Garbage In. Garbage Out

The Net is roiling with the news that mainstream climate research scientists have been corrupting the science of global warming for upwards of a decade. That's the science that has the U.N. International Panel on Climate Change in a terrible frenzy over the coming apocalypse, along with sundry Hollywood types and our great leaders in Congress. The evidence of this corruption is straightforward and damning: someone dumped a mountain of internal emails off of Britain's Climate Research Unit (CRU) server, catching the big-wigs of world climate research (people like Phil Jones, Michael Mann, and Thomas Wigley) discussing how to alter the data to conform with climate models, plotting to marginalize climate skeptics by freezing them out of the peer-review process, and conspiring to destroy information requested under Britain's Freedom of Information Act.

Don't look for this story in the Mainstream Media. It's too busy worrying about gate-crashers at Washington parties.

As shocking as the emails are, the fact is we already knew the science community - and the peer-review process, which is its raison d'etre - was corrupt. Here's why.

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The climate debate is actually rather simple. We are sure about two things: (1) if you introduce greater concentrations of CO2 into, say, a green house, the temperature will rise; and (2) the earth's temperature has been rising for about the last 100 years or so. This establishes a plausible hypothesis that the world's temperature increase has been caused by increases in atmospheric CO2 stemming from the Industrial Revolution of the last couple of centuries.

But only a plausible hypothesis. Coincidence does not equal causation; something else is needed to eliminate other possible causes of global warming. If, for instance, it can be established that 20th Century global warming is anomalous, that is, much higher than years past, then the case for global warming as a man-caused problem becomes much stronger. This is precisely the tact of climate scientists over the past 15 years, and this is precisely where the debate is most fierce.

Which brings us to the last 1,000 years and the so-called Medieval Warm Period. 1,000 years ago the world apparently was quite warm, as evidenced by historical curiosities like a current-day icebound northern island that is called 'Greenland.'  Climate science, however, needs more than anecdotal evidence; it needs hard temperature data with which to compare current data. Modern temperature information is pretty good, especially since the advent of satellite technology, but there is nothing remotely comparable from medieval times.

So, climate scientists have come up with the notion of "proxies" for temperature. During warm periods, it is reasoned, things will grow and flourish, leaving a record behind. For instance, sedimentation layers and tree rings should be larger during warm periods. As a result, the science and methodology of deriving temperature data from the study of sedimentation and tree-rings (and a growing number of other things) has exploded over the last few decades.

Central to our story are the tree-rings in the Yamal Peninsula of Russia. It is these trees which provided the basis in the 1990's for deducing that the temperature during the Medieval Warm Period was actually much cooler than supposed, and that the subsequent temperature variations, even during the so-called 'Little Ice Age' of the 1700's, was milder than previous assumptions. The result was a graph of temperatures over the last 1,000 years that looked like a hockey stick, with 20th Century temperatures exploding upward. 

This Hockey Stick graph was a political bomb-shell, kicking off a nearly world-wide angst over the coming world apocalypse. 20th Century temperature was not only anomalous to previous centuries, it seemed to be in a class by itself. A man-made class, in fact.

Again, if the 20th Century temperature rise is indeed statistically anomalous with the preceding 800+ years, this presents powerful evidence that man's industrial activity is at least a very significant cause of global warming. Not conclusive evidence (something else might still be causing it), but certainly strong evidence.

But well before the CRU email dump, we already knew that the science behind the Hockey Stick was flawed. That is because the research was conducted, published, and peer-reviewed in gross violation of the scientific method. Normally, when a scientist publishes his research, it is accompanied with the actual data and conditions underlying his conclusions, in such detail that other scientists can duplicate his research to see if they get the same results. In the case of the Hockey Stick graph, and subsequent studies seemingly confirming the Hockey Stick, fundamental data was withheld. Specifically, the information on the precise trees used in compiling the temperature series prior to the 20th Century was not published, nor were the various computer algorithms that were used to interpret the tree-ring data made available.

The climate scientists essentially published their conclusions and as for the rest, they said, "Trust us."  In fact, they refused to divulge the deep data behind their global warming conclusions right up until they were forced to by a Congressional investigation in 2005. Since then, other scientists have discovered, among other things, that the tree-ring data was cherry-picked to produce the now infamous Hockey Stick graph.

So, the recent CRU email dump only confirms what we already knew.  The behavior of the mainstream climate scientists in withholding their data from scrutiny should have made them and their theories laughable, ab initio. Instead, they have been lauded and feted, received millions of dollars in research grants, and have driven the world to the brink of madness in the name of a Global Catastrophe, wherein grown-up educated people contemplate spending trillions of dollars and regulating freedom to near death.

And all of it, all of it, based on a monstrous scientific hoax. Man-made global warming might still be true (as any theory might be true before it is researched), but we will never know it from scientists such as these. For they are not scientists, but mere partisan ideological hacks feeding away at the public trough. These people need to get other jobs, and let the real scientists get back to work.