Out here in the most western part of La La Land, they are all agog over Earth Day — with lots o’ Gaia lovin’ goin’ on and such.

SMC is also hosting an Earth Day Festival on Earth Day, April 22. There will be an open mic, performance art, vegetarian food and drinks, as well as educational activities. The educational activities will include a game show wheel, treasure hunt, eco-themed music, art, and a raffle for eco-prizes.

Poster contests, awards ceremonies . . . be still my fluttering heart — not! From a link over at Jammie Wearing Fool comes the story of how big business has jumped on the GREEN bandwagon and is particularly slick at fleecing these go-green fanatics of their filthy-hard-earned lucre:

Josephson’s gung-ho green attitude is echoed by millions of others willing to pay extra for everything from green coffee to eco-friendly coffins. Overall spending in the green marketplace is tough to measure because there are so many products and so many terms that fit the description. Yet, sales in the healthy product market, which includes green products as well as those promoting personal health or benefiting the environment, totaled $722 billion in 2009, up 41% from 2004, according to Mintel International Group. The market is expected to hit $992 billion by 2014.

More than half of consumers say they would pay more for a product if they knew it was better for the environment, according to a national poll conducted this month by ad agency Venables Bell & Partners.

Yet, some of the spending is misplaced: Overhyped and overpriced enviro-friendly impostors share shelves with the truly planet- and human-friendly products. Misleading claims are so rampant, there is actually a term for it: greenwashing.

Of course it just wouldn’t be Earth Day without the LA Times printing an eleventh-hour-wild-assertion-filled opinion piece about how Global Warming is going to kill us all:

According to the NASA data, we have just experienced the hottest 12-month period in more than 100 years, which means that the past 12 months have been the hottest in at least the past 1,000 years.

What does this mean? Well, if global temperatures continue to rise at the rate that they have risen for the past generation, then the world of 2100 will see a world 4.1 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than the world of the 1970s. New York will get the climate of Washington. Los Angeles will get the climate of Tijuana.

But global warming might accelerate, especially if China, India and other industrializing powers continue to increase the amount of carbon dioxide they pour out. Perhaps the world by 2100 will be 9 degrees hotter than the world of the 1970s. That would give Washington the climate of Miami and Los Angeles the climate of Cabo San Lucas.

So, what’s this U.C. Berkeley economics professor’s solution? Why, “a climate council made up of the seven governments that have the biggest power to influence the climate and the most at stake: the United States and the European Union, along with Japan, China, India, Indonesia and Brazil” of course.

He even acknowledges that this is essentially an impossibility:

Utopian? Yes. Impractical? Probably. But what is the practical and realistic alternative that it would be better to push for?

Uh . . . like, look at the overall climate record of this grand ol’ planet — glaciation, non-glaciation, over and over again and realize that we humans just don’t have all that much influence on global climate.

Then again, when you are talking a religion, not a science, faith trumps reason. That’s why these guys castigate any conflicting opinions and brand those that disagree as global-warming-denying heretics.

For those on the other side, our eyes are a bit more open. There’s a Climate Change Believer descriptor for ya: Eyes wide shut! LOL!!!

Go out and love ya some Earth today in a very special way . . . ask for both paper AND plastic and watch a greenie’s head explode — I double-dog dare ya!

My category for these posts is “Global Warming B.S.”, but baloney is just as appropriate a term. There has been so much of it piling up for the last few decades that we could eat Global Warming sandwiches for eons and still not make a dent in it. However, if that be your culinary jones, better get as much as you can ’cause the Anthropogenic Global Warming movement is unraveling faster than an ol’ sweater left with a pack o’ cats — or somethin’ like that!

Yesterday, in Britain’s Mail Online we find out that Climate Scientist and Climategate-email-participant Professor Phil Jones is a really lousy records keeper, possibly if not probably has lost the original data records that were used for the infamous Hockey Stick graph, not to mention — but I’ll do that anyway — he concedes that there probably hasn’t been any statistically significant warming in the last decade and a half. What’s up with that?

Asked about whether he lost track of data, Professor Jones said: ‘There is some truth in that. We do have a trail of where the weather stations have come from but it’s probably not as good as it should be.

‘There’s a continual updating of the dataset. Keeping track of everything is difficult. Some countries will do lots of checking on their data then issue improved data, so it can be very difficult. We have improved but we have to improve more.’

He also agreed that there had been two periods which experienced similar warming, from 1910 to 1940 and from 1975 to 1998, but said these could be explained by natural phenomena whereas more recent warming could not.

He further admitted that in the last 15 years there had been no ‘statistically significant’ warming, although he argued this was a blip rather than the long-term trend.

And he said that the debate over whether the world could have been even warmer than now during the medieval period, when there is evidence of high temperatures in northern countries, was far from settled.

Don’t ya just LUV it when those that have been screaming for over a decade that the science of man-caused Global Warming is settled, that there is a scientific consensus devoid of rational dissent on the issue, that Global Warming deniers are as loony as Holocaust deniers finally have to pull their heads out of their asses, breath some real non-global-warmed air and admit that, well . . . maybe the science isn’t really settled after all. Hate to break it to them poor, misunderstood Global Warming Hysterics, but when you find yourself caught in a shit storm, the stuff just keeps flyin’ at ya! Like this for instance:

“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.
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The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.

These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.

Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa, and the American states of California and Alabama.

“The story is the same for each one,” he said. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”

Uh, yeah! Let’s keep the weather stations where we collect temperature data to support our religion theory of man-caused Global Warming next to heat sources and on heat-generating land fills. That’ll teach them pesky deniers to doubt that Gaia’s having a big-time mankind-caused hot flash! Over at Hot Air Ed Morrissey comments:

These revelations come on top of a series of embarrassing disclosures about the IPCC report. Another research team at Loughborough University may expose even more. Terry Wills will publish a paper in Climatic Change that will argue that the IPCC misread its data, and that the temperature fluctuations it saw are just as likely to be random weather than any systemic trend, whether caused by greenhouse gases or not.

The struts have begun to collapse under AGW hysteria.

Michelle Malkin has a great roundup of information and sources and ends her post with this, “Eco-hysteria doesn’t deliver world peace. It threatens it.” The Anchoress has needs, and a request that I totally agree with:

I want me freaking incandescent bulbs back, and I want them now. And I want the space program refunded with all this global warming hoo-hah money.

Stop the man-caused Global Warming nonsense NOW! Can we do that”

Yes, we can!

Did I really just write that?

Sheesh!

Walter Russell Mead at The American Interest Online site writes in The Death Of Global Warming:

The global warming movement as we have known it is dead. Its health had been in steady decline during the last year as the once robust hopes for a strong and legally binding treaty to be agreed upon at the Copenhagen Summit faded away. By the time that summit opened, campaigners were reduced to hoping for a ‘politically binding’ agreement to be agreed that would set the stage for the rapid adoption of the legally binding treaty. After the failure of the summit to agree to even that much, the movement went into a rapid decline.

The movement died from two causes: bad science and bad politics.

After years in which global warming activists had lectured everyone about the overwhelming nature of the scientific evidence, it turned out that the most prestigious agencies in the global warming movement were breaking laws, hiding data, and making inflated, bogus claims resting on, in some cases, no scientific basis at all. {,,,}

Mead isn’t a denier, in fact he seems to strongly believed in AGW, but is facing the reality that Al Gore and the Holy Order Of Global Warming Hysteria blew it big time. “Bad science and bad politics” indeed. Mead follows up that one with one today about the Liberal Media’s total lack of coverage of the collapse of AGW due to all that bad data, manipulated data, false data and cover-ups galore.

Readers of The New York Times have no idea that any of this is happening (although this story in today’s paper hints that President Obama is retreating from the goal of a comprehensive climate bill). Those who get their news from the three old news networks haven’t heard about it. It’s likely that even key members of the Obama administration haven’t realized the full dimensions of the problem they face.

The word here is denial: there’s too much intellectual, political and moral energy invested in the climate change movement for liberals to pay attention to the dots, much less to connect up the whole dismaying picture. It looks very much as if reporters or (more likely) editors were so invested in climate change that they assumed that the initial charges were less consequential than they have turned out to be. They therefore failed to understand the effect of the cascading charges and revelations on American politics. Skeptics up, Obama down, cap-and-trade dead. Since they couldn’t see that, they failed to think through the consequences of cap and trade’s death for the global climate change process.

One lesson from this: the secret weapon of American conservatives is the liberal media. Had American liberals known what was coming, they could have taken some steps to limit the damage. But they didn’t see it coming because the media they rely on lacks the insight and the instincts to recognize a major story in time.

It’s fun when even the Looney Left is starting to “get it”! To all you AGW hysterics out there — Anthropogenic Global Warming Is DEAD! Crap & Tax is a FARCE.

Deal with it . . .

[H/t: Ace -- don't miss the Puppeh Cam!]

This broke yesterday, just in case you missed it. Seems like those dire “Scientific” predictions that the Himalayan glaciers are all gonna melt away due to Global Warming were a bit less than scientific, in fact, this bombshell that has fueled the Global Warming hysteria for years was based upon a short phone call to an obscure Indian scientist who was speculating out his ass because there had been NO formal research done to back up said speculation!

Say what? From the UK’s Times Online:

A WARNING that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it.

Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world’s glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.

In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC’s 2007 report.

It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.
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Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was “speculation” and was not supported by any formal research. If confirmed it would be one of the most serious failures yet seen in climate research. The IPCC was set up precisely to ensure that world leaders had the best possible scientific advice on climate change.

Professor Murari Lal, who oversaw the chapter on glaciers in the IPCC report, said he would recommend that the claim about glaciers be dropped:

Go read it all. Ain’t it grand that our Obamessiah and his HarryPelosi lawmakers want to followup Obamacare with Cap & trade Crap & Tax legislation to tax the livin’ bejeesus out of all of us to stop the Global Warming that ALL, most, some, a few, well, maybe one or two, real-live-actual climate scientists actually, really, well maybe just a little bit believe.

Mostly they are just trying to keep that Global Warming grant money rolling in. Ol’ Big Al Gore just wants you to buy his Carbon Offsets so that he can light up that big ol’ mansion of his.

BTW — it’s balls off the brass monkey freezin’ in Boston. That won’t stop the Brown voters! Maybe we’re gonna get a pass on both Obamacare and Crap & Tax?

Go Scott Brown!

I’ve taken some time off from blogging to do a slew of dinners, including roasting two ducks and last night preparing an abbreviated version of Thanksgiving dinner — call me dog tired!!! I’m also enjoying Glenn Beck’s book, Arguing With Idiots plus trying to catch up on work — now, that’s something to be thankful for — Oh, ya betcha!

Our Obamessiah, er, uh President, is back from Hawaii, reluctantly it seems, so with him getting back to work making our lives more complicated and expensive, I might as well get back to this.

On the Global Warming front, it’s being estimated that this winter might be the worst in a quarter of a century, over in Iowa the field of dreams might need some diggin’ out as they are having temps 30 degrees below normal, ice is slowing energy production at a New Jersey nuclear power plant, good ol’ Miami, Florida is having their coldest winter in a decade.

It’s not just in this hemisphere either. Seoul, Korea is having the most snow they’ve seen in 70 years, while China shivering like they havent’ for the past 40 years.

Must be all that Global Warming, huh Al?

OK — well, at least it’s a start . . . wishing all a wonderful 2010!

The only thing worse than gettin’ your tit caught in the wringer, is gettin’ both tits caught in the wringer. If you thought that Climategate was going to be bad news for the anthropogenic global warming hysterics, check out this news from a Russian economics institute:

Climategate has already affected Russia. On Tuesday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data.

The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming theory.

Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country’s territory, and that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports.

Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations.

The data of stations located in areas not listed in the Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature UK (HadCRUT) survey often does not show any substantial warming in the late 20th century and the early 21st century.

The HadCRUT database includes specific stations providing incomplete data and highlighting the global-warming process, rather than stations facilitating uninterrupted observations.

On the whole, climatologists use the incomplete findings of meteorological stations far more often than those providing complete observations.

IEA analysts say climatologists use the data of stations located in large populated centers that are influenced by the urban-warming effect more frequently than the correct data of remote stations.

The scale of global warming was exaggerated due to temperature distortions for Russia accounting for 12.5% of the world’s land mass. The IEA said it was necessary to recalculate all global-temperature data in order to assess the scale of such exaggeration. [Emph: mine]

OK, let’s recap:
Climate-change-”believing” scientists cherry picked data from the 25% of the Russian meteorological stations and observatories that support their claims of global warming and totally ignored the data from the 40% that showed no warming for the last 100+ years. They also chose to use data from sources that were incomplete rather than those that supplied “uninterrupted observations”, once again because the interrupted data sets show warming while the contiguous ones do not.

Wow — Sounds like science fiction, not science.

Actually, to me it sounds like collusion and corruption and global fraud. Isn’t there a RICO act provision to use against these criminals? Not that the Obamanaughts would ever . . .

But hey, just askin’.

Hmmm, badly written computer code. Self-confessed very badly written computer code at that! Now, after watching this:

Is the world REALLY willing to spend hundreds of billions, or even trillions on Climate Change?

Is it reasonable, rational or even remotely moral to bet whole economies on models derived from software created by bad programmers?

Just askin’ . . .

“Fudge factor” — LOL

At the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research there’s a recap of Kenneth P. Greens’ Nov. 10, 2009 testimony before the Senate Committee on Finance about global warming issues. Specifically they cover Green’s response to Senator John Kerry’s (D-MA) assertion that “not one peer-reviewed paper contradicts the “consensus” view that greenhouse gas emissions will cause devastating consequences[.]”

Readers of this blog know better, but this is the accepted talking point pushed by the Holy Order of Global Warming Hysteria and its minions — hundreds of which are FREEZING their tookuses (tooki?) off in Copenhagen where all that anthropogenic Global Warming is making standing in line for hours in near-freezing temps interesting. Heh!

But, back to Green. Along with citing numerous peer-reviewed papers calling AGW into question and or calling into question the research leading to the pro AGW positions, he gave Senator Kerry and whoever else bothered to show up for that hearing a little lesson on the potential economic effects of Cap & Trade legislation.

Key Points from Kenneth P. Green On Cap & Trade:

1. Cap-and-trade is an inappropriate mechanism for the control of greenhouse gases. I observed that this was not only my opinion, but also that of the economists who first developed the concept, as well as people like James Hansen, and the organization Earth First!, neither of which are known to dismiss climate change as a problem. I have subsequently learned that Greenpeace also opposes cap-and-trade as a mechanism for controlling greenhouse gases.
2. Cap-and-trade will fail to control carbon emissions because of inevitable corruptions of the scheme in the political process and afterward in trading markets.
3. Cap-and-trade will, however, cap economic growth, as every time the economy grows, we use more energy, which will increase permit prices, eventually stifling growth.
4. Higher energy prices will increase the costs of goods and services, suppressing demand and killing jobs.
5. Higher energy prices will make American industry less competitive, leading to industry flight and more lost jobs, unless we wish to return to the days of tariff-wars and unfree trade.
6. Current cap-and-trade legislation will cause economic winners and losers both regionally and sectorally across the United States, often unjustly transferring money from poorer communities to more wealthy communities.
7. Cap-and-trade will create a new class of poorly understood financial instruments (PUFIs) that risk creating a bubble far larger than the one that recently knocked the economy into a deep recession.
8. By favoring biofuels, cap-and-trade will put a bounty on ecosystems and lead to massive conversion of forests and prairies into biofuel plantations.
9. The idea that current legislation can be described as a “jobs bill” is ludicrous. One hundred and fifty years of economics tells us that governments do not create jobs, they just move them around, invariably killing more than they create.

From the revealed secret deals that were leaked last week in Copenhagen, to the stated goals of the radical environmentalists all over the globe, to our own Progressive Senators and Representatives it is absolutely crystal clear — Man-Caused Climate Change is nothing but a dangerous bit of political theater designed to scare the masses into giving their governments ever more control of their lives and to accelerate the ever ongoing redistribution of wealth, not just from OUR richer to OUR poorer, but all around the globe.

Except, of course, for those save-the-planet elites that think nothing of jet-setting to far-off places, like Copenhagen, along the way emitting tons and tons of that nasty ol’ carbon into the atmosphere, accelerating the very Global Warming they so decry, if it was actually happening — but hey, they’re doing it to SAVE Mother Gaia, don’t ya know?

Oh, ya betcha! Gaia, and their own filthy little bank balances . . . or big ones.

Now, that’s Progressive!

Not much of a yellow brick road in Denmark these days, and maybe, just maybe, the house has fallen smack on top o’ them assembled Global-Warming-Hysteria Witches. One can dream . . .

In a DailyMail.co.uk Special Investigation Report there is a nice set of graphs that illustrate just how much the famed Hockey Stick Graph — that visual representation of Global-Warming-Doom-&-Gloom used throughout the world to scare the beejeezus out of all of us — was altered by manipulation of the tree-ring data used to extrapolate (guess?) the temperatures before the invention of the thermometer. Yeah, if something was never measured then they gotta guess, I guess.

Of course, when you’re makin’ those educated guesses and they’re bolsterin’ your own conclusions and drivin’ your own agenda like a Nascar ace on crank, it must have been a super downer to have those same data sources turn on ya, show something 180 degrees opposite o’ what you believe — would make ya look like a blitherin’ idiot if you let that one show up on the chart. So — what to do, what to do?

Hmmmm. Just stop that naughty little errant data line where it deviates from expectations and hide the end of it behind some of the others — yeah, that’s the ticket! ‘Hey — gotta save Mother Gaia, don’t ya know?” Yeah, and those million-pound research grants, too.

It’s a long article so you should go and read it all. Here’s some of the red meat to make you hungry for more — besides, you should go if only just to see the graphs!

It is true that, in Watson’s phrase, in the autumn of 1999 Jones and his colleagues were trying to ‘tweak’ a diagram. But it wasn’t just any old diagram.

It was the chart displayed on the first page of the ‘Summary for Policymakers’ of the 2001 IPCC report – the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph that has been endlessly reproduced in everything from newspapers to primary-school textbooks ever since, showing centuries of level or declining temperatures until a dizzying, almost vertical rise in the late 20th Century.

There could be no simpler or more dramatic representation of global warming, and if the origin of worldwide concern over climate change could be traced to a single image, it would be the hockey stick.

Drawing a diagram such as this is far from straightforward.

Gabriel Fahrenheit did not invent the mercury thermometer until 1724, so scientists who want to reconstruct earlier climate history have to use ‘proxy data’ – measurements derived from records such as ice cores, tree-rings and growing season dates.

However, different proxies give very different results.

For example, some suggest that the ‘medieval warm period’, the 350-year era that started around 1000, when red wine grapes flourished in southern England and the Vikings tilled now-frozen farms in Greenland, was considerably warmer than even 1998.

Of course, this is inconvenient to climate change believers because there were no cars or factories pumping out greenhouse gases in 1000AD – yet the Earth still warmed.

Some tree-ring data eliminates the medieval warmth altogether, while others reflect it. In September 1999, Jones’s IPCC colleague Michael Mann of Penn State University in America – who is now also the subject of an official investigation –was working with Jones on the hockey stick. As they debated which data to use, they discussed a long tree-ring analysis carried out by Keith Briffa.

Briffa knew exactly why they wanted it, writing in an email on September 22: ‘I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards “apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more”.’ But his conscience was troubled. ‘In reality the situation is not quite so simple – I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1,000 years ago.’

Another British scientist – Chris Folland of the Met Office’s Hadley Centre – wrote the same day that using Briffa’s data might be awkward, because it suggested the past was too warm. This, he lamented, ‘dilutes the message rather significantly’.

Over the next few days, Briffa, Jones, Folland and Mann emailed each other furiously. Mann was fearful that if Briffa’s trees made the IPCC diagram, ‘the sceptics [would] have a field day casting doubt on our ability to understand the factors that influence these estimates and, thus, can undermine faith [in them] – I don’t think that doubt is scientifically justified, and I’d hate to be the one to have to give it fodder!’

Finally, Briffa changed the way he computed his data and submitted a revised version. This brought his work into line for earlier centuries, and ‘cooled’ them significantly. But alas, it created another, potentially even more serious, problem.

According to his tree rings, the period since 1960 had not seen a steep rise in temperature, as actual temperature readings showed – but a large and steady decline, so calling into question the accuracy of the earlier data derived from tree rings.

This is the context in which, seven

weeks later, Jones presented his ‘trick’ – as simple as it was deceptive.

All he had to do was cut off Briffa’s inconvenient data at the point where the decline started, in 1961, and replace it with actual temperature readings, which showed an increase.

On the hockey stick graph, his line is abruptly terminated – but the end of the line is obscured by the other lines.

‘Any scientist ought to know that you just can’t mix and match proxy and actual data,’ said Philip Stott, emeritus professor of biogeography at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.

‘They’re apples and oranges. Yet that’s exactly what he did.’

Since Warmergate-broke, some of the CRU’s supporters have claimed that Jones and his colleagues made a ‘full disclosure’ of what they did to Briffa’s data in order to produce the hockey stick.

But as McIntyre points out, ‘contrary to claims by various climate scientists, the IPCC Third Assessment Report did not disclose the deletion of the post-1960 values’.

On the final diagram, the cut off was simply concealed by the other lines.

By 2007, when the IPCC produced its fourth report, McIntyre had become aware of the manipulation of the Briffa data and Briffa himself, as shown at the start of this article, continued to have serious qualms.

McIntyre by now was an IPCC ‘reviewer’ and he urged the IPCC not to delete the post-1961 data in its 2007 graph. ‘They refused,’ he said, ‘stating this would be “inappropriate”.’

Of course, the Climate Change Scientists are still up to their old tricks of subterfuge and bullying:

Last week, Michael Schlesinger, Professor of Atmospheric Studies at the University of Illinois, sent a still cruder threat to Andrew Revkin of the New York Times, accusing him of ‘gutter reportage’, and warning: ‘The vibe that I am getting from here, there and everywhere is that your reportage is very worrisome to most climate scientists … I sense that you are about to experience the “Big Cutoff” from those of us who believe we can no longer trust you, me included.’

But in the wake of Warmergate, such threats – and the readiness to bow to them – may become rarer.

‘A year ago, if a reporter called me, all I got was questions about why I’m trying to deny climate change and am threatening the future of the planet,’ said Professor Ross McKitrick of Guelph University near Toronto, a long-time collaborator with McIntyre.

‘Now, I’m getting questions about how they did the hockey stick and the problems with the data.

‘Maybe the emails have started to open people’s eyes.’

One can only hope. Speakin’ o’ Hope — the Obama circus will be in Copenhagen at the end of the week, where the Chosen One will declare that Global Warming will stop — right now dammit! — because, HE says so . . . or something to that effect. Afterwards we all get shafted with zillions of dollars in new carbon taxes and ever more legislation that enables the Federal government to regulate take over the rest of American industry and American energy production.

He did promise to double our energy bills during the campaign — might be the only campaign promise he keeps!

[H/t: Ace]

Iowahawk has deviated from his usual super-snark-parodies to provide a (relatively) simple-to-comprehend layman’s guide to climate-change statistical modeling. The MSM has never done much investigative homework on climate change and have constantly parroted the supposed “scientific consensus” to one and all; obviously it must take super-scientists with super-computers to crunch all those numbers, right? Iowahawk answers:

Au contraire! The climate reconstruction models used by Mann, et al. are relatively simple to derive, don’t take a lot of data points, and don’t require any special or expensive software. In fact, anybody with a decent PC can build a replica at home for free. Here’s how:

I didn’t play along with my Open Office Calc, but I did read through all of it. My head’s kinda spinning right now, but I certainly do get the drift. The graphs representing the analysis are only as good as the data being used to do the modeling. The significance of the Climategate emails and working-data that was released by the hackers for, finally some independent review, is that the climate scientists have been massaging their working data for decades. Their credo: If the data didn’t predict the intended outcome, ie rapidly accelerating temperatures at the end of the 20th Century, then keep working the little suckers until it did just that! Tossing all the original core data into the dustbin of history leaving only the manipulated data for further review was a masterful touch, a veritable scientific touché on the skeptics, so to speak. “Here you climate heretics, just try and prove us wrong now — HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!! Can’t be done! Our Hockey Stick is the most robustest of all Hockey Sticks!”

Oh . . . really? As Iowahawk so deftly puts it:

What you’ll find is that contrary to Mann’s assertion that the hockey stick is “robust,” you’ll find that the reconstructions tend to be sensitive to the data selection. M&M found, for example, that temperature reconstructions for the 1400s were higher or lower than today, depending on whether bristlecone pine tree rings were included in the proxies.

What the leaked emails reveal, among other things, is some of that bit of principal component sausage making. But more disturbing, they reveal that the actual data going into the reconstruction model — the instrumental temperature data and the proxy variables themselves — were rife for manipulation. In the laughable euphemism of Philip Jones, “value added homogenized data.” The data I provided here was the real, value added global temperature and proxy data, because Phil told me so. Trust me!

“[V]alue added homogenized data.” Gotta LUV that one. “Trust me”, indeed.

NOT!

Now, go out there and emit some carbon, lots o’ carbon! I double-dog dare ya!