Global Warming Scandals

One failed resurrection of the old hockey stick prop, one "scientist" using thin data, and one entire research unit destroying what should have been secured are distasteful scandals that couldn’t have erupted at a worst time for global warming alarmists. Cooling temperatures and collapsed economies have already forced this once hot issue of yesteryear to the bottom of anyone’s list of concerns. How embarrassing to have an "official" United Nations Climate Change Science Compendium caught most recently using an unscientific graphic from Wikipedia. The hockey stick graph selected had never been peer-reviewed, so it should not have been used, but it did back the global warming storyline being pushed. A citation to "Hanno 2009" was even made as if the graph had been from a published and peer reviewed work. It wasn’t. Having now been caught out, the United Nations has hurriedly replaced it. Isn’t this all a bit sloppy for science? Then, a UK "scientist" is exposed for having used inexcusably frail studies. This is the same "scientist" whose work has been relied upon to support the Hockey Stick all along. Tree-derived temperature data have long been controversial. Keith Briffa’s Yamal series has been the basis of multiple papers since 1990. But, recent inspection of Briffa’s work has exposed that just a few trees yielded any unusual proxy warming information. Far too few trees and far too-highly-selected trees, at that, were used for any work that could be called science. On top of these two gaffes, it’s been barely a month since an entire government-funded research unit also violated basic scientific principles. It didn’t cherry-pick; it just wholly destroyed original raw data – data behind major studies claiming a global warming crisis. How credible can those studies be now? That’s a scandal. Data are stored and shared for the express purpose of all interested scientists who might work to replicate results. That is the scientific process...read more