Politick

Global Warming Deception Unveiled UPDATED

A very disturbing report makes you wonder whether any Global Warming scientist can be trusted. The vaunted Mann Hockey Stock is at the heart of the GW case, and now it turns out the core data was cherry-picked to show warming. Use of the whole sample would have shown cooling! The red line is the Mann Hockey Stick. See it shoot up in recent years. The black line is the whole data set. See it shoot down. A completely contrary conclusion.

The tale is well-told here. And even better is to start here. Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit debunked the original hockey stick, but until just now was not able to get a hold of the core data.

Also below the fold I include a good summary of the history of the Mann Hickey Stick and its debunking, with links. 

Why Mann would resist revealing his source data was always a point of concern - real science would not work this way. What Steve found when he saw the data was that the tree ring data was cherry-picked - one of Mann's co-authors had selected a mere 10 rings out of a larger sample, specifically chosen to create the hockey stick. When the whole sample is used, the black line above results. Instead of warming, we have cooling.

The Mann Hockey Stick was a reconstruction from tree ring data of historic temperature that was then tied to recent surface temperature data. An explanation of tree ring data is here. The sharp spike up is an artifact of tying two disparate data sets together.

The hockey stick has been hugely influential on the GW debate; it caused the IPCC to completely reformulate the historical record.The second chart shows how the IPCC used to view the historical record, with a Medieval Warm Period and a Little Ice Age.

The whole point of the Mann Hockey Stick was to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period - it is warmer than now without SUVs. Also the rise off the Little Ice Age can explain all the anecdotal data (like glaciers melting) as natural, without blaming man-made CO2.

This broken hockey stick fiasco follows a whole series of questionable political acts by the British climate center (CRU). They had been refusing to open their data to scrutiny. They also either lost or purged core data. Another British center had been withholding tree ring data. And so it goes.

Something is very wrong when scientists hide data and refuse to allow their work to be reviewed. Peer Review is not a review of the data and conclusions themselves, but of the approach - process not substance.

Something is very rotten when the data *finally* gets reviewed and found to be deceptive or plain wrong. This is not the only example; the Steig Antarctic study has been shown to be laughably false. Steig smeared data from the only warmish spot, the Peninsula, across most of the  Continent. A mere 4% of the area led to 75% of the temperature weighting. See chart.

The pro GW crowd must be absolutely sure they are right, regardless of the data, to engage in such shenanigans. Politics corrupts science. Absolute politics corrupts absolutely.

UPDATE 9/30: a lot more coming in on this topic. A detailed chronology of the events leading to this expose shows how fortuitous it was, and how hard the climate scientists resisted subjecting their analysis to scrutiny.  They resisted because they knew the importance of the cherry-picked tree rings to resurrect the debunked Mann analysis. Consider the author's conclusion:

But I think it is pretty obvious that pretty much all the relevant authors of the article must know that without any fabrication of the data, they don't get any hockey stick from the trees. It means that it can't be an innocent mistake and all of them, and not just Keith Briffa, are fraudsters who know very well what they're doing and why they're doing it. The next question is whether the society knows what it should be doing with such people.

The impact of this fraud includes having to revisit a number of peer-reviewed papers that used the cherry-picked data rather than the broader data set precisely because the cherry-picked set supported their conclusion, if not their science. Now, tree-ring data is fraught with difficulties - a discussion of the problems with tree-ring analysis here - but cherry-picking tree-rings is fraught with fraud. Maybe peer-review itself in the GW world needs to be revisited, not just the data sets.

Get a Grip, People, on Obama!

This brewing hysteria over Obama has gone over the edge.  What is the great fear of Obama talking to school kids?  That he will sweet-talk them into being little ObamaBots to pursue a glorious socialist revolution in Amerika?  Peggy Noonan captures the Independent Angst of the moment in her column today, that the feeling is growing the Obama Is Not One Of Us.  It has already begun to infect the moderate Democrats, particularly the soon-to-emerge Hilary '12! crowd.  It may take down the leftwing wingnut and Green Czar, Van Jones, for his intemperate remarks.   But are all these Czars a fifth column to take over control of the government unconstitutionally, or just a way to give Chicago-style patronage jobs to those people who helped Obama get elected?  And is the threat in '12 a moderate challenger, or a more radical candidate angry over the loss of the public option?  

The best assessment of this I have read comes from James Srode in the American Spectator article One term Obama.  You would expect this publication to be virulent against Obama, as it outed President Clinton's Paula Jones escapade that eventually cascaded into a special prosecutor and impeachment.  Yet this piece provides a reasoned historical perspective about past Presidents who got into similar situations, and gives a much needed perspective to quell the brewing hysteria.

The thesis is that during grave crises, the better Presidents will seize excessive and unconstitutional powers, and as the crisis abates the powers will be pulled back.  Lincoln for example went way beyond anything even imagined about Obama's purported power grab; and yet as the Civil War was being won his powers were pulled back.  If he hadn't been assassinated, he might have become a failed President in his second term, as Wilson was - another example of a Presient who went beyond Constitutional powers from 1915-1918, to prepare for war, and then found his legs cut out from under him at home when he tried to create the League of Nations.  The crisis had abated and the body politic took back what he had seized.

As our financial crisis has seemed to recede, the power pullback is already well underway.  This is very early in his Presidency. The mistake he made was to try to seize power in areas unrelated to the crisis. Our crisis is financial, and his agenda is to fix healthcare, global warming and education.  The two bills in process, healthcare reform and cap&trade, are hugely complex monstrosities which look more like power grabbing than problem solving.  He should be benefiting from the green shoots; but instead he is sinking from them. 

Ironically a W-Shaped Recession and a second wave down might do more to help Obama's Presidency than success against the Great Recession.  If his luck is we muddle through, his karma may be that he overplayed the Crisis Card, and it came back to bite him.  

The Republic is in crisis.  It is always in crisis.  Get a grip.