The Hockey Stick Is Broken Permanently

This is a tale of forensics and what appears to be scientific fraud. And wouldn't you know it: climate hysteria. Let me start with the famous hockey stick. It is a graph showing unprecedented global warming at the end of the 20th century. It was the icon of global warming hysteria. The wiki has the graph and a picture of Michael Mann (the discoverer).

You will note that Mr. Mann is holding a section of a tree. Why? Well the hockey stick was developed by analyzing tree rings which are supposed to be a proxy for temperature. This may or may not be true but I'm not going to deal with that question. You can look into that at The Problem With Tree Ring Thermometers.

Steve McIntyre showed that by using the Mann methodology and feeding noise into the computer program that analyzed the tree ring data you get the hockey stick. So the tree rings are irrelevant to the hockey stick.

But that is not too important to the current controversy. What is important is that it has now been shown (since Steve was finally - after years of asking - able to get the data) that Michael Mann cherry picked the data. And in fact with the full data set the hockey stick goes down (Steve prefers to say the results are flat) and not up. Which is rather a surprise given the bias of the analysis.

It started with this post (which references Climate audit):

Mann Cherry Picked The Data

Here is a mirror posting of the Climate Audit post (it is kinda technical):

How Michael Mann Was Found Out

A more detailed look at the revised graph.

UK Climate scientists have some 'splainin to do.

In layman's terms what does it mean? The hockey stick is dead and its development in the first place may have been a scientific fraud for at least two reasons. Bad analysis and data cherry picking.


Books on some other things wrong with climate science:

Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed

Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science They Don't Want You to Know

The Really Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Don't Want You to Know About--Because They Helped Cause Them

Happy reading!

Cross Posted at Classical Values