Posted on 10/15/2004 2:39:25 AM PDT by Goat Locker Freeper
Progress in science is sometimes made by great discoveries. But science also advances when we learn that something we believed to be true isn’t. <>
In the scientific and political debate over global warming, the latest wrong piece may be the “hockey stick,” .... This plot purports to show that we are now experiencing the warmest climate in a millennium, and that the earth, after remaining cool for centuries during the medieval era, suddenly began to heat up about 100 years ago....
-SNIP-
But now a shock: independent Canadian scientists... have uncovered a fundamental mathematical flaw in the computer program that was used to produce the hockey stick. In his original publications of the stick, Mann purported to use a standard method known as principal component analysis, or PCA, to find the dominant features in a set of more than 70 different climate records.
But it wasn’t so. McIntyre and McKitrick obtained part of the program that Mann used, and they found serious problems. Not only does the program not do conventional PCA, but it handles data normalization in a way that can only be described as mistaken.
Now comes the real shocker. This improper normalization procedure tends to emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppress all data that do not. To demonstrate this effect, McIntyre and McKitrick created some meaningless test data that had, on average, no trends. This method of generating random data is called “Monte Carlo” analysis, after the famous casino, and it is widely used in statistical analysis to test procedures. When McIntyre and McKitrick fed these random data into the Mann procedure, out popped a hockey stick shape!
-SNIP-
Suddenly the hockey stick, the poster-child of the global warming community, turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics.
(Excerpt) Read more at technologyreview.com ...
Tree huggers are such fun loving pranksters/s
I'll have to show this to my mathmatician/statistician husband (Sir SuziQ). He'll get a real charge out of it! He absolutely HATES it when folks fudge numbers to support their own personal agendas!
BUMP!
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The data upon which Kyoto is based (Mann, Bradley, Hughes: Global-Scale Temperature Patterns and Climate Forcing Over the Past Six Centuries, Nature, No. 392, pp. 779-787, 1998) has been documented to be fraudulent by a recent paper published in the British journal "Energy & Environment" and available on the Internet at http://www.multi-science.co.uk/mcintyre_02.pdf In their paper, titled "CORRECTIONS TO THE MANN et. al. (1998) PROXY DATA BASE AND NORTHERN HEMISPHERIC AVERAGE TEMPERATURE SERIES," Canadian researchers Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick examined the data set of proxies of past climate used by Mann, Bradley and Hughes for the estimation of temperatures from 1400 to 1980. McIntyre and McKitrick determined that the Mann data "contains collation errors, unjustifiable truncation or extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, geographical location errors, incorrect calculation of principal components and other quality control defects." Applying the Mann methodology to the corrected data "yielded a Northern Hemisphere temperature index in which the late 20th century is unexceptional compared to the preceding centuries." The fact that Kyoto is based upon fraudulent data should be troubling to anyone without some hidden agenda. |
I've always thought that the global warming disaster scenarios were the result of computer models going ballistic. I've written many physics simulations and they're only valid for a relatively short amount of time (iterations). Energy conservation has to be strictly enforced or you get runaway, etc.
Wrong--born and rasied in South Louisiana. Now admittedly, my dissertation advisor "was" a Brit, but I also cannot recall any instances of hearing "data is" from any of my analytical chemist colleagues at professional meetings. Maybe there are fields of science other than analytical chemistry where such (incorrect) usage is the norm, but to us analytical chemists, "datum" is singular, and "data" is plural (and yes, I realize that in this specific case, "data" IS singular).
Doesn't matter.
The hockey stick will still be universally cited as fact 25 years from now.
Remember the first line of inquiry when trying to explain behavior is to follow the money. If you want lots of funding in any scientific disipline you need a crises. If there isn't one there many will create one. The louder you scream that the sky is falling the more money you get. This also helps explain why aids research gets over three times the funding Breast Cancer does.
Bookmark bump.
Couldn't we reverse the process by driving backwards for 10,000 years?
Thank s for this and your last link as well. :-)
Will the MSM pick this up and run with it?
I sure don't think so. However, if there was another global warming scare, it would be all over the front page.
It's all about agenda.
Hey! You left out the dead lynx fur!
Geological data aren't singular, either. (Born and raised a Marylander, North Dakotan by choice.)
Looking at this graph, I wonder why people weren't suspicious before. The 'little ice age' is a matter of historical record. It shows up clearly in the corrected plot. It's nnowhere to be seen in the Mann plot.
GW bump
Doesn't matter. To the left, environmentalism is a religion. They're not gonna reject their religious beliefs because of a few messy facts. Faith, they have. Their cause is so just and so noble, don't you see, that it simply =must= be true.
Yes, I always think of the old Star Trek character Data who properly should have been named Datum. It seems that only some fields of science still use proper English. The system is breaking down. To be consistent, remember that medium is singular, media is plural; gymnasium is singular, gymnasia is plural, and so on. There are lots of other examples. The situation leads to the invention of new plural forms of words that are already plural. As another science-fiction character, a Vulcan, would have said: "It is not logical."
LOL--good point!
"As another science-fiction character, a Vulcan, would have said: "It is not logical.""
Or as another robot put it "This does not compute!".
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