I am an empirically minded guy who thinks math is the only important and necessary field of study. In my free time I like to work math puzzles and learn machine languages. That’s not to say all the other stuff is unimportant or useless, but I put it into the leisure activity category. Western society took off with Calculus, not the Canterbury Tales.
That said, a healthy skepticism with science is warranted. Science, in the abstract is pure, but we don’t live in the abstract; we live in the real. In the real world science is financed by men and practiced by men. That means all the stupidity, vice and bias that is a part of the human animal will find its way into the lab. There’s no greater example of that phenomenon than the global warming hoax.
When future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature records – on which the entire panic ultimately rested – were systematically “adjusted” to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data justified.
Two weeks ago, under the headline “How we are being tricked by flawed data on global warming”, I wrote about Paul Homewood, who, on his Notalotofpeopleknowthat blog, had checked the published temperature graphs for three weather stations in Paraguay against the temperatures that had originally been recorded. In each instance, the actual trend of 60 years of data had been dramatically reversed, so that a cooling trend was changed to one that showed a marked warming.
This was only the latest of many examples of a practice long recognised by expert observers around the world – one that raises an ever larger question mark over the entire official surface-temperature record.
Following my last article, Homewood checked a swathe of other South American weather stations around the original three. In each case he found the same suspicious one-way “adjustments”. First these were made by the US government’s Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN). They were then amplified by two of the main official surface records, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Giss) and the National Climate Data Center (NCDC), which use the warming trends to estimate temperatures across the vast regions of the Earth where no measurements are taken. Yet these are the very records on which scientists and politicians rely for their belief in “global warming”.
A basic rule of science is that data, data collection methods and data normalization methods are always exposed to scrutiny. Heck, it’s true in hedge funds and big data shops. No one takes anyone’s word for it. It has to be right so the data, collection methods and adjustments are checked, rechecked and monitored by multiple people. It’s simply prudent.
In climate science, the opposite is often true. Michael Mann, for example, refuses to expose his raw data to public scrutiny. The “adjustments” are rarely explained and often hidden. The models these guys rely upon are black boxes where even the inputs are not entirely clear.
One of the first examples of these “adjustments” was exposed in 2007 by the statistician Steve McIntyre, when he discovered a paper published in 1987 by James Hansen, the scientist (later turned fanatical climate activist) who for many years ran Giss. Hansen’s original graph showed temperatures in the Arctic as having been much higher around 1940 than at any time since. But as Homewood reveals in his blog post, “Temperature adjustments transform Arctic history”, Giss has turned this upside down. Arctic temperatures from that time have been lowered so much that that they are now dwarfed by those of the past 20 years.
Homewood’s interest in the Arctic is partly because the “vanishing” of its polar ice (and the polar bears) has become such a poster-child for those trying to persuade us that we are threatened by runaway warming. But he chose that particular stretch of the Arctic because it is where ice is affected by warmer water brought in by cyclical shifts in a major Atlantic current – this last peaked at just the time 75 years ago when Arctic ice retreated even further than it has done recently. The ice-melt is not caused by rising global temperatures at all.
The other old rule of science and of life, is that if you have nothing to hide you have no reason to hide. These guys keep trying to trick the public for a reason and the only plausible reasons are not good. Worse yet, they diminish the people’s trust in science, giving space for lunatics like the anti-vaccine nuts make their claims.
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Global warming is one of the great con jobs of our time, designed to enrich scientists, who are 99 percent in academia, and redistribute wealth from the private sector to governments, including the UN. Environmentalism has become the religion of the left, and global warming is its doomsday scenario. Al Gore is the messiah.
Global warming “science” follows the same model as Bigfoot studies, UFO institutes, or JFK conspiracy groups. The only folks researching these things are already true believers, who can’t afford to design a falsifiable experiment.
Western society took off beginning with the Renaissance rediscovery of Roman and Greek civilizations, not their math. The greatest leap forward was the contribution of British custom and law, which did come to rule the world and provide an environment for calculus to flourish in.
Nothing in human development is so crucial as the development of positive custom and tradition, or as difficult to evolve. Math does not evolve, it has always existed exactly as it is. Math is discovery, not invention.
The English had progressed furthest of all people in three important things–piety, commerce and freedom–
Montesquieu
When Europeans landed in China three hundred years ago, they found there that almost all the arts had reached a certain degree of perfection and were surprised that they had not improved beyond that point. It was an industrial nation where most scientific processes had been preserved, while science itself was dead. That explained the unusually static quality of mind of this nation. The Chinese, in following the path of their ancestors, had mislaid the reasons for the direction the latter had chosen. They still used the formula without asking why; they kept the tool but they had lost the skills to adapt or replace it. The Chinese were, therefore, not able to change anything and had to abandon any notion of improvement. The well of human knowledge had dried up and although the flow still ran, it could neither increase its volume nor change its course–
Tocqueville
In my free time I like to work math puzzles and learn machine languages. That’s not to say all the other stuff is unimportant or useless, but I put it into the leisure activity category. Western society took off with Calculus, not the Canterbury Tales.
hmmm …Historically speaking, they are both equally important. If you only studied math and not writing you would not be able to write this blog. Can society become advanced without language and a means to convey it? I don’t think there is a simple example. Even the Egyptians, who used glyphs, still had to write the stuff down.
There are small tricks the hoaxers perform to make their ‘case’ such as the time a few years when data from a Russian weather station for October was missing so the September figures were simply re-used.
Given that there is a huge difference between September and October temperatures in Russia then more global warmist hysterics could begin.
The polar bear issue is funny because there are culls of polar bears because their numbers grow so big they are a danger to a lot of wildlife and humans. No one would cull a species that wasn’t on the increase, but the warmists are too dozy to realise that.
When you are frothing at the mouth, facts merely irritate…
But, but, but the science is settled. Why should we look further, just hop on the hoax. I read an article about 20 years ago that asked, after the fall of the Soviet Union, where did all the communists and sympathizers go? It answered by stating they went to the environmental movement after their economic/political model was found unworkable. That explains a lot.
Greece has been a melodrama since 2010. the pundits said it would pull the rest of Europe and the world into a crisis, with the dow at record highs, so much for that.