David Hand was not any old statistician but the President of the Royal Statistical Society, and it wasn't just the "denial mill" but publications such as
New Scientist and Mann's own newspaper
The Guardian that reported, happily or otherwise, that his hockey stick was "exaggerated". I wrote about Hand's intervention
here. But notice how Mann in his book rebuts Hand's charge:
The statement was nonsensical, however. The end of the blade of the hockey stick was simply the instrumental temperature record; there was no way that our reconstruction, or any reconstruction for that matter, could either underestimate it or overestimate it.
That's a great example of the smooth ease with which Mann evades addressing criticism from other scientists. Yes, the "end of the blade" is simply the late 20th century temperature record. But the 900 years in front of it aren't: they're Mann's own calculations as to what the temperature was in 1737 or 1439 or 1102. And what David Hand is disputing is "the particular technique" Mann deployed to get from the apples of the proxy data to the oranges of the temperature record. When the proxy data became inconvenient (as with the downturn in Keith Briffa's tree-ring data after 1960) it got tossed in the trash - because it would have lowered the upward swing of the blade. As I said yesterday, if the proxies are an unreliable guide to the climate of the late 20th century, why are they reliable for the early 16th century? Or, as one climate scientist put it to me recently, if you applied the methods Mann used to establish what the climate was like in, say, the 13th century to our own time, they would give you an entirely inaccurate picture of 21st century climate.
~As I mentioned yesterday, the Climategate inquiries settled on an artful fudge, claiming that East Anglia's scientists had done nothing wrong in their papers but the IPCC had played somewhat fast and loose with how they presented it to the world. At Climate Audit, Ross McKittrick
writes:
An important point that you [Steve McIntyre] make in the last paragraph is that for all intents and purposes, IPCC = Team = IPCC. The various inquiries sometimes pull the trick of exonerating a Team member for having once pointed to (e.g.) the divergence problem in an academic journal article somewhere, while blaming "the IPCC" for concealing it, without pointing out that it was all the same people. When Oxburgh makes an ever-so-gentle rebuke of "presentations of this work by the IPCC and others" who "have sometimes neglected to highlight this issue" it's disingenuous, since Mann and the CRU guys were the authors both of the underlying papers and the IPCC chapter alike.
That's the point: The deception was not perpetrated by some vast bland bureaucracy called "the IPCC". In 2001, the IPCC was Mann, as Lead Author on climate variability, and a handful of cronies.
~The other day, the Swedish climatologist Lennart Bengtsson outed himself as having "defected" to
the skeptic side of the street:
I have always been a skeptic and I believe this is what most scientists really are.
But Professor Bengtsson was previously a reliable warm-monger who took the party line "
up to and including the belief that Michael Mann's Hockey Stick was a scientifically plausible assessment of the relationship between CO2 emissions and global mean temperature".
He now
says:
The whole concept behind IPCC is basically wrong.
As this headline puts it, "
Lennart Bengtsson: He Knows How Little We Know." Which is more than you can say about Mann's latest dupe John Gibbons above. But, at 77 and with his career winding down, Bengtsson also knows enough to know that the cartoon climatology advanced by Mann through the IPCC will one day, soon, be seen as a kind of madness of which real science will be deeply ashamed. He doesn't want to be remembered as part of that madness. He won't be the last, either.
~UPDATE: In the wee small hours since the above was posted, the climate mullahs went to work.
Lennart Bengtsson:
I have been put under such an enormous group pressure in recent days from all over the world that has become virtually unbearable to me. If this is going to continue I will be unable to conduct my normal work and will even start to worry about my health and safety. I see therefore no other way out therefore than resigning from GWPF. I had not expecting such an enormous world-wide pressure put at me from a community that I have been close to all my active life. Colleagues are withdrawing their support, other colleagues are withdrawing from joint authorship etc. I see no limit and end to what will happen. It is a situation that reminds me about the time of McCarthy. I would never have expecting anything similar in such an original peaceful community as meteorology. Apparently it has been transformed in recent years.
This is the "climate of fear" I've written about. The ugly climate that Mann has made.
Village Idiot :: SteynOnline
