Did people lie about the "hockey stick"?

Question

The National Academy of Sciences studied the issue for months, and issued a report that said it was basically correct. They did criticize the presentation of the graph, saying it had been overly "smoothed".

Since then, it's been duplicated by scientists many times, although it looks just a little different, since it's not so smoothed.

http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Image:1000_Year_Temperature_Comparison_png

Answer 1

I'm not sure "lie" is the correct term, because I think they actually believe that the 'hockey stick' was a case of scientists with an agenda manipulating the data.

Of course, those of us who have read the NAS analysis of the study and examined subsequent temperature reconstructions know that it was largely accurate, and that criticisms of the Mann et. al methodology were largely unfounded (as discussed in the link below).

But those who desperately want to disbelieve AGW tend to ignore that kind of information.  Plausible deniability, false claims, but not necessarily lying.

Answer 2

Bob the central core of every argument or dissertation put forth by the alarmists is the same one put forth in the bible of the National Socialist New Left that clearly states a policy that denies the existence of 99.9% of humanities physical and material resources. This book called “The Limits to Growth” published and funded by group of billionaire elitists called the club of Rome makes the false assumption that we as a race have already discovered and are consuming every possible resource that is in existence and when we finish consuming them there will be no more forever.

This report was written by and funded by people with small minds and limited knowledge of the world and the solar system. It is a group of inbred blue blooded morons that because they have inherited great riches from their grandfathers and a staff to manage them for them they are like gods in their glory directing the fate of the whole planet and all that live on it. In all truth the world and its people would be much better off if all these blue blooded parasites would just stop breeding and die off like Darwin predicted they should.

Right over our heads in near space we have access to ten times the resources we can mine on the earth. And if we go past Mars to the asteroid belt and the moos and rings of Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune there we will be able to access a million times what we have on earth. In orbit around Saturn alone is up to 10 times the amount of water to be found on Earth in nice handy frozen chunks ready for transport. The asteroid that passed between the earth and moon a dew years back and scared the liberals out of their skins contained more high quality nickel iron than we have mined on earth since we discovered the use of it 3,000 years ago.

Alarmists deny the plenty that surrounds us in the new frontier and like their predecessors before Columbus deny the riches to be found out there just a step over our heads. But then it always has been the skeptics who deny the existence of limits that have explored new frontiers and opened things up so the cowardly can follow and steal it away from the productive.

The limits to growth of the head in the sand alarmists who would deny the human race its future of plenty so they can hog what’s here for themselves.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limits_to_G...

A link about the future and the new frontier of plenty for all of humanity if they will only reach out and work for it.

http://www.nss.org/settlement/ColoniesIn...

How to reach this dream vote for any party except the democrats and the greens this year for all offices. Throw the Luddite bums out and maybe the world can be saved for future generations!

Answer 3

Considering that when you look at the graph on your wiki site it shows a variance of 0.6 degrees between the highest temperature point and the lowest temperature point (+0.4 to -0.2) at the current global temperature.  That is something to question.  It also calls into question the fact that the IPCC claims we are 0.6 degrees warmer and the highest temperature point on this chart only claims 0.4.

Mann's chart has been debunked and only true alarmists keep bringing it up.  So the next time you claim that a skeptic should not keep bringing up information that you claim has been debunked "a million times", remember this question.

Also, the link posted by Dana only shows back to the year 1400.  This is the time we were already in the Little Ice Age.  Why is Tamino trying to debunk criticism of Mann's hockey stick graph and only goes back to the year 1400?  Why doesn't Mann's graph  goes back to the year 1,000?  Seems like a little case of persuasion through manipulation.  If Tamino takes it back a few hundred years, to the year 1,000, it will show how it was much warmer during those previous 400 years.  Tamino should make his chart include the previous 400 years.

Answer 4

The key objection is that precise satellite and less than precise instrument data on the right is appended to rough proxy estimates on the left.

When you include the uncertainty estimates and eliminate the smoothing, like the graph from "The evolution of climate over the last millennium", all of a sudden things don't look so simple.  See:

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=h...

When you compare precise data to precise data, there doesn't seem to be much correlation between CO2 and global temps, at least over the last ten years:

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=h...

And finally, at a larger scale, our current ice age cycle doesn't appear to be any different from past cycles:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Vosto...

The issue of smoothing is actually a big deal.  Because past swings of 0.4C makes the current uptick seem not unusual.

That is why this issue doesn't resonate with anyone outside the field.  No one is going to live in huts, on the edge of starvation, watching their children die before age five on the basis of data like this.

The cigarette smoking/lung cancer link is as solid a correlation as you will ever find -- and it still doesn't scare people enough to stop smoking.

Answer 5

Bob, it looks like fly p**p in a pepper pile.  

Answer 6

I wouldn't call it a lie, because as far as I know they didn't present any false data.  As I understand it, the only thing that has been disputed is the scale of the graph, which makes it appear somewhat more dramatic.

Answer 7

Of course they didn't lie.

http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record...

"The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1,000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence"

National Academy of Sciences