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The Hockey Stick scam that heightened global warming hysteria

UN agencies, especially the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) and its offspring the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), were orchestrated to achieve the goal of convincing public and policy makers that warming and climate change were a human created disaster. Manipulation of the process was first publicly exposed in the Chapter 8 issue (here). Sadly, it was just the first of several that established the pattern of IPCC behavior.

It was not the first time the unsupportable claim that humans were causing global warming had made the news. A major incident occurred in 1988 when James Hansen, Director of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS), appeared before Senator Al Gore's committee and said he was "99 percent" certain the Earth had warmed.

Few who study climate change denied warming even though many were accused. They knew that for 22,000 years the world generally warmed as it emerged from the last Ice Age and more recently it warmed from 1680 out of the Little Ice Age (LIA). However, Hansen then suggested the cause was likely an enhanced Greenhouse Effect due to human addition of CO2 from industrial activity what was to become known as the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory The problem is there was no proof and there were many other possible explanations. It was an untested theory that was accepted as fact by the IPCC.

By the time of the 2001 IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR), the politics and hysteria about climate change had risen to a level that demanded clear evidence of a human signal. An entire industry had developed round massive funding from government. A large number of academic, political, and bureaucratic careers had evolved and depended on expansion of the evidence. Environmentalists were increasing pressure on the public and thereby politicians. In addition, the bar of proof was raised by claiming the 20th century and especially the last decade had 9 of the 10 warmest years in history; warming beyond anything previous and therefore unnatural. These claims were to become their downfall because, as some climate experts knew, there were much warmer periods in the historic record.

There were hundreds of research papers from a wide variety of sources confirming the existence of a period warmer than today just a thousand years ago known as the Medieval Warm Period (MWP). Its existence is well documented in the work of Soon and Baliunas.
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Soon, W., and S. Baliunas, 2003. Proxy climatic and environmental changes of the past 1,000 years. Climate Research, 23, 89-110.
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This period was clearly warmer than present temperatures and warmer than some computer model predictions for the future. Its existence was a serious problem because it negated the claims that the 20th century temperatures were unprecedented. What to do?

The answer is provided by Professor Deming in the following letter to Science .

"With the publication of the article in Science [in 1995], I gained significant credibility in the community of scientists working on climate change. They thought I was one of them, someone who would pervert science in the service of social and political causes. So one of them let his guard down. A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said "We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period." (My emphasis)

This was effectively done by what became known as the "hockey stick". The name came from the shape of a graph which showed no temperature increase for 1000 years (the handle) with a sudden rise in the 20th century (the blade). It was ideal, two strikes with one event. The MWP was gone and the sudden rise in the 20th century was clearly unnatural. It had to be due to human activity.

Research that produced the hockey stick came from dendroclimatology, the reconstruction of past climates from tree ring data--but they tacked on modern temperature data for the blade. They incorrectly assumed tree rings are only a function of temperature and cherry-picked those trees that gave the desired result. When challenged on this, one dendroclimatologist justified this practice by telling a US Congressional committee, "You have to pick cherries if your are going to make cherry pie." Another wrote, "However as we mentioned earlier on the subject of biological growth populations, this does not mean that one could not improve a chronology by reducing the number of series used if the purpose of removing samples is to enhance a desired signal. The ability to pick and choose which samples to use is an advantage unique to dendroclimatology." These are deeply disturbing comments in any area of research.

Source of the hockey stick was a dendroclimatic study published in 1998 by Mann, Bradley and Hughes, (known as MBH98) was introduced in Chapter 2 of the Technical Report (produced by Working Group I). Conflict screamed because Mann was a lead author of the Chapter while Bradley and Hughes were contributing authors, but was ignored. It screamed louder when the hockey stick appeared as a major part of the Summary for Policymakers again with Mann involved. After an opening statement that said,

"New analyses of proxy data for the Northern Hemisphere indicate that the increase in temperature in the 20th century is likely to have been the largest of any century during the past 1,000 years. It is also likely that, in the Northern Hemisphere, the 1990s was the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year"

The graph appeared on the second page of the Summary and underscored the argument visually and scientifically. It also, as intended, stole the media limelight and versions quickly appeared in everything from National Geographic to government web sites. Now they could bully people who questioned the science and introduce draconian legislature to get rid of the evil CO2 as was the intention all along. Now the useless Kyoto Protocol apparently had justification.

The hockey stick fiasco was unmasked by a basic scientific test known as reproducible results. Other scientists use the same data and procedures to try and reproduce the original findings. Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick (M&M) attempted, but failed to reproduce the MBH98 findings. A debate ensued with claims M&M were wrong or not qualified climate experts. They replied that Mann had refused to disclose all the codes he used to achieve the results, but even without them the major problem was a misuse of data and statistical techniques. In effect the hockey stick was meaningless.

The US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) appointed a committee chaired by Professor Wegman to investigate and arbitrate. His committee report found in favor of M&M as follows;

It is not clear that Mann and associates realized the error in their methodology at the time of publication. Because of the lack of full documentation of their data and computer code, we have not been able to reproduce their research. We did, however, successfully recapture similar results to those of MM. This recreation supports the critique of the MBH98 methods, as the offset of the mean value creates an artificially large deviation from the desired mean value of zero.

Mann continues to refuse disclosure of all his codes. He and his acolytes are still fighting a rearguard action claiming the work is valid.

Serious concerns were raised about the objectivity of an IPCC Report and Summary with major input from scientists citing their own research. Unfortunately, this is typical of the incestuous, political, nature of the entire IPCC process. In his report Professor Wegman's first recommendation says,

Especially when massive amounts of public monies and human lives are at stake, academic work should have a more intense level of scrutiny and review. It is especially the case that authors of policy-related documents like the IPCC report, Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis, should not be the same people as those that constructed the academic papers.

Most people, especially the media, missed the equally startling and disturbing conclusion by Wegman.

In our further exploration of the social network of authorships in temperature reconstruction, we found that at least 43 authors have direct ties to Dr. Mann by virtue of coauthored papers with him. Our findings from this analysis suggest that authors in the area of paleoclimate studies are closely connected and thus 'independent studies' may not be as independent as they might appear on the surface.

The incestuous potential of such a small close-knit group is disturbing beyond co-authorship. Proponents of the anthropogenic global warming theory have made much of the fact that critics have few or no 'peer reviewed' papers. Why? It appears members of the group of 43 were also peer reviewing each other's papers. It is one possible explanation why Mann's paper sailed through peer review. Journal editors are not required to disclose the names of reviewers, so we can't know. It probably also explains why so much is made of peer review by members and defenders of the IPCC. When you have a small group in a specialized research area it is too easy to control what gets published. What I call peer review censorship.

The hockey stick debacle caught the attention and shifted the views of many who understood the scientific problems. It did not deter the group now known as the hockey team. It seems they were victims of what Tolstoy presciently wrote about 100 years ago.

"I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives."

Most of the public did not understand the issue, something those pushing human caused warming and climate change understood. They pushed ahead riding the wave of global warming hysteria broadcast by most of the media. They also developed the technique of convincing people that what was natural was unnatural. The science in Gore's movie is mostly wrong, but the images he shows are natural. I will examine a major example of that approach in the next Part as the IPCC continued to point the finger at CO2 in its search for a human signal.