THE GLOBAL WARMING HOCKEY STICK
It's very likely that various entities and individuals and institutions have been scamming us and cooking the books and lying to us for as long back as anyone can remember. When this kind of thing is done by a business or an entity the media would be inclined to label as 'right of center', it immediately makes front page news along with calls for severe retribution. When similar activities are perpetrated by what the MSM (Main Stream Media) regards as 'Holy Cows' (the MSM themselves, the UN, Hollywood, Liberals or various Liberal special interest groups, etc.), the news is either totally suppressed or shows up on the functional equivalent of page nine.
This pattern was in force for a long time because the MSM seemed to have an ideological oligopoly on The Means of Information. This has fortunately changed. We can now get news the MSM ignores and second or alternate opinions along with supporting facts from Talk Radio, Fox News, the Internet, various print vehicles, and most recently and spectacularly, the Blogosphere.
At first it was only the MSM which came under the scrutiny of bloggers and others for 'making up the news' and/or 'perpetrating unsubstantiated rumors' and/or 'cooking the books on generally available information' and/or 'blatant plagiarism' and/or 'egregious leftward bias' and/or more generally being unprofessional and FUBARING the whole process of gathering and disseminating news and/or information. Exposure (in spite of considerable MSM 'stonewalling') of one or more such misdeeds has resulted in resignations from the BBC, the NYT (Blair, and Raines), CBS (Rather and four others), and most recently CNN's Jordan.
* MEDIA BIAS AND FREEDOM OF SPEECH ISSUES
http://members.fortunecity.com/veritas1/aopedix1.html#media
Instances of malfeasance have been brought to light in institutions other than just the MSN. The UN and Kofi Annan and many of his associates and subordinates (including his son) have a lot to answer for regarding the 'Oil for Food SCAM'. This is orders of magnitude bigger than Enron or the UN's previous UNICEF scam of several decades ago, and it brings into question the integrity of the UN, an institution held in reverential awe by the MSM.
Sadly, corruption and/or 'making things up' and/or 'cooking the books' and/or 'egregious leftward bias' does not stop here. It seems to have crept into UN sanctioned 'science' as well.
By way of background, it comes as no surprise that since the 60's in both Europe and the US, the softer, squishier more intrinsically subjective academic disciplines have been infected by a general hatred for the West and the US in particular, and manifested in diseases like multiculturalism and relativism and post modernism and deconstructionism and bastardized versions of Marxism and bigoted and intolerant incarnations of political correctness and a triumph of ideology over facts and truth and academic diversity and freedom, originated and perpetrated by the likes of Herbert Marcuse (a 'Europeanized' version of 'Marcus' as in Nieman Marcus??) Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault.
The result is that everything from the softer sciences like Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy and Sociology and Anthropology and Political Science all the way to the even more squishy Humanistically oriented subjects like Philosophy and Art and Literature and History have been FUBARED to a disturbing degree, and turned into deconstructed post-modernist JUNK.
For example, the Academia and/or MSM postmortem on the recently departed Arthur Miller hails him as being the virtual modern equivalent of Shakespeare. In fact, his 'Death of a Salesman' was good (but not great), and his other works were not particularly notable. They did however have a 'leftish slant' (that in itself does not preclude the production of great work as is evidenced by Eisenstein, Upton Sinclair, Faulkner etc.), which accounts for the accolades from the MSM and Academia. Had it been a 'rightish slant' his passing would have barely been noted.
The 'harder' sciences like Climatology would seem to be more insulated from this kind of decay and corruption because of Scientific Method and Peer Review. This continues to be generally true except that even this enclave of relative academic integrity seems to have been politicized and hijacked by 'politicized scientists', whose tendency is to retrofit information and findings to ideology and their particular political views rather than sticking with the facts and where they lead. The institutions they work for also tend to reward and encourage such behavior.
This kind of thing is not entirely new, and there have been instances in the past where 'scientists' with a particular ideological point of view compromised on honest methodology and 'cooked the books' to fit their particular predilections or in some cases, those of their sponsors. Fudging of results by geneticist Lysenko in Stalinist Russia is a prime example.
Alfred Kinsey and Ruth Benedict in the US also come to mind, even though they operated in fields that were not quite regarded as 'hard science' and thus allowed for a bit more leeway. They proceeded to abuse this leeway to the max. The MSM and Academia and Hollywood (in the case of Kinsey) have of course ignored their ideologically driven methodological lapses and 'cooking of the books', and have proceeded to lionize them both. Their tendency is not to ask whether something is accurate or true, but whether it conforms with leftist ideology or political correctness.
This tendency is also evident in the recent attack by Feminists, the Harvard Faculty and the MSM on Harvard's president Larry Summers (formerly of the Clinton administration). Essentially, he stated in a speech closed to the general public, that while the Means in Standardized Math and Science Tests were essentially equal for males and females, the bell shaped normal distribution of male test scores is more 'platykurtic' (i.e. relative to an 'idealized' normal distribution, more individuals are at both the high and low end tails of the distribution), while the distribution of female scores is more 'leptokurtic' (i.e. the distribution is more concentrated about the mean and has fewer individuals at either the high or low extremes).
What's more, those in Math and Science careers tend to be drawn from the upper tails of such test distributions, which are more densely populated in the male distribution than the female distribution. This along with several other factors, may help to explain why there are more males than females in Math and Science careers. There is nothing in this which is at variance with current research findings, and in any event, Summers merely suggested that these were areas worthy of further discussion and debate.
For this the Feminists, the Harvard Faculty, and the MSM descended on him like a swarm of leather winged demons, and demanded his head on a platter. None of them suggested that what he said was not true. What seemed to set them off was that his statement was at variance with their ideological dogma, which posits that the brains and minds of males and females are hard wired exactly the same way, and that the relative scarcity of females in Math and Science careers is due exclusively to oppression and discrimination. Summers apologized several times for telling the truth. One wishes he'd had more 'guts' and had stuck to his guns, since he may end up being cashiered by the 'PC Inquisition' in any event.
EMPIRICISM and MATH/SCIENCE EDUCATION (12-17-04)
http://members.fortunecity.com/veritas1/aopedp12.html#PART12DEC02
JUNK LOGIC (06-26-04)
http://members.fortunecity.com/veritas1/aopedp11.html#PART11JUN12
With this background in mind we come at long last to the 'Hockey Stick Scam'. It's relevant because it's been used in support of the hypothesis of Global Warming (GW), and the Kyoto Treaty which exists because of it. This treaty is now in effect for those countries that signed off on it. The US is not a signatory, China is not covered by it (though it's rapidly becoming a bigger CO2 threat than the US) and Putin's Russia was also not ready to sign except that Putin figured that if he did, it would help Russia get into the WTO, and in any event, he probably would violate its strictures pretty much as the old USSR ignored various arms and test ban and nuclear disarmament treaties.
A crucial issue in the GW hypothesis (the MSM seem to treat GW, not as a hypothesis [every so called law or finding of science is still treated as a hypothesis by honest scientists because it could be subject to change as more and better information becomes available], but as an 'established fact' that rises to the level of Metaphysical Certitude) is whether a small increase in global temperatures in the last century is something that's not unusual and is within the normal variation (Standard Deviation from the long term Mean) in global temperatures historically, or is exceptional and is caused by industrialization and burning of fossil fuels and the resulting CO2 emissions from these sources.
The problem is of course that we don't have any global (or even local) temperature measurements that go back much more than a hundred years or so, and concomitantly, nothing from which to compute a Mean and Standard Deviation.
To get around this problem, surrogate estimates of temperature must be substituted for real data if we are to make inferences for what happened in the last 1000 years. Such surrogate measures can be obtained from examining the rings of certain very old trees. Using such surrogate measures, temperature estimates for the past 1000 years were made. Needless to say, there can be considerable latitude in terms of which of these trees are used in the estimates.
If we look at the RAW data obtained in this way, it becomes clear that temperatures were quite variable historically, and that in fact there was a period of GW in the 1400's that was more substantial than anything that we're seeing recently. Since there were fewer humans, no industrialization, and no emissions from cars in the 1400's it would seem that GW apparently could happen without any of these causes being present, and is both 'normal' and was very likely caused by something else.
It has also been said that when seen from a geological perspective, GW is what happens between Ice Ages, and has been happening periodically before there were even humans on this planet. Things like variations in solar radiation and activity as exhibited in solar prominences and sunspot outbursts, as well as nutation (the periodic 'wobbling' of the earth's axis and the resulting changes in the angle of the sun vis-a-vis the earth which in turn affects temperature and climate), and other factors have been suggested as explanations for the Ice Age/GW cycles.
All this was known in the early 1990's but apparently it did not sit well with the UN and its IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). It obviously did not support their ideologically driven hypothesis of GW. Fortunately for them, there were some like minded 'politicized scientists' i.e. Mann, Bradley, and Hughes, who published an article in 1998 in Nature. This article came to the rescue of the GW hypothesis by coming up with a 1000 year long estimate of global temperatures that resembles a hockey stick.
This description comes from the fact that after the raw data had been selectively gleaned (not ALL tree data going back 1000 years was included), and filtered and otherwise statistically massaged, the trend line of temperatures starting 1000 years ago was essentially 'flat' and slightly declining (the handle of the hockey stick) while after 1900 there was a dramatic upturn (the 'J' shaped upward curved end of the hockey stick).
This 'hockey stick curve' became the poster child of all GW advocates, because it dramatically 'proved' the existence of GW. It played no small part in being one of several 'justifications' (one suspects the REAL 'justification' for this treaty was that it would hobble the industrialized nations [especially the US] economically in order to let the 'third world' catch up... a 'screw the US' transnational income redistribution scheme of sorts) for the drafting of the Kyoto Treaty. The 'hockey stick' appeared in just about every screed put forth by GW advocates.
This scam was eventually exposed when a set of independent researchers (McIntyre and McKitrick... not beholden to the UN or the IPCC) as well as others (a research paper recently published in the journal Science by Professor Hans von Storch and colleagues has found significant problems with the hockey stick. Von Storch, the leader of the research team at the Institute of Coastal Research at Geesthacht, Germany, calls the hockey stick "junk" or "rubbish."), raised some questions about the work of Mann et al, which perhaps should have been raised by the editors of Nature before they published the article. Google these names and their associated works, if you're interested in more detail.
To quote McIntyre's comments at a symposium:
"As an academic study, there are a number of ordinary questions that academics routinely ask when looking at these kinds of things. It is an empirical paper, so we can ask
• What data were used?
• How were the numbers crunched?
• How sensitive are the results to different ways of crunching them?
• Are there any mistakes in the data?
These are all everyday, ordinary questions that academics ask of each other’s work. Now in talking about this as an academic exercise, you need to understand that there are two distinct stages of scientific review. There is the peer-review process which is a pre-publication review. It provides sometimes minimal, sometimes more extensive review, but it is a first stage quality control and it happens prior to publication. It is providing advice to the editor about whether the paper should be published, but it is not providing a definitive once-and-for-all answer about whether the results are right, only whether these results should be put out in published form.
The second stage of the review is the more extensive one. That happens after publication where the work is examined, challenged and in a sort of a core practice of science, where others try to replicate the published results. The second stage is often the most important part of the review."
What they found in this 'second stage' was disturbing in several respects.
1) The tree ring data was selectively screened.
2) The data filtering (using 'programmable Low Pass' filters) and data analysis (Principal Components Analysis) were both 'rigged' and inappropriately used.
3) Several RANDOM sets of Monte Carlo generated data yielded the same 'hockey stick' curve as the 'actual' data used by Mann when they were run through Mann's analytic algorithms. In effect, the analytical algorithm was guaranteed to produce a 'hockey stick' no matter what kind of data was run through it.
4) Mann et al were stonewalling in terms of providing the exact data and algorithms that they used to produce the 'hockey stick curve'. They never owned up to 'filtering' the data before hand (i.e. in their article) until they were called on it. This hardly resembles openness to Peer Review.
5) When ALL the data were used and examined via both Mann's algorithm and a simple moving average, there was a SUBSTANTIAL divergence in the two estimates, especially in the 1400's. Mann's algorithm suppressed the substantial GW that occurred in the 1400's.
6) Mann et al subsequently made some minor corrections and retractions regarding their 'hockey stick curve' hypothesis but essentially acted like Dan Rather and CBS did vis-a-vis the forged TANG memos.
7) McIntyre et al submitted their findings to Nature, but its editors refused to publish this work. Apparently this was in spite of overwhelming evidence generated in support of their (and the work of others) findings. Sounds like the 'PC Inquisition' all over again.
At the end of the day, this is another example of ideologically driven 'cooking of the books' and FUBARING of the data, which nowadays is becoming all too familiar. Fortunately, independent researchers (acting somewhat the same way as Bloggers did in the case of CBS/Rather and CNN/Jordan) found them out. The Bloggers once again stepped in to make these findings known on the WEB until finally, publications like the WSJ picked up on this story.
posted by showme | 2:16 PM
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