Thus spake, or spat, Lord Fitzwater to the Duke of Surrey in Shakespeare's Richard II and the words immediately came to mind whilst I contemplated the festering stew-pit of deceit which has bubbled and gurgled over the last 20-odd years - and all in the name of "perverted science". The very name, climate science, is now an execrable insult to the countless and honourable scientists in so many different fields who have widened our knowedge and improved our lives beyond the wildest imaginings of even our grandfathers. It is entirely appropriate that it should be the ancient and privileged Royal Society that has finally driven a stake into the black heart of this farrago of 'scientific' lies and deception. I am, as all of us should be, immensely grateful to Steve McIntyre for his years of hard slogging against the seemingly impervious wall of 'scientific' obfuscation, deceit and cover-up which has hitherto kept him from the truth. Also, I owe a debt of gratitude to 'Bishop Hill', an intelligent blogger with the great gift of 'translating' and condensing scientific complexities into plain English for the benefit of dummies like me.
So, here is a synopsis of the story so far - in my words. Ever since the 'climateers' veered away from their 1970s warnings of an imminent ice-age and turned to global warming as the next scare-story from which great 'reputations' might be made and better still, great government grants, they have sought for some means of measuring global temperatures from centuries before the modern scientific age. The main means to this end was the study of tree rings, the width of which re-act to temperature (and other influences, although they were carefully ignored) and given the extreme age of trees would provide a window back in time. For various reasons the trees chosen were situated in the polar north and several studies were made in the '90s and the '00s. Unsurprisingly, to cynics like me, they all pointed to a sudden up-tick in temperatures during the 20th century. This might have been swallowed whole but like con-men the world over, they could not avoid over-egging the pudding. Thus, the Medieval Warm Period which had been attested to by numerous historical records was 'proven' not to have occurred and the 'climateers' insisted that their 'science' showed no such indications. The end result was that they now had sufficient data to draw a graph of global temperature which has since become the single major icon to the global warming sect - I use that last word advisedly - I advise you to study it carefully because it is going to cost you a fortune - yes, you! - and it is one of the finest examples of a big fat lie that you will see:
This is the (in)famous 'hockey stick' upon which the mighty United Nations, and all the government leaders who regularly plant their huge carbon footprints all over the world as the gad about from one conference to another, rest their case. And it's as phoney as a nine bob note!
For years, McIntyre hammered away trying to get the underlying data from which that graph, and others like it, were derived. In contravention of every scientific convention that insists that scientists archive and then exchange their basic data, the 'scientists' concerned refused point blank, even, with the connivance of their semi-governmental employers (the British Met Office being one), avoiding Freedom of Information Act requests. Equally supine were the so-called 'august' scientific journals whose own rules insisted that any papers published must have archived data to which other scientists should be allowed access. None of them met even their own standards, instead they simply allowed the 'climateers' to pull their strings. But then, perhaps emboldened by their success in avoiding McIntyre's scrutiny for so many years, one of them made the mistake of publishing a paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, the Royal Society's journal for the biological sciences. Wearily, once again, McIntyre applied for the background material expecting the usual obfuscation - but suddenly, and he must have nearly keeled over in shock - he discovered that the Royal Society not only printed its rules but expected its authors to abide by them. Slowly, over very many months, some of the basic data was reluctantly produced and McIntyre began to apply his considerable expertise as a statistician. Suffice to say that the end result is the utter and complete demolition of the 'hockey stick' graph with its, oh so, convenient up-tick in the 20th century which purports to support the notion that there has been a huge jump in global temperatures, and that the only inference must be that Man is guilty! Here is the corrected graph with McIntyre's results superimosed in black.
The details of the underhand and deceitful way in which the hockey stick was first produced and then supported by conniving 'scientists' can be read in two different ways. If you are comfortable with computer codes and the latest statistical methods, read McIntyre; but if, like me, you can only grasp the very outlines of this complexity then go to 'Bishop Hill' and he will explain it clearly and succinctly in plain English.
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