The Global Warming Lies That Bind
It is a curious thing, when a global warming alarmist has their work checked.

Take the case of Michael Mann, whose infamous hockey stick temperature graph was soundly discredited by people who actually understood statistics. The essential problem was that Mann's statistical methods derive a hockey stick shape from random noise.

So how did Mann respond? He wrote another paper, this time 'all new and improved' with many many more sources of data and a refined statistical method, and lo and behold....another hockey stick appears.

The obvious question remains...if Mann's original study was essentially statistical rubbish, how did he get to a hockey stick shape? Was it sheer fluke (unlikely), or perhaps instead it was an attempt to show the preconceived notion that Mann held that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) was real. For Mann, the hockey stick is an article of faith. It must be real so that his faith in AGW is real.

It is no surprise then, that when the same people who checked over his previous hockey stick paper, checked over his latest paper, they find a host of similar problems. (For the mathematically minded, you can view the investigation at Climate Audit (Search for mann 2008).

Mann isn't the only global warming alarmist whose scientific efforts seem somewhat unreliable.

Enter Santer, a scientist who has showed us, time and again, that the spread of temperature in the atmosphere is what we would expect if AGW was real. An earlier Santer paper from 1995 made it into the findings of IPCC reports (as "[the] pattern correlation coefficient [was increasing with time] as the human signal emerged from the background noise of climate variability"), where Singer (1997) noted that he had removed all of the trend lines, including zero and negative trends, except the one that suggested an increasing correlation in the last 50 years. Santer claimed he had done this for "pedagogic reasons". One can only think he was trying to 'educate' (and I use the term loosely) us that AGW was real.

Santer also had another part in the IPCC where he one again, used selective data to to supposedly show that altitude and latitude patterns matched AGW expectations.

Singer, Douglass , Pearcey and Christy published peer-reviewed articles highlighting Santer's paper's failings.

But, like a faithful global warming alarmist, Santer released a new study (Santer et al 2008) which was 'new and improved' and showed the signal Santer tried to show in his 1995 paper.

So once again, we have an AGW alarmist scientist, whose original paper was not valid, amazingly finding the same answer as before. Another lucky coincidence...or is this just another example of the failure of the scientific method. Santer and Mann should be trying to disprove their hypothesis, not to select the data and methods which confirm it.

Climate Audit also looks into this Santer paper as well.
- posted by Alan Grey @ Friday, November 07, 2008 1 comments