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*TIA Daily* • *September 29, 2009 * *COMMENTARY* Swindle *Editor's Note*: As I continue my recovery, note that this edition is dated September 29—Tuesday's date. The reason for the backdating is that I've just got too many issues I wanted to comment on but didn't have the energy to tackle for the past week, so this is my attempt to work through the backlog of news stories.—RWT A few years ago, a British television station put out a terrific documentary on the global warming hysteria. The best part about it was its title, "The Great Global Warming Swindle <http://www.greatglobalwarmingswindle.co.uk/>," which perfectly captured the atmosphere of dishonest hucksterism that has corrupted the science of climatology. The word "swindle" may prove to be the most precise word to describe the bogus science of global warming. A recent development is making the claim of global warming look less and less like a real scientific controversy—a disagreement over the *interpretation* of the data—and more like a case of plain scientific *fraud*, a deliberate corruption of the data itself. And you can bet it's going to be a long time before you read about any of this in the *New York Times*. They'll treat this the way they treat every scandal in the Obama administration: they'll report it in three paragraphs on page A17, two days after the whole story is over. The important work in this case has been done by Steve McIntyre of the Climate Audit blog. McIntyre has been tireless in seeking out access to the raw data and mathematical methods used by the global warming alarmists to back up their claim of an unprecedented 20th century warming trend. And now he has found a real "smoking gun." First, some context. I'm going to try to lay out all of this science in fairly simple terms in just a few paragraphs, then I'll refer you to longer and more detailed articles. The widest context is this: a keystone of the claim that human activity is leading to a disastrous increase in global temperatures is the denial of previous, pre-industrial warming trends, particularly the Medieval Little Optimum. After all, if global temperatures were warmer a thousand years ago than they are today, then a minor warming trend in the past few decades is well within the range of natural variation. More important, such previous warming trends imply that something other than carbon dioxide actually drives the climate, since CO2 levels were significantly lower during previous warm periods, and there were certainly no industrial smokestacks or automobiles. (This, by the way, is the real significance of Ian Plimer's arguments, which have turned the climate debate in Australia upside down<http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/06/24/could_australia_blow_apart_the_great_global_warming_scare_97148.html>. The strength of his book *Heaven and Earth* is that it extensively cites the geological and historical record to demonstrate that global temperatures have varied in the past with no connection to carbon dioxide. Plimer is telling us that we can be confident that carbon dioxide won't cause global warming, because it has never done so in the past. As he put it in his interview<http://www.intellectualactivist.com/php-bin/news/showArticle.php?id=1120>with TIA, "The past is the key to the present…. Over the history of time, climate changes have been driven by galactic, solar, orbital, tidal, and tectonic processes, and there has been no climate change in the past driven by CO2.") So how do you make the evidence of a Medieval warming disappear? In 1999, a scientist named Michael Mann produced the infamous "Hockey Stick" graph of global temperatures over the past 1000 years. The name refers to the fact that the graph shows fairly flat temperatures for most of that period—then a sharp upward turn in the past few decades. Some years ago, Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick thoroughly debunked the methodology behind the Hockey Stick, showing that it was heavily based on questionable data and a statistical method that would produce a similar hockey stick shape out of random noise. Last year, undeterred, Mann produced a *new* version of the Hockey Stick—quickly dubbed "Son of Hockey Stick"—claiming that it was based on a wider set of data. Since reliable direct measurements of global temperature only date back about 150 years, how do scientists go about estimating global temperatures over the past 1000 years? They have to rely on proxies. They have to find some other data that varies with temperature and which *can* be measured directly. Both versions of the hockey stick rely heavily on tree rings. Since the annual growth rate of trees is partly dependent on temperature, the size of tree rings can serve as a proxy for temperature. By analyzing petrified remains of trees, or the growth rings of very old, slow growing trees, scientists can use this data as a proxy for global temperatures going back many centuries. But here's where McIntyre's latest analysis comes in. He discovered that Son of Hockey Stick relies heavily on data from tree rings in northern Russia, but that Mann and his collaborators have used that data selectively, citing only a small subset of tree ring data which confirms the upward sloping "hockey stick"—while ignoring a much larger pool of data from the same region which contradicts the hockey stick. If that data is included, it shows that current global temperatures are unexceptional and lower than temperatures during the Medieval Little Optimum. As Jack Wakeland pointed out to me, this isn't just a scientific scandal. It is a *crime*, since it involves the fraudulent misappropriation of public funds by government-sponsored climate scientists. Read McIntyre's main blog entry on this issue here<http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=7168>, as well as a good summary<http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/27/quote-of-the-week-20-ding-dong-the-stick-is-dead/>by Anthony Watts at Watt's Up With That? and another<http://joannenova.com.au/2009/09/breaking-news-cherry-picking-of-historic-proportions/>by Australian science reporter Joanne Nova. Also see McIntyre on the disproportionate influence of one "outlier" in the data, which McIntyre calls "The Most Influential Tree in the World<http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=7241>" and which the commenters on his blog are calling the "Enchanted Larch of Yamal." The wider scandal here is the long fight McIntyre had to go through to get access to the data used to create Son of Hockey Stick. It is a basic principle of science that you don't just get to present your results; you also have to present the data and methods used to obtain the result, so that others can verify and reproduce it. Yet it seems to be standard for climate scientists to refuse to divulge the sources of their data on global temperature, for fear that troublesome interlopers like McIntyre will pick the data apart. Last week, I linked to an article<http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZTBiMTRlMDQxNzEyMmRhZjU3ZmYzODI5MGY4ZWI5OWM>by Patrick Michaels describing how another major source of global temperature records has refused to release its raw data, using a lame "the dog at my homework" excuse. As Michaels notes, "If there are no data, there's no science." A scandal involving the corruption of the data by global warming researchers invalidates every claim they have made. So you can see how this story could get very interesting, very quickly. Stay tuned.—RWT *back to top* <#1240e985b554f789_TOC> ------------------------------ [image: TIADaily.com] <http://www.TIADaily.com> One-Year Subscription — $74 Six-Month Subscription — $38 Subscribe now! <http://www.TIADaily.com/subscribe> Copyright © 2009 by Tracinski Publishing Company PO Box 8086, Charlottesville, VA 22906 To remove yourself from this mailing list, reply to [email protected] with the subject line "unsubscribe." -- Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups. For options & help see http://groups.google.com/group/PoliticalForum * Visit our other community at http://www.PoliticalForum.com/ * It's active and moderated. Register and vote in our polls. * Read the latest breaking news, and more.
