Nov

9

Climate Audit wins

November 9, 2007 |

Final vote tally, subject to revision for apparent cheats and bots is:

Climate Audit 20,288
Bad Astronomy 19,080

However, the real win for Climate Audit is that its traffic will increase and more people who are interested in a close examination of the “global warming” “data” will have the opportunity to see the outstanding science Steve McIntyre is doing at Climate Audit.

This was close all the way with Boing Boing posting a really dumb slag of Steve McIntyre as well as Kos and Huffington putting the boots in. CA was boosted by everyone from The Corner to SDA and Five Feet of Fury. Newsbusters weighed in this morning and was linked up by Drudge.

It is too bad a couple of non-CA blogs in the competition had to get nasty about it. Ah well, its what the left does best.

UPDATE: There is all sorts of monkey business over at the Webblog Award counting site. Votes were still showing up three and a half hours after the polls had closed. CA’s 1500 vote lead has switched to a 47 vote loss. I think this is BS and hope the Weblog Award people clear it up post haste.

That said, I posted the following at the Bad Astronomy blog:

I was rooting for and campaigning for Climate Audit. Not because I have anything against BA - in fact I really like what I have been reading here - but rather because of the importance of supporting a healthy skepticism in the face of the “consensus”.

Steve and his crew like looking at numbers. They like sifting through data - when they can get it - and examining methodology. They look at the papers produced by the “consensus” scientists because those are the papers which are, at present, influencing policy. And that policy has very real costs associated with it. Economic costs but also huge opportunity costs; a dollar spent on carbon sequestration is a dollar not spent on anti-malaria programs or producing clean water.

Governments are relying upon the correctness of the studies which have underlain the reports of the IPCC. These studies - while peer reviewed for the most part - need to be subjected to really serious, independent, verification. An audit if you will.

Pretty much on his own, Steve has been revisiting the date, recoring the Bristlecones, filing Freedom of Information requests, asking for proper data archiving, reconstructing the undisclosed modeling techniques of the climate scientists and, generally, testing the actual science which underlies the claims of AGW.

Where those claims do not stand up to such scrutiny Steve reports it.

Now, were the IPCC a scientific rather then political body, before it published its reports it would have its own “tiger teams” doing due diligence on the basic soundness of the science it was relying upon. After all, the IPCC is making recommendations which will cost in the trillions of dollars and, because that money will be diverted from other uses, almost certainly kill millions of people who are alive right now. It is not unreasonable that those recommendations be based on research which has been independently tested.

When Climate Audit sank the “hockey stick” it did so by exposing behaviour which, had it occurred in a business context would have seen people fired at best and convicted of criminal offenses at worst. The IPCC should have caught Mann’s data manipulations long before it relied on such a shoddy piece of work.

Climate Audit certainly has an agenda: Steve wants transparency, full disclosure and due diligence as well as independent verification of the research which underpins the radical departures the AGW people want to impose upon the world.

All of which is why I thought it was important to use this web contest to get the Climate Audit message out to as many people as possible. No matter how the voting turns out Climate Audit’s vital message has reached many more people. More will listen skeptically to the Al Gores of the world, more will resist accepting unproven assertions, more will demand to see the data and the analysis.

In so far as Bad Astronomy has given CA a fantastic race you have helped bring forward the day when real science will test the religious dogmas of the AGM believers. So thank you. And, as well, thank you for bashing the real flat earthers with your own finely tuned skepticism. Realistically, you very much belong over at CA trashing bad numbers and demanding clear, transparent, honest research.


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