July 14, 2006
Climate Con
Climate consensus? A report commissioned by the House Energy Committee, due to be released today, refutes the "hockey stick" as being a small slice of available data. The WSJ Ed Page calls it WSJ.com - Hockey Stick Hokum (Paid link, sorry!)
It is routine these days to read in newspapers or hear -- almost anywhere the subject of climate change comes up -- that the 1990s were the "warmest decade in a millennium" and that 1998 was the warmest year in the last 1,000.This assertion has become so accepted that it is often recited without qualification, and even without giving a source for the "fact." But a report soon to be released by the House Energy and Commerce Committee by three independent statisticians underlines yet again just how shaky this "consensus" view is, and how recent its vintage.
The claim originates from a 1999 paper by paleoclimatologist Michael Mann. Prior to Mr. Mann's work, the accepted view, as embodied in the U.N.'s 1990 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), was that the world had undergone a warming period in the Middle Ages, followed by a mid-millennium cold spell and a subsequent warming period -- the current one. That consensus, as shown in the first of the two IPCC-provided graphs nearby, held that the Medieval warm period was considerably warmer than the present day.
The charge is that they airbrushed away hotter periods in the Middle Ages and focus on just part of the curve. I could show temperatures from December to July and show good warming trend as well.
Inconvenient.