11/24/2009

New Fox News piece: Why You Should Be Hot and Bothered About 'Climate-gate'

My newest piece at Fox News starts this way:

Science depends on good quality data. It also relies on replication and sharing data. But the last couple of days have uncovered some shocking revelations. Computer hackers have obtained 160 megabytes of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England. These e-mails, which have now been confirmed as real, involved many researchers across the globe with ideologically similar advocates around the world. They were brazenly discussing the destruction and hiding of data that did not support global warming claims. The academics here also worked closely with the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Professor Phil Jones, the head of the Climate Research Unit, and Professor Michael Mann at Pennsylvania State University, who has been an important scientist in the climate debate, have come under particular scrutiny. Among his e-mails, Professor Jones talks to Professor Mann about the "trick of adding in the real temps to each series...to hide the decline [in temperature]." Professor Mann admitted that this was the exchange that he had and explained to the New York Times that "scientists often used the word 'trick' to refer to a good way to solve a problem, 'and not something secret.'" While the New York Times apparently buys this explanation, it is hard to see the explanation for "to hide the decline." . . . .

Labels: , , ,

1 Comments:

Blogger Al B. said...

Michael Mann is the man behind the infamous 'hockey stick curve' scandal, where he used tree-ring data as a proxy for temperature, and obtained his data from a previously published paper entitled, "Detecting the Aerial Fertilization Effect of Atmospheric CO2 Enrichment in Tree Ring Chronologies" by Graybill and Idso, 1993. His paper was subsequently used in the IPCC AR3 report published in 2001.


Of course, his methodology was so far beyond stupid that both he and the IPCC were accused of deliberate fraud in many circles. Specifically, he used the effects of CO2 on tree growth as a proxy for temperature in order to show a correlation between temperature and CO2. The IPCC used his results to recommend drastic reductions in CO2 emissions in their AR3 report.

You can read all about it by doing a Google search for, "hockey stick curve global warming."

Well, he's baaaack!!!

Regards,

Al B.

11/26/2009 7:52 AM  

Post a Comment

<< Home