Steve McIntyre has another post up documenting Dr. Hansen's dedication to the maintenance of consensus regarding global warming. The unraveling of the spaghetti Fortran code that Hansen finally released continues apace in other threads at Climate Audit.If a publicly owned corporation tried this with information presented in a prospectus they would incur some rather lengthy visits from the FBI followed by very serious discussions with a US attorney. Dr. Hansen is not building confidence with these maneuvers.
12 comments:
McIntyre blogs about very detailed statistics at a furious pace. I'm glad he is semi-retired and can devote so much time and energy to this. In fact we need many more statisticians who can spend the time needed to audit much of this crapola, because you really have to get into the details to expose the man behind the curtain. This is technically difficult work made all the harder by folks playing funny with the numbers.
Barry:
This is technically difficult work made all the harder by folks playing funny with the numbers.
When you can prove that folks are playing funny with the numbers, it ceases to be technically difficult. :-)
Of course, proving it is :>)
Hansen is edging farther into pathetic territory every week. NASA should give him the hook - or accept the fact that their reputation is going to follow the swirly path that he's on.
Some pols need to do a little table pounding on this. If there were any with backbones they would have started before now.
The warmers are laying out a fairly simple narrative: people are making the earth warmer and here are the temperature increases which show that. Demonstrating the problems with that means explaining things like principle components analysis, people's eyes glaze over. It is truly an uphill battle at this point.
From a public relations standpoint, perhaps the most effective way will be to show how screwed up temperature collection (even today) is. Pictures of monitoring stations near air conditioners isn't rocket science. Even the average person understands that angle on cooking the books.
The data set sucks and now smart people like McIntyre and that Goetz feller and several others are discovering that the methodology for tickling meaning out of the shit data set is, in and of itself, shit. Wow, and they call it science.
While we must change the narrative, which as Barry says is truly an uphill battle, the immediate objective should be more limited. It should be to embolden more scientists to question the orthodoxy and to create justifiable doubt in the eyes of policymakers who can be made to see the shakiness of the science and the enormous costs of the new policies. Once we accomplish that, hopefully the MSM will quietly drop the narrative in the scrap heap along with all the earlier failed apocalyptic predictions. Hopefully. That is the gamble.
Skook,
The questioners are certainly out there. Getting them into the media is the tough part.
I think that Jones, Mann and Hansen were all decent scientists. The problem is that they live in an age where science moves so quickly that they are not allowed to die without seeing their hypothesis demolished (with the "good" parts used in a new hypothesis). That's where the pathos comes in. Science is actually more efficient than capitalism at creative destruction.
Skook,
The problem I see is that people believe what they want to believe. There is a huge need for religion. People have it, and become religious, even when they flatly deny they have any beliefs. The scientists have entered the realm of "medicine men" in our modern mythos. Whether what they say has anything to do with science—with reality that is—has little or nothing to do with it as far as the vast majority of people are concerned. They are looking for someone of religious authority to sanction the beliefs they already hold.
When you view this particular belief system, you realize that it is really a form of Christianity in disguise. Maybe that's too strong. But it shares many elements with Christianity. It has a form of "turn the other cheek" in the form of "environmentalism" because after all the "environment" is the not-you. That is the ultimate turn the other cheek. Then, there is the revulsion against the modern, another form of Romanticism. And couple that with anti-Americanism and you've really got a winning combination. Who cares what a few crackpots believe? Crackpots are always with us.
It is very true that this is at heart a profound religious impulse, not Christian, but with a post-Christian belief in the fallen nature of man coupled with the old Romantic disaffection with industrial society. And given that , it is extraordinarily difficult to change the mind of the true believer. Still, my hope is that while politicians may be responsive to the beliefs of these people, and often may share those beliefs, they hopefully are also calculating enough to see the enormous economic damage that would result and to care about what that damage might mean. So rebuttals backed by good science might help give some of them a way out. That is the hope, anyway.
I personally have absolutely no faith in politicians. They will either: a) follow the latest poll numbers, b) put in something even more eggregious because of their enormous egos.
That is also true. But if we throw people out of work to propitiate Gaia, the effects of doing so are things that politicians also understand.
Theoretically.
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