Thursday
Sep232010
by
Bishop Hill
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The Hockey Stick lives!
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At least according to John Collins Rudolf at the New York Times Green Blog. Mr Rudolf seeks to defend the Hockey Stick, a reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere temperatures, by reference to a handful of local and regional proxies. This doesn't strike me as very clever.
Update on Sep 23, 2010 by
Bishop Hill
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I tried to post a comment at the NYT. I said that the NRC defence of the hockey stick - that Mann used a biased methodology and inappropriate data but had still reached the right answer - was an embarrassment to science.
They have not allowed it to be posted.
Reader Comments (31)
Delusion is one of the first symtoms during withdrawl from additive drugs.
Now - why is it that the blue line always seems to stop before the red line? I keep forgetting...
...surely if the science were robust...oh never mind.
I guess that the climatic urge to care for endangered icons (Pachauri, Hockey Sticks, the CRU etc.) is a deep seated, almost maternal, instinct.
http://goodnewsrev.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/goodgrief.jpg
"A study published in September 2009 in the journal Science, meanwhile, found that temperatures in the Arctic in the last decade were likely warmer than any time since the birth of Christ."
Please, please STOP! What was that quote ... something about a vague stat followed by an appeal to a Much Higher Authority being the last refuge of rogues and scoundrels?
Words fail me.
Meanwhile the latest post on WUWT is about a peer reviewed study that says current arctic ice is more extensive than most of the last 9000 years.
Looks like the NYT green blog is greener than the Grauniad. No wonder they wouldn't post your comment (is it free?). It's another place where you are wasting your time trying to post.
the map re-drawn by the Turk Piri Reis in 1513 with a mostly ice free artic has been of interest to me for many years.
http://www.world-mysteries.com/sar_1.htm
I haven't bothered trying to post at the NYT Green section. Its frequenters are fundamentally eco-religiously motivated and logically ineducable. There is nothing to be achieved there by posting reasonably or with a sceptical overtone because, even if your comment were to escape moderation, it would fall on deaf ears there.
Unlike Monbiot, the NYT Green bunch have not yet realised that the hockey stick science that was supposed to be there to support their ideological persuasion is not actually traditional science in any recognisable form. There will always be an eco-religious bunch, just as there will always be Raelians.
"I tried to post a comment at the NYT. . . "
Mine made it through:
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/23/the-hockey-stick-lives/?permid=25#comment25
NYT is the USA's Grauniad. Eyes wide shut, unswerving allegiance to The Cause of driving the world leftwards.
BTW, the AGW faithful seem to be trying a comeback in the media, from where I'm sitting. Just trotting out the same decades-old stuff as though nothing has happened between-time. Hmmm
btw bish -
don't think your govt is pulling back; if anything it looks like they would like to spread the pain around:
24 Sept: Reuters: Nina Chestney: UK corporate CO2 trade scheme needs revamp-advisers
Editing by James Jukwey
The British government should re-design its scheme to cut corporate energy usage to make it less complex so as to include smaller businesses, a climate advisory body to the government said on Friday.
The mandatory Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) energy efficiency scheme was introduced in April to force businesses like banks, hotels, hospitals and schools ...
The CRC has been criticised for being too costly, confusing and unfair...
If simplified, the threshold could be lowered to make more businesses eligible for in(clusion?)...
Firms face a Sept. 30 deadline to register for the scheme but as much as 35 percent are forecast to be late, according to consultancy WSP Environment and Energy..
The committee would not comment on whether the entire scheme should be scrapped in favour of starting from scratch...
Those which have cut their energy use the most will get a bonus payment from companies which have made the least progress.
However, this could be unfair to the public sector, which has less money to invest in energy saving but still has to ensure the running of essential services like hospitals.
To avoid the transfer of funds from public to private sector organisation, there should be separate league tables for the public and private sectors, the committee said.
http://af.reuters.com/article/energyOilNews/idAFLDE68M0EV20100923?pageNumber=1&virtualBrandChannel=0
J.R.R. Tolkien
Any man who lives in hope that the world will settle on the side of reasoned argument will die disappointed.
Oops sorry, no source quoted.
IIRC, M Mann 1984
Aged Eighteen and Three Quarters!
Bish, appealing to the NYT using Pre-normal scientific methods of scrutiny is as welcomed as asking why they still open their allegiances to the penny pimps when the simple exposure of the truth would yield untold treasures.
Iz they, I torture myself with the thought, so terrorised by their protectors that they have huddled together into future opprobrium?
well done cameron. i was going to try the same thing.
i prefer the less diplomatic 'embarasment to science' tho.
It seems that the Piri Reis map mystery doesn't stand up.
"So in response to people who ask how to explain why the Piri Reis Map shows the coastline of Antarctica accurately, the answer is - it doesn't."
http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/PSEUDOSC/PiriRies.HTM
Just checked out the NYT comments - and good to see that after the typical initial rush of believer posts - there are far more that question the data.
But by far the best reward was this one post:-
"People who believe the universe was created in 6 literal days are considered religious nuts.
People who believe that the earth was finished when they got here get Nobel Prizes.
Funny, huh?"
A good start to Friday once I had cleaned up the Tea I guffawed all over the keyboard.
@Alleagra
That was a very useful link. Trouble is -- a lot of people are getting all excited about the map over at WUWT. And -- it gets worse -- they're confusing Antarctica with the Arctic. Rather embarrassing really. Makes us look almost as bad as the opposition...
But of course -- they could be damnable fifth columnists. Why on earth didn't I think of that before?...
"It seems that the Piri Reis map mystery doesn't stand up.
"'So in response to people who ask how to explain why the Piri Reis Map shows the coastline of Antarctica accurately, the answer is - it doesn't.'"
I am not going to argue for or against the Piri Reis map - I simply don't know enough about it. I'd just point out that an early map-maker could make a decent stab at the North Atlantic and Arctic, while still needing to be entirely creative about the Southern Hemisphere. "Arctic" means something like "Bear-land", "arktos" being the Greek for "bear". "Antarctic" is nothing more than the deduced opposite of "arctic". Early European maps showing the Great Southern Continent were the Hockey Sticks of their time and I should think that quite a lot was expended, in terms of both blood and treasure, before the bien-pensants admitted defeat and accepted that the continent at the bottom of the world belonged to the penguins.
@Owen
Ah, well. Let's just draw a decent shroud over the Piri Reis map and put it down to what it really seems to be. Late medieval fantasy.
@ LevelGaze "a lot of people are getting all excited about the map over at WUWT. And -- it gets worse -- they're confusing Antarctica with the Arctic"
all I could find was one person bringing it up and two replying... "I’m sceptical about claims made about global warming. I’m extremely sceptical about the claims made about the Piri Reis map. "
"It beats me how you can think theories about the Piri Reis map will get a warm reception here on a website full of confirmed sceptics."
Link please showing a) a lot of people discussing the map b) a lot of people excited about it c) Any person (besides the original person to mention the map) confusing Antarctica with the Arctic.
Your comment seems to give a false impression of the facts.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/18/hot-times-in-antarctica/
@Pete
Ach Gott your'e right! Have just revisited the site, only only one oddiity protesting fascination with The Map for years, yet apparently still confusing arctic with antarctic. Me and someone else picking up on it, everyone else sensibly ignoring it.
I've over-egged the pudding, mea culpa. Hey, I'm just a chain smoking alcoholic Aussie. Forgive. :)
Andrew,
My comment successfully made it to this NYT's Green Blog. Perhaps your name and e-mail have been fingered by the blog's e-mail filter.
Lately I have been occasionally posting at Revkin's Dot Earth, following the discussion at one of your earlier blogs. I've not been censored yet, although Revkin has never replied to one of my comments.
I tried posting a comment at the Green blog about 8 hours ago, but no dice so far. I guess it was too inflammatory. I asked when any environmental reporter from the NYT was going to actually read the hockey stick illusion.
Perhaps your book title also falls within Science Advisor Holdren's listing of 'dangerous words', like global warming...
I lol'd at one of the comments:
"And of course the deliberate misleads when it comes to sources, your specialty. I remember, one such commenter (a climate denier) showed a source of Bristol University in the UK purpoting to discredit the Global warming theory. I went online, and the presentation was impressive. The site was www.bris.ac.uk........and it gave me pause. Then I checked the actual website of Bristol University and is was www.bristol.ac.uk."
If he'd bothered to check, both bris.ac.uk and bristol.ac.uk direct your browser to the same page. I bet he's funded by big oil...
"They have not allowed it to be posted".
Thank God for that.
Science - 1
Layman pseudo science - 0
Thanks for that Bishop Phil, you owe me a new keyboard!
New keyboard?
Surely not a problem for you in the curious alternate reality you're busily constructing for yourselves here.