[at-l] More Global Warming ahead

[jbryankramer at msn.com (J Bryan Kramer)]

I am not way off, 6 editors from a journal were fired for daring to publish
a paper that contradicts Enviromental Theology:

"Six hundred years ago, the world was warm. Or maybe it wasn't. What's the
truth? Beware. This question has recently been elevated from a mere
scientific quandary to one of the hot (or cold) issues of modern politics.
Argue in favor of the wrong answer and you risk being branded a liberal
alarmist or a conservative Neanderthal. Or you might lose your job.

Six editors recently resigned from the journal Climate Research because of
this issue. Their crime: publishing the article "Proxy Climatic and
Environmental Changes of the Past 1,000 Years," by W. Soon and S. Baliunas
of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

"Then last month the situation became even more complex. S. McIntyre and R.
McKitrick published a paper in Energy and Environment with a detailed
critique of the original hockey stick work. They stated bluntly that the
original Mann papers contained "collation errors, unjustifiable truncations
of extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, geographical location
errors, incorrect calculations of principal components, and other quality
control defects." Moreover, when they corrected these errors, the medieval
warm period came back-strongly. Mann, et al., disagreed. They immediately
posted a reply on the Web, with their criticism of McIntyre and McKitrick's
analysis.

The math questions involve the procedures for combining data sets. Mann used
a well-known approach called principle component analysis. This method
extracts from a set of proxy records the behavior that they have in common.
It can be more sensitive than simply averaging data, since it typically
suppresses nonglobal variations that appear in only a few records. But to
use it, the proxy records must be sampled at the same times and have the
same length. The data available to Mann and his colleagues weren't, so they
had to be averaged, interpolated, and extrapolated. That required subjective
judgments which-unfortunately-could have biased the conclusions.

When I first read the Mann papers in 1998, I was disappointed that they did
not discuss such systematic biases in much detail, particularly since their
conclusions repealed the medieval warm period. In most fields of science,
researchers who express the most self-doubt and who understate their
conclusions are the ones that are most respected. Scientists regard with
disdain those who play their conclusions to the press. I was worried about
the hockey stick from the beginning.  When I wrote my book on paleoclimate
(published in 2000), I initially included the  hockey stick graph in the
introductory chapter.  In the second draft, I cut the figure, although I
left a reference.  I didn't trust it enough....

http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/wo_muller121703.asp

----------------------
There's lots more, of course I suspect you'll reject Harvard and MIT as
Conservative rags.

Bryan

 Samuel Adams advised, "Let us contemplate our forefathers, and posterity,
and resolve to maintain the rights bequeathed to us from the former, for the
sake of the latter."
>
> --- J Bryan Kramer <jbryankramer@msn.com> wrote:
> > Another fact is this: there is money to be made, in grants and
> > books, for people who's research claims support the
> environmental lobby. There seems to be only opprobrium and
> infamy for those who dare to do research that doen't return
> results that support the party line.
> ### With trillions of dollars at stake in required capital
> investment, US utilities would run all over themselves to anyone
> who could counter what you term the party line. You're way off.
>
> > "global warming" temperatures back 1000 years ago. You know
> > that time when Greenland was...Green?
> ### You need to do a little research on why/how Greenland came
> to be named. It was not named to laud it's lush hinterlands, in
> fact, quite the opposite.