The 'Hockey Stick' Scandal

I've been reading around the web a bit, catching up on latest in the Climate Research Unit (CRU) scandal that broke wide open yesterday.

One of the things I'm learning more about is the 'hockey stick', which refers to the (hypothesized, and now rigged) dramatic increases in global temperatures in the last 130 years, so that when graphed the changes look something like a hockey stick. The chart's from Wikipedia's entry, the "Hockey Stick Controversy." What's so interesting about this, is that the graph is derived from the data and research aggregation of Michael Mann, who is at the center of the CRU hacking case now unfolding online.

The first post to read is at Jeff Id's Air Vent blog, "Baby Steps." That entry links to a series of essays by the author called the "Hockey Stick Posts," where the first entry is called, "How to Make a Hockey Stick – Paleoclimatology (What They Don’t Want You to Know)." Clicking there leads us to a Michael Mann research paper on the hockey stick phenomenon, "Proxy-Based Reconstructions of Hemispheric and Global Surface Temperature Variations Over the Past Two Millennia."

Now, going back to the Baby Steps post, Jeff Id (who's apparently been at the center of some of the online debates) adds this key passage:

These new emails do not provide any huge revelation of collusion, we already knew about that. They don’t provide any smoking gun proving intentional corruption of data for a conclusion (although the Jones quote was good enough for me). They don’t have any proof of making a conclusion in exchange for money or proof of changing a conclusion for personal benefit. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t expect any of that. The mechanism of reward for certain results is exactly what some of us expected it to be.

What the emails show is that there is some good science going on. There are some quality open discussions in them for sure. What they also show however, is a pattern of elimination of dissenting views. They show an advocacy by some ’scientists’ which belies scientific credibility. These few names are universally limited to the top people in the field — think about what that means. These are the ones who actively work to make sure that dissent is unpublished and are often the loudest in public to discredit others. Mann (creator of the bogus Al Gore hockey stick) seems to be the worst offender along these lines but he clearly has a circle of trusted friends. Finally, these files show a lot of money involved in the industry. Big dollars are in play with big travel budgets, prestige and a lot of power for those who follow the main player’s lead [emphasis added].

There's lots more developments in the controversy.

Check Marc Sheppard, "The Evidence of Climate Fraud," which has an analysis of the devastating significance of the CRU scandal. Also, John Hinderaker has a post examining the hacked e-mails, "The Alarmists Do 'Science': A Case Study." (Via Memeorandum.)

Plus, a couple of entries from James Delingpole, "Climategate: How the MSM Reported the Greatest Scandal in Modern Science," and "Climate Change Has Nothing to Do With the Holocaust or 9/11":

But you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise from all the hysterical propaganda put out by the ecofascists of the AGW lobby.

Here’s the latest example from those silly trustafarian children at Plane Stupid:

Actually, this isn't a horrible joke (see for yourself here).