The Hockey Stick is Bad Science

Bad ScienceIf the hockey stick is good science, then ice skating on Dutch canals and ice festivals on the Thames during the Little Ice Age must have been faked. The Hockey stick shows them to be impossible. Con acknowledged that natural phenomena play a role in climate change. However, the Hockey stick shows that nothing whatsoever has happened in climate for a thousand years, until humans caused global warming in the 20th century. It was bad science for Mann et al to conceal how the hockey stick was derived, claiming it was proprietary. That defeats peer review.The hockey stick analysis ended on what is now widely recognized as a temperature spike caused by an unusually strong El Nino event in the 1990s, which had nothing to do with CO2. Does the good science of the Hockey Stick cancel the obvious El Nino transient. Con points to Mann and his colleagues being able to continue to construct hockey stick graphs. Every confirming paper con sites included Mann as a coauthor. No doubt about it, they know how to make hockey sticks. For a small fee, I'll make a hockey stick out of climate data as well. The method is to write software that heavily over-weights anything that looks like a hockey stick and underweight everything hat doesn't. Statistical Analysis is an expert specialtyCon attacks McKitrick as being a professor in the Economics Department of his university, the University of Guelph in Canada. He specializes in environmental economics. Economics is probably closer to the field of statistics than climate science, but no matter, the analysis stands on its own. McKitrick was also a consulting expert in statistical analysis of mineral exploration data for validity. People trying to sell mining claims would use every statistical technique available to attempt to establish the value of a claim from limited assay data. McKitrick sorted valid claims from every bogus use of statistics in the book,.Statistical expertise is not tied to a particular discipline. It is certainly possible for Mann to have been an expert in statistics; it just turns out that he was not. A PhD in climate science may not require s much as a single course in statistics. As part of the Senate hearings, the scientists who provided peer review for the original Mann paper all acknowledged they lacked the expertise in statistics needed to review it properly. Wegman showed that Mann confined his work to a small group o like-mined associates and never subjected it to mainstream statistical expertise. [8. http://www.uoguelph.ca...] Con suggests that Wegman only objected to one minor point that had no effect on the conclusion. Here are some excerpts from the Senate expert panel's report: “In general, we found MBH98 and MBH99 to be somewhat obscure and incomplete and the criticisms of MM03/05a/05b to be valid and compelling. … It is not clear that Dr. Mann and his associates even realized that their methodology was faulty at the time of writing the MBH paper. The net effect of the decentering is to preferentially choose the so-called hockey stick shapes. … [paraphrasing here:] MBH method creates a PC1 statistic dominated by bristlecone and foxtail pine tree ring series (closely related species). However there is evidence in the literature, that the use of the bristlecone pine series as a temperature proxy may not be valid (suppressing "warm period" in the hockey stick handle); and that bristlecones do exhibit CO2-fertilized growth over the last 150 years (enhancing warming in the hockey stick blade). “ [9. http://en.wikipedia.org...] Wegman separately stated, “We explicitly looked at the first principle component of the North American Tree Ring series and demonstrated that the hockey stick shows up when the data are decentered, but not when properly centered.” [8, http://www.uoguelph.ca...] Wegman explicily stated that the hockey stick was "bad science." McKitrick's book article was not peer reviewed, but all the material was also published in Geophysical Research Letters in 2005, and was nominated as a journal highlight by the American Geophysical Union. The Mann Team Wegman showed that Mann confined his work to a small group o like-mined associates and never subjected it to mainstream statistical expertise. [8.] They review each others papers, defend the hockey stick, generate new hockey sticks, and work to prevent critics from being published. The group is defined primarily by observing the small universe of paper reviewers that comprise the group, but they also contribute to Mann's blog, work together on committees, and sometimes e-mail is published. In the Climategate scandal, e-mail among global warming advocates revealed that they worked to prevent publication of any papers contrary to their theory. [9. http://reason.com... ] That has undermined confidence in the peer review process. Mann and his associates have continued to rationalize their methods, but they are amateurs at statistical analysis compared to McKitrick and rank amateurs compared to Wegman. Additional hockey sticks are generated by the Team. These pretend to be independent, but they actually share the methodology of selecting and over-weighting data that looks like a hockey stick, and they share faulty tree ring data that produces the hockey sticks. [10. http://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com... ] The trees exhibiting the hockey stick were resampled ten years later, and the new grown did not show a continuation of the hockey stick and, even more surprisingly, Simple taken as little as six inches away on the twisted trees from those selected for hockey stick inclusion showed a different pattern. [10] The Mann rationalizations they are weasel-worded with claims that the MWP was not proved to be warmer than the present, as if that were the key issue at stake. No, the key issue was that the Hockey Stick incorrectly wiped out all natural variations in climate for the past thousand years, a claim disproved by paintings of the Dutch ice skating, never mind McKitrick. As far as I know, everyone in paleoclimatology agrees that the Holocene Optimum, about 4000 to 8000 years age, was warmer than the present. So whether the MWP was few tenths of degree warmer or cooler than the present isn't significant.. Another weasel-wording is to produce curves that are sort of U-shaped and say they confirm the Hockey Stick.The MWP Con claims the Harvard study verifying the existed other MWP has been discredited. Only in the minds of the Mann Team. Many others disagree: The conclusion of Soon & Baliunas? That the vast majority of published, peer-reviewed papers on the MWP conclude that it was both geographically widespread (not, as Warmists and their amen corner in Wikipedia like to pretend, a little local anomaly confined to Northern Europe) and significantly warmer than now. This irritates Michael Mann and his Hockey Team no end, for it contradicts their view that late 20th century warming is both unprecedented and catastrophic. So how do they respond? Do they counter it with new, learned papers demonstrating in closely illustrated detail just where Soon & Baliunas have got it wrong? Of course they don't! Instead, what they do is gang up to shoot the messenger. They conspire to have Climate Research closed down; to have Chris de Freitas sacked; then, they write to the head of his university in Auckland to see if they can't get de Freitas deprived of his living too. Nice! http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk... We are not dead from the exponential rise in temperatures the curve predicted. Instead temperatures have bounced around at about the same level. Bad methods make bad predictions which make bad science.