Tree Ring Circus

manntree-highresGlobal Warming Hysteria Might be a Crime

By Steve Milloy

Are academics some special subspecies of humans who are beyond suspicion and above the law? That’s the question being played out in a drama between Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli and the dead-end defenders of global warming’s poster junk scientist, Michael Mann.

Mr. Cuccinelli is under assault by the climate-alarmist brigades for launching an investigation into whether any fraud against taxpayers occurred with respect to Mr. Mann’s hiring by the University of Virginia and his receipt of government grants. Mr. Cuccinelli recently sent the university a civil investigative demand requesting e-mails and other documents pertaining to Mr. Mann.

Mr. Cuccinelli’s rationale is simple to understand: Mr. Mann’s claim to fame – the infamous “hockey stick” graph – is so bogus that one cannot help but wonder whether it is intentional fraud.

Developed in the late 1990s, while he was at the University of Massachusetts, Mr. Mann’s hockey-stick graph purports to show that average global temperature over the past millennium was stable until the 20th century, when it spiked up, presumably because of human activity. The hockey stick was latched onto by the alarmist community, incorporated into government and United Nations assessments of climate science and held out to the public (particularly by Al Gore in “An Inconvenient Truth”) as proof that humans were destroying the planet.

But by the mid-2000s the hockey-stick graph was revealed for what it was – pure bunk.

Skeptics first became suspicious because the hockey stick failed to show two well-known periods of dramatic swings in global temperature – the so-called Medieval Optimum and the Little Ice Age. Mr. Mann’s indignant refusal to share his data and methods with skeptics only added fuel to the fire. Eventually, skeptics discovered that the hockey stick’s computer model would produce a hockey-stick graph regardless of what data was input. But it gets worse.

Mr. Mann apparently created the hockey stick by cherry-picking data he liked and deleting data he didn’t like. While the vast majority of the hockey stick is based on temperature data extrapolated from tree rings going back hundreds of years, the tip of the blade (representing the late 20th century) was temperature data taken from thermometers. Beyond the obvious apples-and-oranges problem, Mr. Mann appended the thermometer data to the hockey stick at a point at which the tree-ring data actually shows cooling. This cooling trend data was then deleted. This is what is referred to by the now-famous “Climategate” phrase “Mike’s Nature trick to … hide the decline.”

Read the rest of this piece at the Washington Times.

41 Responses to Tree Ring Circus

  1. Hal Groar May 12, 2010 at 9:00 pm #

    Has anybody ever read the authors book “Green Hell…”? It sounds like a fun read! I like how the article frames the argument for going after Mr. Mann. Well put!

  2. Neil F. AGWD/BSD May 14, 2010 at 5:27 am #

    I have not read his book, but I have been to his website http://www.junkscience.com/ and I used to get a lot of material from there. I had it in my favorites until my computer crashed, and I got a new one. I really like it and I don’t know why I have not been back there until now. But I am re-adding it to my favorites.

  3. cubanshamoo May 14, 2010 at 8:53 am #

    Geat site!!! I already include it in my favorites

  4. Rob N. Hood May 14, 2010 at 10:49 am #

    It’s one thing to accept that a politician is trying to screw you. It’s quite another to realize the screwing is being done by the entire party. It’s one thing to accept that an entire administration is corrupt and incompetent. It’s quite another to realize corruption and incompetence is endemic in the system itself. And it’s one thing to imagine in some vague way that the country is steered by a benign establishment and/or people. It’s quite another to accept that, as Simon Johnson of MIT argues and as Inside Out dramatizes, the benign establishment is in fact a rapacious oligarchy.

    Americans are possessed of a built-in reluctance to accept the rotten substance behind the shiny surface of their institutional brands. We hesitate to understand the ugly reality behind the pretty facade. I don’t think this disinclination serves us well. Denial, as Dave Grossman has famously observed, has no survival value. If we want to survive our institutions, a good start would be seeing them for what they really are.

    • Neil F. AGWD/BSD May 14, 2010 at 8:04 pm #

      Are you refering to the IPCC?

  5. paul wenum May 14, 2010 at 11:32 pm #

    I agree on one thing, “seeing them for what they really are.” Look at the last Year and a half. Obama, Pelosi, Reid et al. The biggest deficient in American history and now they want more entitlements/taxes? Greece will be a non-factor by 2012. We will be an after-thought after this administration is finished. Get real and wake up. I would hate to think about going to market with a wheelbarrow full of useless dollars for a loaf of bread.

    • Rob N. Hood May 22, 2010 at 9:50 am #

      That deficit was inherited. Were you asleep the previous 8 years Rumplestiltskin?

      Now hear this:

      A basic and alarming fact?
      Rand Paul’s opposed to the Americans with Disabilities Act.

      Re: Civil Rights legislation, he thinks it’s vital to
      Absolutely and quickly get rid of Title II.

      (Paul would like to eliminate
      Making private businesses unable to discriminate.)

      He has maintained that he thinks it’s best
      To ban abortion even in cases of rape or incest.

      Paul’s been willing to announce across the nation
      That he’d like to get rid of the Department of Education.

      The way that he’s now currently running
      Makes him seem crazier than crazy Jim Bunning.

      Speakinginthismonotone, Rand Paul rarely thrills;
      He’s Sarah Palin without her beauty pageant skills.

  6. cubanshamoo May 15, 2010 at 8:52 am #

    You’re right Rob, that rapacious oligarchy (from Marx books) please go and buy a gun, don’t suffer so much!

  7. Rob N. Hood May 15, 2010 at 3:44 pm #

    Peace lovers don’t own or buy guns. But fascists do.

    • Dan May 16, 2010 at 11:46 pm #

      Fascists would prefer we weren’t armed. The founders of our nation intended that every household be armed – for defense and to preserve liberty.

      • Rob N. Hood May 17, 2010 at 7:07 am #

        True. But there are Fascists and then there are fascists. So what if they are all armed? Then you’d have just another bloody bannana Republic. I’m not against gun ownership. Just pointing out a flaw in your reasoning. Plus, the fact that the armed Public was encouraged to fight a war against another country, not against each other or their own country. To “preserve Liberty”? From whom exactly?

        You really believe your little arsenal could stand up against the US Military? Sure… for a few seconds.

        • Dan McGrath May 17, 2010 at 9:43 am #

          Some quotes from Thomas Jefferson:
          “What country can preserve its liberties if it’s rulers are warned from time to time that this people preserve the spirit of resistance?”
          “When the people fear their government there is tyranny. When the government fears its people, there is liberty.”
          “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

          “Whereas civil-rulers, not having their duty to the people duly before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as military forces, which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the article in their right to keep and bear their private arms.” – Tench Coxe (commenting on the Second Amendment)

          “To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them.” – Richard Henry Lee

          You think the US military could subjegate the entire nation? They can hardly hold together one city in backwards Iraq. You even think they would try? It wouldn’t work that way. If we find ourselves in a revolution, the military would be fractured.

          • Rob N. Hood May 20, 2010 at 7:28 am #

            Well, Dan, you’re simply hoping that would be the case. Kind of Pollyannaish if you ask me. Look- if “they” really wanted to subjugate Iraq or any other country including this one, they surely could- they would bring out the big bombs if you know what I mean. Impossible? No- we’ve done it before, (WWII) and even in Iraq with bunker busters. Much like Vietnam was, wars are mostly waged as a business. With weapons and oil being the product for sale. And the elite become even richer as a result. They then do other business once the war ends (construction, corporatism, etc.) They win both ways- get it??!!

            That said- your quotes above were from a different century and a different world. And I don’t even disagree with most of them btw. But again I think you’re living is a childish dream-world if you really think your guns (and your friends’ guns) would stop this the most well armed and largest military in the history of the world. And even if you could for awhile, is that really the kind of country you’d want to live in? There are much better means to your ends, and I have been showing you the way, but you are blinded by your own biases. And that is the attitude that creates chaos and misery which we can just as easily witness daily on any news channel. Sad… humans need to evolve, not devolve (my word for regress).

  8. paul wenum May 15, 2010 at 9:10 pm #

    Peace lovers own guns to “Keep the Peace.” Never forget that.

  9. Rob N. Hood May 16, 2010 at 2:43 pm #

    In your up-is-down world, you are correct as usual.

    Then again, WWJD?

  10. paul wenum May 16, 2010 at 11:16 pm #

    WWJD? Pack and carry my friend. You never know if a “Judas” will take you down. Always know your adversary as well as their intent.

  11. Rob N. Hood May 17, 2010 at 7:01 am #

    So Jesus should just have “wasted” Judas? Wouldn’t that have made him a hypocrite?

  12. paul wenum May 17, 2010 at 9:25 pm #

    Christians don’t kill without just cause.

    • Rob N. Hood May 20, 2010 at 7:31 am #

      Just cause for killing- where is that in the 10 commandments?? I must have missed that one- or maybe it’s on the other missing 5 commandments, the tablet that was dropped and broken and never seen by man, except for Moses…. hmmmm?????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  13. Cubanshamoo May 18, 2010 at 4:06 am #

    I have been trying to participate again and again, but all my posts are blocked. Have a nice time guys and teach Rob as much as you can.

  14. paul wenum May 18, 2010 at 9:29 pm #

    Cubanshammo, Check with Dan.

  15. Rob N. Hood May 20, 2010 at 7:32 am #

    Must be a commie plot to shut you down….

  16. Rob N. Hood May 22, 2010 at 9:53 am #

    No response, Paul, re: the Commandment issue?

  17. Rob N. Hood May 23, 2010 at 7:18 am #

    How about this hard working patriot??

    Ray Dalio is a billionaire hedge fund manager who makes more money in a single day than most Americans will earn in their entire lifetimes. That’s because hedge funds are the top of the Wall Street food chain — and Dalio runs the largest hedge fund of all, Bridgewater Associates. Life’s good at the top of this food chain: in 2008, a bad year for most Americans, Dalio took home $780 million. That same $780 million could have paid the salaries of about 20,000 teachers — and those 20,000 teachers could have taught about 400,000 American students (using author Les Leopold’s calculations). A lot of people might find this offensive and unjust, but not Dalio—he thinks this is all part of Nature’s Plan, and it just so happens that Nature favors the hedge fund managers:

    “I believe that self-interest and society’s interests are generally symbiotic…That is why how much money people have earned is a rough measure of how much they gave society what it wanted.”

    Moral of story- we want to get screwed and have a severe Recession and an unstable dysfunctional economy. Oh, ok then.

  18. paul wenum May 23, 2010 at 10:26 pm #

    You continue to confirm what I was taught as a child. If people that complained constantly put their efforts (As yours) to start/building a company, there would be no discussion and your work ethic would be financially rewarded such as the “Hedge Fund Guy.” You spend more energy looking back or finger pointing than working looking forward. As to the 10 Commandments, I will leave that discussion up to you and your mirror. You seem to like each other. Yes, life’s a bitch, working hard is time consuming and there are no guarantees. It’s called LIFE, Deal with it!

  19. Rob N. Hood May 25, 2010 at 6:57 am #

    ZZZZZZZ, same old from Paul. Sometimes it is intelligent and VERY helpful to point the finger. So you want crooks to get away with their crimes, but only if they are very rich and successful crooks? Ok, then.

  20. paul wenum May 25, 2010 at 10:28 pm #

    No, you don’t wish to deal with life as it exists do you? Here we come “Avatar.”

  21. Rob N. Hood May 26, 2010 at 4:05 pm #

    Under the leadership of “Liberal” President Bill Clinton, Wall Street secured the radical deregulation of the financial industry that its lobbyists had long sought. Real Liberals opposed that betrayal of the sensible policies of the last great Democratic president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and I suspect that Rand Paul applauded the move as an extension of the free market that he so uncritically celebrates.

    With freedom comes responsibility, and when the financial conglomerates abused their freedom, they, and not the victims they swindled, should have borne the consequences. Instead, they were saved by the taxpayers from their near-death experience, reaping enormous profits and bonuses while the fundamentals of the world economy they almost destroyed remain rotten, as attested by the high rates of housing foreclosures and unemployment and the tens of millions of newly poor dependent on government food handouts.

    But the poor will not find much more than food crumbs from a federal government that, thanks to another one of Clinton’s “reforms,” ended the federal obligation to deal with the welfare of the impoverished. Yes, Clinton, not either Paul, father Ron or son. It was Clinton who campaigned to “end welfare as we know it,” and as a result the federal obligation to end poverty, once fervently embraced by even Richard Nixon, was abandoned.

    Concern for the poor was devolved to the state governments, and they in turn are in no mood to honor the injunction of all of the world’s great religions that we be judged by how we treat the least among us. That would be poor children, and it is unconscionable that state governments across the nation are cutting programs as elemental as the child care required when you force single mothers to work.

  22. paul wenum May 26, 2010 at 11:07 pm #

    You pull at my heart strings. Real life is what YOU make it, NOT what the Government tells you do with your life! My family, Mother, Father brothers, sisters, all work hard for what we do and take no handouts from the government. Maybe more people should think that way. I’m sick of cry babies! “Poor me, Poor me.” Get with reality.

  23. Rob N. Hood May 27, 2010 at 2:19 pm #

    The neocons have been fighting the same war: self-restraint against self-expression, traditional rules against individual freedom. For them, it was a “culture war” — a term they largely created. In fact, a raft of careful studies have shown that there is no real culture war in the U.S. because few people consistently hold either all liberal or all conservative views. Most pick and choose, depending on the issue, and end up somewhere in the middle.

    But neocons have found it useful to promote the simplistic idea of a left-versus-right “culture war” to rally their troops against the left. And the belief in a clear-cut dividing line between good and evil made their followers feel more secure, convinced that they were “the good guys.”

    To keep their war going, though, the neocons had to keep shifting the issue focus. By the mid-‘70s the counterculture no longer seemed like much of a threat to anyone, much less to civilization itself. So the neocons whipped up renewed cold war fervor to fend off “the commies.” They hoped to revive a post-Vietnam nation’s belief in traditional values — absolute good against absolute evil — and a willingness to accept authority, follow orders, and sacrifice oneself for the values handed down from above.

    After the cold war ended, Irving Kristol’s son William still called for the U.S. to “go abroad in search of monsters to destroy” and gain a permanent “benevolent global hegemony.” Thus the neocons wrote the script for the Bush-Cheney “war on terror.”

    The neocons, like Bush himself, were not concerned chiefly to protect the nation from foreign “terrorists.” They urged a return to the fighting spirit, above all, to revive what Bill Kristol called “a clear moral purpose,” to “restore a sense of the heroic” by making sacrifices for “the defense of the nation and its principles.” They were using the “war on terror” to continue their war on the ‘60s counterculture.

    Now economic disaster has pushed terrorism from the center of public concern. When pollsters ask, “What is the biggest problem facing the nation?” they often don’t even offer “terrorism” as an option. In a nation plagued by unemployment and foreclosure anxiety, what’s a neocon to do?

    Join the Tea Party, it seems. Make “big government,” not hippies or “commies” or “terrorists,” the new symbol of frighteningly rapid change that breaks down the familiar structures and boundaries.

  24. paul wenum May 27, 2010 at 10:10 pm #

    You can rant and post blather until you are blue in the face. Bottom line. You are accountable for your actions or in-actions. Something missing in today’s society. Nobody will take responsibility, they simply pass it on to the government to solve their problems, which by the way, is you and me. Think about it my friend.

  25. Rob N. Hood May 29, 2010 at 8:11 pm #

    So we leave it up to the private sector, like BP for example?! They can’t even solve their own problems… Plus their problems turn into OUR problems unfortuantely. What is it about logic and reasoning you don’t get?!

    And I don’t believe what I post comes even CLOSE to being “blather.” That is simply your illogical and biased opinion.

  26. paul wenum May 30, 2010 at 12:17 am #

    Defensive are you? That’s a sign of defeat my friend. That’s just an “Old Scot” making an opinionated statement.

  27. Rob N. Hood May 30, 2010 at 12:29 pm #

    You are the one who said it was ranting and blather. Is that being defensive?

  28. paul wenum May 30, 2010 at 11:20 pm #

    Yes.

  29. Rob N. Hood May 31, 2010 at 2:28 pm #

    That’s what I thought.

  30. Rob N. Hood June 12, 2010 at 7:44 am #

    It’s called Projection, Paul. Look it up.

  31. paul wenum June 12, 2010 at 8:49 pm #

    I took psych. And your point is?

  32. Rob N. Hood June 13, 2010 at 7:28 am #

    Already made my point.

  33. paul wenum June 15, 2010 at 11:43 pm #

    You missed the point. Thank God I don’t hunt with you.

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