POST SCRIPTS

I see, oh great weatherman, I see!

The following from the article by Dr. Lindzen expresses my frustrations and suspicions perfectly...

"...with poor and uncertain models in wide use, predictions of ominous situations are virtually inevitable--regardless of reality.

Such weak predictions feed and contribute to what I have already described as a societal instability that can cascade the most questionable suggestions of danger into major political responses with massive economic and social consequences. I have already discussed some of the reasons for this instability: the existence of large cadres of professional planners looking for work, the existence of advocacy groups looking for profitable causes, the existence of agendas in search of saleable rationales, and the ability of many industries to profit from regulation, coupled with an effective neutralization of opposition. It goes almost without saying that the dangers and costs of those economic and social consequences may be far greater than the original environmental danger. That becomes especially true when the benefits of additional knowledge are rejected and when it is forgotten that improved technology and increased societal wealth are what allow society to deal with environmental threats most effectively. The control of societal instability may very well be the real challenge facing us."

Thanks Anthony

Just so this is a balanced post, for anyone who wants to learn about Al Gore's Movie, An Inconvenient Truth you can see a complete transcript of the audio online along with the slides from his movie.

Transcript: An Inconvenient Truth

It was posted by a Canadian who went to see the film.

One of the things cited by Gore in his movie and by advocates of CO2 induced global warming is a graph that has come to be known as the "hockey stick". It has become the "smoking gun" for those who believe man-made CO2 is the source of global warming.

see it here in a BBC news article:

Climate legacy of the 'hockey stick'

It is important to note that the hockey stick graph is composed of two types of data: Measured temperatures since about 1850, and extrapolated temperature data going back hundreds of years.

Now here is an article from MIT's Technology Review from two years ago that says the math used to graph the temperature data is seriously flawed.

Global Warming Bombshell
A prime piece of evidence linking human activity to climate change turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics.

Now what I find as the most interesting is the "hockey stick" in the Solar Proxies Graph above. A more active sun results in lower Beryllium-10 concentrations (note inverted scale on graph). Beryllium-10 is a cosmogenic isotope created in the atmosphere by galactic cosmic rays. Because the flux of such cosmic rays is affected by the intensity of the interplanetary magnetic field carried by the solar wind, the rate at which Beryllium-10 is created reflects changes in solar activity.

The graph of Beryillium-10 has its own "hockey stick" that began just before 1900. Now since the Be-10 isotope is not something produced by man or man-made pollution, and this is well proven, its clear that the Be-10 data is free of any human bias and therefore can only be linked to extra-terrestial processes.

Yet this data, which so clearly shows an increased solar output, is conveniently ignored because the facts don't fit the well funded theories that abound.

Gore doesn't mention the sun's variability at all in his movie. Nor does he mention the flawed computer program that generates the famous global warming "hockey stick".

This from the MIT article says it all:
"Now comes the real shocker. This improper normalization procedure tends to emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppress all data that do not. To demonstrate this effect, McIntyre and McKitrick created some meaningless test data that had, on average, no trends. This method of generating random data is called Monte Carlo analysis, after the famous casino, and it is widely used in statistical analysis to test procedures. When McIntyre and McKitrick fed these random data into the Mann procedure, out popped a hockey stick shape!

That discovery hit me like a bombshell, and I suspect it is having the same effect on many others. Suddenly the hockey stick, the poster-child of the global warming community, turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics. How could it happen? What is going on? Let me digress into a short technical discussion of how this incredible error took place. "

Now there's an inconvenient truth indeed.