UNRAVELLING SCIENTIFIC HOCUS POCUS

Some excerpts below from a recent article in The Wall St. Journal. An article there will reach a wide and influential audience. Note the report of a coverup.

One of the pillars of the case for man-made global warming is a graph nicknamed the hockey stick. It's a reconstruction of temperatures over the past 1,000 years based on records captured in tree rings, corals and other markers. The stick's shaft shows temperatures oscillating slightly over the ages. Then comes the blade: The mercury swings sharply upward in the 20th century. The eye-catching image has had a big impact. Since it was published four years ago in a United Nations report, hundreds of environmentalists, scientists and policy makers have used the hockey stick in presentations and brochures to make the case that human activity in the industrial era is causing dangerous global warming.

But is the hockey stick true? According to a semi-retired Toronto minerals consultant, it's not. After spending two years and about $5,000 of his own money trying to double-check the influential graphic, Stephen McIntyre says he has found significant oversights and errors. He claims its lead author, climatologist Michael Mann of the University of Virginia, and colleagues used flawed methods that yield meaningless results.

Dr. Mann vigorously disagrees. On a Web site launched with the help of an environmental group, he has sought to debunk the debunking, and counter what he calls a campaign by fossil-fuel interests to discredit his work. "It's a battle of truth versus disinformation," he says.

But some other scientists are now paying attention to Mr. McIntyre. Although a scientific outsider, the 57-year-old has forced Dr. Mann to publish a minor correction. Now a critique by Mr. McIntyre and an ally is being published in a respected scientific journal. Some mainstream scientists who harbored doubts about the hockey stick say its comeuppance is overdue. The clash has grown into an all-out battle involving dueling Web logs, a powerful senator and a score of other scientists. Mr. McIntyre's new paper is circulating inside energy companies and government agencies. Canada's environment ministry has ordered a review.

Mr. McIntyre's critique isn't going to settle the broader global-warming debate. Indeed, he takes no strong position on whether fossil-fuel use is heating the planet or, if so, how to cope. He just says he has found a flaw in a main leg supporting the global-warming consensus, the consensus that led to an international initiative taking effect this week: Kyoto. The Kyoto protocol obligates the 35 industrialized nations that ratified it -- which don't include the U.S. -- to reduce emissions of six gases 5% below 1990 levels by 2012. The thinking behind it is straightforward: Human activity, especially the burning of fossil fuels, generates carbon dioxide, methane and other gases that accumulate in the atmosphere; there they trap the sun's heat the way a greenhouse does; to reduce the heat, reduce the gases.

But that will mean far-reaching industrial changes. Mr. McIntyre's complaint is that supporters of Kyoto pushed for it by wielding a graph, the hockey stick, whose validity they'd never fully scrutinized. "Give me a break -- we are making billion-dollar decisions," he says, noting that businesses, by contrast, must carefully audit their financial statements and projections.

Many skeptics contend that liberal environmental agendas are behind alarming global-warming headlines, though often skeptics bring policy agendas of their own. Think tanks backed with funding from the energy industry have waged a wide campaign to cast doubt on key scientific results. "Climate science today is fully politicized," says Roger Pielke Jr., head of the University of Colorado's Center for Science and Technology Policy Research. Mr. McIntyre says he hasn't received any industry funding......

The problem, says Mr. McIntyre, is that Dr. Mann's mathematical technique in drawing the graph is prone to generating hockey-stick shapes even when applied to random data. Therefore, he argues, it proves nothing. Statistician Francis Zwiers of Environment Canada, a government agency, says he now agrees that Dr. Mann's statistical method "preferentially produces hockey sticks when there are none in the data." Dr. Zwiers, chief of the Canadian agency's Center for Climate Modeling and Analysis, says he hasn't had time to study Dr. Mann's rebuttals in detail and can't say who is right......

Mr. McIntyre first became interested in the hockey stick in late 2002 after seeing the graph in materials distributed by the Canadian government. "What struck me is that it looked very promotional," he says, "and I wanted to see how they made it." As a financial consultant to small minerals-exploration companies, he was mindful of how wrong estimates of the size of Borneo gold deposits lay behind the 1997 Bre-X Minerals scandal. Mr. McIntyre, who won math contests in high school and a math scholarship to the University of Toronto, says he'd always been disappointed in not having any academic accomplishments "despite having a good mind."

Mr. McIntyre e-mailed Dr. Mann requesting the raw data used to build the hockey stick. After initially providing some information, Dr. Mann cut him off. Dr. Mann says his busy schedule didn't permit him to respond to "every frivolous note" from nonscientists. The climate-statistics expert, now 39, gained a big career boost from initial publication of the graph in 1998 and 1999. Although others had sought clues to past temperatures, his team was among the first to stitch many disparate records together to span hundreds of years across the entire Northern Hemisphere.

Scientists already knew that average global temperatures had risen about one degree Fahrenheit since 1900. Now the hockey stick, showing only smaller fluctuations in earlier centuries, was seen as a breakthrough. The IPCC used it to back a striking conclusion: The 1990s were probably the warmest decade in 1,000 years. This conclusion helped shut down skeptics' claim that the 20th century's greater warmth might be due to natural factors such as changes in solar intensity.

Some scientists had doubts, however. The graph gave little emphasis to what's known as the "medieval warm period," the years around 1000 A.D. when the Norse colonized Greenland. It also seemed to smooth over a cold epoch starting in the 15th century called "the little ice age." Others worried that it relied too heavily on growth rings from a small number of ancient trees, such as California bristlecone pines that can live thousands of years clinging to mountainsides.

Some also disliked Dr. Mann's self-confident persuasive style, among them Wallace Broecker of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Yet because the graph so neatly strengthened the case for man-made warming, Dr. Broecker says, "a lot of people grabbed that hockey stick." From the outset, the graph was a target of numerous lobbyists and skeptics. When Mr. McIntyre became interested in it, he quickly teamed up with Ross McKitrick, an economist at Canada's University of Guelph who'd written a book questioning global warming. (The two met on an Internet chat group for climate skeptics.) In October 2003, Energy & Environment, a British social-science journal known for contrarian views, published an initial critique by the pair.

The two were invited to Washington as a vote neared on a bill to cap fossil-fuel emissions. They met with Sen. James Inhofe, who heads the environment committee and has called the threat of catastrophic global warming the "greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people." The Oklahoma Republican relied on doubts raised by a variety of skeptics in leading successful opposition to the bill in 2003. Mr. McKitrick says he was paid $1,000 by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market research and lobbying group, and had his travel costs picked up by another lobby group. Mr. McIntyre, who briefed lobbyists with the National Association of Manufacturers, says he has taken no payment.

Dr. Mann and scientists close to him viewed this as a political attack, not science. Dr. Mann offered a strong rebuttal of the Canadians' 2003 journal article, explaining that it didn't correctly apply his techniques. In doing so, however, he revealed details of his data and mathematical methods that hadn't appeared in his original paper. When Messrs. McIntyre and McKitrick pointed this out to Nature, the journal that first published the hockey-stick graph, Dr. Mann and his two co-authors had to publish a partial correction. In it, they acknowledged one wrong date and the use of some tree-ring data that hadn't been cited in the original paper, and they offered some new details of the statistical methods. The correction, however, stated that "none of these errors affect our previously published results."

Mr. McIntyre thinks there are more errors but says his audit is limited because he still doesn't know the exact computer code Dr. Mann used to generate the graph. Dr. Mann refuses to release it. "Giving them the algorithm would be giving in to the intimidation tactics that these people are engaged in," he says.

Mainstream scientists have also been scrutinizing the hockey stick. One, Hans von Storch of Germany's GKSS center, has presented theoretical findings arguing that Dr. Mann's technique could sharply underestimate past temperature swings. Indeed, new research from Stockholm University on historical temperatures suggests past fluctuations were nearly twice as great as the hockey stick shows. That could mean the 20th-century jump isn't quite so anomalous.

Mr. McIntyre says he intends to continue his audit of climate science and has demanded that other researchers send him details of their work. He isn't satisfied with the responses so far. "When I ask them for additional data, you can imagine how cooperative they are," he says.

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JERRY POURNELLE NAILS THE COVERUP

You can prove anything with secret data and algorithms.

"There is a long piece on the global "hockey stick" in today's Wall Street Journal that explains something I didn't understand: Mann, who generated the "hockey stick" curve purporting to show that the last century was unique in all recorded history with its sharp climb in temperature, has released neither the algorithm that generated his curve nor the data on which it was based.

I had refrained from commenting on the "hockey stick" because I couldn't understand how it was derived. I've done statistical analysis and prediction from uncertainty much of my life. My first job in aerospace was as part of the Human Factors and Reliability Group at Boeing, where we were expected to deal with such matters as predicting component failures, and deriving maintenance schedules (replace it before it fails, but not so long before it fails that the costs including the cost of the maintenance crew and the costs of taking the airplane out of service are prohibitive) and other such matters. I used to live with Incomplete Gamma Functions and other complex integrals; and I could not for the life of me understand how Mann derived his famous curve. Now I know: he hasn't told anyone. He says that telling people how he generated it would be tantamount to giving in to his critics.

More on this after my walk, but the one thing we may conclude for sure is that this is not science. His curve has been distributed as part of the Canadian government's literature on why Canada supports Kyoto, and is said to have been influential in causing the "Kyoto Consensus" so it is certainly effective propaganda; but IT IS NOT SCIENCE. Science deals with repeatability and openness. When I took Philosophy of Science from Gustav Bergmann at the University of Iowa a very long time ago, our seminar came to a one-sentence "practical definition" of science: Science is what you can put in a letter to a colleague and he'll get the same results you did. Now I don't claim that as original for it wasn't even me who came up with it in the seminar; but I do claim Bergmann liked that formulation, and it certainly appealed to me, and I haven't seen a better one-sentence practical definition of science. Mann's work doesn't meet that definition, and those who use Mann's curve in their arguments are not making a scientific argument.

One of Pournelle's Laws states "You can prove anything if you can make up your data." I will now add another Pournelle's Law: "You can prove anything if you can keep your algorithms secret.""





AND "THE TIMES" OF LONDON WEIGHS IN ON THE WEIRD POLITICS OF "GLOBAL WARMING"

"Global warming has a way of prompting metaphors so bad they destroy a claim to seriousness. This week's prize goes to Klaus Toepfer, head of the Kenya-based United Nations Environment Programme. Climate change could lead to Earth "spinning out of control", he warned, neglecting to describe the time when the planet's climate, or rotation, have been under control.

Africa, he continued, is where "the hammer of global warming will . . . likely hit hardest", using an image of a targetted blow to describe the threat of unpredictable and diffuse change. The "spectre at the feast", he concluded, was the chance that models had underestimated the effect.

It is part of the politics of global warming that there can be no let up in the warnings of catastrophe, in case people think the problem solved. Toepfer's vocabulary perfectly illustrates the genre, with its muddle of inflated expectations and supernatural threats. Such prophesies have poured in this week even though yesterday, the Kyoto Protocol, the most ambitious concerted attempt to combat climate change, finally came into force, seven years after the summit which gave it its name.

The alarm calls are understandable politics, if some have more scientific basis than others. Even though Kyoto is now in force, it has created new headaches. Inflaming public concern may seem like a good way to tackle them. The first is that it has huge gaps, as critics see it. According to the Protocol, the 34 industrialised countries which have ratified the treaty are legally bound now to slash output of greenhouse gases before 2012, with different targets set for each depending on the level of emissions in 1990.

But the US is absent, and there are no binding curbs on the giants of the developing world, China and India. Critics of the Bush Administration find these "flaws" endlessly provocative. They fret about how to bring these rebels within the corral. But this should not be a distraction. There was never any question that the US Congress would sign up to a treaty which would have required the US to make cuts of 7 per cent in its emissions, given the country's dependence on cars.

That is a point which Tony Blair grasped early on. But his notion of a "Kyoto-lite" to include the US - a scheme for rewarding new "green" technology, without binding commitments on emissions - has brought him brickbats within Europe and the Labour party. One of the mysteries of the politics of climate change is why Blair has boxed himself into such an awkward corner. His interest in the subject appears to have sprung from the darkest days of the Iraq row. Whatever his own convictions, the political use was clear.

A commitment to the cause of climate change was a useful offer to those who loathed the war, particularly to those who claimed it was "all about oil", and to young, "green" voters. But it has taken him quickly into difficult territory, otherwise known as the loathing of nuclear power in parts of his party. Britain has no easy way to explain how it will counter the sharp rise in its emissions once existing nuclear stations close, without building more.

Nor, to take the second "flaw", is the dispute with China and India susceptible to a quick burst of pressure. They are resentful that the industrialised world, which grew rich on the unpenalised use of coal and oil, does not want to allow them the same freedom. Their resistance on this point is simply one aspect of a new assertiveness on many fronts. It is helping to stall the current Doha round of global trade talks, among others. But that may be a better forum in which to unpick their objections, offering deals which are more clearly of reciprocal benefit.

Source





Kyoto treaty a pointless exercise

An Australian economist comments:

"Today the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions comes into force. If you believe the climate change propagandists, it is the first step in saving the world from the terrible consequences of global warming. The truth is Kyoto is a joke. It will do next to nothing to lower the rate of global emissions of greenhouse gas and provides no workable framework for future action. By 2012, when ratifying countries' commitments under Kyoto to cut CO2 emissions expire, we will find key countries have failed to comply and global emissions will be rising steadily as the result of world growth.

For this we can all be thankful. The costs of following a Kyoto-style system of emission caps and timetables would, on most available studies, exceed the benefits. This is not, of course, what you will hear from the legion of scientists, bureaucrats, lobbyists, companies and politicians who have taken seats on the Kyoto gravy train. But privately at least the smart ones know Kyoto is a dead duck.

This does not, apparently, include the retreaded Labor leader Kim Beazley and his environment spokesman Anthony Albanese. Boldly undaunted by the disastrous failure of Labor's forest policy and its electorally unproductive alliance with the Greens, they launched a pro-Kyoto stunt for Valentine's Day. Labor's Valentine's Day gift to the Australian people, Beazley told a press conference in Sydney, was Anthony Albanese's Avoid Dangerous Climate Change Bill. This bill would require the Howard Government to ratify the Kyoto Protocol within 60 days of its being carried, which fortunately it won't be.

Urging Australians to make the Protocol their Valentine comes close to advocating national necrophilia. Kyoto has been a corpse since December. That was when the conference of the parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change held their 10th session in Buenos Aires. The aim of the European Union and its allies among the green non-government organisations and lobby groups was to use Buenos Aires to both celebrate the coming into force of the Protocol and to prepare the way for its extension beyond 2012. Recognising just how limited Kyoto was, the idea was to get agreement to a so-called second commitment period, with tougher emission targets for developed countries and a commitment from the developing countries, particularly China and India, to emission targets.

Instead the European Union was isolated and rebuffed by the developing countries, notably India and China, who joined with the US to reject any move to extend the system of enforceable caps on emissions that is at the heart of the Kyoto approach. So, importantly, did Italy - an EU member. Its environment minister declared there was no point in trying to replace Kyoto with something similar after 2012 when it was unacceptable to the US, India and China. According to a Reuters report last week, even the European Commission is backing off any binding commitment on future emission reductions after 2012. It said any future EU commitments to further reductions should depend on the level and type of participation of other big emitters.

The failure of Kyoto should not come as a surprise. Following a series of attempts in 2002 and 2003 by the Green's Bob Brown and by Labor to introduce a bill to, guess what, force the Government to ratify Kyoto in 60 days, it was finally introduced and was referred to a Senate committee for inquiry and report. One of the witnesses to appear before it was Australia's then ambassador for the environment, Chris Langman, from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. "The question is," Langman told the committee, "how can we engage India and China, where most of the growth in the global emissions will take place over the next several decades, in a way that is effective from an environmental point of view? I have very little sense from the negotiations that the [Kyoto] protocol and its approach of binding quantitative caps on emissions, is feasible in terms of engaging those countries." ....

Attempts to turn every unusual weather event into confirmation of these forecasts by climate change propagandists and politicians, from England's Tony Blair to Australia's Beazley, should be seen for what they are - either misinformed or fraudulent. Rather than let them alarm you, ask yourself this: do you think people who can't tell you whether it will rain next Wednesday are really capable of building models that tell you what the climate will be like 100 years from now? I wouldn't trust any economic modelling that forecast what the world economy would look like a century hence, and climate models are at least as flawed as economists' ones".

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

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