http://opinion.financialpost.com/201...e-hockey-team/

Peter Foster July 9, 2010 - 7:09 pm
How a small group botched and manipulated climate science

The third British investigation into the Climategate scandal - led by former civil servant Sir Muir
Russell - amounts, at best, to a greywash. No reason, it claims, to doubt the honesty of the
scientists related to the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia (which
commissioned the review). However, buried within the review's 160 pages considerable doubt is
raised about the operations of both the CRU and the organization that it serves, the United
Nations'
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

For anybody who wants to understand the scientific and psychological background to Climategate,
there is no better read than Andrew Montford's new book, The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and
the Corruption of Science.

Climategate was based largely on emails related to the so-called "Hockey Stick," an iconic graph
that purported to show that 20th-century temperatures were unprecedented in at least a thousand
years. As Mr. Montford points out, "[T]he chief importance of the Hockey Stick lies not in that it
is central to the case for man-made global warming, but in the fact that the IPCC promoted it as if
it were."

In other words, the real scandal lies in whoever was pulling the political strings of the IPCC.

The U.K.-based Global Warming Policy Foundation, an influential skeptical institution, has now
appointed Mr. Montford to run an inquiry into the three British inquiries. There will be no
whitewash here, although it will be fascinating to see how far Mr. Montford can penetrate into the
Yes Minister nature of the investigations, whose guiding principle seems to have been that of the
Three Wise Monkeys.

The Hockey Stick Illusion leaves no doubt about Mr. Montford's reporting abilities. He tells a
gripping detective story in which the star gumshoe is semi-retired Canadian mining consultant Steve
McIntyre. Mr. McIntyre, unfortunately for his opponents, happens to combine mathematical genius
with a Terminator-like relentlessness. He also found a brilliant partner in Ross McKitrick, an
economics professor at the University of Guelph. Their story is one of intellectual determination
in the face of Kafkaesque "peer review" and Orwellian "freedom of information."

The Hockey Stick derived from the arcane science of paleoclimatology, which reconstructs
pre-thermometer temperatures from proxies such as tree rings. The most oft-quoted of the
Climategate emails referred to a "trick" to "hide the decline" in proxy data after 1960. Those
post-1960 proxy figures not merely failed to correspond with actual temperature increases, they
raised inevitable issues about past reconstructions. This was particularly important because the
Hockey Stick had - conveniently - eliminated the Medieval Warm Period, when the Vikings were
farming in Greenland.

If temperatures were as warm or warmer a thousand years ago, then the claim that 20th-century heat
was unprecedented and due to rising levels of man-made CO2 was weakened. (And even if the 20th
century was unprecedented, that still wouldn't have "proved" man-made global warming. Correlation
is not causation.)

The Hockey Stick reconstruction was led by an ambitious and aggressive young climatologist named
Michael Mann of the University of Massachusetts. It was eagerly seized upon by the IPCC. Its
prominence made Prof. Mann an academic star and the recipient of hefty research grants. In 2002,
Scientific American named him one of "50 leading visionaries in science."

However, Mr. McIntyre's determined digging suggested that Prof. Mann's conclusions rested on dodgy
statistical manipulation of a tiny amount of data from a few unreliable proxy trees in very
specific locations. It also led to two U.S. congressional inquiries, one of which Mr. Montford
notes was flagrantly rigged.

Mr. Montford's book might be accused of being one-sided, but Mr. McIntyre's opponents emerge as an
unresponsive clique who were hardly likely to co-operate with a narrative that had them lying,
destroying data, and mounting vicious ad hominem attacks (such as that Mr. McIntyre had close links
to the perpetually demonized "fossil fuel industry." He didn't.).

"The Hockey Team," as Mr. McIntyre wryly called them, were also no credit to the scientific method.
CRU head Phil Jones - whose emails were at the heart of Climategate - sent an amazing response to
an Australian researcher asking why he should provide data "when your aim is to try and find
something wrong with it." But that is exactly why data and methods should be made freely available.

Messrs. McIntyre and McKitrick were in fact brought into the IPCC review process for the 2007
Fourth Assessment Report, but presumably mainly to keep an eye on - or muzzle - them. However,
being involved in the process confirmed how rigged and conflicted it was.

Mr. Montford concludes that the Hockey Stick affair suggests that "the case for global warming, far
from being settled is actually weak and unconvincing. The implications for policymakers are stark.
They have granted an effective monopoly on scientific advice to an organization that has proven
itself to be corrupt, biased and beset by conflicts of interest. Their advisors on the
global-warming issue are essentially a law unto themselves .."

Meanwhile, the hockey stick may be only one of many other examples of botched or manipulated
science. "Who knows what other instances there are of arguments contrary to the IPCC consensus
disappearing into the ether, of doubts suppressed and questions ignored?" asks Mr. Montford. "It is
clear that it would be foolish in the extreme to give the IPCC the benefit of the doubt. Their
record is too poor, the stakes too high."

Mr. Montford's book is required reading, but it only scratches the surface of the much bigger
scandal. The Hockey Stick graph was used as a promotional tool for a political agenda. No inquiry
has even begun to address the origins and nature of that agenda, which amounts to building a
rationale for unprecedented global economic control. Prof. Mann writes in one of the Climategate
emails about letting "our supporters in higher places" deal with Messrs. McIntyre and McKitrick.
But who were these "supporters?" Another Hockey Team member, Keith Briffa, wrote: "I know there is
pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards 'apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand
years or more in the proxy data,' but in reality the situation is not quite so simple."

Where was that "pressure" coming from?

The wholesale acceptance of the alarmist hypothesis by virtually the entire global political
establishment and an overwhelming proportion of the world's popular media also demands analysis.

Prof. Mann, who is now at Penn State, continues his campaign of bluster and demonization of those
who would merely dare to ask questions. In an interview in the wake of the Russell report, he
continued to deride the "malicious" and "dishonest" attacks on him by alleged "professional climate
change deniers" and "contrarians" and "special interests." (In the interview he exploded his
scientific credibility by claiming that the current North American heat wave is proof of man-made
global warming!)

Anybody who reads Mr. Montford's book will understand that Prof. Mann's charges of "well-funded"
opposition are ludicrous. The only oversight of the Hockey Team was "provided by volunteers like
McIntyre and his ragtag band of skeptic supporters." But, as Mr. Montford points out, Prof. Mann's
strategy has always been to try to shout "louder and longer."

Ultimately, Prof. Mann and his colleagues were merely foot soldiers in a bigger ideological thrust
to use the environment as a rationale for assuming global economic control.

Mr. Montford writes of one of the early climate meetings that "One can almost detect the germ of an
idea forming in the minds of the scientists and bureaucrats assembled in Geneva: here, potentially,
was a source of funding and influence without end. Where might it lead?"

But it is unlikely that such thoughts were articulated as anything other than concern for the
planet, and a burning desire to "speak up" for those who were most vulnerable to bad weather caused
by materialism and greedy "fossil fuel interests." The lust for power almost invariably cloaks
itself in high moral purpose. What higher purpose could there be than saving the world?

"Eric Gisin" wrote in message
...
http://opinion.financialpost.com/201...e-hockey-team/

Peter Foster July 9, 2010 - 7:09 pm
How a small group botched and manipulated climate science

Indeed. A small group of 'skeptic' scientists is botching and manipulating
data to serve their own agenda.

Scientists like Lindzen and Miscolszi and Lu and Soon and a few others
continue to publish papers with gross mistakes and manipulation of data and
formula's.
Their fraudulent data is supported and pupularized by a large number of
conservative think tanks amd fossil-fuel funded blogs, and media outlets
including wuwt.com, Sen Inhofe's web site and Fox News (and several similar
outlets abroad).

These media outlets spin stories (and spin the spin of each others stories)
with the sole purpose of creating 'doubt' about the scientific findings that
CO2 emissions (from fossil fuel sources mostly) cause climate change on our
planet, with potentially unprecedented consequences.
It is painfully clear that these media outlets bring these lies and
deception to the public simply because it tells a story that we like : that
scientists are lying, that AGW is a conspiracy and there is nothing wrong
with the way we live, and nothing wrong with pumping giga-tons of greenhouse
gasses into our atmosphere.

Several investigations have already estabished connections between these
scientists and money from fossil fuel industies such as Exxon Mobil and Koch
Industries.

This network from fraudulent scientists to public media outlets is known as
the "Denial Industry" and it's method of operation resemble those of the
movement (incidentally supported by the same 'think tanks') which denied the
relation between smoking and cancer (and serious other heath consequences).

The only think different between the two movement seems to be that the
Climate Change Denial Industry has found a 'viral' form on-line, with
thousands of 'supporters' who blindly replicate the deception that their
well-paid spin masters are feeding them via their media outlets.

Rob