Are the “Climate Change” Emails a Tempest in a Teapot?
The “hockey stick” was all that was needed to move the process from creating mass hysteria to “doing something,” which has meant draconian environmental policies that already are creating perverse economic effects. Not surprisingly, Gore made the “hockey stick” the centerpiece of his An Inconvenient Truth documentary, which won him both an Oscar and the Nobel Peace Prize.
However, the “hockey stick” itself had huge problems. The first was that other scientists could not replicate the results using the same data. When one publishes a paper with statistical analysis, one is supposed to make the data available so that others can try to find the same results, which is a powerful tool in keeping researchers honest.
It turned out that the mathematical algorithm used to transform the data was created in a way that no matter what one put into the equation, one received the same results. This is fraud, pure and simple, but because the “hockey stick” resonated with environmentalists and their political allies, it became the centerpiece for anyone who wanted to claim that modern economies are killing the planet.
Furthermore, governments have rigged the game by funding most “climate science.” How likely are they to finance studies that don’t justify the political class’s ambition to control the lives of others?
Science or Nonscience?
The black mark earned by alarmists during the 1970s, for predicting continued global cooling, may be replicated for global-warming alarmists. The real tragedy, however, may be that — one day — scientists will cry wolf to a public that has learned to ignore them.
By now, anybody who is serious about the possibility of global warming knows that the "hockey-stick" theory promulgated by the UN a few years ago is bunk.
This theory held that there was no meaningful variation in global temperature during the past several thousand years until recently, when capitalism began to harness industrial power. That this theory was advanced by a scientist who was a socialist might raise a question about its validity.
"Science" is not, as some people imagine, memorizing a list of facts (such as the names of the planets). Nor is the progress of science determined by laboratory experiments. This is because, at the edge of our knowledge, accepted laboratory experiments don't exist and, in certain fields, laboratory experiments might not even be possible. Rather, the progress of science is determined by free inquiry, open discussion, and transparency among those engaged in a discipline.
Climategate: it's all unravelling now
So many new developments: which story do we pick? Maybe best to summarise, instead. After all, it’s not like you’re going to find much of this reported in the MSM.
1. Australia’s Senate rejects Emissions Trading Scheme for a second time. Or: so turkeys don’t vote Christmas. Expect to see a lot more of this: politicians starting to become aware their party’s position on AGW is completely out of kilter with the public mood and economic reality. Kevin Rudd’s Emissions Trading Scheme – what Andrew Bolt calls “a $114 billion green tax on everything” – would have wreaked havoc on the coal-dependent Australian economy. That’s why several opposition Liberal frontbenchers resigned rather than vote with the Government on ETS; why Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull lost his job; and why the Senate voted down the ETS.
Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation
Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with the Climategate whitewash, says Christopher Booker.
The reason why even the Guardian's George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Professor Philip Jones, the CRU's director, is in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC's key scientific contributors, his global temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC and governments rely – not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.
Dr Jones is also a key part of the closely knit group of American and British scientists responsible for promoting that picture of world temperatures conveyed by Michael Mann's "hockey stick" graph which 10 years ago turned climate history on its head by showing that, after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures have recently shot up to their highest level in recorded history.
Given star billing by the IPCC, not least for the way it appeared to eliminate the long-accepted Mediaeval Warm Period when temperatures were higher they are today, the graph became the central icon of the entire man-made global warming movement.
Since 2003, however, when the statistical methods used to create the "hockey stick" were first exposed as fundamentally flawed by an expert Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre.
Climategate: Which part of 'over' don't these people understand?
Some people still don’t get Climategate.
The main lesson – according to today’s Guardian – is that ‘climate scientists’ have done nothing actually wrong but that in future they should improve their cover-up skills just in case:
But like politicians before them, climate scientists are learning the hard way that sticking to the rules is not enough – they must also to be seen to be sticking to them.
And the other lesson, apparently, is that ‘deniers’ who write stories about such things are just stupid, ignorant scuzzballs:
For one thing, as well as the proper scepticism of the inquisitive mind, which all scientists face, they must tackle the talk-show brand of bastardised scepticism that is borne [sic] of wilful ignorance.
Meanwhile, today’s Times – the paper which boasts it has more environmental correspondents than any other publication: gotta use them somehow, I suppose – prints a special, glossy, Copenhagen-themed supplement about global ecodoom ...
[...] The Classic Liberal looks at the CRU e-mails again – I believe his conclusion is that Climate Change is done. I’m not so sure. I think so far they have been pretty effective at containing the damage. Unless another big shoe drops Copenhagen will steam along and in 6 months this will be mostly forgotten just like all the past revelations. [...]