Climate catastrophe canceled

Finish TV discussion on problems with the Mann hockey stick temperature graphs

Climate catastrophe canceled

A couple excerpts:
Korhola: "Especially now with the Copenhagen conference approaching, one gets the impression that also among scientists, many have lost control. Especially when you compare original studies to how they are presented to the public, in the mass media, there is a huge gap in what comes out. We get a lot of material with terms like dramatic, catastrophic, unprecedented, and among some researchers there is even talk of planetary doom and saving the planet."

Lindzen: "The real question is, why the last few years have seen this huge boost with all these crazy movies - “Inconvenient truth” - nonsense spewed out, hysteria? We are all going to die, if we don't change our light bulbs immediately. I can only say, somebody must have noticed that the temperature has stopped increasing and they had all these agendas by now to make billions of dollars, and do this and do that, get people to pay taxes and feel happy about it, because they are saving the earth and so on. So you have the politicians, the bureaucrats, the scientists and so on, and all felt you know that if the temperature continues this way, this is finished if we don't get it through immediately so the volume has increased.”

This ten-year-old figure, dubbed as the hockey stick, was meant to revolutionize the dominant view of global climate history.

But in the hockey stick graph, the Medieval Warm Period and the little ice age after it have disappeared.

McIntyre: ” It turned out that he had modified a principal components method incorrectly and the modified method produced hockey stick-shaped graphs ninety-nine percent of the time. It also emphasized a class of proxies, strip-bark bristlecone pines that previous authors had said were not actually a temperature proxy”.

In the mid 1990's the American geologist David Deming received an astonishing e-mail, in which one prominent climate researcher announced to his colleagues: "We have to get rid of the medieval warm period."

Kari Mielikäinen, professor of forest research (Metla, Finland): "We have this long series going back over 7,000 years, and there's no hockey stick there."

VO: Briffa's Yamal hockey stick was published in the prestigious journal Science. McIntyre asked for a copy of the raw data from Yamal.
McIntyre: ”Briffa refused. The editors of Science refused to require Briffa to provide the measurement data…”
VO: It took McIntyre three years to get hold of the data, although one of the most important rules in science is that, raw data should be made available to anybody who is interested in checking and replicating a study.
Finally Briffa made a "mistake". He published yet another article based on the Yamal data in a journal of the British Royal Society. The prestigious scientific society held on to the principle of data transparency and forced Briffa to make his raw data public. In September this year, the Canadian climate auditor had his forebodings confirmed.
McIntyre: ”So after, after sort of, three years of frustration and trying to examine the data that Briffa had used and probably four years of people saying that this data supported the Michael Mann -work on other grounds, it was really quite frustrating to find that it was built up on ten trees that had been not randomly selected”.

McIntyre: "An Australian named Warwick Hughes had asked for the data and Warwick Hughes had published some articles that had been critical of how the temperature histories had been prepared, and Jones said 'Why should I send - we have twenty-five years invested in this, why should I send the data to you when your only objective is to find anything wrong with it?”, which is a very unscientific statement."
VO: The CRU database is the most important scientific justification for the demands that the most ambitious treaty in mankind's history should be finalized in Copenhagen in December. In spite of this, there is no way to replicate its' validity.
Recently the CRU director Phil Jones has announced that the original measurement data does not exist anymore because of data storage difficulties. A dog ate the world's most important scientific measurement homework.

Ojala: "Based on these studies it seems that this claim is not quite true, at least for the Northern hemisphere, at least for Scandinavia. We've clearly had much warmer winters here in the Nautajärvi and Korttajärvi area, than what we are experiencing now."

VO: At least two research teams close to the IPCC added the sediment data collected by Finnish researchers as part of their own paleoclimatic model reconstructions. This was done with agreement, but the Finns were surprised to see that in a study published this September, their data and interpretation of its' meaning had been turned upside down.

Atte Korhola: "Some curves and data have been used upside down, and this is not a compliment to climate science. And in this context it is relevant to note that the same people who are behind this are running what may be the world's most influential climate website, RealClimate. With this they are contributing to the credibility of science - or reducing it. And in my opinion this is alarming because it bears on the credibility of the field, and if these kinds of things emerge often - that data have been used insufficiently or even falsely, or if data series have been truncated or they have not been appropriately published (for replication), it obviously erodes the credibility, and this is a serious problem."

Richard Lindzen: "This field is completely sick in that way, I mean, you have models you know that they don't work, you know they don't reproduce a - phenomenon, but you bend data to fit the model. I don’t think this can go on for long without being embarrassing".

VO: It turned out that, cloud cover changes as the surface warms, but it was not getting thicker; it was thinning. In this way, nature prevents the atmosphere from excessive heating. The cloud cover reacts to temperature changes like an eye's iris to changes in light, by contracting or expanding. Lindzen calls this thermostatic behavior the Iris-effect.