Why you should debunk the 2012 hoax

[Stella_Omega]

"I have a 7 year old that happened to see a documentary on the history channel that scared him so bad, that he became depressed and often questioned the meaning of life.Like I said above, he is only 7 years old! This nonsense is scaring our children - it must stop immediatly."

http://www.2012hoax.org/

2012 is a hoax. Anyone who insists it's real is either making money off of your gullibility (like the History Channel), or has been duped by some huckster.

 

[TE999]

It's also a lousy movie.

 

[Dragonlipz]

Jeez, this a bigger lump of crap than the millenium nonsense......At least the four digit calender change gave the IT guys a chance to make $100 - $150 bucks an hour resetting computers and updating codes!!!!
If anyone really believes that the world will end on December 21, 2012 then they should start partying now and be ready for the event......come to think of it, that's not bad advice for any time - why waste it on the end of the world????
Drinks are on me.....

 

[DeeZire]

Perhaps it's metaphorical. Perhaps they're referring to Obama's impending departure from the Whitehouse in 2012, which would be the equivalent of the end of the world for some of us.

 

[voluptuary_manque]

Perhaps it's metaphorical. Perhaps they're referring to Obama's impending departure from the Whitehouse in 2012, which would be the equivalent of the end of the world for some of us.

Oh Jeez! No, it's not metaphorical it's media-driven hysteria. Get real.

 

[DeeZire]

Oh Jeez! No, it's not metaphorical it's media-driven hysteria. Get real.

It's metaphorical to me. I don't buy into media-driven hysteria. Well... except for Al Gore's charts and graphs.

So this 2012 thing has gone beyond the National Enquirer level? That's disconcerting. I guess I need to watch some trash TV and get back in the loop.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

So 2012 is a hoax but global warming isn't...interesting.

 

[Stella_Omega]

So 2012 is a hoax but global warming isn't...interesting.

You can't compare fake science with real science.

Well, YOU can.

 

[3113]

So 2012 is a hoax but global warming isn't...interesting.

Hm. You compare something that uses nothing other than speculation of why an ancient calendar of a long gone civilization came to an end on a certain date to scientific theory based on years of current data, detailed facts and the combined knowledge and expertise of climatologists from around the world.

Interesting.

Actually, I take it back. It's not interesting. It's just dumb.

 

[Wyldfire]

I have to agree with Stel here. 2012 is total trash. Only thing true to the whole 2012 thing is that guys young and old want to see the movie just to see the destruction. The eldest of the kids here have compared it to the last Godzilla movie.

 

[lance gt]

It's going to be such a laugh when they finally discover the reason the calendar ended on that date was because they switched to Mac stone from the old PC stone and the two didn't syncronize. Barring some catastrophic impact from space, I'm going to wake up Dec.22 2012, the same way I did on Jan. 1 2000. nothing's going to change and all the crap will stop until the next Irwin Allen event takes place.

 

[Jenny_Jackson]

Actually it's not exactly a hoax. The Mayans had several different calendars based on either 265 day years or 365 day years. The "Long Count Calendar" was based on 365 days and is the particular calendar referenced in the movie.

From "Mesoamerican Archaeoastronomy: A Review of Contemporary Understandings of Prehispanic Astronomic Knowledge

Misinterpretation of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar is the basis for a New Age belief that a cataclysm will take place on December 21, 2012. December 20, 2012 is simply the last day of the 13th b'ak'tun, which began September 18, 1618 (1,728,000 days from the beginning of the calendar).

In other words neither the calendar nor the world ends on December 21st. It's simply the beginning of a new cycle of the calendar.

 

[Stella_Omega]

Actually it's not exactly a hoax. The Mayans had several different calendars based on either 265 day years or 365 day years. The "Long Count Calendar" was based on 365 days and is the particular calendar referenced in the movie.

From "Mesoamerican Archaeoastronomy: A Review of Contemporary Understandings of Prehispanic Astronomic Knowledge



In other words neither the calendar nor the world ends on December 21st. It's simply the beginning of a new cycle of the calendar.

Oh, you spoil everything, you do.

But seriously, while the adults are having their fun-- and raking in the money-- seven to twelve year olds are feeling vulnerable and afraid, feeling that there is nothing they can do, and they might as well die now.

 

[Verdad]

Put me down for "out of the loop". Has this gotten so serious as to actually need debunking? Also, what is the proposed mechanism of the world ending?

 

[Jenny_Jackson]

Oh, you spoil everything, you do.

But seriously, while the adults are having their fun-- and raking in the money-- seven to twelve year olds are feeling vulnerable and afraid, feeling that there is nothing they can do, and they might as well die now.

I'm not sure a little of that isn't good for kids. But the movie sucked ass, had no point other than 2nd rate special effects and a convoluted, stupid plot based on some totally erroneous information.

I put this in the same class as the 2008 version of War of the Worlds. YIKES!

 

[Golden_Silence]

I'm not sure a little of that isn't good for kids. But the movie sucked ass, had no point other than 2nd rate special effects and a convoluted, stupid plot based on some totally erroneous information.

I put this in the same class as the 2008 version of War of the Worlds. YIKES!

Aww fuggit.... I wanted to see the film... Yeah, I'm a special effects junkie

As for the 'date' I have always had an issue with all these theories - if its the 21st December 2012 on the West coast... then surely if the prophecy is true, then Australasia already went down the toilet.

 

[Liar]

So 2012 is a hoax but global warming isn't

Yes.

...interesting.

No.

 

[scotsmitch2001]

of course it is because if you look at the old gregorian calendar and take into account the celtic equinox,the world is going to end on August 21st 2010....bet john cusack is gonna feel really silly then!

 

[oggbashan]

Jezreelites

In Gillingham, Kent, there was a sect who believed that there would be a second coming and prepared by building a tower to house the faithful:

Jezreel's Tower

Throughout the centuries people have being predicting the imminent end of the world. 31 December 1999 was the most popular.

But all those predictions depend on calendars which are faillible human constructs. Depending on which calendar system we use, we are in the 21st century, the 14th century; the 28th century; the xxxxxxth Olympiad etc.

There is no real agreement on the year and date of Jesus' birth. The 25th December was chosen, not at random, but to coincide and replace a heathen festival. The year? Was Jesus born in Zero AD? Or 1 AD? Or even 4 BC which seems impossible. How could he be born four years before Anno Domini?

So a date in 2012 might have already happened, might be hundreds of years in the future, or might be tomorrow.

Place your bets now.

Og

 

[Epmd607]

Has anyone tried to prove 2012 with pseudo science yet? There was that one pseudo economics calculator man who says he can predict human events. Yep, the history channel promoted him to. I think the history channel might be the number one purveyor of pseudo science/history/philosophy since the Catholic Church.

2012 is just a new myth, it isn't an ancient mayan myth, the calendar is theirs, but all the nonsense of end of the world myths around 2012 are fairly recent euro-american creations. A friend of mine that runs Cornell's ask an astronomer page has been interviewed by ABC and the AP about 2012, I think her answers are right on. Cornell's ask an astronomer pages attempt to answer and debunk pretty much all physics and astronomy questions people have. So if you're worried about your kids, don't let them watch history channel, go to http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/

Oh yeah, here's the 2012 link: http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=686

 

[Epmd607]

In Gillingham, Kent, there was a sect who believed that there would be a second coming and prepared by building a tower to house the faithful:

Jezreel's Tower

Throughout the centuries people have being predicting the imminent end of the world. 31 December 1999 was the most popular.

But all those predictions depend on calendars which are faillible human constructs. Depending on which calendar system we use, we are in the 21st century, the 14th century; the 28th century; the xxxxxxth Olympiad etc.

There is no real agreement on the year and date of Jesus' birth. The 25th December was chosen, not at random, but to coincide and replace a heathen festival. The year? Was Jesus born in Zero AD? Or 1 AD? Or even 4 BC which seems impossible. How could he be born four years before Anno Domini?

So a date in 2012 might have already happened, might be hundreds of years in the future, or might be tomorrow.

Place your bets now.

Og

Jehovah's Witnesses say that Jesus returned to the Earth in human form in 1914 and he is still with us invisibly readying the world for the final conflict. The thing is the J Witnesses already were sure that Jesus was going to return a couple times before that, so 1914 was going to be the last time and just to make sure they have him return invisibly.

 

[trysail]

Oh, you spoil everything, you do.

But seriously, while the adults are having their fun-- and raking in the money-- seven to twelve year olds are feeling vulnerable and afraid, feeling that there is nothing they can do, and they might as well die now.

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/get-file.php?report=national&image=timeseries02&byear=2009&bmonth=10&year=2009&month=10&ext=gif&id=110-00

 

[trysail]

Yes.

No.

Steve McIntyre and Richard Lindzen, Ph.D. (Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at M.I.T. ) appear on Finnish TV documentary
[ N.B., This transcript does not include the illustrations ]

Climate catastrophe cancelled
Finnish Broadcasting Co. YLE, TV1, Nov 11th 2009 at 8.00 pm.



Voiceover (VO), reporter Martti Backman: Governments around the world are preparing for a grand climate conference, which should decide how humanity responds to the threat of a climate catastrophe. Negotiations are under way to replace the Kyoto treaty with a new treaty of Copenhagen. The threat is based on assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC. According to the panel, the Earth is going through an unprecedented period of temperature increase, caused by man and his carbon dioxide emissions from burning coal and oil. The Earth’s climate has always been changing. But now we are told that warming is happening faster than ever. The view is based on this figure.


(Picture: The global warming hockey stick graph. Music: Electric organ sounds from an ice-hockey game)

VO: This ten-year-old figure, dubbed as the hockey stick, was meant to revolutionize the dominant view of global climate history. The stick’s handle stretches for almost a thousand years, creating an impression of a steady climate, and its’ rising blade in the late 1900’s is proof of sudden, strong warming, which is caused by man.

According to the older view, climate has naturally varied considerably over the past millennium, and in the middle ages it was clearly warmer than today. But in the hockey stick graph, the Medieval Warm Period and the little ice age after it have disappeared. The hockey stick was promoted to honorary status in the IPCC’s third assessment report’s cover. It became the logo of catastrophic climate change. The stick was used to back up the claim that, 1998 was the warmest year of the millennium.

Steve McIntyre: “At the time I was doing mining exploration business and I just wondered, in the most casual possible way, how they knew that. So that led me start looking at the data and six years later, I’m still doing it”.

VO: The Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre had doubts about the scientific strength of the hockey stick graph, and he decided to unravel the numbers behind it, with the diligence of an auditor. The father of the hockey stick, professor Michael Mann resisted McIntyre’s efforts to get hold of his research data, and it wasn't until 2003 that McIntyre succeeded in getting access to the data.

McIntyre: “It turned out that he had modified a principal components method incorrectly and the modified method produced hockey stick-shaped graphs ninety-nine percent of the time. It also emphasized a class of proxies, strip-bark bristlecone pines that previous authors had said were not actually a temperature proxy”.

VO: Temperature records measured by thermometers are at most 150 years long. Earlier histories have to be reconstructed with so-called proxies, or surrogate thermometers. Past climates are deduced for example from tree rings and lake sediments or varves. The shape of the hockey stick was to a large extent caused by tree rings from a few North American bristlecone pines. McIntyre succeeded in deconstructing the stick. The United States National Academy of Sciences set up a committee to investigate his findings. The committee found that, McIntyre had been right to question the temperature reconstruction and announced that, bristlecone pines should no more be used as proof of climate change.

Steve McIntyre, an outsider in climate science, had succeeded in breaking Mann’s hockey stick, the icon of the climate change movement. But the story was not over. A whole factory started to produce new sticks to replace the broken one.

McIntyre: “There was another class of study, which used a series of tree rings from a scientist called Keith Briffa, from Northern Russia, from a site called Yamal, and this had an even bigger hockey stick-shape than the Michael Mann - hockey stick and this one - has been used in multiple studies as well and so, over the past few years I’ve been trying to get information about how this particular series was constructed”.

VO: Keith Briffa is one of the big names in climate research. He is a professor in the IPCC’s scientific stronghold in Britain, the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. He is also a lead author of the past climate chapters of the IPCC's assessment reports. McIntyre had to fight for three years to get Briffa’s Yamal data under his microscope. But a lot happened before that.

The well-known medieval warmth was disturbing to the scientists close to the IPCC, the so-called hockey team. In the mid 1990’s the American geologist David Deming received an astonishing e-mail, in which one prominent climate researcher announced to his colleagues: Actor’s voice: “We have to get rid of the medieval warm period.”

(Picture of Deming’s written statement from the Senate Environmental committee website)
VO: Deming testified about the e-mail at hearings in the United States congress.

Soon after this e-mail, Keith Briffa published a study, where the millennial temperature history looked like this: (the upper curve appears on screen)



VO: The Briffa study was based on a very limited number of tree ring samples from the so-called Polar Urals region in Siberia. With the help of just three short tree ring series he claimed that the year 1032 in the middle of the balmy middle ages, had been the coldest in the millennium. And the modern period appeared to be very warm. A real hockey stick. A couple of years later, Briffa’s colleague returned to Siberia to drill new tree ring samples. When they were added to Briffa’s original data, the curve looked surprisingly like this: (lower curve appears on screen, the curves merge). The hockey stick had disappeared, and the medieval warm period had been reinstated as warmer than the present.

McIntyre: “Unfortunately, this updated Polar Urals result was never published and Briffa, in his works since 2000, has made no � - reference to this updated study”.

VO: The updated Polar Urals series was forgotten. Instead, Briffa replaced his original weak Polar Urals data in 2000 with new tree ring series drilled from the Yamal peninsula hundreds of kilometers away. With this data, the climate reconstruction looks like this: (lower curve appears).



VO: The blade of the hockey stick rises at the end of the millennium stronger than ever and the medieval warm period is clearly shadowed by it, if not made to vanish completely. Yamal data became the most important temperature proxy for all later hockey sticks, and it was used in at least seven temperature reconstruction studies.

But McIntyre knew something about the construction of hockey sticks, and he could not believe in the Yamal curve. The contradiction to established paleoclimatic knowledge was simply too big.

McIntyre: “And the question is just, why was the Polar Urals update not reported? And if the Yamal series was going to be used rather than Polar Urals, that should have been clearly explained to readers. The criteria for preferring one rather than the other should have been also clearly explained”.

VO: Finnish Lapland lies at the same latitudes as Yamal, and there are plenty of Finnish studies on past climates based on tree rings. These studies are considered to be among the best in the world, for their sample quality as well as methodologically. What kinds of hockey sticks have been found in them?

Kari Mielikainen, professor of forest research (Metla, Finland): “We have this long series going back over 7,000 years, and there’s no hockey stick there.”

VO: Briffa’s Yamal hockey stick was published in the prestigious journal Science. McIntyre asked for a copy of the raw data from Yamal.

McIntyre: “Briffa refused. The editors of Science refused to require Briffa to provide the measurement data.”

VO: It took McIntyre three years to get hold of the data, although one of the most important rules in science is that, raw data should be made available to anybody who is interested in checking and replicating a study.

Finally Briffa made a “mistake”. He published yet another article based on the Yamal data in a journal of the British Royal Society. The prestigious scientific society held on to the principle of data transparency and forced Briffa to make his raw data public. In September this year, the Canadian climate auditor had his forebodings confirmed.

McIntyre: “So after, after sort of, three years of frustration and trying to examine the data that Briffa had used and probably four years of people saying that this data supported the Michael Mann -work on other grounds, it was really quite frustrating to find that it was built up on ten trees that had been not randomly selected”.

VO: So the Yamal data included only ten living trees from the 1990’s, and the rapid growth of these individuals caused the steep rise of the hockey stick blade. In Finnish dendrological studies, hardly anything would be said based on just ten trees. What’s demanded is at least 50 trees for each year, and several other quality criteria as well. How have these criteria been observed in the Yamal data?

Kari Mielikainen (professor of forest research, Finnish Forest Research Institute Metla): “Rather weakly it seems. It looks like there are problems with both cohort structure and also the regional distribution (of the sample).”

VO: McIntyre conducted a simple statistical exercise. He replaced the 10-tree Yamal sample by a larger 34-tree sample collected from the same area. (In this figure) the added material is depicted with the black curve, and the combination of both data sets as a green curve.



VO: The hockey stick blade disappears, or actually turns downwards. And the medieval period is again warmer than the present.

McIntyre: I think that the preferential selection of Yamal, rather than Polar Urals, biases the result that's presented to the public.

VO: All good proxy-based climatic reconstructions should compare the results with adjacently located measurements from thermometers. When this is done in the Yamal area, it emerges that none of the near-by weather stations have recorded warming that would explain the hockey stick graph. In other words, if those ten trees have grown abnormally fast in the 1990’s it is due to something else than heat.

Mielikainen: “If you choose one convenient series just to prove a point, be it a hockey stick or anything, you are definitely on a wrong track.”

VO: Problems with tree ring studies will be addressed next summer in an international scientific congress chaired by Mielikainen in Rovaniemi (Finnish Lapland).

VO: The author of the Yamal reconstruction, Keith Briffa, has disputed the criticism aimed at his study, but it still draws heated debate. Briffa’s employer, the IPCC-affiliated climate research unit CRU maintains a global database of temperature measurements from weather stations. This database is central to the conclusion that global temperatures have risen to a worrying extent during the past 40 years. The CRU has combined thermometer readings into a global average with a method which it refuses to disclose, but which allegedly has brought added value to the raw data. McIntyre has requested the data from CRU director Phil Jones, but he has been turned down, and others as well.

McIntyre: “An Australian named Warwick Hughes had asked for the data and Warwick Hughes had published some articles that had been critical of how the temperature histories had been prepared, and Jones said “Why should I send - we have twenty-five years invested in this, why should I send the data to you when your only objective is to find anything wrong with it?”, which is a very unscientific statement.”

VO: The CRU database is the most important scientific justification for the demands that the most ambitious treaty in mankind’s history should be finalized in Copenhagen in December. In spite of this, there is no way to replicate it's validity.

Recently the CRU director Phil Jones has announced that the original measurement data does not exist anymore because of data storage difficulties.

 

[trysail]

For your consideration and reflection:

I listened to 'Quirks and Quarks' on the CBC yesterday and they had a scientist on about Mt. Kilimanjaro. Kilimanjaro has become the "poster-child" for human-induced global warming, and as I sip my coffee I thought I might touch on it. I hope no-one minds.

The Kilimanjaro glacier (i.e. Furtwangler Glacier) has shrunk 9.8 sq. km since 1880. One of the interesting coincidences of global warming trends is that the industrial age ca. 1850 occurs around the same time as the end of the Little Ice Age (a solar minima). However, it seems very unlikely that the human emissions took 30 years to affect climate, especially since the response of glaciers to climate change is lagged (i.e. it doesn't occur overnight).

So if it isn't human-induced climate change what caused it? Well Kilimanjaro is within 3 degrees of the equator, and it's a stratovolcano, now dormant. But what's in question here is what causes glaciers to retreat and advance--three factors: aridity, solar radiation, and temperature. Temperatures at high altitudes tend to be less dramatic, and are often relatively stable; that`s why tree ring data is best acquired from high altitude trees. In other words, temperature is not as large a factor as sublimation and solar radiation. At Kilimanjaro, 2m high needle-like spires act like compasses pointing to the sun due to sublimation driven by aridity and solar energy.

Drier air causes sublimation. Dry air means less precipitation and glaciers wax and wane based on the precipitation/sublimation ratio (Kaser, G., Hardy, D.R., Molg, T., Bradley, R.S. and Hyera, T.M. 2004. Modern glacier retreat on Kilimanjaro as evidence of climate change: Observations and facts. International Journal of Climatology 24: 329-339. ).


So what caused the drier air? Well maybe not CO2, but possibly still anthropogenic forces--some speculate that denuding of forest around the mountain has cause drier air, but this is just speculation. It's counterintuitive to imagine how increased temperatures can make an area less humid, unless the evapotranspiration process is retarded--plants are essential in regulating humidity (hence the cold nights in deserts--no vapour=no latent heat). THere are well documented examples of how human land use can alter regional humidity by changing vegetation, farming and water transfer (e.g. Lake Chad), which can cause chronic drought (e.g. Australia) and subsequently lead to things like out of control brush fires (e.g. Australia). Note that this is NOT CO2 induced geomorphological response but actual human geomorphological change, the same way a dam alters it`s ecosystem. Either way, the key gas in question here is H2O(v) not CO2. Environmentalists might be better served trying to reclaim the vegetation around Kilimanjaro--an irony that plagues such groups in my opinion: they seek a singular culprit (e.g CO2) for all the Earth`s problems and ignore the very complexity they seem to cling to as the primary aesthetic of Nature. Oops...i didn`t mean to get political there, but I`ll leave it in

Enjoy your day!

 

[Epmd607]

2012? Of course we're talking about anthropogenic global warming.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6908357.ece

Look, I have proof, a massive iceberg is off the coast of Australia. "Oh, EPMD, that's anecdotal, I have real articles written by non-specialists that prove the ozone layer never really existed over the Antarctic."