Oh, You Mean that Science
The panel concluded we know a lot about the last 400 years, but have far less confidence in the period 900 to 1600, and not much confidence at all about prior to 900. The panel indicated it is “plausible” that the last 25 years of the 20th Century were warmer than any period in the last 1,000. But Mann’s and the IPCC’s claims about the last 1990s “likely” being the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year had no plausibility. And Mann’s attacks on McIntyre and McKitrick for pointing out flaws in his statistical techniques received a comeuppance by the panel on page 107 of the report, when the panel diplomatically stated:“Some of these criticisms (by McIntyre and McKitrick) are more relevant than others, but taken together, they are an important aspect of a more general finding of this committee, which is that uncertainties of the published reconstructions have been underestimated.”
The hockey stick, in short, is 600 years shorter than it was before and the uncertainties for previous centuries are larger than Mann gave credence. And when the uncertainty of the paleoclimatogical record increases with time, the uncertainty about human contribution is likewise increased.
tech central station
Steven McIntyre is one of Canada’s great contributions to the debate on climate change. He comes from a highly quantitative business background and his website/blog, climate audit has become a clearing house for climate change skeptics.
McIntyre’s great heresy is to have suggested that the data and the statistical procedures used to develope the IPCC’s famous hockey stick model were open to question. For this heresy McIntyre was roundly abused…after all, the international orthodoxy is that climate change is true and its our fault.
McIntyre pushed forward and discovered that the principal author of the IPCC study would not release the data the hockey stick was founded upon. He also discovered both statistical errors and errors in the algorithm the principal investigator used. More abuse followed.
However, the release last week of the National Academy of Science panel report, suggests that McIntyre has a lot of this right.
McIntyre’s larrger point was that, in business, no one would proceed with a serious investment without exercising due dilligence regarding the assumptions underlying the project. With Kyoto no such due dilligence has been exercised.
Given that the cost of Kyoto’s implementation is in the hundreds of billions of dollars the failure of governments and their scientists to insist upon a rigorous due dilligence proceedure before committing to the unlikely enterprise of Kyoto is, at best, negligent. At worst it suggests that the climate alarmists simply bamboozled the bureaucrats and created a program for the de-industrialization of the West on the flimsiest of scientific pretexts.
However, such is the power of the Kyoto orthodoxy that simply suggesting a rigorous assessment of the hockey stick’s underlying statistics and data remains beyond the pale.
Written by jay on June 28th, 2006 with 3 comments.
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