking of evidence, I find it interesting that you didn't even try to discredit the satellite data, the historic temperature record, the ice core data, the retreating glaciers, melting sea ice, or expanding deserts. So out of the ten things I rattled off the top of my head, you could only find anything at all to say about four of them.

The recent spate of tornadoes in the US could well have a lot to do with the ENSO. I'm not a climatologist, so I don't know. And I honestly don't feel like going to the trouble of reading up on it, since it's a pretty minor point. An increase in violent and extreme weather has been a predicted consequence of climate change for decades, and that's exactly what we're seeing right now.

Its been over 1000 days since a hurricane made landfall in the US. Longest such streak since the civil war.

Ah, yes, hurricanes and the climate in general pay ever so much attention to political boundaries...

Rising at a rate that will make a difference long after we are all dead if ever.

Given that we were discussing evidence for climate change, it's not especially relevant how long it would take the current rate of sea level rise to substantially impact humans. The point is that it is rising, and at the moment mainly due to thermal expansion. If global temperatures aren't going up, why then would sea water be getting warmer?

What about it. Bore holes show a strong Holocene optimum and medieval warm period. Hockey stick reconstructions don’t get their shape from the borehole series.

Umm, Holocene optimum? You do realize that borehole data only allows for temperature reconstructions of the last 500 years, right? And yes, this method does show dramatic warming over that time, and they do contribute to the hockey stick.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/globa...g/pollack.html

So this is a molehill, then? Does that make Olympus Mons a hillock, then?

I'll make a fuller response later.

#1 Yes there is such a thing as conspiracy. That is why there are criminal statutes. Conspiracy is easy in today’s world of e-mail and social networking. Dr. Mann went along to get along. He provided the science the IPCC needed. Can come up with another explanation of how a fresh out of grad school unknown became an IPCC lead author.

#2

Umm, Holocene optimum? You do realize that borehole data only allows for temperature reconstructions of the last 500 years, right? And yes, this method does show dramatic warming over that time, and they do contribute to the hockey stick.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/globa...g/pollack.html

Oh my (*)(*)(*)(*)ing god. Where does that say that they only go back 500 years. They go back thousands of years. They truncate the data to 500 years so their graphs wont show the show the strong Midlevel warm period and Holocene optimum. God you are gullible. What you thought that since their grapsh didn’t' show it that it didn't exist. All your source does is prove my point. They intentionally hide the data that doesn't agree with their narative.

"Pollack et al. found that the 20th century to be the warmest of the past five centuries, thus confirming the results of earlier multi-proxy studies."

Yep it confirms them when it does and we wont look at when they dont.

Originally Posted by James Cessna

"BTW, I happen to agree with you that a lot of the opposition to nuclear power is unreasonable, and rooted in an emotional response to the words "nuclear" and "radiation", not on a reasonable assessment of the risks and benefits."

You are very correct, Kessy_Athena!

By the way, I also agree with you that global warning does indeed exist.

However, as I have said throughout this thread, the cause for global warming is very natural and not man-made.

The people who shout "anthropogenic (man-made) global warming!" are the very people who are wearing blinders and refuse to see or accept anything else!

For example, they ignore reliable satellite data that clearly show "global warming" is confined to the northern latitudes where many urban "heat centers" and very large metropolitan cities are in high concentrations.

They also ignore the fact that 75% of the earth's surface is covered with oceans and oceans are very effective at absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The other 25% of the earth’s surface includes a lot of plant life and vegetation that is also very efficient at absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and then converting and releasing it as molecular oxygen!

Would you care to render a guess as to what this very natural and very common process is called?

Okay, when it comes to the carbon cycle, let's take a look at the numbers. Talking about climate, you typically measure things in gigatons of carbon per year (GtC/yr). That's metric tons, and just measuring the mass of the carbon itself, not the other elements in carbon compounds like oxygen.

The oceans absorb about 92.4 GtC/yr, and emit about 90.8, so the ocean is net carbon sink to the tune of about 1.6 GtC/yr.

Humans are currently emitting a total of about 6.2 GtC/yr from burning fossil fuels and making cement. About 3.8 GtC/yr of that stays in the atmosphere. The rest is absorbed by the oceans, the terrestrial biosphere, and a good bit goes we know not where.
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/pns/graphics/c_cycle.htm

As I explained before, the fact that CO2 is absorbed by various sinks is worrying, not reassuring, since all carbon sinks have a finite capacity, and will at some point become saturated. And given the large uncertainties about the exact nature of the sinks (especially the missing sink) the amount of our CO2 that stays in the atmosphere could go up quite suddenly at any time.

Global Satellite Data

The above figure shows a more recent satellite data trend from the RSS analysis 1979 - 2008 [http://www.ssmi.com/msu/msu_data_description.html]. The left-hand figure shows regional warming around the world, the right-hand figure shows the average warming by latitude – zero warming at 60 degrees S with increasing warming into the Arctic. This illustrates that recent warming is a northern hemisphere phenomenon.

Urban heat islands are really not a reasonable interpretation of this data. For one thing, the satellite data shows the most warming in places that are most decidedly not major urban centers, such as the Gobi desert, the Arctic Ocean north of the Bearing Straight, and the area around Greenland and Iceland. For another, areas that do have big urban centers such as India, china, the Northeast Corridor of the US, and the US west coast show only moderate to low amounts of warming.

It's also not right to say that this data is only showing warming in the Northern Hemisphere. It is certainly true that the north is warming more then the south, but the south is also warming. To illustrate this, I've retouched the map to just show where there is warming and where there is cooling, not how much.

It's never been expected that all areas of the world would warm uniformly, and local factors have a lot to do with where you see warming and where you see cooling. I would imagine the cooling this shows in the Southern Ocean has a lot to do with the circumpolar current, which isolates the climate of Antarctica from the rest of the world. but you'd have to ask a climatologist to explain the details.

Originally Posted by Windigo

I'll make a fuller response later.

#1 Yes there is such a thing as conspiracy. That is why there are criminal statutes. Conspiracy is easy in today’s world of e-mail and social networking. Dr. Mann went along to get along. He provided the science the IPCC needed. Can come up with another explanation of how a fresh out of grad school unknown became an IPCC lead author.

So you're saying that you seriously believe that there is a conspiracy of millions of people around the world at the highest levels of science, government, industry, and the military? What possible motive could they have for such a thing? I mean, Shell is campaigning for action on climate change. You know, Shell, the oil company? What reason could they have to participate in such a conspiracy? And how do you get everyone who reads scientific journals to go along with it? (Apparently except for McKitrick, who I guess must have gotten a mind control free copy of Nature.) Why would governments around the world, including China, go along with this? What do they have to gain? Or the Pentagon, why would they help perpetuate this "hoax"?

Or maybe you think this is all due to mind control implants used by the Greys to soften humanity up for invasion?

Originally Posted by Windigo

#2

Oh my (*)(*)(*)(*)ing god. Where does that say that they only go back 500 years. They go back thousands of years. They truncate the data to 500 years so their graphs wont show the show the strong Midlevel warm period and Holocene optimum. God you are gullible. What you thought that since their grapsh didn’t' show it that it didn't exist. All your source does is prove my point. They intentionally hide the data that doesn't agree with their narative.

"Pollack et al. found that the 20th century to be the warmest of the past five centuries, thus confirming the results of earlier multi-proxy studies."

Yep it confirms them when it does and we wont look at when they dont.

Umm, you are aware that the core of the planet is hot, right? And that below a certain depth the thermal flux from the interior completely overwhelms any temperature signal from the surface, right?

Well, I'd ask you to show some evidence that borehole data goes back thousands of years, but I guess it would be pointless since Prof Mann and his nefarious men in black have made it all disappear, right? So if it's been so thoroughly suppressed, how exactly do you know about it?

Originally Posted by James Cessna

"BTW, I happen to agree with you that a lot of the opposition to nuclear power is unreasonable, and rooted in an emotional response to the words "nuclear" and "radiation", not on a reasonable assessment of the risks and benefits."

You are very correct, Kessy_Athena!

By the way, I also agree with you that global warning does indeed exist.

However, as I have said throughout this thread, the cause for global warming is very natural and not man-made.

The people who shout "anthropogenic (man-made) global warming!" are the very people who are wearing blinders and refuse to see or accept anything else!

While I certainly don't mean to try to speak for you or anyone else, James, but some of your posts make it sound to me as if the economic consequences of political action on climate change are more of a concern to you then any issues with the actual science. Am I right about that?

If I am, I think it might be more constructive to talk about the economics and politics of the issue, rather then the science.

First, let me assure you that I and most other Democrats are very aware of the potential economic damage of a clumsy approach to the climate. The last thing I or anyone else wants is legislation that deals with climate change by sending the economy down the toilet. We don't want to put people out of work, we don't want to put companies out of business. What we want is a smart, market based approach that will minimize any drag on the economy.

We also don't want excessive and intrusive government regulation either. We don't want government bureaucrats micromanaging the economy, and we don't want Washington making arbitrary decisions that may later to turn out to have been less then far sighted. And we know that one thing the market does well is finding the most efficient solution to a problem.

So what do we want? That's the real question. It's important to keep in mind what the ultimate goal of any attempt to deal with climate change is. To find an alternative to fossil fuels. In other words, energy independence. Remember that climate change is only one of the issues caused by our dependence on fossil fuels. OPEC, gas prices, Mideast politics, terrorism funded by oil money, you get the idea. Even if climate change turns out to be no problem at all, energy independence would still be worthwhile.

I think that we can find a way to achieve that without wrecking the economy or having the government take over everything. The idea behind a cap and trade approach is to let the market do the heavy lifting, to have the government only give things a push to get things rolling. The idea is to incentivize finding solutions, and then step back and let the people actually doing the hard work figure out the best way to go about it. Now, the proposal as it stands now is certainly far from perfect, and could definitely be improved. And we could really use your help in doing that.

I would also like to point out that some special interests seem to have been greatly exaggerating the economic consequences of action on climate change. Think about it, have you heard anyone object to cap and trade, or any other proposal, because it would reduce GDP by X amount, or increase unemployment by Y points? It seems to me that when you see someone making an argument without any sort of numbers, you should be suspicious. If the numbers were there and supported the argument, wouldn't they be included?

One of the few examples I could find of real numbers being used to argue against action on climate change comes from back when the Kyoto Protocol was being debated. The Heritage Foundation released a commentary in 1998 on a report from the US Department of Energy on the likely results of Kyoto. The biggest, baddest, scariest number Heritage could come up with, the one they headlined and repeated several times was that by 2010, the price of gas could be as high as $1.91 a gallon. You can read the entire document here: http://www.heritage.org/research/rep...energys-report

Originally Posted by Kessy_Athena

So you're saying that you seriously believe that there is a conspiracy of millions of people around the world at the highest levels of science, government, industry, and the military? What possible motive could they have for such a thing? I mean, Shell is campaigning for action on climate change. You know, Shell, the oil company? What reason could they have to participate in such a conspiracy? And how do you get everyone who reads scientific journals to go along with it? (Apparently except for McKitrick, who I guess must have gotten a mind control free copy of Nature.) Why would governments around the world, including China, go along with this? What do they have to gain? Or the Pentagon, why would they help perpetuate this "hoax"?

No I beleive that the big con is the same as it always was. Marks like yourself think it cant be that big because you think everyone has to be in on it. The truth is that the big con is the easiest to pull off because fewer people have to be in on it.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWj7oWlVtag&feature=re lated"]YouTube - ‪Revolver - The Formula‬‏[/ame]

I hope you can follow it. Cons are actually quite simple. The problem is people with large egos like yourself over think them so you fall for them.

Take the IPCC. The IPCC is set up to look like it is large. But it is not. It is actually small. Every conclusion the IPCC comes to is really just the opinion of a couple of dozen of lead authors. Specific conclusions like Solar forcing or historic temperatures are often the result of the single lead author of that chapter.

Warmmonger Mike Hulme let this slip, not that we didn't know it already, recently.

"Without a careful explanation about what it means, this drive for consensus can leave the IPCC vulnerable to outside criticism. Claims such as ‘2,500 of the world’s leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate’ are disingenuous. That particular consensus judgment, as are many others in the IPCC reports, is reached by only a few dozen experts in the specific field of detection and attribution studies; other IPCC authors are experts in other fields."

The thousands of people claim comes from all the expert reviewers the IPCC has. But the catch is that by the IPCC process only the lead authors have the final say. The reviewers are powerless and truth be told only a small minority of expert reviewers actually bother to send back review comments of the IPCC ARs.

While the environment appears to be big it is actually quite easily controlled. This is fundamental to the big con.

Umm, you are aware that the core of the planet is hot, right? And that below a certain depth the thermal flux from the interior completely overwhelms any temperature signal from the surface, right?

That is a dumb statement. I cant even begin to start to point out how many things are wrong with that. Were you just talking out of your ass?

Well, I'd ask you to show some evidence that borehole data goes back thousands of years,

Uh that first graph I posted. That was a borehole graph. It goes back 20k years.