Posted by Bob on 11/19/2007, 7:00 am, in reply to "Global Warming: The Numbers"
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Santer and Mann are true believers. They don't need evidence. Evidence is just something you create to persuade other people.
Here's the amazing thing about Mann's original report: He's not the only researcher working in this field. In fact, it's the job of many hundreds of researchers to refuse to accept his data at face value. After all, his findings disagree with everyone else's. Before they accept his results, they have a duty to look at his software, look at his data, and try to duplicate his results.
But nobody does it. Not a soul.
Nor, when it goes public, does anyone in the press check the results — because they want him to be right, too.
Steve the Canadian Businessman
Not until a Canadian businessman — let's call him "Steve" — took a look at the stats and got curious. Now, it happens that Steve is in the mining business; he also happened to be a prize-winning math student in college. He knows how to read number sets. He knows what good analysis looks like.
He also knows what cooked figures look like. He has seen the phony projections that companies use when they're trying to swindle people. Their results are too perfect. Mann's report looks too perfect, too.
So Steve starts digging. First, he read's Mann's original report. He finds it an exercise in obscurity. From what he published, it's very, very hard to tell just what statistical methods Mann used, or even what data he operated on.
This is wrong — it's not supposed to be that way. Scientists are supposed to leave a clear path so other people can follow them up and replicate their research.
The fact that it's so obscure suggests that Mann does not want anyone checking his work.
But Mann used government grants in his research. Which means he has an obligation to disclose. Steve contacts him, asks for the information. He gets a runaround. He gets pointed to a website that does not have the information. He tries again, and again gets a runaround — in fact, Mann sends him a very rude letter saying that he will no longer communicate with him.
Why should he? Steve isn't a legitimate researcher in that field. He's just a businessman.
But Steve is now sure there's something fishy going on, and he doesn't give up. He gets other people to help him. Finally they are pointed to a different website, where, to their surprise, they find that someone has accidentally left a copy of the FORTRAN program that was used to crunch the numbers. It wasn't supposed to be where Steve found it — which is why it hadn't been deleted.
Also, there was a little more carelessness — there is a set of data labeled "censored." Steve can't see, right away, what's significant about it, except that a score or so of data sets are left out of the censored data.
Steve looks at the program. He finds the glitch rather easily. He tries the program on random numbers and realizes that it always yields the distinctive shape that has caused all the stir.
Sorting out the data sets is much harder. He contacts a lot of people. He does what anyone checking these figures would have to do, and he realizes: If anyone had tried to check, a lot of this information would already have been put together.
He realizes: I am the first person ever to attempt to verify these astonishing, anomalous, politically hot results. Out of all the researchers in this field who had a responsibility to do "due diligence" before accepting the data, none of them has done it.
Finally he has all the original data put together. It includes more than just real numbers — it includes "extrapolated" data, which means that sometimes, where there were holes, Mann just made the numbers up and plugged them in. This is sloppy and lazy — but it's just the beginning.
What's crucial is that Steve now understands why the "censored" data sets are smaller than the ones Mann used. The full source data includes those misleading results that shouldn't have been used. But the "censored" data sets leave it out.
This means that Mann knew exactly what he was doing. This was not an accident. Mann ran the program on the data without the misleading numbers, and then he ran it with the misleading numbers. What he published was the results that made his ideological case.
Where's the Press?
This story is true.
Anybody who cares to can verify the story. In fact, one of the leading science journals was prepared to publish Steve's results. But then, before publication, they kept cutting back and cutting back on the amount of space they would let Steve's report take up in the journal.
Finally the space they were going to allot was so small that they concluded Steve could not tell his story in that number of words, and therefore they decided not to publish it at all.
Meanwhile, serious publications did publish Mann's savage response to what Steve was saying on the website where he was putting up his results for everyone to read.
Notice: Steve is making all his work transparent to the world — anyone is free to check his data.
Mann is still hiding, denying, attacking — but not providing the full information. You still have to do detective work to ferret it out.
Now, if you were a reporter — you know, those brave guys and gals who are committed, body and soul, to "the public's right to know" — wouldn't you smell a rat? Wouldn't you jump on the chance to expose such an obvious fraud?
After all, there are now governments all over the world basing their decisions on Mann's false report. Crucial decisions are being made. Schoolchildren are being terrorized with dire projections of what will happen if Mann's report is not believed and acted upon. Vast sums of money are being spent. People are treating Mann's cause as a crusade — and his fake results are the chief weapon they use to prove their case.
Where's the press? Why am I able to tell you this story in full confidence that very few who are reading it will have ever heard it before?
Because Mann doesn't report to the Bush administration. The government agency for which the result was filed was a UN agency — specifically, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
And Mann's report is the famous "hockey stick" that "proves" that global warming not only is happening, but right now we're in the warmest climate period in the past thousand years.
Ah! You've heard of that report, haven't you! The press has been all over that one! Your kids are being taught about it in school!
You have friends who look at you like an idiot or the scum of the earth if you don't get energized by it, frightened by it, determined to act on that information. Don't you care about the future of the environment?
Why haven't you joined the cause? Why doesn't the Bush administration act to save the world from the most terrible threat imaginable?
It's like the opening of the "Talk of the Town" section of the February 12th New Yorker: "Except in certain benighted precincts — oil-industry-funded Web sites, the Bush White House, Michael Crichton's den — no one wastes much energy these days trying to deny global warming."
This statement is not just false, it's stupidly false. It speaks of such deep ignorance at The New Yorker — ignorance that they're actually proud of — that it makes one despair, for this is a magazine that once prided itself on knowing what it was talking about.
"By the time the IPCC publishes an assessment, it has been vetted by thousands of scientists," says The New Yorker — but we know that in fact nobody vetted the Mann paper, and nobody checked Santer except, of course, Santer — while he went ahead and removed statements of some of those "thousands of scientists" (p. 27).
In other words, whoever wrote this New Yorker piece did not check. He or she just spouted.
What is really being said here is, "We believe in the IPCC and anybody else who supports Global Warming. We believe it so much that we refuse to listen to anybody who says otherwise."
The only difference between this and Jim and Tammy Baker on the old PTL Club is that nobody says "Jesus." It's all faith, no science.
They're like four-year-olds putting their fingers in their ears and chanting "La la la la" until the person talking to them goes away.
The Hockey Stick Hoax should be a scandal as big as the discovery of the Piltdown Man Hoax. Bigger, really, since so much more is at stake.
But because the media are dominated by True Believers, they are doing everything they can to maintain the hoax, to keep the public from learning the truth.
What were those bad numbers Mann plugged in to get his fake results? Modern bristlecone pine tree-ring data in which recent tree rings showed the widths that would normally mean unusually warm weather.
However, these trees were located near temperature recording stations that showed lower than usual temperatures. So instead of being a sign of warmer temperatures, the tree rings are actually responding to the increased CO2 levels.
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