“Shut-eyed Denial”

[Sunsettommy]

Climate Audit

Mar 11, 2010 at 5:06 PM

John A

EXCERPT:

A shout-out for a review of Andrew Montford’s “The Hockey Stick Illusion” by Matt Ridley in Prospect Magazine.

Andrew Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion is one of the best science books in years. It exposes in delicious detail, datum by datum, how a great scientific mistake of immense political weight was perpetrated, defended and camouflaged by a scientific establishment that should now be red with shame. It is a book about principal components, data mining and confidence intervals—subjects that have never before been made thrilling. It is the biography of a graph.

LINK
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Here is a good comment to ponder over:

Quote:SteveGinIL
Posted Mar 12, 2010 at 1:14 AM

Bishop Hill has this, plus he comments on this link:

11 March: Physics World: Concerns raised over Institute of Physics climate submission
by Michael Banks, news editor of Physics World
The hockey-stick graph, which is widely considered as a valid result in the climate-research community, was later included into the third assessment report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2001.
The “trick”, as mentioned by Jones in one of his e-mails to Mann, Bradley and Hughes, is a statistical method that is widely accepted in the climate community and is applied to proxy measurements in the years since 1960. It deals with the problem that some tree rings in certain parts of the world have stopped getting bigger since that time, when they ought to have been increasing in size if the world is warming.

"See, now THIS goes to the nub of science, of the basis of Uniformitarianism.

Stealing from Wikipedia (because it is quicker than paraphrasing it myself):"

Quote:Uniformitarianism, in the philosophy of naturalism, assumes that the same natural laws and processes that operate in the universe now, have always operated in the universe in the past and apply everywhere in the universe. It is frequently summarized as “the present is the key to the past,” because it holds that all things continue as they were from the beginning of the world.

"You see, they are violating the very CORE of Uniformitarianism, if they are saying that what is observed in the present is DIFFERENT from what has occurred in the past. They can’t have one standard for tree rings in the last 50 years and a different one for the time before that.

If Uniformitarianism is the gold standard for science, they were/are completely abrogating that. Actually, in doing so, they are claiming something that they have not formulated a basis for, something to SHOW convincingly that Uniformitarianism does not apply in THIS ONE SITUATION. They don’t even bother trying to argue it: they just apply it and leave it up to everyone else to discover that they’ve changed the rules of science.

Mr Mann, Mr Briffa, Mr Jones, and assignment:

Please inform us why the tree ring evidence of the last 50 years should have a different interpretation and quantification from all previous years and centuries.

And, PLEASE, show your work."