James DeMeo's OBRL-News Blog

Excellent work, going through the detailed evidence originally presented by Mann, et al, claiming a dramatic increase in global temperatures in the 20th Century, and which became THE body of work abused by the UN's IPCC to justify all the new "global warming" propaganda, hysteria and legislation.  Montford shows, point by point, how the Mann, et al, and other "hockey stick" graphs are based upon misrepresentation and outright fraud. He details how the primary critics of the claim of a significant 20th Century global warming, McIntyre and Mckitrick, were opposed and thwarted every step of the way in their efforts to expose the flaws and fraud, by use of dirty-tricks and censorship carried on by "top" editors of major science journals.  These latter two authors exposed these problems in various published and peer-reviewed papers, even later on using a duplicate of the Mann, et al statistical algorithms to show how they are guaranteed to produce "hockey stick" shaped graphs, even from data sets composed of random numbers.  By using such academic slight-of-hand, the powerful Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age were erased from existence, through a flattened "hockey-stick-handle".  The head of the hockey stick was produced by exaggerating certain tree-ring data sets as gathered by other scientists who had already demonstrated how they were non-responsive to temperature.  Many of the Mann et al data sets were also shown to demonstrate a late 20th Century cooling, but these were mathematically diluted down in the final computations.  And so forth.  But no matter, the various "hockey stick" scientists collaborated, figured and calculated things to produce the results they wanted, and then did their very best to hide away the details of their correlation computations and algorithms such that nobody could proof-check their findings.  The data they used -- gathered by many other scientists who freely shared with them -- was frequently cherry-picked for it's "hockey stick" appearance.  Then they refused to share their tainted data with other scientists, so as to conceal the fudging.  This made it nearly impossible to follow their procedures exactly from the raw data to the actual final conclusions, for proof-checking, which was never done by anyone during the process of claimed peer-review.  Years later, when finally being forced to disclose their data by journal editors and government funding agencies, they frequently "lost their data" in the classic "the dog ate my homework" excuse.  Finally came the computer hack which dug out their private emails, showing how they joked about what they were doing, and plotted like Stalinists to censor and professionally destroy those who were critical of their work.  It is that bad.  The awful marriage of science and politics. 

// posted by James DeMeo @ Thursday, April 21, 2011