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Mann Lies: Global Warming Unremarkable
by Jim Davidson
planetaryjim@yahoo.com

Special to The Libertarian Enterprise

Ross McKitrick writing in the Financial Post about work performed by himself and Stephen McIntyre had this to say about the tree ring data used to allegedly support wild claims of a "hockey stick" in global temperatures by liar Michael Mann.

"It turns out that many of the samples were taken from dead (partially fossilized) trees and they have no particular trend. The sharp uptrend in the late 20th century came from cores of 10 living trees alive as of 1990, and five living trees alive as of 1995. Based on scientific standards, this is too small a sample on which to produce a publication-grade proxy composite. The 18th and 19th century portion of the sample, for instance, contains at least 30 trees per year. But that portion doesn't show a warming spike. The only segment that does is the late 20th century, where the sample size collapses. Once again a dramatic hockey stick shape turns out to depend on the least reliable portion of a dataset."

The Financial Post article is here.

The worst part of this scam is that the global warming liars refused to release their data for many years, and were not required to do so by supposedly peer-reviewed journals. How disgusting. How can the journals claim a legitimate standard of peer review if the peers cannot see the actual data on which the assertions are based? Eventually, one of the journals where these liars posted their absurd claims did require publication of the data set. And, what do you know? It turns out that the liars deliberately reduced their sample set to a small portion of the data in order to obtain the hockey stick graph. In other words, they did what we've known they were doing for years—they lied.

How do we know these were deliberate lies by the likes of Michael Mann? McKitrick explains: "But an even more disquieting discovery soon came to light. Steve searched a paleoclimate data archive to see if there were other tree ring cores from at or near the Yamal site that could have been used to increase the sample size. He quickly found a large set of 34 up-to-date core samples, taken from living trees in Yamal by none other than Schweingruber himself!Had these been added to Briffa's small group the 20th century would simply be flat. It would appear completely unexceptional compared to the rest of the millennium."

So what may we conclude about how this data manipulation fits into the broader global warming controversy? Again, McKitrick explains.

"I have been probing the arguments for global warming for well over a decade. In collaboration with a lot of excellent coauthors I have consistently found that when the layers get peeled back, what lies at the core is either flawed, misleading or simply non-existent. The surface temperature data is a contaminated mess with a significant warm bias, and as I have detailed elsewhere the IPCC fabricated evidence in its 2007 report to cover up the problem. Climate models are in gross disagreement with observations, and the discrepancy is growing with each passing year. The often-hyped claim that the modern climate has departed from natural variability depended on flawed statistical methods and low-quality data. The IPCC review process, of which I was a member last time, is nothing at all like what the public has been told: Conflicts of interest are endemic, critical evidence is systematically ignored and there are no effective checks and balances against bias or distortion."

These liars in the academic community such as Michael Mann are doing the world a grave disservice. Obviously, they have benefited personally from their fraud, by getting more funding for their area of science. But they have harmed the people who depend on economic growth and prosperity the most—the very poorest people who need a growing economy in order to survive. As a result of the work of these vicious liars, millions of people have starved to death, new laws and new taxes restricting the formation of new businesses, and new layers of governmental regulatory overburden have been placed on the economy.

There ought to be severe penalties for such behavior. But there are not. The global warming hysteria will continue, the liars will continue to lie, and the truth will only slowly come to the surface. The academic community will continue to promote the careers of these liars because they did what the academics wanted: they expanded the amount of money available in their field for more research—so they can publish more lies.

People ought not to blindly trust the conclusions of scientists. You should look at the data yourself. If the data isn't published, you should call shenanigans on the whole thing.

And that goes triple for the machinations of politicians and bureau-rats who use bad pseudo-science to get more money and more power.

Jim Davidson is an anti-war activist involved in the divestment project detailed at divestfromdeath.wordpress.com. He is also an author and entrepreneur. His latest book comes out this Autumn at 623 pages plus notes. Two of his current projects involve financing films, one a documentary about destination resorts in orbit. See www.11at40.com for details. Visit cadre.ag for more ideas.

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