Climate Change: Man-made Hockey Sticks

The Climatic Hokey Schtick

The primary drive for global weather panic, otherwise known as GLOBAL WARMING (gasp), comes from a simpleton graph by Michael E. Mann, known as The Hockey Stick. This graph reputed to show that the Earth was undergoing an unprecedented spike in temperature. The graph has been criticized by many real statisticians, paleontological climate scientists, and simple weathermen for various reasons.

The usual criticism is centered on the simple point that to establish a "norm" in statistics, one must be confident that a wide spread and accurate body of data exists to create a base line. For example, selecting Friday night at PM to average out the price of hotel rooms in New York City may not actually reflect..........the price of hotel rooms in New York City. And 1979 is really a bad year to suddenly start modern global weather science, but that is where the United Nations, NASA, and NOAA do,....... because that is when the USA put up the first weather satellite. 1979 was cold. Hey, but who cares? Seems like a nice place to begin if you want to prove the world .....warming.

In fact the world did significantly warm from 1979 thru 1998. And while temperatures have not risen since, the world remain a fraction of a degree warmer on average than it was from 1950 through 1979. This has apparently convinced many that the world is about to turn into Venus--and mankind is responsible.

But is this temperature really that historically unique?

Mann's Hockey Stick graph, Keith Briffa's information and graph of his own concluded as much.. In fact this information was incorporated, graph and all, into the United Nations report on Global Warming.




Many scientists always were skeptical of Mann and Briffa's seemingly absolute ability to discern average temperatures around the globe for tens of thousands of years. We presently cannot tell you the temperature of central Antarctica or Baffin Island.... last year or... last week.

But Mann and Briffa demonstrated to everyone that the present run up of the world's temperature for a 30 year period, from 1979 through 2007 was unprecedented, and hence gave Global Warmists their strongest data point that Global Warming was anthropogenic in origin. Because, well no one knows the because. Because a minor greenhouse gas, CO2, seemed to increase in correlation to the temperature.

Duh. (Could it be because a warmer world increases biologic and geologic CO2 ?)
Human kind exudes a great deal of Carbon Dioxide. All fauna does. Humans now contribute almost 6 billions tons a year to atmospheric Carbon Dioxide .





Against nature's 183 billion tons.

A year.

But what if the entire Hockey Stick graph was manufactured? What if the famous Hockey Stick was purposely created to prove a POLITICAL point?

That the Western World needed to become more like South America.
That Americans are evil.
That they should be punished?
That all of the Western World should be punished.
That people should have less babies.
That old people should be kindly eliminated.
That the unfit should be humanely disposed of.
That Democracy was an aboration that let peasants have a say over the 'much smarter'...and that these smarter people now need to create a series of International Treaties to deal with the aberrant societies.


As it turn out: it is true.

Manufactured by creating evidence by purposely choosing temperature proxies that favored a graph showing that historical Earth temperatures were markedly colder than now. Thus creating the impression that current temperatures are not only unusual, but an impetus to ...PANIC!!!!.




Steve McIntyre, has finally, after years of requests, has managed to get his hands on the temperature proxies selected by Briffa to establish the planet was in a runaway heat up. Proxies are obviously necessary because there were no thermometers around at the times we are interested in. So we use ice cores, ocean sediment, tree rings, dead civilizations, and geologic evidence to try to deduce past weather. Of course it is notoriously inaccurate. And extremely regional. In fact the Southern Hemisphere and the Northern often seem to be out of tune with each other.

Of all of the proxies one may use, tree rings seem the flimsiest. Tree rings vary because of sunlight, rain, weather, and stress. And there is only general correlation between these variables. Sometimes none at all.

So Mann and Briffa selected ....tree rings as his temperature proxy. The key word being 'selected'. Which cleared up why the data sources were basically concealed for 14 years. Briffa and Mann, who utilized the Briffa data selected tree proxies that indicated warming by their analytical methodology. When McIntyre included all proxies available to Briffa from the same sources, a decidedly different picture emerges:




Yup. The Hockey Stick turns into a Hokey Shtick.

Also at DBKP: Man-Made Hockey Sticks: The Climatic Hokey Schtick


by pat
Sources:
* http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=7142
* http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/27/quote-of-the-week-20-ding-dong-the-stick-is-dead/
* http://joannenova.com.au/2009/09/breaking-news-cherry-picking-of-historic-proportions/
Images:
* http://tamino.files.wordpress.com
* http://i.ehow.com/
* http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/