Key Global Warming Study May Have Bad Mathematics

An anonymous reader writes "Berkeley physics professor Richard A. Muller writes that a key study showing a sudden 'hockey stick shape' increase in global temperature may be flawed from bad mathematics. Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick say that Michael Mann's computer program handled data normalization incorrectly and exaggerated data with a hockey stick shape." Update: 10/18 18:26 GMT by J : Alas for the environment, it looks like McKitrick and McIntyre have been refuted. "In previous rounds of the debate, Lambert has shown that McKitrick messed up an analysis of the number of weather stations, showed he knew almost nothing about climate, flunked basic thermodynamics, couldn't handle missing values correctly and invented his own temperature scale. But Tim's latest discovery really takes the cake."

Junk science strikes again

[Anonymous Coward]

For a group of techno-nerds who supposedly present themselves as independent thinkers, cynics, and skeptics, I see a lot of you buying into these environmental reports from the government, and the various international agencies.

The facts are quite clear. There is no proof for man-made global warming. Between solar cycles, the cycles of ice-ages, and other complex atmospheric and land-based occurrences, it would appear that we have very little to do with any of it. There were times of extreme heat and extreme cold long before we were here. Temperatures have been on a slow, and natural climb, since the last ice age, as you would expect. Most of the increases in the 20th century occurred before we even had any big industry. One cannot dismiss volcanoes and other natural forces that created the atmosphere in the first place.

There is a long history of anti-American, anti-technology fanaticism that works to destroy successful enterprises and nations. The enviro extremists fall into that category quite nicely. Did you ever notice how they never mention one shred of evidence that they might have miscalculated, or might be wrong altogether? It rarely happens in real science that your theories are perfectly accurate throughout your experimentation, especially when the real evidence shows contrary results. Maybe that's because they're not presenting real science.

It just so happens that the very small, agenda driven, socialized, government-paid scientific community is the only one that buys into the extremist theories. 19,000 independent scientists and engineers came forward two years ago to show that the evidence being presented for global warming was not science, but rather pseudoscience and rhetoric. These were people who were the best in their fields from all over the world and their concerns were understandably focused on the bogus Kyoto Treaty. They sucessfully debunked the enviro theories and showed quite a bit of evidence that described the exact opposite of the "Chicken Little" doomsday theories.

Even many liberals are leaving the ranks of the extremist environmentalist groups. Largely because the groups have shown themselves to be fraudulent. The scare tactics from those groups are created to keep the money rolling in, so they can promise to present a solution that is waiting for a problem. If everything is OK, as is the case, we don't need them, and that's their greatest fear. Let's not forget that they focus all their attentions on the big metropolitan areas for their supposed research and completely ignore the outlying areas, the weather balloon tests, and the satellite results, all of which show a slight cooling trend lately. Sure, we can create heat islands, but that is not global, and certainly should not require punitive actions. And why is it that it's always the US that gets the blame? We produce more than any other country, support a good portion of the world through foreign aid, and follow some of the strictest standards for emissions. It's cowardly to point the finger at us and ignore countries like China, India, and the third world nations who live in heavily polluted, heavily populated areas where no research is being done to clean things up.

I would suggest that everybody follow the money trail and where ultimate power is being created. Follow your instincts of skepticism and dig deeper to find the real facts. Figure out what it is that concerns you the most about the future and why so many people seem to ignore our sovereignty and Constitutional rights to freedom and are so quick to buy into junk science. Remember what our forefathers were insinuating when they stated: "He who sacrifices a little freedom to gain a little security, will lose both, and deserves neither". Don't fall into the trap of allowing bogus results determine what we're all allowed to do and not do for the remainder of human civilization.

Alternative solutions

[FooAtWFU]

The problem with some people who worry about global warming is that they have a tendency to say that severely reducing carbon dioxide emissions is the only way to prevent disaster- and while that's a lovely sentiment, it is excessively impractical. But what of alternative solutions [reason.com] to the problem?

A mere 0.5 percent change in Earth's net reflectivity, or albedo, would solve the greenhouse problem completely. ... About 1 percent of the United States is covered by human constructions, mostly paving, suggesting that we may already control enough of the land to get at the job.

It's a whole lot more likely than cutting emissions 30% or more.

Nemesis

[bcrowell]

Interesting to see this coming from Rich Muller, who was my favorite prof as an undergraduate at Berkeley. At that time (1983), he was working on an idea that there was a periodicity to mass extinctions caused by comet impacts. He thought the sun might actually be a double star, and its companion might be too dim and far away to have been detected. This star, which he called Nemesis, would come close to the Oort cloud every 30 Myr (?) as it approached the sun in its elliptical orbit, and knock a bunch of comets out of their normal orbits. The whole thing was based on a statistical analysis of the dates of impacts, and the problem was that some impacts were more accurately dated than others, so he threw out the ones with inaccurate dates. Skeptics argued that he had produced the periodicity by throwing out certain data. They searched for the companion star with IR astronomy (?), but never found it. Muller wrote a very entertaining popular science book about the whole thing.

So anyway, one of the biggest episodes in Muller's scientific career was built on a controversial statistical analysis. He dealt with a lot of the same issues he's talking about now with respect to the hockey stick graph: doing Monte Carlo simulations, worrying about biases in the data, etc. Probably a case of once burned, twice wary.

My Rich Muller Story...

[rjh]

When I was seventeen I read Muller's Nemesis: the Death Star. I suspect that title was foisted on him by his publisher; it's too sensationalistic for Dr. Muller, I think. Anyway, yes, Rich Muller is the guy who came up with the Nemesis hypothesis.

I loved the book. It wasn't a one-sided argument in favor of his theory. Rather, the book was more about the history of his hypothesis rather than "look at me, I'm so cool". (For all that I love Linus Pauling, he did a lot of the latter in his writing.) The book made mention of some experiments which could disprove the Nemesis hypothesis, and I waited for the results of the Hipparcos sat... and didn't hear anything in the media.

So, with the simple wisdom of a seventeen-year-old, I decided to write Rich Muller and ask him the results of Hipparcos. I mentioned how I'd found his book, that I was going to college next year to pursue an engineering degree, the usual stuff a seventeen-year-old talks about.

Three weeks later, I had a two-page letter back from him. He explained the Hipparcos results; he wished me luck in my undergraduate career; and asked me to drop him a line in a couple of years to let him know how my engineering studies were going.

I never got around to responding to Rich, because by the time I got to my undergraduate career I'd become infected with the common wisdom of adults: "of course he's got better things to do than hear from me." When I was seventeen I knew better; when I was twenty, I was an idiot.

Well, now I'm looking at 30 in a couple of months. So. Rich, if you're reading this?

The 17-year-old from the early '90s who wrote you asking about Hipparcos? That's me. I'm now 29 and working towards a Ph.D. in Computer Science. It's been a helluva ride, let me tell you. I'm basically doing applied math, and some of the ways the math gets applied take my breath away.

Thanks for taking me seriously when I was seventeen. Only a couple of people did.