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In Climate Debate, The 'Hockey Stick' Leads to a Face-Off
Wall Street Journal ^ | February 14, 2005 | ANTONIO REGALADO

Posted on 02/14/2005 8:11:12 AM PST by animoveritas

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 semiretired Toronto minerals consultant, it's not.

(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Foreign Affairs; Government
KEYWORDS: climatechange; environment; globalwarming
The big lie that is global warming.
1 posted on 02/14/2005 8:11:12 AM PST by animoveritas
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To: animoveritas

Great article.


2 posted on 02/14/2005 8:14:08 AM PST by aculeus
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To: animoveritas
Anybody want to summarize the article for those of us who don't subscribe to the WSJ?
3 posted on 02/14/2005 8:17:02 AM PST by Edgerunner (Proud to be an infidel.)
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To: animoveritas
Perhaps I'll have to add it to my list. :-)


Repeat after me:

Man-made Global Warming is a MYTH!
Man-made Global Warming is a MYTH!
Man-made Global Warming is a MYTH!


4 posted on 02/14/2005 8:20:21 AM PST by TChris (Most people's capability for inference is severely overestimated)
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To: animoveritas

www.junkscience.com has the best info I have seen on 'global warming'.

The bottom line on global warming - BUNK.


5 posted on 02/14/2005 8:24:05 AM PST by GaltMeister (The only time a Democrat should be allowed in the White House is to visit the President.)
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To: animoveritas

And even if it's not a lie it proves that evolution is a myth because the lieberals say we can not adapt to our (new) environment.


6 posted on 02/14/2005 8:27:40 AM PST by funkywbr
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To: TChris

ping


7 posted on 02/14/2005 8:28:32 AM PST by Jibaholic
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To: animoveritas

Horse hockey!!


8 posted on 02/14/2005 8:57:30 AM PST by beethovenfan
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To: animoveritas

As part of natural quasi periodic oscillations in glaciation (mind you, we are STILL in the midst of TEMPORARY interglacial period) one can clearly see that the medeival optimum and little ice age are harmonics of the grand oscillation. In this context, the slight warming since 1850 appears to be either another optimum, or, more incidiously, the overshoot prior to the INEVITABLE return to glaciation. And mankind has had little if any impact on this. How could we, the forces responsible for these oscillations are so immense that we are simply not physically capable of modifying the atmosphere enough to change them. One other oft overlooked factor is that CO2 is only a miniscule component in the atmosphere and is constantly being precipitated out by phytoplankton via their shells.


9 posted on 02/14/2005 9:10:54 AM PST by GOP_1900AD (Stomping on "PC," destroying the Left, and smoking out faux "conservatives" - Take Back The GOP!)
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To: Edgerunner

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 (www.realclimate.org1), 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 (www.climateaudit.org2), 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.

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 hockey stick was a highlight of a 2001 report by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That is an advisory body through which the world's scientists try to reach consensus on man-made climate change and provide advice on how to limit it. Because the graph showed only minor temperature changes before the industrial age and then an upward slant -- the hockey-stick shape -- it became an oft-cited argument that human activity was raising temperatures.

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.

Dr. Mann, while agreeing that his mathematical method tends to find hockey-stick shapes, says this doesn't mean its results in this case are wrong. Indeed, Dr. Mann says he can create the same shape from the climate data using completely different math techniques.


10 posted on 02/14/2005 9:21:12 AM PST by animoveritas (Dispersit superbos mente cordis sui.)
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To: animoveritas
Dr. Mann and scientists close to him viewed this [McIntyre and McKitrick's critique of the "hockey-stick"] 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.

11 posted on 02/14/2005 9:40:22 AM PST by MRMEAN
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To: animoveritas
Dr. Mann, while agreeing that his mathematical method tends to find hockey-stick shapes,

Concession.

...says this doesn't mean its results in this case are wrong.

Hee, hee.

Indeed, Dr. Mann says he can create the same shape from the climate data using completely different math techniques.

That also are biased in favor hockey-stick shapes...

12 posted on 02/14/2005 9:41:24 AM PST by freedomcrusader (Proudly wearing the politically incorrect label "crusader" since 1/29/2001)
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To: TChris

Executive summary of broken hockey stick:

We showed that the PCA method as used by Mann et al. effectively mines a data set for hockey stick patterns. Even from meaningless random data (red noise), it nearly always produces a hockey stick.

WEBPAGE OF STEPHEN McINTYRE
http://www.climate2003.com/

The silver bullet? Maybe.

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/index.html#contents contains a
fairly good summary of global warmist theory. The attention to
detail shown by the following models:

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/xwiring.htm
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/xwiring-big.htm

perhaps portends eternal obstructionism:

[Arguments are] made up of words, and every word is a universe in
its own right. And every universe is filled with many, many
questions, all of which you can ask.

How to hold off your opponent until the cavalry arrives.
http://expertpages.com/news/expert_ambush.htm

Yet another site that debunks global warming:

Myths and Frauds
http://mitosyfraudes.8k.com/ENGLISH.html



13 posted on 02/14/2005 9:50:32 AM PST by Milhous
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To: animoveritas

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18524861.400




Article Preview
Climate change: Menace or myth?
12 February 2005
Fred Pearce
Magazine issue 2486
Global warming is a fantasy dreamed up by climate scientists, say the sceptics. Could they possibly be right, asks Fred Pearce
ON 16 FEBRUARY, the Kyoto protocol comes into force. Whether you see this as a triumph of international cooperation or a case of too little, too late, there is no doubt that it was only made possible by decades of dedicated work by climate scientists. Yet as these same researchers celebrate their most notable achievement, their work is being denigrated as never before.

The hostile criticism is coming from sceptics who question the reality of climate change. Critics have always been around, but in recent months their voices have become increasingly prominent and influential. One British newspaper called climate change a "global fraud" based on "left-wing, anti-American, anti-west ideology". A London-based think tank described the UK's chief scientific adviser, David King, as "an embarrassment" for believing that climate change is a bigger threat than terrorism. And the bestselling author Michael Crichton, in his much publicised new novel State of Fear, ...

The complete article is 2603 words long.
To continue reading this article, subscribe to New Scientist. Get 4 issues of New Scientist magazine and instant access to all online content for only $4.95
If you are in the UK please click here, if you are in Australia or New Zealand please click here


14 posted on 02/14/2005 10:49:20 AM PST by aculeus
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To: aculeus

BUMP!


15 posted on 02/14/2005 12:35:08 PM PST by Publius6961
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To: TChris

You might want to remove that petition link from OISM.

http://www.prwatch.org/improp/oism.html


16 posted on 02/14/2005 12:44:40 PM PST by Sir Gawain
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To: Sir Gawain

Hmm... Yeah, that's a bit flaky. Thanks for the heads-up.


17 posted on 02/14/2005 1:03:47 PM PST by TChris (Most people's capability for inference is severely overestimated)
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To: animoveritas

Thank you...


18 posted on 02/15/2005 6:35:38 AM PST by Edgerunner (Proud to be an infidel.)
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