Global Warming Hoax

Sunday, August 25, 2019

The Iconic Image of the Global Warming Movement Is a Fraud

Global warming alarmist Dr. Michael Mann of Penn State University has lost his multimillion dollar libel suit in British Columbia. Not only did he lose, the suit was thrown out and Mann was ordered to pay defendant Dr. Tim Ball's legal costs. The judge threw out the case "with prejudice" meaning Mann cannot not refile it. Details here.

This is a huge victory for honesty and ethics in science.

Unfortunately, it is highly unlikely the MSM will cover Dr. Mann's loss in court and its implications for the global warming movement. So, I have put together this background posting to explain what this means. It will be the lead story on the blog the rest of today and Monday.

Dr. Ball was sued because he said, of Dr. Mann's seminal "hockey stick" work, "he belongs in the state pen, not Penn State." While others came to the same conclusion about the hockey stick, Mann sued Ball for libel. After eight years, Mann refused to provide a single document under the court-ordered discovery. It is now reasonable to conclude "the hockey stick" (HS) was a fraud. This is vitally important because it was the HS that directly led to the Nobel Prize for Al Gore and United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). One of the major tenets of the catastrophic global movement has been falsified.

Here is the backstory...

In 1999, the world was stunned when the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published on the cover of its then-latest report the illustration below. It came to be 
Mann's graph from the ilustration from the
 cover of the 1999 IPCC Reportknown as "the hockey stick." It was a breathtaking piece of science: it showed there was no Medieval Warm Period (~900-1300 AD) and that contemporary temperatures are far higher than anything mankind has previously experienced.

The hockey stick was featured in just about every newspaper, on every newscast, in Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, and throughout the scientific community.

It was almost certainly a fraud. 

And, it was scientifically wrong in two ways:

1) The temperature reconstruction for the period from 1000 AD to about 1890 AD was based on tree bark from a number of bristlecone pines that, according to Mann, accurately reflected the temperatures experienced by the tree (a questionable assumption but I will not go into that here). But, there was a huge problem: the bristlecones showed world temperatures declining in the 20th Century!

As Steve McIntyre tirelessly labored to demonstrate (and, he is the person that deserves a Nobel Prize!), Mann's (and Keith Briffa's) data showed temperatures declining in the 20th Century.
Orange line shows 20th Century temperatures declining
in the bristlecone bark data.
From: climateaudit.orgOf course, we had thermometers in the 20th Century and it wouldn't do for the bristlecone data's (BD) credibility to show falling temperatures during the period when global warming activists wanted to show a rapid rise. So, Mann used a "trick" where he decided to "hide the [bristlecone data] decline." He did so by splicing the contemporary thermometer data onto the bristlecone data and deleting the BD after the vertex. Below is one of the key Climategate emails. "Nature" refers to Mann's paper published in Nature.
One of the key Climategate emailsFrom Mcintyre, here is a reconstruction of all of the pertinent data. The BD is pink. Mann deleted the bristlecone data around

year 1500 and the most recent data showing the declining temperatures. In place of the declining contemporary temperatures, he spliced in (in black) the thermometer record. This was known as "hiding the decline."

2) When one fed even random data into Mann's Excel program:
...a couple of Canadian researchers, McIntyre and McKitrick, found that when they ran simulations of “red noise” random principal components data into Mann’s reconstruction model, 99% of the time it produced the same hockey stick pattern. 

Not only did Mann create this scientific fraud, Climategate revealed him conspiring with Britain's Dr. Phil Jones to reject meritorious papers that cast doubt on catastrophic global warming so as to keep those papers out of the scientific journals. A quote from the Climategate emails:

We “will keep them [papers with differing conclusions] out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

Which is why global warming alarmists always ask the question, "Has [whomever] published in the peer-reviewed climate journals?" They know they have gamed the process and it is highly unlikely radically opposing viewpoints will be published. Renowned climate scientist, Dr. Judith Curry, recently had a paper rejected. One of the reviewers wrote:

“Overall, there is the danger that the paper is used by unscrupulous people to create confusion or to discredit climate or sea-level science. Hence, I suggest that the author reconsiders the essence of its contribution to the scientific debate on climate and sea-level science.”

Please note: the above rejection had nothing to do with the scientific merit of the paper. It had to do with -- gasp -- casting doubt on the "consensus." Remember: The huge monies that flow into climate study only continue to flow if there is a real or manufactured catastrophe.

So, where are we?

The hockey stick was the major piece of evidence that current temperatures are unprecedented in human history. They likely are not. Temperatures today appear to be similar during the Medieval Warm Period and even warmer during the Roman Optimum (when Jesus walked the earth).

Because those periods were equal to or warmer than today, it calls into question just how much of today's warming is due to CO2 emissions. Mother Nature is apparently able to create current temperature levels on her own.

Still,

There is no question temperatures are significantly warmer today than they were 100 years ago or even 40 years ago. 

Sea level will continue to rise (if temperatures continue to rise). That will, over decades, eventually flood low-lying coastal areas and will worsen the storm surge from major storms. 

While warming eventually may be a (net) plus as parts of Canada and Russia open for farming, there will be some agricultural disruption due to changing temperature patterns.

It makes sense to move to second and third generation nuclear (along with nuclear fusion, if and when available) for power generation. That will lessen emissions of greenhouse gas while allowing inexpensive energy to continue to lift the poor out of poverty. 

In other ways, when it makes economic sense, we should cut greenhouse gases. 

So, while global warming is real and a problem, the scientific case for catastrophic global warming continues to weaken (see new paper, here).

ADDITION, 1:50p Sunday:
To clarify the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) issue, here are the two versions of the climate history of the last thousand years.

Until the hockey stick, the MWP was generally accepted science. The HS is wrong not only because of it eliminating the warm period, it also does not show the Little Ice Age which obviously occurred. As one climate scientist was quoted as saying, "We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period." The HS certainly accomplished that goal. 

Mass Shootings

1. Minimize gun free zones. Over 95% of mass shootings in the United States are in gun free zones.

2. The whole of “mental health professionals” and their schools should be class actioned for inflicting all of the nutso whack jobs on the rest of us. Most of the mass shooters have histories of mental illnesses. These nuts cannot be drugged into sanity. They are put into society by shrinks with little if any supervision and everyone is so suprised that they snap and kill groups of citizens.

Reparations

By Walter E. Williams | June 27, 2019 9:43 PM EDT

Several Democratic presidential hopefuls are calling for Americans to make reparations for slavery. On June 19, the House judiciary subcommittee on the constitution, civil rights, and civil liberties held a hearing. Its stated purpose was “to examine, through open and constructive discourse, the legacy of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, its continuing impact on the community and the path to restorative justice.”

Slavery was a gross violation of human rights. Justice demands that all participants in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade make compensatory reparation payments to slaves. However, there is no way that Europeans could have captured millions of Africans. That means compensation would have to be paid by Africans and Arabs who captured and sold slaves to Europeans in addition to the people who bought and used slaves. Since slaves and slave traders and owners are no longer with us, compensation is beyond our reach and it's a matter that will have to be settled in hell or heaven.

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Let's pretend for a moment that the reparations issue makes a modicum of sense. There's the question of responsibility. More explicitly, should we compensate a black person of today by punishing a white person of today, by taking his money, for what a white person of yesteryear did to a black person of yesteryear? If we believe in individual accountability, we should find that doing so is unjust. In other words, are the tens millions of Europeans, Asian, and Latin Americans who immigrated to the United States in the late 19th and 20th centuries responsible for slavery, and should they be forced to cough up reparations? What about descendants of Northern whites who fought and died in the name of freeing slaves? Should they pay reparations to black Americans? What about non-slave-owning Southern whites -- who were a majority of Southern whites -- should their descendants be made to pay reparations?

Reparations advocates make the unchallenged pronouncement that the United States became rich on the backs of free black labor. That's utter nonsense. While some slave owners became rich, slavery doesn't have a good record of producing wealth. Slavery existed in the southern states and outlawed in most of the northern states. Buying into the reparations argument suggests that the antebellum South was rich and the slave-starved North was poor. The truth is just the opposite. In fact, the poorest states and regions of our country were places where slavery flourished: Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. And the richest states and regions were those where slavery was absent: Pennsylvania, New York, and Massachusetts.

The reparations movement would be an amusing sideshow were it not for its damaging distractions. It grossly misallocates resources that could be better spent elsewhere. According to the state Department of Education, 75% of black California boys cannot meet state reading standards. In 2016, in 13 of Baltimore's 39 high schools, not a single student scored proficient on the state's mathematics exam. In six other high schools, only 1% tested proficient in math. The same story of low education outcomes can be told about most cities with large black populations. I'd like to see lawyers bring class-action suits against public school systems in cities like Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Detroit, and Los Angeles for conferring fraudulent high school diplomas. Such diplomas attest a 12th-grade level of academic achievement when in fact those youngsters often cannot perform at sixth- or seventh-grade levels.

D Day

 As a young Airman in 1966 I was honored to accompany the Color Guard for D Day commemoration services at the resting places for   some of the Americans that lost their lives that day.  It was a moving and life changing experience.

May they find comfort in the arms of Angels...

Wise Man

https://youtu.be/MRpEV2tmYz4

Earth is not Fragile

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By Walter E. Williams | March 6, 2019 12:59 PM EST

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claims that “the world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change.” The people at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change agree, saying that to avoid some of the most devastating impacts of climate change, the world must slash carbon emissions by 45 percent by 2030 and completely decarbonize by 2050.

Such dire warnings are not new. In 1970, Harvard University biology professor George Wald, a Nobel laureate, predicted, “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” Also in 1970, Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford University biologist, predicted in an article for The Progressive, “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” The year before, he had warned, “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” Despite such harebrained predictions, Ehrlich has won no fewer than 16 awards, including the 1990 Crafoord Prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences' highest award.

Leftists constantly preach such nonsense as “The world that we live in is beautiful but fragile.” “The 3rd rock from the sun is a fragile oasis.” “Remember that Earth needs to be saved every single day.” These and many other statements, along with apocalyptic predictions, are stock in trade for environmentalists. Worse yet, this fragile-earth indoctrination is fed to the nation's youth from kindergarten through college. That's why many millennials support Rep. Ocasio-Cortez.
Let's examine just a few cataclysmic events that exceed any destructive power of mankind and then ask how our purportedly fragile planet could survive. The 1883 eruption of the Krakatoa volcano, in present-day Indonesia, had the force of 200 megatons of TNT. That's the equivalent of 13,300 15-kiloton atomic bombs, the kind that destroyed Hiroshima in World War II. Before that was the 1815 Tambora eruption, the largest known volcanic eruption. It spewed so much debris into the atmosphere that 1816 became known as the "Year Without a Summer." It led to crop failures and livestock death in the Northern Hemisphere, producing the worst famine of the 19th century. The A.D. 535 Krakatoa eruption had such force that it blotted out much of the light and heat of the sun for 18 months and is said to have led to the Dark Ages. Geophysicists estimate that just three volcanic eruptions — Indonesia (1883), Alaska (1912) and Iceland (1947) — spewed more carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere than all of mankind's activities during our entire history.
Our so-called fragile earth survived other catastrophic events, such as the floods in China in 1887, which took an estimated 1 million to 2 million lives, followed by floods there in 1931, which took an estimated 1 million to 4 million lives. What about the impact of earthquakes on our fragile earth? Chile's 1960 Valdivia earthquake was 9.5 on the Richter scale. It created a force equivalent to 1,000 atomic bombs going off at the same time. The deadly 1556 earthquake in China's Shaanxi province devastated an area of 520 miles.
Our so-called fragile earth faces outer space terror. Two billion years ago, an asteroid hit earth, creating the Vredefort crater in South Africa, which has a diameter of 190 miles. In Ontario, there's the Sudbury Basin, resulting from a meteor strike 1.8 billion years ago. At 39 miles long, 19 miles wide and 9 miles deep, it's the second-largest impact structure on earth. Virginia's Chesapeake Bay crater is a bit smaller, about 53 miles wide. Then there's the famous but puny Meteor Crater in Arizona, which is not even a mile wide.

My question is: Which of these powers of nature could be duplicated by mankind? For example, could mankind even come close to duplicating the polluting effects of the 1815 Tambora volcanic eruption? It is the height of arrogance to think that mankind can make significant parametric changes in the earth or can match nature's destructive forces. Our planet is not fragile.
Occasionally, environmentalists spill the beans and reveal their true agenda. Barry Commoner said, “Capitalism is the earth's number one enemy.” Amherst College professor Leo Marx said, “On ecological grounds, the case for world government is beyond argument.”

Reality

By Walter E. Williams | February 6, 2019 6:20 PM EST

Suppose I declare that I am a king. Should you be required to address me as “Your Majesty”? You say, “Williams, that's lunacy! You can't prove such nonsense.” You're wrong. It's proved by my declaration. It's no different from a person born with XY chromosomes declaring that he is a woman. The XY sex determination system is the sex determination system found in humans and most other mammals. Females typically have two of the same kind of sex chromosome (XX) and are called the homogametic sex. Males typically have two different kinds of sex chromosomes (XY) and are called the heterogametic sex. 

Governments are beginning to ignore biology and permit people to make their sex optional. Sex can be changed on one's birth certificate, passport, Social Security card and driver's license. In New York, intentional or repeated refusal to use an individual's preferred name, pronoun or title is a violation of the New York City Human Rights Law. If a person born with XY chromosomes asserts that he is a woman, then repeatedly addressing the person by the name on his birth certificate, referring to the person as “him” or addressing him as “Mister” violates the law and subjects the villain to heavy penalties. The law requires acknowledgment that sex is optional rather than a biological determination.
Do the people who support the optionality of sex also support the optionality of age? My birth certificate shows 1936 as my year of birth. Age cutoffs exclude me from many jobs, such as police officer, service member and firefighter. If one can change his sex on his birth certificate according to how he feels, why not his age? I think I'll petition to change my year of birth to 1972.

Super Bowl LIII made history. For the first time, there were two male dancers working out with a cheerleading squad -- in this case, with the Los Angeles Rams' squad. Men being on the field with female squads is not new. They've helped the women with stunts. But Quinton Peron and Napoleon Jinnies danced with the female cheerleaders and performed all the same moves. It's nice to see cheerleader barriers fall, but there's another form of rampant cheerleader discrimination that needs to be addressed. I don't think I've ever seen a full-figured older female cheerleader for any professional sports team. Most appear to be younger than 30 and don't look as if they weigh more than 120 pounds.
There are other forms of discrimination in sports. There's a sensible argument that can be made for segregating sexes in football, boxing, basketball and ice hockey. Men are typically stronger and bigger than women, so integrating sports such as football, boxing, basketball and ice hockey would lead to disproportionate injury and possibly death to women. But what about sports in which there's no contact, such as tennis, bowling, billiards and swimming? Why should there be men's teams and women's teams? Why aren't feminists protesting against this kind of sports segregation? After all, feminists have ignored the huge strength, aggressiveness and competitiveness differences between men and women in their demands that women be assigned to military combat units.

Refusing to acknowledge chromosomal differences and giving people the right to declare their sex can lead to opportunities heretofore nonexistent. For example, the men's fastest 100-meter speed is 9.58 seconds. The women's record is 10.49 seconds. What if a male sprinter with 10-second speed claimed womanhood, ran in the women's event and won the gold? A lower bar to achieving fame and fortune exists in women's basketball. It would take only a few tall men who claim they are women to dominate the game.
Suppose a college honored the right of its students to free themselves from biological determinism and allowed those with XY chromosomes to play on teams formerly designated as XX teams. What if an “unenlightened” women's basketball team refused to play against a team with a starting five consisting of 6-foot-6-inch, 200-plus-pound XYers? The NCAA should have a rule stating that refusal to play a mixed-chromosome team leads to forfeiture of the game. It's no different from a team of white players refusing to play another because it has black players.