Friday, August 22, 2008

The climate disaster hockey stick

How do you explain what seems to be obscured too much by technical jargon and high mathematics?

Finally, a good bishop in the Anglican Church grants us an explanation of the other side of the climate controversy in terms most of us, I expect, can understand.

"Bishop Hill, a dissentient afflicted with the malady of thought," speaks of Caspar and the Jesus paper--the former referring to Caspar Amman and Eugene Wahl, associates of Michael Mann, the chief architect of the "hockey stick" graph that Al Gore used to "prove" and dismay "Inconvenient Truth" audiences about the climatic disaster we all face.

And the "Jesus Paper"? That's a supposedly scientific paper that wouldn't die. Or, rather, that kept "coming back to life" even though it really was dead. (Someone suggested Bishop Hill might have better called it the "Lazarus Paper," since "[m]iraculous risings from the dead don't always start with crucifixion.")

See how scientific that Lazarus paper is . . . and how scientific all the other papers that are dependent upon it really are.

I encourage you to read the article. It's a bit long, but well worth the minor slog--especially considering that both of the leading presidential candidates seem committed to establishing a trillion-dollar, government-sponsored march toward freedom from dependence on hydrocarbon-based energy production.

Oh. And, y'know, Gore says, the climate situation has "not improved" since his film in 2006. But if you look here, you find that he seems to have cherry-picked his data to make the situation look worse than it is. --So maybe he is telling the truth this time: it really wasn't all that bad when he first warned us. And it's no better than the "not bad" that it was when he told us about the "inconvenient truth."

--The graph Gore used "conveniently" ended in 1999 and, as the authors of the Gore Lied blog note, the creator of the graph, Dr. Spencer,
highlighted the Mt. Pinatubo cooling and the 1998 El Nino warming, and our graphics department added the release date of Al Gore's science fiction movie. Much to our amusement, it shows that the temperature has dropped approximately .58 degrees Celsius (1.04 degrees Fahrenheit) since his movie's release.
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