Another Round Of Anti-Science From The IPCC
By Paul Homewood
Francis Menton writes about the latest Hokey Stick!
What with the ongoing catastrophe in Afghanistan and the earthquake in Haiti, among other news, you may have failed to notice that the IPCC came out on Monday with substantial parts of its long-awaited Sixth Assessment Report on the state of the world’s climate. This is the first such assessment issued by the IPCC since 2014. The most important piece is the so-called “Summary for Policymakers,” (SPM), a 41 page section that is the only part that anyone ever reads.
The IPCC attempts to cloak itself in the mantle of “science,” but its real mission is to attempt to scare the bejeezus out of everyone to get the world to cede more power to the UN. Beginning with its Third Assessment Report in 2001, the lead technique for the IPCC to generate fear has been the iconic “hockey stick” graph, supposedly showing that world temperatures have suddenly shot up dramatically in the last 100 or so years, purportedly due to human influences. The 2001 Third Assessment Report thus prominently featured the famous Hockey Stick graph, derived from the work of Michael Mann and other authors. Here is that graph from the 2001 Report:
As longtime readers here know, the Hockey Stick was then demolished by the work of Canadian mathematician Stephen McIntyre through his work at his website Climate Audit. The main issue was that the temperature “proxies” that had been used to create the “shaft” of the Hockey Stick, particularly various tree ring series, could not be shown to have any close relationship to actual temperatures; and moreover, there were strong reasons from many sources to think that the Medieval Warm Period (approximately 1000 – 1300 AD) had been warmer than the present.
And then came the ClimateGate emails of 2009. From my post of February 22, 2018:
The coup de grace for the Hockey Stick graph came with the so-called Climategate emails, released in 2009. These were emails between and among many of the main promoters of the climate scare (dubbed by McIntyre the "Hockey Team"). Included in the Climategate releases were emails relating specifically to the methodology of how the graph was created. From the emails, skeptical researchers . . . discovered that the graph’s creators had truncated inconvenient data in order to get the desired depiction.
One particular series that had gone into creation of the Hockey Stick had come from a guy named Keith Briffa. Briffa’s series diverged greatly from actual temperatures, going down (declining) substantially after about 1960 when temperatures measured by thermometers had gone up. This fact needed to be concealed in order to sustain the Hockey Stick presentation. So the creators simply deleted the inconvenient information. The most famous of the ClimateGate emails, copied among various Hockey Stick participants (including Mann), dated November 16, 1999, discussed the situation in these terms:
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.
In any rational world, that email alone would have ended the careers of all of these participants. In the actual world where we live, Mann continues to hold a prestigious position at Penn State University, and in February 2018 he won the AAAS award for “Public Engagement With Science.”
And with that background, we come to this week’s SPM. After a few preliminaries, here’s the big scary headline:
Human influence has warmed the climate at a rate that is unprecedented in at least the last 2000 years
And to prove it? Yes, it is another Hockey Stick graph. Although coming from different authors and seemingly different data, it bears a striking resemblance to the Mann, et al., graph of 2001.
McIntyre is promptly on the job again. Here is his post of August 11, basically dismantling the new Hockey Stick. If you have a taste for a lot of technical detail, I urge you to read the whole thing. But the gist is actually simple. This time these people were not going to get caught furtively “hiding the decline.” Instead, they announce boldly that they are simply going to exclude any data that do not fit the narrative that they are putting forth.
McIntyre goes through multiple of the data series that contribute to the “shaft” of the new stick. Most just appear to be random fluctuations up and down. But then there are the few key series that show the sharp 20th-century uptick needed to support the Hockey Stick narrative. One such series is the McKenzie Delta tree ring series from Porter, et al., of 2013. McIntyre goes back to that Porter article and quotes the passage that describes how the researchers chose those trees that would contribute to the series::
Got that? It’s a “divergence-free chronology.” You can get that by simply excluding any data that don’t conform to the result that you want. And you don’t even have to exclude whole trees from the series, but only those portions from a particular tree that just don’t seem to be going along.
McIntyre comments:
They took “hide the decline” to extremes that had never been contemplated by prior practitioners of this dark art. Rather than hiding the decline in the final product, they did so for individual trees: as explained in the underlying article, they excluded the “divergent portions” of individual trees that had temerity to have decreasing growth in recent years. Even Briffa would never have contemplated such woke radical measures.
Decide on your desired conclusion and then just exclude any data that refuse to go along. This is the “science” on which our world leaders are off spending multiple trillions of taxpayer dollars.
https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-8-15-another-round-of-anti-science-from-the-ipcc
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Science is a side-show in the politics of climate change. In fact it’s not about the climate at all, more to do with creating a political world order. It’s quite legitimate to be concerned with human impact on our environment but not to fool us with deceit and lies.
I trust that the initialism is pronounced “arse”.
UN Agendas 2021 and 2030, we’ve got another 9 years of this BS, with the sheople on full hysteria and the BBC in panic mode!
As an aside probably not wholly relevant to NALOPKT, but nevertheless demonstrative of the Leftist press. Everyone is blaming Biden and Johnson for withdrawing UK & US troops from Afghanistan and allowing the Taliban to take control again after 20 years of ‘occupation’.
Those who do so forget to mention that during those 20 years, the Afghan Army was intensively trained by the US & UK and the US left behind $83 Billion of munitions and equipment. The Afghan Army had 300,000 troops, the invading Taliban 120,000, but the army surrendered en masse, without firing a shot, allowing the Taliban to take over. Much of the equipment was destroyed to prevent the Taliban from using it.
This was covered in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph.
The US and UK only trained frontline soldiers. All the logistics came from US contractors and no Afghans were trained. There were some Afghan helicopters trained, but no engineers to keep them in the air. That was because the US contractors didn’t want to lose their lucrative contracts to local operators. The Pentagon let them get away with that.
You say the Afghan army ran away. Well, what would you do as a soldier when your unit has run out of ammunition because logistics simply doesn’t exist any longer, and the units either side of you are also out of ammo? Stay and throw rocks at guys with Kalashnikovs? Every army runs away when logistics fails.
In fact the Afghan army has fought very well, neither the British nor the US army has been involved in frontline fighting since 2014, it was all the Afghans, but the Idiot Biden wasn’t in charge then.
If you believe what you read in the DT, then there is no hope for you.
I don’t doubt that next you will give me your simplistic view of French soldiers running away in 1940, and Dunkirk.
sorry, forgot to paste: Mann continues to hold a prestigious position at Penn State University, and in February 2018 he won the AAAS award for “Public Engagement With Science.”
Meanwhile, in the real world, possibly an imminent renewal of La Nina:
By definition, the NINO 3.4 must be above or below the 0.5°C threshold. According to the latest data from NOAA, it is now back in neutral…the El-Nada.
https://origin.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/ensostuff/ONI_v5.php
Either way, the ENSO is a natural event that has been taking place irregularly for eons. It has no correlation with AGW CO2.
70% chance of La Nina emerging by Nov-Jan, according to the Climate Prediction Center of NOAA:
Click to access enso_evolution-status-fcsts-web.pdf
“Got to live in the future, since the present is shit,” is my motto.
“Got to live in the future…”
or the past:
I’ve been saying it for years – any supposedly “scientific” theory that can only be sustained by lies, deceit, exaggeration and falsification is itself inherently false.
A very succinct explanation of the dishonesty of the new-hockey-stick graph. Even more damning than the original: pity that our fear-campaign-obsessive news media will ignore this and go on repeating the lies, as “scientists” or “experts” say is their get-out-of-jail-free card.
The original Mann hockey stick could, charitably, be regarded as incompetent science and over-zealousness; this new version is straight forward dishonesty.
Yep. And that’s the polite version.
No, the original was dishonest. Mann knew what he was doing and understood the problem – recent proxy data disagrees completely with instrument data and so invalidates the reconstructions need to show no MWP. The “decline” problem is not that temperatures are actually declining but that proxy data shows a decline when instrument data shows a rise – proxies are rubbish. But without a reconstruction Mann couldn’t show that current temperatures are unprecedented. So he hid the decline and so hid the fact that 1,900 years of the 2,000 years on his graph were totally false.
A good piece about the hockey stick. I think video is a clear exposition of the IPCC scam https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S50_juP5S5U
Wouldn’t it be strange if it were found that CC is caused by the proliferation of catalytic converters and such-like that captured harmful particulates making the atmosphere cleaner and thus more receptive of a warming Sun?
Wouldn’t it be hilarious if found to be true?
Rationally it makes perfect sense, too. I’m not saying it is or isn’t true or accurate but it certainly is possible.
Try the Futurelearn course on atmospheric chemistry, run by the university of Leeds. The course is not worth its weight, and distorts by omitting important feedbacks, but they let this one out of the bag:
‘Chemical feedbacks mean that solutions to improve air quality may worsen climate change. For example, reducing sulphur dioxide (SO₂), which is emitted when coal is burned, reduces sulphate (SO₄₂-) aerosols which scatter radiation back to space’
It makes you wonder if any adjustments to temperatures taken in the past from industrial areas such as Sheffield and Birmingham are necessary due to the poor air quality.
With the increasingly less polluted atmosphere in the UK, I feel sure the temperatures especially in summer have risen for this reason alone.
Numerous Futurelearn MOOCs include either modules of climate scaremongering propaganda, or, opinions of their creators disseminating such propaganda.
They end up successfully brainwashing lesser-knowledgeable participants.
There must be more to it than reduction in particulates Harry. Just this morning, I spoke to somebody who took the fact of recent warming to be reason to blame increase in pCO2. My challenge was to explain the LIA and the warming (in stops and starts) since the LIA. Warming therefore goes back to before the recent increase in pCO2, and the same would surely be true of a case that warming could be significantly due reduction in particulates. (Just my tuppeneth on the question.)
Air clean-up began in earnest after killing smogs/fogs in England and the USA.
Specifically see: [from Wikipedia]
Early example, Black Country, and then
Great Smog of London;
in the USA – 1948 Donora smog
This is not to dismiss the irony of your “catalytic” hypothesis.
“Human influence has warmed the climate at a rate that is unprecedented in at least the last 2000 years.”
Human influence translates to anthropogenic addition of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels. If that is the cause, the “control knob”, it is NOT the rate. It is the amount at the end. From the geological record we know that the amounts have been more than double in the past and the climate was not “catastrophic”.
Never mind hiding the decline. If one want’s to hide the global warming trend one can simply do an arithmetical year-over-year change to the temperature anomaly data and plot it against time. The increase in temperature disappears. The same is not true for the increase in carbon dioxide. Climate is a random walk?
It looks to me as if the alarmists are getting desperate. More and more people are coming to the conclusion that they are full of shit. Dusting off the Hockey Stick seriously?
Meanwhile in the real world, none of the IPCC tenets are true in the place they will be holding COP26. Latest here: https://www.weather-research.com/articles/countdown-to-unfcc-cop26-glasgow
Small point but I think you’ll find that that unsavoury gang called themselves ‘the Hockey Team’.
What particularly saddens me is the fact that there are legions of ostensibly honest atmospheric and meteorological scientists, physicists, geologists, engineers etc etc, out there who know full well that the IPCC narrative is at best, overblown, at worst, completely bogus and corrupted, yet remain silent in order to retain their status, tenures and livelihoods. Self interest is understandable but, at which point, do they start to despise themselves for their weakness, dishonesty and lack of courage in not calling out the ‘settled science’ for what it is? Let’s hope we don’t have to wait for the onset of the next glaciation for them to suddenly realise that they might have jumped on to the wrong ship!
I’m not sure your description captures the point. You can only validate the proxy reconstruction if you can show proxy data matches instrument data. The original “decline” in the proxy data was a problem because it invalidated the pre-1900 proxies and thus the claim that current warming is unprecedented (of course there are also huge other problems with the proxies anyway).
What we have now is a temperature series that explicitly assumes the pre-1900 proxies are correct but then uses a different methodology for post-1900 proxies! They include divergent data in the proxies but then say it’s accurate because proxies WITHOUT divergent data match instrument data. This is so extraordinary and so obviously wrong I cannot quite believe it’s written down. They don’t seem to be aware of the issue with proxies and simply accept proxy data DESPITE having to manipulate proxy data since 1900 to get it to agree with instrument data. They seem to be solving for the problem of a decline in the proxy data since 1900 when the actual problem is that the decline invalidates the pre-1900 proxies because it shows proxy data is completely inaccurate. They are fighting their own decline straw man rather than the actual issue – we have no idea if current warming is unusual. I strosuspect that many climate scientists and activists don’t understand the problem because they have never been properly exposed to the argument. And questioning the orthodoxy is forbidden so we have this sort of utter and complete nonsense.
Just because an idea is demonstrated to be false, doesn’t mean it won’t become the dominant belief in the world.
The IPCC headline mean sea level projections are also self evidently stupid, they even say this themselves.
However many people now believe sea levels will rise by 2metres by 2100.
I have given up.
Jo Nova’s take on Hockey Stick Rides Again, is here:
https://joannenova.com.au/2021/08/all-these-years-later-and-ipcc-still-depends-on-argument-from-ignorance/
Steve McIntyre’s co-forensic, Ross McKitrick, has done a demolition job on the IPCC’s attribution claims:
John Daly’s site is still maintained and you can see Hockey Stick – The Original, here:
“The Broken Hockey Stick”
http://www.john-daly.com/press/press-03c.htm#hockey
Check a few of the other links to see that Deja Vu is not a thing of the past.
You put your right temp in
Your left temp out
In, out, in, out
You shake it all about
You do the hokey cokey
And you turn around
That’s what it’s all about
More on the desperation front, from someone called Meryl Batchelder in the Graun.
“We need a green curriculum that starts in early years and extends through all key stages. Properly taught, climate change education should be a thread through all subjects – not just science and geography – from the food miles of the ingredients we cook in food technology to debates on humanitarian issues such as mass migration in religious education or personal, social, health and economic (PSHE) education.”
Indoctrination of children isn’t needed if what you are claiming can be demonstrated to be true.
More desperation. They are wheeling out Greta Thunberg again. This time to tell the UK that we aren’t committing economic suicide quickly enough for her satisfaction.
A historical context for our fear of global warming
Does the slasher of the English language and clutterbrained ricky betts still make up stuff for the ipcc? Or does the panel consist of the mock the week and nature climate change porn?