Words fail me.

[run_silent]

This is an honest question and please leave politics out of it.

When I was a teenager all the science said we were going into an ice age. Now all the science says it's global warming.

Here is the question.

Has it ever been scientifically explained why the science was so wrong back then?

 

[Sean]

When I was a teenager all the science said we were going into an ice age.

NO IT FUCKING DIDN'T.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Good to see the party of small government is as anti-science as ever.
http://www.addictinginfo.org/2013/0...uire-political-approval-of-scientific-papers/

Waitaminnit, now -- that story links to the text of the bill and I don't see the quoted language anywhere in it.

 

[KingOrfeo]

This is an honest question and please leave politics out of it.

When I was a teenager all the science said we were going into an ice age. Now all the science says it's global warming.

Here is the question.

Has it ever been scientifically explained why the science was so wrong back then?

Yeah, sort of.

Hey, remember global cooling? Science was wrong back then, so obviously it's wrong now! Some scientists did argue for "global cooling" back in the '70s, but there never was a consensus and proponents of the hypothesis called for further research, not widespread political action. The primary hyping came from "pop science" publications (i.e. Science News rather than Science). The serious scientists who did argue for it based their theory on a) the cooling effects of ever-increasing amounts of aerosols (which, as we may recall from the "1940-1970 cooling" point above, caused significant cooling during the middle of the century), or b) the natural cycles of glaciation which would lead to an ice age in the next 20,000 years. Point (a) was avoided by clean air acts reducing aerosol production (in other words, a victory for environmentalism), and point (b) obviously has nothing to do with imminent global cooling. Deniers conveniently forget to mention either of these things. In addition to that, the majority of papers published in the 1970s (when the "cooling" phenomenon was hyped) were actually predicting warming.[15][16]

 

[trysail]

If you're actually serious about wanting to know, you're going to have to read Andrew W. Montford's book, The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and The Corruption of Science.


In it, Montford details the tireless and dogged efforts of Steve McIntyre to replicate [remember that verification and reproduction are requirements of scientific method— the peer reviewers certainly seem to have forgotten ] the now infamous and discredited "Hockey Stick" chart that was created by Michael Mann and widely used to promote the CAGW conjecture.

http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/hsi_montford.jpg​

It is not easy reading but you'll learn paleoclimatological methods and how they were abused by MBH98 and MBH99. Peer review in climatology has been an absolute farce (as well-documented by the Climategate emails).

There's an on-line preview of the sorts of abuse that would have gone undetected were it not for the efforts of an outsider. Read this:

http://bishophill.squarespace.com/picture/propburvsmall.png?pictureId=17043274


Unfortunately, a whole lot of shonky science has been allowed to see the light of day. Peer review has failed miserably.




Excerpt from:

Review of The Hockey Stick Illusion, by A.W. Montford (Stacey Intl., 2010)

by Jay Lehr, B.S. (Princeton), Ph.D. ( Arizona )

... As Montford explains, the Hockey Stick refers to an attempt by global warming alarmists to mislead people into believing the Medieval Warm Period of the 13th century, when coastal Greenland was actually green, trees in California grew above today’s tree line, and wine grapes grew in places too cold to grow them today, never occurred.

As Nigel Calder, author of The Chilling Stars, explains in the foreword to The Hockey Stick Illusion, this is a thriller about code-breaking—not Hitler’s codes or al Qaeda’s codes, but computer codes programmed in a manner to produce a false claim about the temperature record.

The Hockey Stick made its grand entrance in the scientific debate in a paper published in April 1998 in the journal Nature. The senior author was a then relatively obscure scientist named Michael Mann, who had just received his Ph.D. and was serving as an adjunct faculty member at the University of Massachusetts. The paper is commonly referred to as MBH98 for the three authors, including Ray Bradley and Malcom Hughes.

The MBH98 paper describes, but does not include, the 112 sets of data the authors claimed to have studied in forming a temperature analysis of the previous millennium. The authors referred to the data as “indicators”—commonly described as “proxies”—in which tree rings and other items are asserted to convey temperatures long before humans set up a global network of mercury thermometers.

Statistical experts Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick suspected something was funny about the unprecedented claims made in the MBH98 paper and the authors’ failure to disclose the raw data upon which they made their claims. The Hockey Stick Illusion details how McIntyre and McKitrick spent years navigating endless roadblocks and obstacle courses to obtain the raw data and unravel the statistical gymnastics performed by the MBH98 authors to make their maverick claim current-day temperatures are higher than those of the Medieval Warm Period.

Reading Montford’s book, it is impossible to miss the parallels between McIntyre and McKitrick unraveling the MBH hockey stick scheme and federal law enforcement officials exposing the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme. One must hope fervently that Mann’s deception will get equally extensive exposure.

Mann and his coauthors used a variety of tricks to make their analysis of their unpublished data appear plausible to those not expert in statistical analysis. Montford offers clear tutorials on every one of Mann’s statistical tricks, which could make this book an excellent selection for outside reading in a college statistics course. You do not need to understand statistics to enjoy this book, but if you do, you will especially enjoy Montford’s tutorials on such things as centring, regression analysis, and principal components.

After years of investigation and analysis, McIntyre and McKitrick showed a graph of the earth’s temperature during the past thousand years does not resemble a hockey stick...

The world is indebted to Steve McIntyre, Dr. Ross McKitrick and Andrew Montford for their dogged pursuit of truth. It is horrifying to discover that this branch of science succumbed to temptation and proved unwilling to properly police itself.

 

[trysail]

Jonathan Jones is a professor of physics at Oxford. The following comment can be found at: http://bishophill.squarespace.com/b...dington-challenge.html?currentPage=2#comments

People have asked why mainstream scientists are keeping silent on these issues. As a scientist who has largely kept silent, at least in public, I have more sympathy for silence than most people here. It's not for the obvious reason, that speaking out leads to immediate attacks, not just from Gavin and friends, but also from some of the more excitable commentators here. Far more importantly most scientists are reluctant to speak out on topics which are not their field. We tend to trust our colleagues, perhaps unreasonably so, and are also well aware that most scientific questions are considerably more complex than outsiders think, and that it is entirely possible that we have missed some subtle but critical point.

However, "hide the decline" is an entirely different matter. This is not a complicated technical matter on which reasonable people can disagree: it is a straightforward and blatant breach of the fundamental principles of honesty and self-criticism that lie at the heart of all true science. The significance of the divergence problem is immediately obvious, and seeking to hide it is quite simply wrong. The recent public statements by supposed leaders of UK science, declaring that hiding the decline is standard scientific practice are on a par with declarations that black is white and up is down. I don't know who they think they are speaking for, but they certainly aren't speaking for me.

I have watched Judy Curry with considerable interest since she first went public on her doubts about some aspects of climate science, an area where she is far more qualified than I am to have an opinion. Her latest post has clearly kicked up a remarkable furore, but she was right to make it. The decision to hide the decline, and the dogged refusal to admit that this was an error, has endangered the credibility of the whole of climate science. If the rot is not stopped then the credibility of the whole of science will eventually come into question.

Judy's decision to try to call a halt to this mess before it's too late is brave and good. So please cut her some slack; she has more than enough problems to deal with at the moment.

If you're wondering who I am, then you can find me at the Physics Department at Oxford University.

Feb 23, 2011 at 10:29 PM | Jonathan Jones

http://www.bnc.ox.ac.uk/323/about-brasenose-31/academic-staff-150/professor-jonathan-jones-457.html

 

[trysail]

For the purposes of this book there are two main conclusions to be drawn from the emails. Firstly that senior climatologists have sought to undermine the peer review process and bully journals into supressing dissenting views. This means that the scientific literature is no longer a representation of the state of human knowledge about the climate. It is a representation of what a small cabal of scientists feel is worthy of discussion. Secondly, the IPCC reports represent the outcome of a process in which a relatively small group of scientists produce a biased review of a literature they themselves have colluded to distort through gatekeeping and intimidation. The emails establish a pattern of behaviour that is completely at odds with what the public has been told regarding the integrity of climate science and the rigour of the IPCC report-writing process. It is clear that the public can no longer trust what they have been told. What is less clear is what we, as ordinary citizens, can do in the face of the powerful, relentless forces of corrupted science, to set things right. Awareness, however, is the essential first step.

-Andrew W. Montford
The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science
London, England (UK) 2010.

 

[trysail]

For those who claim to be computer literate:​

​

​

​

The infamous "HARRY_READ_ME.txt" file:
http://www.anenglishmanscastle.com/HARRY_READ_ME.txt

 

[tactful]

So, we can count on the Sun for its' constant heat and the Earth for its' never changing orbit, 'cause for a minute there, I thought something was outa-of-wack.
Damn those Ice aged stories, and all that Air pollution bullshit.

 

[trysail]

By exaggeration, suppression, bullying and manipulation, Al Gore, Michael Mann and James Hansen have done an enormous disservice to science. Not only that, the irony is that their political advocacy and scientific exaggeration caused scrutiny of the facts and opposition to the policies they advocated.

 

[run_silent]

NO IT FUCKING DIDN'T.

Thank you for the well thought out and informative reply. I appreciate the effort you put into it.

Sigh

Edited to add-

I guess you don't believe in science. You are a denier.

 

[Busybody]

This is an honest question and please leave politics out of it.

When I was a teenager all the science said we were going into an ice age. Now all the science says it's global warming.

Here is the question.

Has it ever been scientifically explained why the science was so wrong back then?

not only that

since I was a TEENAGER at that time as well

They also said

WE WOULD BE OUT OF OIL by 2000

 

[Busybody]

Thank you for the well thought out and informative reply. I appreciate the effort you put into it.

Sigh

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_hUqhilguoPs/TRunydGXRrI/AAAAAAAAGNU/d9d6BJX6RA8/s1600/time1.bmp

 

[Busybody]

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_hUqhilguoPs/TRunydGXRrI/AAAAAAAAGNU/d9d6BJX6RA8/s1600/time1.bmp

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

 

[Busybody]

here is real science

THE NEW ICE AGE.....

http://www.globalresearch.ca/global-warming-or-the-new-ice-age-fear-of-the-big-freeze/30336

from 2 months ago


THE REPOH IS RIGHT

STOP FUNDING CRAZY PEOPLE WITH CRAZY IDEAS

 

[pointless]

i can't see nine of the last ten posts and the odd man out is pushing it.

 

[Busybody]

i can't see nine of the last ten posts and the odd man out is pushing it.

fuck you, I am smiling

 

[Sean]

i can't see nine of the last ten posts and the odd man out is pushing it.

Pretty much. But thankfully I don't see the stub, either.

 

[run_silent]

So the global cooling debate never happened? There was no science involved?

 

[1sickbastard]

This is an honest question and please leave politics out of it.

When I was a teenager all the science said we were going into an ice age. Now all the science says it's global warming.

Here is the question.

Has it ever been scientifically explained why the science was so wrong back then?

The only certainty in science is that which may be observed and quantified. In doing so it helps us to realize the limits of our knowledge and the depths of our ignorance.

 

[Sean]

So the global cooling debate never happened? There was no science involved?

Very little. And what there was was blown out of all proportion by a scientifically illiterate press. Nothing much has changed in forty years.

 

[phrodeau]

A bit off thread topic, but what is "normal"? It can't be a flat line.

Reasonable deviation around an historic average.

Trysail's graphs try to hide the hockey stick. At least he stopped posting graphs for the moment.

 

[trysail]

Some of these folks have been making shit up right from the beginning. They've never stopped.



http://youtu.be/wXCfxxXRRdY

Dr. James Hansen’s testimony before Congress in June 1988.

[Senator] TIMOTHY WIRTH: We called the Weather Bureau and found out what historically was the hottest day of the summer. Well, it was June 6th or June 9th or whatever it was. So we scheduled the hearing that day, and bingo, it was the hottest day on record in Washington, or close to it.

DEBORAH AMOS: [on camera] Did you also alter the temperature in the hearing room that day?

[Senator] TIMOTHY WIRTH: What we did is that we went in the night before and opened all the windows, I will admit, right, so that the air conditioning wasn’t working inside the room. And so when the- when the hearing occurred, there was not only bliss, which is television cameras and double figures, but it was really hot.

 

[thør]

Reasonable deviation around an historic average.

Still, not flat and straight.

 

[Colonel Hogan]

Well, it's a whole nother discussion as to why the Federal government is funding research in the first place. It's corporate welfare that the tax payer's shouldn't be funding.

It's not nearly that simple.

Some years ago, I worked in the PR department of a notable lung research hospital. Since the "hospital" had less than 100 inpatient beds, the emphasis was obviously on research. Much of that research was directly related to respiratory disease, as one would expect.

But much of it was on a microbiological level investigating how cell and cell components behaved in various environments and in response to various stimuli. There was no guarantee that any of that research would bear any dramatic conclusions at all -- not for respiratory disease or anything else.

Scientific research performs a valid role when it reveals what doesn't work as surely as it does when it unveils miracles. Certainly, miracles are more exciting. But oft times we would have not found them had we not ventured to the end of many scientific cul-de-sacs along the way.