OT:Global Warming and Junk Science

[Bill Akers]

Boaz Bezborodko wrote:
> I have recently been in an extensive argument on GW with some 
> Anthropogenic GW promoters.  It is amazing the extent to which these 
> people rally around each other in their defense of what seems to be some 
> very incomplete science.  One particular case that comes to mind is the 
> Mann Hockey Stick chart. 
> 
> A scientist by the name of Mann came up with an analysis of climate 
> proxies that "proved" that the current rise in temperatures is both 
> unprecedented and man-made.   The man-made part comes by comparing this 
> with the growth of CO2, but this is not "proof" and would easily be 
> disproved by the existence of the Medieval Warming Period (MWP).  What 
> his chart has done, and what its supporters keep insisting is the case, 
> is to "prove" that the Medieval Warming Period did not happen. 
> 
> According to anecdotal evidence the MWP was a period of very warm 
> weather over a period of a few centuries.  During this period Greenland 
> was full of arable land on which the vikings were able to sustain 
> settlements and the Romans were cultivating vineyards in northern England.
> 
> The pro-AGW folks are saying that the MWP didn't really exist except as 
> a short-term and regionally isolated blip on the global temperature 
> record.  I think that it is so critical to their argument that current 
> rises in temperature have to be human generated that they have blinded 
> themselves.  The disturbing part is that this includes eminent 
> scientists who are supposed to not be biased by the outcomes. 
> 
> What happened was that some econometric statisticians (McIntyre and 
> McKitrick) evaluated the Mann work and found serious problems with it.  
> Essentially they were able to get the same chart by feeding the program 
> random data.  After years of work and pressure from Congress to open up 
> the data used they found a lot of the causes for those errors.  One 
> report by the National Research Council on behalf of the National 
> Academy of Sciences analyzed the work and in their sumary said that what 
> Mann said was "plausible".  What the summary did not say and what you 
> have to piece together from various parts of the actual report is that 
> Mann's critics were correct.  But instead of saying this the NRC study 
> goes further by adding other studies that "confirm" Mann's hypothesis if 
> not his work.  The study included a number of people who've already 
> expressed their belief that AGW is real.
> 
> There is still, to this day, an ongoing argument about whether the MWP 
> did or did not exist and whether the proxies chosen are valid for the 
> comparisons being made.
> 
> What is certain is that a selection of which proxies to use has a huge 
> impact on what you find.  Some proxies support the existence of the MWP, 
> others don't, while still others that were believed to be accurate 
> (usually this simply means they tracked recent temperatures reasonably 
> well AND don't show an MWP) don't seem to track temperatures since they 
> were first developed.
> 
> But all this controversy is not evidence that we don't yet know enough 
> about what happened in the past, let alone what's going to happen.  No, 
> it is merely evidence that Global Warming "deniers" are either in the 
> pay of the oil companies or are unwilling to accept the "consensus" of 
> the "experts".
> 
Boaz,
What astounds me about the Manmade Global Warming hypothesizers is 
that they really do tend to ignore the evidence that warming was 
already happening before we had the means to have an impact of any 
consequence. One example that comes to mind is that the original 
documentarian(whose name I don't recall) of Ice Bay in Alaska, about 
1797 or so named it that because it was completely covered by a deep 
glacier. About 100 years later, the next chronicler of Ice Bay(whose 
name I also do not recall)observed that the bay was open water and 
navigable by the vessels of the time. Scientists who study such 
phenomenon merely say that the bay is still being studied, since 
there is currently no hypothesis by which the melting of extensive 
glaciation in such a relatively short time is explainable and 
especially since it actually precedes the period of time during 
which Manmade phenomena are blamed for increases in Earth's average 
temperature and falls right into the period that is being used as a 
baseline for current projections of temperature increase.
I am not a disbeliever in our impact on the environment, since it 
has been evident from our toxic landfills to our denuded mountain 
sides to our insistence that we are practicing sustainable forestry 
by growing trees that are 10% of the size at harvest of a full grown 
tree of the same species, but all the science that gets explained to 
justify the global warming concept does seem to just feel it is 
appropriate to skip over anything that doesn't fit into their 
hypotheses. That tends to irritate my engineering idea that the 
world holds together in a comprehensive manner if you take all the 
components into consideration rather than just distorting or lying 
about the parts that don't fit into your personal theories; AKA Al Gore.

> Boaz
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