Wednesday, February 29, 2012

 

Glaring Errors

There was an unsigned piece yesterday in the Los Angeles Times which supports the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming crowd, particularly Michael Mann. It is full of unsupported allegations and some very telling omissions but here are three errors that cannot be ignored (or explained), other than by the LAT's less than scrupulous regard for the truth.

1) The LA Times writes:
Their paper showed that the so-called medieval warm period of the 15th
century
exhibited temperatures similar to what we're seeing today -- yet, as
Mann explains, they came to this conclusion after having "inexplicably removed
from our network two-thirds of the proxy data we had used for the critical
fifteenth-sixteenth-century period
." In other words, having found data they
didn't like, they simply removed it from the equation. (Emphasis added).

What are these people talking about? The Medieval Warm Period existed from approximately 950 AD to 1350 AD. After that there was the Little Ice age--1400 AD to 1900 AD. The 15th and 16th centuries were during the Little Ice Age, not the Medieval Warm Period. Don't believe me, how about the IPCC (before Mann's corrupt contribution)?


The editors go on to state that a review of Mann's infamous graph resulted in exoneration and the debunkers were debunked. Right. What the LAT admits is that the review found a "high degree of confidence only that recent years are the warmest they've been in 400 years." Well, no kidding. 1612 was deep in the Little Ice Age, almost at the nadir, of course we are warmer now than during a 300 year extended cold spell.

2) The La Times writes:

Mann's fame has lasted longer than 15 minutes, and it wasn't up when the hockey stick controversy died down. He was propelled back into the headlines in 2009, when hackers broke into the computer system at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit and stole thousands of emails sent by and to some of the world's most prominent climate scientists -- including Mann. Dozens of them contained phrases that, when taken out of context, made it sound as if these scientists were purposely manipulating data or trying to prevent contrary research from being published, creating an ensuing scandal dubbed Climategate by the media. Some of the most explosive of these emails were written by Mann.
No one knows who released the e-mail between the scientists and received at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. There is no evidence of hacking. It is most likely a whistleblower revealing the anti-science practices of the CAGW crowd in their own words. In or out of context, the e-mails put the group in a very bad light, sunlight.

3) The LAT writes:

Peter Gleick, a MacArthur "genius" grant recipient for his work on global freshwater challenges and president of the Pacific Institute, admitted earlier this month to borrowing a page directly from the denialists' playbook. Posing as someone else, he obtained internal documents from the Heartland Institute and distributed them to journalists, a tactic little different from the hack attack at the University of East Anglia that has been decried by environmentalists.



Gleick, I believe, committed identity theft, wire fraud and theft by deception but he did not 'borrow' a page from the denialist's playbook. Unlike the publically funded CRU at East Anglia, the documents at the Heartland Institute were not subject to a Freedom of Information request, one of which was pending at CRU (but being ignored or evaded by the ethical scientists there) when the e-mail dump called Climategate occured.

No Denier has committed the crimes of Mr. Gleck. Not one.

And notice that the fact that one of the documents the LAT claims were obtained from the Heartland was not obtained from the Heartland but was received, according to Gleick, days to weeks earlier from an anynymous source. This document is almost certainly a fake and it is likely that Gleick forged it because the documents he did steal from the Hearland indicated no wrong doing. Perhaps this is a minor detail, but it is a telling one.

The empire is striking back, but it is a unpersuasive effort.

Labels: ,


Comments: Post a Comment

<< Home

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?