HOCKEY STICK HOKUM

Before 1999 the accepted view on climate change was that the world had undergone a warming period in the middle ages, followed by a mid-millennium cold spell and a subsequent warming period -- the current one. That all changed when paleoclimatologist Michael Mann's research paper eliminated the Medieval warm period from the history books. With a nice, steady temperature oscillation that persists for centuries followed by a dramatic climb over the past century, Mann's work produced the "hockey stick" graph.

The trouble is that there's no reason to believe Mann, or his "hockey stick" graph of global temperature changes. Subsequent studies have shown Mann's analysis to be less than definitive:

* In 2003, Ross McKitrick and Steven McIntyre published an article in a peer-reviewed journal showing that Mann's methodology could produce hockey sticks from even random, trendless data.

* Furthermore, in a soon to be released report by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the three researchers -- Edward J. Wegman of George Mason University, David W. Scott of Rice University and Yasmin H. Said of Johns Hopkins University -- find that Mann's methodology is biased toward producing "hockey stick" shaped graphs.

In addition to debunking the hockey stick, Wegman goes a step further in his report, attempting to answer why Mann's mistakes were not exposed by his fellow climatologists. His conclusion is that the coterie of most frequently published climatologists is so insular and close-knit that no effective independent review of the work of Mann is likely.

Source. An extended summary of the report can be found here. Note this quote from the Wegman report:

"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.

Canada still telling lies about climate history

It says it right here on the Official Climate Change Web site of the Government of Canada: "The 20th century has been the warmest globally in the past 1,000 years." This statement is wrong on several counts, and the Government of Canada knows it. After all, the knowledge that it is wrong is the product of two Canadians who have become internationally renowned in climate circles for having debunked the idea that the world is warmer than it has been in a millennium.

The two Canadians are Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick. The saga of their attack on one of the great iconic myths of global warming theory has been chronicled in media all over the world, from The Wall Street Journal to The New York Times and the BBC. Top science publications such as Nature and Science have taken on the issue. It is the subject of Congressional inquiry and, most recently, review by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

For the latest on their work, which continues to reverberate through the global science community, see their article on this page. The National Academy of Sciences essentially upheld the McIntyre/McKitrick critique of the 1,000-year temperature change claim, widely known as the Hockey Stick graph, and downgraded it to a 400-year statement. One of the NAS panelists said the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had sent a "very misleading message" when it adopted the Hockey Stick as the great global symbol of man-made global warming.

Despite its now dubious authenticity, the Hockey Stick continues to appear in Government of Canada publications and Web sites. It was there yesterday, a great anchor in the piles of misleading propaganda produced by Ottawa to shape opinion on climate change.

Outside of the National Post, which first carried the McIntyre/McKitrick critique of the Hockey Stick, the story has been largely ignored by Canadian media. The Globe and Mail has yet to carry one story on the subject. Only a handful of scattered references have appeared in other newspapers across the country, notably the Calgary Herald. The Toronto Star's only acknowledgement was a column by Jay Ingram, who essentially said the debate among scientists was undermining public confidence in science.

At the CBC, Quirks and Quarks, the corporation's flagship radio science show, has steadfastly ignored one of the biggest Canadian-origin science stories around. Two Canadian scientists rock the world climate community, trigger international reaction, Congressional investigation and a National Academy of Sciences report that supports the Canadians' critique of official United Nations science. No news there, apparently.

Fortunately, the CBC does not run Canada. Unfortunately, the Government of Canada does, and it's handling of the 1,000-year climate claim and the Hockey Stick remains a model of disingenuous fabrication. It is, in short, a Big Lie. When the government says, "The 20th century has been the warmest globally in the past 1,000 years," it reports an untruth. Even the United Nations IPCC didn't go that far. It said there isn't 1,000 years of data for the southern hemisphere, so there's no way of knowing the 1,000-year history of global temperatures.

What the IPCC did say is that it is "very likely" the 1990s was the warmest since 1861. It also said it was "likely" (as opposed to "very" likely) that "the increase in surface temperature over the 20th century for the northern hemisphere" was greater than any century in the past 1,000 years.

That looked to be the case before McIntyre and McKitrick came along. Now, according to the National Academy of Science panel, after a review, there exists a "high level of confidence" that temperatures of the recent past are higher than at any level over the past 400 years. As for 1,000 years, the NAS panel said there's too much uncertainty to have much confidence in a conclusion.

So the Government of Canada claim was never true to the IPCC science, such as it was, and now it is even less true. In fact, it is dead wrong. A science reassessment and correction is in order. That task should fall to the Science Assessment and Integration Branch under the Atmospheric and Climate Science Directorate at the Meteorological Service of Canada. The branch took a look at McIntyre and McKitrick back in February, 2005, and glossed over the problems by saying the paper was a "reminder that science proceeds with hesitant steps." The story behind the Hockey Stick has advanced beyond such bromides about scientific progress.

See the Truth. That's one of the marketing promotions for Al Gore's science fiction movie, An Inconvenient Truth. The movie promotes global warming theory, using the bogus Hockey Stick graph as part of its claim to scientific authenticity. But it's hard to See the Truth when you're using a Big Lie to get your message across. One expects such crafty manipulation from Al Gore, but we should not expect it from the Government of Canada.

Source





MORE GREENIE NONSENSE IN BRITAIN

The Government is to outlaw standby switches on televisions and video and DVD players to cut the amount of electricity wasted in the home. Refrigerators, washing machines and dishwashers will have to become energy-efficient, and lightbulbs that burn too much energy will be phased out.

According to yesterday's Energy Review, standby facilities use 8 per cent of all domestic electricity. Lighting, set-top boxes, televisions, chargers, fridges, freezers, washing machines and computers were highlighted as wasteful products that must be redesigned to save power. New homes, which are already four times more energy-efficient than the average household, are to face stringent regulations.

Businesses will have to phase out or reduce drastically the energy used by computers, printers and photocopiers left on standby. By cutting wastage and making equipment more efficient, ministers hope to win a significant reduction in Britain's energy requirements.

Energy efficiency is one of the main planks of the Government's Energy Review, which is intended to lay out how Britain receives and uses its power for the next 20 years. Ministers want to shift energy production away from traditional fossil fuel sources to improve security of supply. The Government hopes that the measures in the review will reduce emissions by an additional 13 to 17 per cent by 2020, on top of the estimated 14 per cent already expected.

Power companies will be expected to play their part. They will be offered incentives to reduce the electricity supplied to each home by encouraging customers to put in insulation or install solar panels

More here









LUDICROUS JAPANESE WINDFARM

The air above Yatabe Minami elementary school is heavy with humidity. The playground swelters without the slightest breath of breeze, and on the highest trees the leaves do not flicker. The sails of the Darius-Savonius generator stand still. Tsukuba, the town that prides itself as Japan's most hallowed scientific research centre, is the site of perhaps the world's worst electricity wind farm: in the 12 months it has operated, its windmills have consumed 43 times more power than they have generated.

The project to make Tsukuba a self-sufficient showpiece for green energy has failed, bringing scorn upon the government programme to test alternative sources. It is likely to be cited by sceptics elsewhere, including in Britain, where the Government published its energy review this week. Tsukuba is involved in civil litigation, criminal investigations and an assault on the academic reputation of Waseda University, Japan's most respected seat of learning.

Amid the embarrassment of Tsukuba's stagnant windmills things have descended into farce. To give the appearance of a functioning alternative energy programme, when dignitaries visit and on parent-teacher evenings, the generators become motors and the sails are made to turn artificially.

For the children of Tsukuba, who watched with fascination as the 10m turbines rose in their grounds, summer science projects are in ruins. They had planned to keep daily registers of how much electricity the windmills were producing but, after a couple of weeks of finding the needles stuck at "0.0kWh", the excitement faded. The three windmills at Yatabe are among 23 installed last July at schools around the high-tech university town of Tsukuba, which had intended to install first dozens, then possibly hundreds more. Home to top-secret industrial laboratories, Japan's space programme and a big robotics institute, Tsukuba has long been pitched as its technology showcase.

Unfortunately it has an average wind-speed of 2.5km/h (1.5mph) - a far cry from the 15-20km/h needed to make a wind farm work. At some schools one or two windmills have occasionally begun spinning in winter gusts. Among them, the 23 windmills have produced one megawatt in 12 months, having been expected to generate more than 200. Experts in the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry are appalled. Shunji Kawamura, the director of its Industrial Technology Research Institute, said: "It should have been perfectly clear the windmills would never work." The sails of the model of windmill purchased by Tsukuba are not turning, but nevertheless consume nearly three megawatts a year.

The Tsukuba City citizens' ombudsman has taken the local authorities to court, demanding that the taxpayers' wasted millions be returned. The academics and industrialists who form the ombudsman's body have found what they claim is a network of bid-rigging scams and other corruption associated with the project. Police have begun a criminal investigation. "Tsukuba has the reputation of being the highest-tech city in the world, but it is run by people out of the 19th century," Daijiro Kameyama, the head of the Shisei ombudsman, said. Tsukuba City is conducting its own civil suit against Waseda University, whose research suggested that the windmills would generate huge amounts of free electricity. The windmills were built by a Waseda University spin-off company.

Source

***************************************

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.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

*****************************************