On Hiding the Decline and Rebuilding Trust part I (of LXXV)

In 1999, the World Meteorological Organization printed a brochure that would have a devastating effect on our society. The brochure featured on its cover the infamous Hockey Stick – a graph with a temperature reconstruction purporting to demonstrate that the alleged recent temperature increase was unprecedented. Almost everybody believed in this graph, and thought it to be the final and ultimate truth. So this graph became the cornerstone in the construction of an unprecedented global warming narrative that came to completely dominate the scientific, political and economical discourse for the next decade. The importance of this WMO cover graph cannot be underestimated. The whole global warming edifice rested on it being correct - this was the single piece of evidence that the warmists had.
But then something happened in 2009. When the Climategate emails were liberated from University of East Anglia, the whole world could see that a trick had been used to hide the decline! The graph did not only contain proxies: the so-called scientist had added actual temperature measurements to make it appear that the temperature had increased the last couple of decades! The proxy data, which were most deceitfully truncated, showed that temperatures were going down! This problem, called the divergence problem, had been carefully hidden in scientific journals where nobody would ever find out about it.
This deceit, yes I do not hesitate to call it a fraud, committed by the notorious Team, a group of activists that are high priests of the IPCC, has fundamentally shaken confidence in climate science. If the Team could remove proxy temperature data that they thought were “bad” from a graph in a WMO brochure and add thermometer data instead, what else could they do? Was there anything in climate science one could trust? The answer was obviously “No”. The public’s trust in climate science was sadly obliterated. Indeed, this scandalous event has led to widespread erosion in people’s trust in science and scientists. Many people don’t believe in physics anymore, and might stop using computers, cellular phones, televisions, microwave ovens and other high technological devices that are based on modern physics. Many people might stop going to medical doctors and start going to witch doctors instead. Many people might start thinking that Earth is flat. Democracy and the modern industrial society are undermined, and feudalism is making a comeback. We are rapidly moving towards a new dark age because of this shameless abuse of a graph in a WMO brochure.
Therefore, it is paramount that we try to rebuild trust in science again. For that purpose, I have started a series of blog posts that will be dedicated to discussing and analyzing the WMO graph and exposing the culprits and bring them to justice and make them take responsibility for this heinous crime. Only by openly and honestly discussing this outrageous event and revealing the truth can the public’s trust in climate science and science in general be at least partially restored.
In this first trust-building post, I want to discuss what adjectives best describe the nefarious and dishonest activities of the Team. After 1000 comments, I will write a second post, and so on. I expect to write about 75 posts on this important subject, until the public’s trust in science, now shattered by the duplicity of the Team in producing that WMO graph from 1999, has been rebuilt. I’m doing this because I believe in science! Nothing, I repeat nothing, can be more important than discussing “hide the decline”. Indeed, I would as far as stating that nothing else matters until this issue has gotten a satisfactory resolution. Until then, all climate science is meaningless and should be ignored.
Ony then can we go on to discuss other importan questions, such as the effect of underwater volcanoes and the iron core sun.

Eco-Nazis - yes that is what they are!

Eco-Nazi tree huggers in action! This tree swastika in Brandenburg was probaly planted in the 1930's. Proof that "green is brown!"

There is an excellent article in American Thinker by the renowned historian (or maybe journalist) Mark Musser that reveals The Nazi Origins of Apocalyptic Global Warming Theory! Musser reveals that one of the pioneers in catastrophic global warming theory was Guenther Schwab(1902-2006), an Austrian Nazi just like Hitler! Schwab wrote a fictional novel in 1958 with the title "Dance with the Devil" where he warned about imagined environmental disasters such as global warming. This was almost 50 years before Al’Gore invented the Apocalyptic Global Warming Theory in his movie “An Inconvenient Truth”. As I see it, Al’Gore simply copied the Nazi-ideas of Nazi-Schwab.
James Delingpole, who has never been afraid to call the eco-fascists by their right name, comments:

You’ll note from that “whoulda thunk?” that I am not altogether surprised by the Nazi connections with the green movement and AGW theory. That’s because, during my research for Watermelons, I discovered how intimately they were bound. The Nazi obsession with “Blut und Boden” (”Blood and Soil”) and the quest for Lebensraum did not die with Hitler in his bunker in 1945: in only slightly changed form they continue to permeate green ideology, in everything from the worship of all things “organic” and the rejection of GM, artificial fertilisers, chemicals (and all the other hideous methods by which we keep the Third World from starving) to the fixation held by so many environmentalists from the Prince of Wales to John Holdren that there simply isn’t enough space on the earth to house and feed us all and that something must be done about population. (The only real difference between the Thirties Nazis and their modern eco counterparts is that they were a bit more honest as to exactly HOW they were going to deal with this population “problem”).

Precisely! Let us also remember that Hitler was a vegetarian, just like many of the present-day environmentalists. And he had dogs. Indeed, the Nazis were very fond of animals.
Hence, people that are concerned about consequences of using pesticides and fertilizers and about over-population, and people that like nature and animals and eat vegetables, are all Nazi!

If it walks like a Nazi and if it quacks like a Nazi then it is a Nazi – that’s my motto!

Obviously, this motto should be used with care. There are some things which the Nazis liked or did which do not implicate Nazism.

For instance beer! On November 8 , 1923, Hitler tried to stage a Nazi revolt in a Munich beer hall. The revolt failed, and Hitler was sent to prison where he went on to write “Mein Kampf”. Of course, it would be ridiculous to claim that people who drink beer are Nazis just because the Nazi’s liked beer.

Hitler built the Autobahn, a superior system of freeways that are still being used today. He also designed the Volkswagen, a car that every German should be able to afford. Yet, it would be ridiculous to claim that people that drive cars on freeways are Nazis!

The Nazis were very fond of weapons – hardly a surprise as they started World War II. But one can admire the beauty of weapons (personally, I like to collect Lugers) without being a Nazi. One can spend the weekends at the firing range without being a Nazi.

Finally, there is the contentious issue of torture. Yes, the Nazis used torture against their prisoners, and there are situations were torture is unethical – I’m the first to admit that. But sometimes torture can be justified in the defense of democracy. For instance, suppose that a group of Nazi terrorists had hidden an atomic bomb somewhere in New York, and that torturing them was the only way to get information about where the bomb was and the code needed to disarm it. In that case, torture would not be the Nazi thing to do, but on the contrary it would be an anti-Nazi act as it would stop the evil Nazi plans. In addition, the situation today is different from the situation in Nazi-Germany - in the latter, there were no Islamic terrorists!

Remember: green is brown!

Josh about anthropogenic and natural CO2

Over at James Delingpole's excellent science blog I found this fantastic cartoon by "Josh" (the guy who did the T-shirt that professor Curry was awarded at the Lisbon reconciliation meeting) explaining why human CO2 emissions are insignificant.

For the record, "Sir Paul" in the cartoon is the man who forced Delingpole to have intellectual intercourse in a BBC show about global warming. Sir Paul clearly didn't know who he was messing with!

Humungous US Funding of Evil and Corrupt IPCC Will Be Stopped!

Stop the flow of money into the deep pockets of these guys (al'Gore and Pachauri)!

The US House of Representatives has voted with the figures 244 for and 179 votes against to stop funding the monumentally corrupt and thoroughly evil organization IPCC!
The US has been paying the enormous sum of $2.3 million millions, or $2.3 trillions, every year to the monstrous bureaucracy of the IPCC. This is roughly 1/6th of the entire US GDP, or 4 times the US military budget. These huge amounts have forced the US to borrow large sums from China, and the money has gone to an organization hell-bent on destroying the Western way of life. An organization fraught with waste and abuse, which cannot get even the most basic figures right (remember Himalaya-gate).
I have already warned about the danger of letting policy be influenced by science. Politicians are gullible and easily manipulated by scientists with a hidden and sinister agenda and an insatiable hunger for more and more grant money (or worse: the politicians themselves are part of the scam, like al’Gore). Finally, the House of Representatives has put down its foot. We can only hope that the Senate follows suit. Then we might finally end the reign of terror of the IPCC.
I will end this post with the immortal words of Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-Missouri):

Scientists manipulated climate data, suppressed legitimate arguments in peer-reviewed journals, and researchers were asked to destroy emails, so that a small number of climate alarmists could continue to advance their environmental agenda.
….
Mr. Chairman, if the families in my district have been able to tighten their belts, surely the federal government can do the same and stop funding an organization that is fraught with waste and abuse. My amendment simply says that no funds in this bill can go to the IPCC. This would save taxpayers millions of dollars this year and millions of dollars in years to come. In fact, the President has requested an additional $13 million in his fiscal 2012 budget request.
My constituents should not have to continue to foot the bill for an organization to keep producing corrupt findings that can be used as justification to impose a massive new energy tax on every American.

Corruptisima re publica plurimae leges

The Trickery Tricks of the Team

There is no end to the tricks, deceits and duplicity of the Team when they are out to protect their lavish funding and to keep any critique against their incompetent frauds and tricks out of the scientific literature. We have recently seen two events where the typical pattern emerges.

First we have the reconciliatory meeting in lovely Lisbon, attended among other by the indomitable Steve McIntyre and the great peacemaker Judith Curry. The latter was very pleased to be awarded a T-shirt depicting a garbage can with "Climate Science" written on it:

But nobody from the Team turned up to this reconciliatory meeting intended to create friendship, understanding, trust, openness, confidence, good faith, mutual respect and appreciation and peaceful harmony between the different sides of the climate controversy. The Team had also used their powers of intimidation to prevent other climate researchers from attending. Yes, the Team returned this noble offer of peace and forgiveness, this olive branch from the innocent to the wicked, with a slap in the face. But it doesn’t stop there. Gavin Schmidt, the evil arch genius, declined by an email in which he very cleverly pretended to say that “the science is settled.” In an act of the noblest reconciliatory spirit and greatest openness and transparency, one of the organizers, the distinguished climate realist blogger Tallbloke, showed this email to Fred Pearce, who wrote about it in New Scientist. So far no surprises. But then Gavin Schmidt started screaming like a donkey when somebody steps on its toes, and claimed that he had said no such thing. And indeed, if one carefully reads Schmidt’s duplicitous response, he does not say so explicitly. It is rather hinted between the lines; this trick is apparent to any skillful interpreter of interpretations. Obviously, this was a trap set by Schmidt to make Tallbloke look stupid and dishonest. A most disgraceful act by Schmidt! A trick! A trick!

Then we have the sordid affair with the paper by O’Donnell, Condon and McIntyre which proved that the infamous paper about Antarctic warming was wrong. They used better methods and demonstrated that the alleged warming had a somewhat different pattern. This affair is becoming as great as Climategate:

• One of the reviewers was Eric Steig, notorious team member and first author of the paper that was being criticized. He used his position as reviewer to delay the publication of the article by coming with a lot of objections and recommendations. As expert interpreter of interpretations and peer review process authority James Delingpole writes: 'Even in the monstrously corrupt world of “climate science” this was clearly a breach of protocol. Certainly, in no other scientific discipline would a reviewer with such a clear conflict of interest be invited to review a paper whose main purpose was to criticise one he’d written himself.'
• In his first review, Steig wrote 88 pages of objections, while the original paper had only 8 pages! This is utter madness!
• Steig also made it appear as if his three reviews were in total 88 pages long, when in reality he wrote only 24 pages, and O’Donnell, Condon and McIntyre wrote 64 pages in responses. Normally, a review for a scientific journal is a few lines (I have heard). Like “Good job, old boy”. Blog science is much superior: one can get hundreds of well-informed comments in just a couple of days. And their original submission was 45 pages (not 8). Shame on you, Steig! A trick! 
• Steig suggested in his reviews that O’Donnell, Condon and McIntyre should use a method (iridge) which he later criticized in a blog post. Well, at least he didn’t sufficiently warn them against the dangers of using such a method. It is clear that Steig planned this so he could ciriticize the paper.Shame on you again, Steig! A trick!
• Finally, when O’Donnell in a reconciliatory spirit published the reviews and revealed that Steig was “Reviewer A” (as the latter had stupidly admitted it in a private exchange), he gets criticized for breaking the confidentiality of the review process. Are they not ashamed to try to hide their clandestine behavior behind a questionable notion of “confidentiality”? And then the Team tries to use this against O’Donnell! How dare they insinuate that O’Donnell has behaved disgracefully? What bottomless hypocrisy! What a nasty, evil trick!

It is obvious that Steig did everything he could to delay and corrupt the article by O’Donnell, Condon and McIntyre. This proves that the peer review system has been corrupted by the Team! But we climate realists must continue to strive for reconciliation which these duplicitous fools and trickery knaves! They spin and spin and trick and trick and the mad dance of the Team never ends! Mark my words: this is the final nail into the rotten coffin of the climate fraud!

Update: I just came up with the following excellent counter-argument to the claim that O'Donnell behaved unethically when he exposed Steig as Reviewer A. Imagine that islamic terrorists have hidden an atomic bomb in New York. They have revealed the location of the bomb and the code needed to disarm it in a review of one of your papers. You have previously told them that you will not expose their identity. What would you do? Respect "the confidentiality of the reviewing process" and do nothing and let millions of people die? Or tell the FBI about the location and code, and the identity of the evil terrorists? The global warming alarmists who support Steig would apparently have done the former. After all, to them nothing is more important than "the confidentiality of the reviewing process". To a true patriot, like O'Donnell and Jack Bauer, the second course of action would be obvious!

Delingpole Victim of Forced Intellectual Intercourse

The Guardian reports about the next episode of the BBC TV show Horizon: Science Under Attack, in which the president of the Royal Society Sir Paul Nurse was supposed to interview the intrepid Telegraph journalist James Delingpole (picture), one of the world's most distinguished blog-experts on Climate Change alongside with Anthony Watts and myself. However, the interview turned into an intellectual rape when Nurse used his scientific weight to bear on Delingpole. Nurse, a Nobel Prize winner, asked Delingpole the following loaded question:

If a dear relative was suffering from a fatal disease, would you opt for the "consensus" treatment recommended by doctors, or advice to drink more orange juice offered by a fringe maverick quack?

Whereupon the poor James was speechless. This question was absolutely disgraceful! The BBC should be ashamed of themselves. They are trying to insinuate that a global warming realist is equivalent to a juice quack! A more relevant question would have been:

If a dear relative was suffering from a fatal disease, would you opt for the "consensus" treatment recommended by eco-fascist grant-grabbing bedwetting doctors hellbent on destroying Western civilisation, or advice to drink more orange juice offered by a British Lord who has already found a cure for HIV, MS and the Common Cold?

Shame on the BBC for exposing poor innocent James Delingpole to such massive cerebral abuse. He is just an innocent journalist who doesn't read scientific papers! They should have pitted him against somebody like George Moonbat instead.

In cauda venenum.

Advanced statistics with percent

The alarmists claim that there is a consensus among scientists. Therefore, they always have to agree with each other. Nobody is allowed to have any opinions that diverge from what is commonly believed. Therefore, you never find any interesting discussions or lively and informed arguments among the warmists. They all just adhere to the IPCC dogma. They believe that disagreement is a sign of weakness, or heresy, and need to be suppressed at any cost.
Not so among us climate realists. We know the value of a critical discourse. We know that by criticizing each other and scrutinizing each other’s arguments, we can eventually get closer to the truth (and not surprisingly, we often find it where we thought it was to begin with). If we are proven to be wrong, we are not afraid to admit it, because we have intellectual integrity.
Dennis Ambler from the Science and Public Policy Institute, one of the world's leading centres for blog science, has recently released a report with the witty title Climate "Consensus" Opiate, The 97% Solution which criticizes the infamous and fraudulent paper by Doran and Zimmerman, two infamous ad-hominem activists, which spuriously claimed to prove that there was a consensus about global warming. They did so by a survey sent out to 10,157 scientists and got 3,146 responses. Among those, they arbitrarily classified 77 as “climate science specialists” (e.g. faithful).

The second question in the survey was:

2. Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?

The SPPI comments:

This is the classic closed question, in that it implies mean global temperatures are being changed and someone must be responsible.
The response to this question was 75 specialists out of 77, so here we have our massive 97%.
It is disingenuous to now use the “climate scientists” as a new population sample size. The response figure of 3,146 is the figure against which the 75 out of 77 should be compared and in this case we get not 97% but just 2.38%.
The original number contacted was 10,157 and of those, 69% decided they didn’t want any part of it, but they were the original target population. When the figure of 75 believers is set against that number, we get a mere 0.73% of the scientists they contacted who agreed with their loaded questions. However a headline of “0.73% of climate scientists think that humans are affecting the climate” doesn’t quite have the same ring as 97% does it?

Percentages is one of the most complex parts of statistics, and it is quite easy for a person without proper statistical training to make mistakes. I’m afraid that my friends from SPPI have made one. They should have consulted somebody with expertise in statistics, like myself of Edward Wegman, to check their calculations. This is the problem in their calculations. They say that 75 climate scientists answered yes, and they say that 10,157 scientists were asked. 75 out of 10,157 gives 0.73%. But the climate scientists are not the same as all scientists. We need to know what all the other proper scientists answered as well, before we can calculate what percentage of them answered yes. If we read a bit further in the SPPI report, we find the number 82% for all proper scientists. This would indicate that 2759.72 scientists answered yes. One of them was apparently only 0.72 sure.
Most alarmists are completely mathematically illiterate, so they will not notice this little and innocent blunder. Nor would they understand it if somebody would point it out to them. Nonetheless, they would gleefully revel in this minor mistake if it came to their attention, and they would use it in their propaganda to divert attention from their own grotesque errors and frauds. They may even try to claim that this innocent little mistake constitute fraud (yes, they certainly can sink so low). Therefore, we should always strive to keep the highest possible standards in our blog science, and we should consult the best experts in statistics.
Thanks to blog science, this minor problem was discovered and corrected in a month from the release of the report. Blog science has once more proven its superiority.

Ab amicis honesta petamus.