How to Manufacture a Climate Consensus

[Sunsettommy]

The Wall Street Journal

DECEMBER 17, 2009, 10:47 P.M. ET

By PATRICK J. MICHAELS

EXCERPT:

Few people understand the real significance of Climategate, the now-famous hacking of emails from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU). Most see the contents as demonstrating some arbitrary manipulating of various climate data sources in order to fit preconceived hypotheses (true), or as stonewalling and requesting colleagues to destroy emails to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the face of potential or actual Freedom of Information requests (also true).

But there's something much, much worse going on—a silencing of climate scientists, akin to filtering what goes in the bible, that will have consequences for public policy, including the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) recent categorization of carbon dioxide as a "pollutant."

The bible I'm referring to, of course, is the refereed scientific literature. It's our canon, and it's all we have really had to go on in climate science (until the Internet has so rudely interrupted). When scientists make putative compendia of that literature, such as is done by the U.N. climate change panel every six years, the writers assume that the peer-reviewed literature is a true and unbiased sample of the state of climate science.

LINK
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Patrick Michaels was one of the scientists who was whitewashed by the alarmist scums and a governor.

[Richard111]

I think it is much worse than that. Listen to pronouncements from Copenhagen about a "strong world body" and other world government comments. Obama has arrived and he "will act, not talk". Right!
Saving the planet requires world government and a strong leader! [/sarc]

[mcclane]

latest i heard on the news is that a draft has been drawn up. I guess all this climate-gate and facts against the hippie's claim of climate change didn't do much good.

[Sunsettommy]

(12-18-2009 02:09 PM)mcclane Wrote:  latest i heard on the news is that a draft has been drawn up. I guess all this climate-gate and facts against the hippie's claim of climate change didn't do much good.

I doubt that it will amount to much,since the U.S. Senate has to muster up 66 Senators to approve the treaty.

[Richard111]

Seems like the UN is a mite peeved with Obama for brokering his own deal on the side. Delegates not included in the deal declared it a "coup d'etat" against the UN.

[HarpoSpoke]

From the article:

Quote: One of the papers, published in 2003 by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas (of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), was a meta-analysis of dozens of "paleoclimate" studies that extended back 1,000 years. They concluded that 20th-century temperatures could not confidently be considered to be warmer than those indicated at the beginning of the last millennium.

In fact, that period, known as the "Medieval Warm Period" (MWP), was generally considered warmer than the 20th century in climate textbooks and climate compendia, including those in the 1990s from the IPCC.

Then, in 1999, Mr. Mann published his famous "hockey stick" article in Geophysical Research Letters (GRL), which, through the magic of multivariate statistics and questionable data weighting, wiped out both the Medieval Warm Period and the subsequent "Little Ice Age" (a cold period from the late 16th century to the mid-19th century), leaving only the 20th-century warming as an anomaly of note.

We certainly hear a lot about "the consensus". Can it be said with confidence that the Hockey Stick was an anomaly against the consensus?

If so, that's ironic....and telling. The IPCC certainly wasted no time tossing all "the consensus" into the waste bin in its rush to plaster Mann's graph all over the place.

[JohnWho]

(12-19-2009 06:47 AM)HarpoSpoke Wrote:  We certainly hear a lot about "the consensus". Can it be said with confidence that the Hockey Stick was an anomaly against the consensus?

"Anomaly" - how about "aberration" or "abomination"?

Quote:If so, that's ironic....and telling. The IPCC certainly wasted no time tossing all "the consensus" into the waste bin in its rush to plaster Mann's graph all over the place.

Well, yeah - that's the way they work. The only people claiming a "consensus" were those who were, and still are, obscuring the truth and the real science.

[HarpoSpoke]

(12-19-2009 07:03 AM)JohnWho Wrote:  

(12-19-2009 06:47 AM)HarpoSpoke Wrote:  We certainly hear a lot about "the consensus". Can it be said with confidence that the Hockey Stick was an anomaly against the consensus?

"Anomaly" - how about "aberration" or "abomination"?

I guess I'm just looking for firm confirmation of the fact that the higher temps of the MWP were the accepted consensus at the time of the emergence of the Hockey Stick graph.

Quote:
Well, yeah - that's the way they work. The only people claiming a "consensus" were those who were, and still are, obscuring the truth and the real science.

That seems to be the case. Just ran across this quote from Al Gore: ""Only an insignificant fraction of scientists deny the global warming crisis. The time for debate is over. The science is settled."

This quote was from 1992! http://www.financialpost.com/story.html?...z0a0MsVhlW

[Sunsettommy]

Quote:Somewhere along the way, I stopped believing that a scientific consensus exists on climate change. Certainly there is no consensus at the very top echelons of scientists -- the ranks from which I have been drawing my subjects -- and certainly there is no consensus among astrophysicists and other solar scientists, several of whom I have profiled. If anything, the majority view among these subsets of the scientific community may run in the opposite direction. Not only do most of my interviewees either discount or disparage the conventional wisdom as represented by the IPCC, many say their peers generally consider it to have little or no credibility. In one case, a top scientist told me that, to his knowledge, no respected scientist in his field accepts the IPCC position.

[Sunsettommy]

Quote:"Only an insignificant fraction of scientists deny the global warming crisis. The time for debate is over. The science is settled."

S o said Al Gore ... in 1992.

Then we should cut off all FUTURE funding for more research in this area since it is all known,and even pay back funding of the last 17 years since,they did not need it.

Al $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ Gore is full of baloney with his anti science attitude.

[HarpoSpoke]

(12-19-2009 11:49 AM)Sunsettommy Wrote:  

Quote:"Only an insignificant fraction of scientists deny the global warming crisis. The time for debate is over. The science is settled."

S o said Al Gore ... in 1992.

Then we should cut off all FUTURE funding for more research in this area since it is all known,and even pay back funding of the last 17 years since,they did not need it.

Al $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ Gore is full of baloney with his anti science attitude.

Excellent point! Why are we spending millions/billions every year on something that is "settled"? Wonder how fast certain climatologists would back off the "settled" claim if this point was brought up?

[blouis79]

This article by John Christy, Professor of Atmospheric Science, University of Alabama is compulsory reading – every last word. He describes in 2007 how the IPCC corrupts the scientific process.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7081331.stm