July 16, 2006

We've Been Trying to Tell You

A Statistician Speaks on the "hockey stick" model of climate temperature, so beloved by the warmists:

It is important to note the isolation of the paleoclimate community; even though they rely heavily on statistical methods they do not seem to be interacting with the statistical community. Additionally, we judge that the sharing of research materials, data and results was haphazardly and grudgingly done. In this case we judge that there was too much reliance on peer review, which was not necessarily independent. Moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that this community can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility. Overall, our committee believes that Dr. Mann’s assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade of the millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year of the millennium cannot be supported by his analysis.

"... cannot be supported by his analysis." Think about that while watching the big "global warming" show on the Discovery Channel tonight. Tom Brokaw has drunk the kool-aide, and I expect this show to be a search for every piece of evidence that supports the theory of anthropogenic climate warming while ignoring the considerable body of evidence that argues against.

(Later) ... And so it was. The main speaker was James Hansen, the guy who was in all the news saying the Bush administration was stifling his message. There was lots of "most scientists say..." and "warming could cause" and "this may bring about", but nobody willing to step up and say "if you people don't stop this we're all going to die".

Lots of anecdotes of bad forest fires and how last year they were the worst anybodys ever seen, by gum! And many, many shots of calving icebergs, something that is a result of normal glacial activity, not melting. Melting causes the bergs never to reach the sea, but the calving shots are much more dramatic, and the audience isn't smart enough to know the difference anyway.

And Hansen left us with a chilling cliffhanger: there have been five or six mass extinction events in earth's history and they were caused by climate change!

Well, no, several were caused by the climate change that followed asteroid or comet strikes, a different thing altogether. But it was very important that everyone watching come away with the message that EVERY SCIENTIST ON THE PLANET AGREES THAT THIS IS WHAT IS HAPPENING AND IT"S BAD but that is nonsense, they can't get that much agreement at their own kool-aide drinking conventions, much less all the others in the field.

But lots of grant money is riding on the message getting out, so expect more of these scary "documentaries".

Posted on July 16, 2006 07:57 PM