Todays Opinion Journal has an article titled “Hockey Stick on Ice: Politicizing the science of global warming” (registration required but OJ is free). The article is regarding the hockey stick shape of North American temperatures over the last 1000 years. As you can imagine, the “toe” of the hockey stick is the last 100 years of this time period. This graph is the product of “research” done by geoscientist Michael Mann in the late 1990’s.
This hockey stick concept has gathered such importance that according to OJ, “Little wonder, then, that Mr. Mann’s hockey stick appears five times in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s landmark 2001 report on global warming, which paved the way to this week’s global ratification–sans the U.S., Australia and China–of the Kyoto Protocol.”
However, there were critics from the start, and the results were immediately challanged. The results are not surprising considering the concept of global warming has created a “religion” around it.
Yet there were doubts about Mr. Mann’s methods and analysis from the start. In 1998, Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics published a paper in the journal Climate Research, arguing that there really had been a Medieval warm period. The result: Messrs. Soon and Baliunas were treated as heretics and six editors at Climate Research were made to resign
This seems almost unbelievable, six editors resigned and two scientists are treated as heretics. One hopes they did more then question Mr. Mann for that to happen. However, in 2003 in a bid to preserve academic freedom two canadians analyzed Mr. Manns data and they concluded:
Mr. Mann’s work was riddled with “collation errors, unjustifiable truncations of extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, geographical location errors, incorrect calculations of principal components, and other quality control defects.” Once these were corrected, the Medieval warm period showed up again in the data.
The results of this questioning are:
Mr. Mann was forced to publish a retraction of some of his initial data, and doubts about his statistical methods have since grown. Statistician Francis Zwiers of Environment Canada (a government agency) notes that Mr. Mann’s method”preferentially produces hockey sticks when there are none in the data.”Other reputable scientists such as Berkeley’s Richard Muller and Hans von Storch of Germany’s GKSS Center essentially agree.
One wonders how Mr. Mann’s work passed peer review to begin with? Perhaps the reviewers are already feeding at the trough of the global warming crowd, and to disupte Mr. Mann’s findings would mean loss of funding for their pet projects? Apparently academic freedom isn’t enough freedom for the peer reviewers, they apparently need a “shot” of courage on the side.
