Plus: Extra bonus feature; what is “hide the decline”?
I have avoided fisking the Oxburg greenwash of CRU, because it’s rather involved, and others have done a pretty thorough job of it here. But I stumbled across an article sympathetic to CRU and the greenwash at New Scientist here that just had my jaw on the floor in disbelief. They not only were full of shiite from one end of the article to the other, they didn’t even get the question right.
If the beleaguered climate scientists of the University of East Anglia have a weakness, it is in their statistics – yet their conclusions that the planet is warming stands on solid ground.
So we open with a violin riff. The beleaguered climate scientists. Really. They screwed up the math, but their conclusions were “on solid ground”. Not only is this ridiculous on its face – it’s the Dan Rather “fake but accurate” claim in a new wrapper, but no one ever questioned that the earth was warming.
That’s the conclusion of the third independent inquiry into “climategate” – the fallout from last November’s release of hundreds of emails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the university, which is located in Norwich, UK.
If that’s the conclusion, then it’s meaningless, because that wasn’t the allegation.
He said the strongest example he had found of imperfect statistics in the work of the CRU and collaborators elsewhere was the iconic “hockey stick” graph, produced by Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University in University Park.
The graph shows how temperatures have changed over the past 1000 years (see graphic, right).
Hand pointed out that the statistical tool Mann used to integrate temperature data from a number of difference sources – including tree-ring data and actual thermometer readings – produced an “exaggerated” rise in temperatures over the 20th century, relative to pre-industrial temperatures.
