They’ve really stepped in it with an unsigned article attacking Willis Eschenbach for asking, er, inconvenient questions about a bizarre adjustment in the GHCN temperature record. Willis responds:
Unfortunately, they adjusted Darwin anyway. Consider the GHCN adjustment in 1920. To find five stations around Darwin covering 1920, you have to go out 1,250 km. Nor is there any guarantee that those stations will be suitable. You need to have five stations with an 80% correlation with the Darwin record … I wish you the best of luck finding those five stations.
…
Your understanding of statistics is as poor as your understanding of chronology. The statistics used by GHCN are average college level tools. You are dazzled by the fact that you don’t understand them, so you make the incredibly foolish assumption that no one without “a PhD in a related field” can understand them either. Some of us actually paid attention in class, you know.
…
Finally, the Economist did not contact me before publishing an article full of false accusations, incorrect assumptions and wrong statements … looks like peer review is not the only system in trouble here. I thought journalists were under an obligation to check their facts before making accusations …
Anthropogenic global warming theory is a kludgy agglomeration of flawed assumptions, bad data, bad data processing, bad modelling, bad science, and corrupted peer review hurled at the energy industry by neo-Malthusian environmental extremists. It doesn’t hold up to serious scrutiny by anyone with a properly skeptical scientific approach, and the economy-crippling solutions offered are as nonsensical as the claims a trace gas is the primary driver of climate.
UPDATE: So much for “don’t be evil.” Google’s behavior has been utterly despicable. Apparently the new company motto is “Hide the decline.” Are we supposed to believe Al Gore’s position on Google’s senior advisory board has nothing to do with this?
You can’t hide the truth. People are figuring this thing out.
Just 24 per cent believe global warming is an “urgent issue” needing “immediate and radical steps”, compared with 38 per cent in a previous YouGov poll in November 2006. And 18 per cent agree that “there is not yet enough clear evidence of global warming and therefore there is no need currently to consider any major steps to change the way we live” – double the 9 per cent in the 2006 poll.
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Basic conservation :
– Leave the campsite in a better condition then when you found it.
–Don’t pollute
–Don’t waste energy
Global Warming:
–Pseudo-scientific non-sense wrapped up like a pretzel with bizarre anti-capitalist political agendas.
I’ll take the former, not the latter.
–HB
I let my Economist subscription lapse a couple years ago when they went 100% bien-pensant left. They still are relatively reasonable when it comes to business coverage, but their coverage of government is purely along the lines of “we need more of it, particularly where greenie matters are concerned”.
They were actually nearly libertarian until 2002 or so, but changed editors and became yet another cheerleader for the transnational ruling class.
One of the big prizes buried in the files is that the CRU temperature reconstruction is largely derived from GHCN.
Advocates of AGW have been claiming that the agreement of NOAA, GISTEMP and CRUTEMP is some kind of evidence of validity. Unfortunately, we now know that all three are derived from GHCN, so there’s no confirmation value here at all. It’s re-branding, and then claiming that the re-branding actually makes a difference.
That they look so similar is not evidence of anything.
On the other hand, that they look so different may be indication of problems in at least two of them.
The rather Orwellian actions of the press establishment are disturbing, but otherwise I pretty much expected this. Human nature is the same in the sciences as everywhere else.
What’s happened with the anthropogenic Global Warming crowd is virtually the same as what happens when a deer is shot through the gut by an arrow that passes entirely through it. The animal continues on and gets away, and may get many miles away. It may take days to die, and if it’s extremely lucky it doesn’t die at all but it’s very close.
Still, for some time after the wound, it goes on. Wounded, dizzy, sick, but still breathing, at least for a little while. Its fellow herd members try to stick by it, though they are uncomfortable…
I keep staring at this and the reference to Google seems like a non-sequitur. What am I missing?
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