Silencing the skeptics

The impact of climategate on the credibility of some key global warming alarmists was significant. Now comes the backlash. And no, it doesn't involve a scientific argument.

At CO2 Insanity, John O’Sullivan writes:

Beleaguered global warming religionist, Michael Mann has signed up a Canadian libel law firm that has ties to the ultra-green David Suzuki Foundation (DSF). Skeptics fear DSF and other warmist groups are gearing up for reprisals against skeptic scientists who have helped derail the global warming tax raising juggernaut.

Internationally renowned climate scientist, Dr. Tim Ball and prominent U.S. skeptic Chris Horner appear to be the first victims of a coordinated attack by discredited ‘hockey stick’ graph conjurer, Michael Mann.

Read the full article. Please.

The Hockey Stick over time

The IPCC has made much of Professor Michael Mann's "hockey stick" graph. It's been a staple of the warm-mongers. Well, I invite you to take a look at this short video produced by Doc over at the Autopsy.



This kinda puts thing into perspective. And even if Mann's hockey stick graph was was true, I think it shows that we have more to worry about from cooling than we do from warming.

h/t to Anthony and Kate.

Update: this animation is from Watts Up With That? and includes a comparison to Mann's hockey stick.

Hide the decline

Via David Rose at the Daily Mail:

The claim was both simple and terrifying: that temperatures on planet Earth are now ‘likely the highest in at least the past 1,300 years’.

As its authors from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) must have expected, it made headlines around the world.

Yet some of the scientists who helped to draft it, The Mail on Sunday can reveal, harboured uncomfortable doubts.

But when the ‘warmest for 1,300 years’ claim was published in 2007 in the IPCC’s fourth report, the doubters kept silent.

It is only now that their concerns have started to emerge from the thousands of pages of ‘Warmergate’ emails leaked last month from the CRU’s computers, along with references to performing a ‘trick’ to ‘hide’ temperature decline and instructions to resist all efforts by the CRU’s critics to use the Freedom of Information Act to check the unit’s data and conclusions.

Which reminds me of that old adage that all that's required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.

Here, courtesy of the Daily Mail, is a closer look at the IPCC's hockey stick chart and how the green line mysteriously "disappears" just as it's about to show a sharp decline.

Be sure to read the whole article by David Rose. It's one of the best investigative reports on climategate to appear in mainstream media.

h/t: ClimateAudit

Illegal curve?

Looks like an illegitimate the hockey stick has been exposed. But will it receive anything more an a 2 minute minor penalty?

CFP: The IPCC on the run at last

Bob Carter at Canada Free Press:

According to UK journalist, Geoffrey Lean, all that is lacking to solve the global warming “crisis” is political will from governments.

Well, thank the Lord for that lack. For the IPCC’s 2007 final Summary for Policymakers shows that the climate alarmists are at last on the run. Their evidence for dangerous, human-caused global warming, always slim, now lies exposed in tatters for all to see.

In contrast, the alternative, persuasive and non-alarmist view of climate change is well summarized in two recently issued and readily available documents. The first is a letter to the Secretary General of the United Nations, which was released at the UN’s Bali conference last December, supported by the signatures of 103 eminent professional persons. The second is the Manhattan Declaration on Climate Change, the release of which coincided with the launch of the International Climate Science Coalition at a major climate rationalist conference in New York in early March.

The evidence for dangerous global warming adduced by the IPCC has never been strong on empirical science. Endless circumstantial scare campaigns have been run about melting glaciers, more droughts and storms and floods, sea-level rise and polar bears, but all founder on one inescapable problem – as does Mr. Al Gore’s over-hyped science fiction film. And that is that we live on a naturally variable planet. Change is what planet Earth does on all scales, and so far not one of the alleged effects of human-caused global warming has been shown to lie outside normal planetary variation. Sea-level rising? Sure, it happens. And the appropriate response is adaptation, as the Dutch have known for centuries.

Stuck with the absence of empirical evidence for dangerous warming or abnormal change, in 2001 the IPCC turned to graphmanship, giving prominence in its 3AR to the so-called “hockey-stick” record of temperature over the last 1000 years. The hockey-stick graphic, which appeared to show dramatic increases of temperature during the 20th century compared with earlier times, has now been exposed as statistical chicanery and, thankfully, is nowhere to be seen in the 4AR.

No hockey-stick and no empirical evidence, what is a man to do? Well, obviously, turn to virtual reality rather than real reality: PlayStation 4 here we come.

The IPCC’s expensive and complex computer models can be programmed to produce any desired result, and it is therefore not surprising that they uniformly predict warming since 1990. Meanwhile, the real-world global average temperature has stubbornly refused to obey this stricture. It exhibits no significant increase since 1998, and the preliminary 2007 year-end temperature confirms the continuation of a temperature plateau since 1998 to which is now appended a cooling trend over the last 3 years.

Is global cooling next?

Read the whole thing.

The global-warmers were bound to attack, but why are they so feeble?

Director Martin Durkin responds to the critics of his documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle:

On March 8, Channel 4 broadcast my programme. Since then, supporters of the theory of man-made global warming have published frothing criticism. I am attacked for using an "old" graph depicting temperature over the past 1,000 years. They say I should have used a "new" graph - one used by Al Gore, known as the "hockey stick", because it looks like one.

But the hockey stick has been utterly discredited. The computer programme used to generate it was found to produce hockey-stick shapes even when fed random data (I refer readers to the work of McIntyre & McKitrick and to the Wegman Report, all available on the internet). Other than the discredited hockey stick, the graph used by us (and published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) is the standard, accepted record of temperature in this period.

A critic claims that one of the graphs cited by us, illustrating the extraordinarily close correlation between solar variation and temperature change, has since been "corrected". It most certainly has not. The graph was produced by Prof Eigil Friis-Christensen, the head of the Danish National Space Centre, who says it still stands. But if the global-warmers don't like that graph, there are plenty of others that say the same thing.

No one any longer seriously disputes the link between solar activity and temperature in earth's climate history. I urge readers to look up on the net: Veizer, Geoscience Canada, 2005; and Soon, Geophysical Research Letters, 2005.

[links added]

...more

Cooking the Figures

This is a story that really won't be news to some, but to many it might be. It's the classic case of thinking that the end justifies the means.

He knows what he wants his results to be. And the original numbers aren't giving him that data. So the agency he works for won't be able to persuade people to fight the war he wants to fight.

Well, that's not acceptable.

He starts with his software. There are certain procedures that are normal and accepted in his line of work. But if he makes just one little mistake, his program does a weird little recursion and if there's any data at all that shows the pattern he wants it to show, it will be magnified 139 times, so it far overshadows all the other data.

He can run it on random numbers and it gives him the shape he wants. Unfortunately, the real-world numbers aren't random -- they have a very different shape. All the numbers. Even his jimmied program won't give the results he wants.

All he needs is any data shaped the right way. And so he looks a little farther, and ... here it is. It looks, on the surface, like all the other data that he's been working with. Other researchers working in his field, just glancing at it, will assume it is, too.

But it isn't. Because the source that gathered this batch of data had some other key information that takes it all away. The numbers don't mean what they normally mean. In fact, this number set is absolutely false.

If you use these numbers along with all the other data, however, the clever little program will pick them up, magnify them radically, and voilá! The final report shows exactly the shape he needs the numbers to have.

The trouble is, these numbers are supposed to be doublechecked. Anybody who looks closely at his numbers and at his program will see what he's done. It's not hard to find, if you have the original data sets and can examine the program. He will be exposed as a fraud. It will do his cause more harm than good, if it's made public.

But he's not afraid. He knows how this works.

He doesn't show the program or the lists of his data sources to anybody.

To those of you familiar with this story, you find some familiar names: Mann, Santer, McIntyre. Those of you who don't recognize these names, go and read All In A Good Cause by Orson Scott Card.

h/t: SDA

Scandal of the Decade

In The 'Hockeystick' - Global Warming Scandal of the Decade author Michael R. Fox Ph.D. says:

This global warming lobby is large, it is organized, it is international, heavily funded, and it is mean. Whatever else the agenda may be, it is not science.

Fox examines the willingness to suppress skeptics and the socialist nature of the movement:

The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a UN organization formed within the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP). This should sound alarms for those familiar with the politics of some of the power brokers within the UN itself. Many are decidedly anti-capitalist and anti-American. For example, consider the statement of Maurice Strong made at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro:

"Isn't the ONLY hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn't it our responsibility to bring that about?"

Read more...

via the Hawaii Reporter.

Resisting Global Warming Panic

By J.R. Dunn at American Thinker

Rumor had it that Bush intended to embrace the warming thesis at last in his State of the Union address. Instead Greens nationwide went into depressed tailspins as he called for an attack on the problem by means of technical advances, a curve ball very much in the old Bush mode, of a type that we've seen too little of recently. Bush is acting in defiance of much of the civilized world, led by a former vice-president and including the media, the entertainment community, the Democrats, most of the policy elite, that peculiar and never-before-encountered group known as "mainstream scientists", and now even corporations, eager to clamber aboard the Kyoto wagon while there's still room.

As James Lewis recently put it on these pages, global warming is most likely a crock. Some of us are old enough to remember similar hysterics over air pollution, overpopulation, and universal famine, none of which ever came to pass. The science behind warming is so full of lacunae, speculation, and outright fraud (e.g., the famed "hockey stick chart" purporting to show temperature levels over the past millennium while conveniently dropping both the medieval warm period and the Little Ice Age) to be in any way convincing.

The rest of the article can be read by clicking here.