Climate cuttings 23

Ian JolliffeBack in March, global warming's canine-in-chief, Tamino, wrote a series of posts explaining why the notorious decentred principal components analysis used by Michael Mann in his near-legendary hockey stick paper were, in fact, entirely valid. He rounded the series of postings up by citing in his support Ian Joliffe, an important authority on principal components. Tamino is now looking rather foolish, because Joliffe has posted a comment on his site saying that Tamino has misrepresented his views and that Mann should not have used decentred principal components. In fact he wonders about the validity of using principal components at all. Oh dear. 

Mann's latest magnum opus is still causing much hilarity, with the stick-meister deleting and replacing the data on his website faster than a climatologist can fill in a funding request. Unfortunately he has (to his credit) already placed the raw proxies in a public archive from where it is possible to see the quality of the inputs to his study. This is a particularly hilarious one..  

Iain StewartThe BBC's "history" of global warming (in reality it's a propaganda piece) showed a few frayed seams. Presenter Iain Stewart spent a lot of time pouting about how Reagan appointed the Nierenburg committee to look at the issue, and hand-picked its chairman so as to bias its findings. Unfortunately, somebody noticed that the committee was actually set up by the Carter administration. This (ahem) error has come straight from the mouth of Naomi Oreskes, so the producers of the programme have only themselves to blame for picking a "player" as the series adviser. The son of the committee's chairman has responded in the comments and notes that Oreskes knew that the committee was appointed by Carter, because she says so in a scholarly work on the subject. I guess the bit about it being wicked Reagan who appointed Neirenburg was a bit of a flourish for the benefit of the proles.

Atmoz (a climatologist from the US) has also been looking into Oreskes' work on the Nierenburg report, and has found some pretty outrageous selective quoting and misrepresentation of the findings. With all these revelations, she is starting to look throroughly dishonest. The perfect series adviser for a BBC documentary, in fact.

This year's Artic melt seems to have come to a end, with small increases in area appearing for the first time this year, slightly earlier than 2007. The minimum area seems to have been some 400,000 sq km higher than last year. Still no sign of the Antarctic warming either.

And lastly, it hailed in Kenya.

Comments

[Masmit]

AlanB, this mirrors very closely the strategy employed by Bush and Blair with regard to WMD in Iraq, and the various anti-smoking organisations regarding passive smoking,

In both of those cases, there was no immediate sacrifice required of the majority, and the strategy was highly effective. I wonder how this bold strategy will work when not only are the majority expected to make sacrifices, but the extent of those sacrifices is not at all clear.

[Bishop Hill]

Masmit

Those are interesting points. Richard North at EU Referendum has (IIRC) pointed out that people's opinions on global warming are likely to change when the lights start going out. That could be this winter according to some.

[masmit]

Ah - hence the Greenpeace et al. insistance on energy policies that pretty much guarantee that lights go out...