“...[the] beginning of the twenty-first century as an embarrassing chapter in the history of science. They [future historians] will wonder about our time and use it as a warning of how the core values and criteria of science were allowed little by little to be forgotten, as the actual research topic of climate change turned into a political and social playground.”
The fraud of globaloneywarming. Not only a fraud but a criminal enterprise. This book is one of the best one-volume compendiums on the non-science and cult dogma which is globaloneywarming. Not one single iota of real science, observation, testing, replication, data integrity and transparent experimentation sustains the cult of warming. None. Globaloneywarming offends every aspect of science as defined by Austrian Karl Popper: observe, hypothesize; test to disprove hypothesis; observe factual outcomes of experimentation; go back and amend hypothesis as needed; and repeat. Not a single aspect of the scientific method makes an appearance in the cult of warming, nor within its once major sales tool - the Hockey Stick Fraud [a better word than illusion].
As Montford or Bishop Hill [site] relates, the story of the ridiculously corrupt 'Hockey Stick' curve, allied with the thousands of 'Climate Gate' emails which prove the unbelievable descent into manufactured graft, corruption and greed, should forever tarnish the illiteracy named 'Climate Science'. It is not science, but about money, influence, career advancement and peddling trash as fact. Quackademia, not academia hard at work, lying and deceiving.
Montford's book is packed with facts, sources, and material that the MSM will never divulge. He is a careful writer, a 10 year veteran of the 'catastrophic man made warming' wars; and incredibly detailed in his supporting documentation. Warming fascists can not utter, or scream, that anything in this book is false. The facts and reality as presented are depressingly true alright and should be read by everyone who was told by their governments and media; that the medieval warming and ice-age eras never existed, that the late 20th century was the warmest in history; and that a trace chemical 95% emitted by Gaia was causing warm weather, or 'climate change'. Stupid all of it.
As Montford states the whole point of the Hockey Stick Fraud was to erase the medieval warming [circa 1000-1300] and ice-age periods [circa 1350-1750]; and replace them with a huge increase in global temperatures in the mid-late 20th century. This Fraud was to be used as a sales tool by the UN, governments and the media, to sell their nonsense to a non-scientific public.
“Climate science wanted big funding and big political action and that was going to require definitive evidence. In order to strengthen the arguments for the current warming being unprecedented, there was going to have to be a major study, presenting unimpeachable evidence that the Medieval Warm Period was a chimera. Enter the Hockey Stick.”
It was thus a political project from the beginning. No science was needed but just 'tricks' to take out-dated, incoherent, and unjustified data sets [tree rings, ice cores, even rainfall records for the love of christ]; and make sure the 'trick' of the algorithms forced the 20th century temperature increase while incredibly, erasing one of history's most documented climactic events, the medieval warming and little-ice-age epochs. As Montford saronically noted, why not include Euro-USD exchange rates in the data-sets as long as they 'correlate' with an increase in 20th century temperature, as 'forced' by bizarre code and stats methods. The Hockey Stick Fraud became the sales tool to sell globaloneywarming to those who did not pay attention to real climactic records, or science.
“What Gore called ‘Dr Thompson’s Thermometer’ was in fact Mann’s Hockey Stick itself, recoloured, placed on different axes and given a new name. It was no wonder that he could claim that his graph looked remarkably like the Hockey Stick: it was the Hockey Stick. Its appearance in place of Thompson’s ice core graph turned out to be a copying error, which neither Gore, nor his staff, nor Thompson, their scientific adviser, had noticed. The splice of reconstructed and instrumental data was not acknowledged in An Inconvenient Truth, but if you referred to Lonnie Thompson’s original papers, it was possible to see the version of the Hockey Stick Gore had used, with the splice clearly shown.”
Gore and other charlatans who became rich from this fraud, welcomed 'Professor' Mann – another quackademic – and his Hockey Stick Fraud as a god-send of marketing power and relevancy.
Montford's story centres on the work by 2 Canadians, McIntyre and McKitrick [phd in economics] who did more than anyone else to expose the fraud by delving deep into the data-sets, codes, algorithms, and statistical methods used in the construction by once obscure Mann and his friends [Mann, phd in 1998, adjunct professor, now a rock star tenured professor at U Penn with millions in budget....]. McIntyre a math wizard, 40 year statistical professional and a man who in the private sector had to report publicly on the complex details on mining data and stats was the perfect match for the Mann-cabal fraud. Some of the thousands of examples of non-scientific deception uncovered by the Canadians as related by Montford include:
“Why did the data file [from the Mann Hockey Stick paper] have to be assembled from scratch? Did he [Mann] not have a copy for his own work? Has no one ever asked for it before? Is he accusing his associate, Scott Rutherford, of inserting all the fills [missing years of temps had data infilled for some reason]? And if what we received was ‘a complete distortion’, and bears ‘no relation’ to the dataset he used, how were we able to replicate his original results so closely? While the claim implicit in Professor Mann’s defence is that he actually did work from correctly collated data file in his 1998 paper, this still fails to address the substantial problems of obsolete series, mislabelled locations, truncation of sources, extrapolations of missing data, use of [summer] data where annual are available etc. The point about having been able to replicate Mann’s work using the allegedly erroneous data was key.”
“McIntyre was able to demonstrate that Mannian short centring [a stats method that is not standard] would almost never produce anything other than a hockey stick. In fact, three-quarters of the time it would produce a hockey stick with a score of 1.5 – in other words a stick with a big blade.”
“McIntyre wanted to explain and quantify exactly what was going on. By the time he had performed 10,000 simulations he had some very damning evidence indeed. In fact, the Mann algorithm managed to deliver a hockey stick from these random data series over 99% of the time.”
“...not only had Mann used incorrect statistics to force his temperature reconstruction into the hockey stick shape of the bristlecone pines, but it now appeared as though that shape was merely an artefact of stripbarking. Nor was MBH98 the only paper where Sheep Mountain was a key proxy. It was used in MBH99 and Mann and Jones 2003 as well. From these papers it had also found its way into Rutherford et al, which used Mann’s PC1, and to Hegerl et al 2006 and Osborn and Briffa 2006, both of which used the Mann and Jones PC1”
Mann's work – garbage in, garbage out. The entire edifice of the Hockey Stick Fraud is based on bizarre Fortran code [which was cool in 1975 and very amateurish to use in 1998]; statistical forcing and invalid algorithms.
Unlike Mann and friends McIntyre understood math, statistics, transparency, replication of results, proper coding and use of algorithms and honesty in reporting what was real. In other words he is the opposite of the Hockey Stick Fraud group – a little coterie of people exploiting public money and ignorance for their own benefit and that of their political masters. The litany of errors, omissions and 'tricks' of the Hockey Stick Fraud is quite breathtaking.
“The ability to pick and choose which samples to use is an advantage unique to dendroclimatology [tree studies]. . . which is a statement to send a shudder down the back of any reputable scientist. In the same paper, Esper had also shown that paleoclimatologists didn’t only cherrypick those sites they felt best met their purposes, but also, when they collected the raw data in the field, they were cherrypicking the ‘best’ trees too. It is important to know that at least in distinct periods subsets of trees deviate from common trends recorded in a particular site. Such biased series represent a characteristic feature in the process of chronology building. Leaving these trees in the pool of series to calculate a mean site curve would result in a biased chronology as well. However if the variance between the majorities of trees in a site is common, the biased individual series can be excluded from the further investigation steps. This is generally done even if the reasons for uncommon growth reactions are unknown..”
‘hockey stick-ness’ was driven by just a few of the proxies, with the others all representing noise and cancelling each other out in the final reckoning. Moberg’s reconstruction was slightly different in that most of the series were actually tending to produce a pronounced Medieval Warm Period, with just a few others pulling its peak down to the level of the modern warming.”
“despite all the billions of dollars poured into global warming research, virtually none of the proxy records had been updated since 1980. We have seen a couple of exceptions, albeit problematic ones, in the shape of the Polar Urals and Gaspé updates. Even the original MBH98 paper only included proxy records up to 1980, lagging nearly twenty years behind the publication date. By the time of the Fourth Assessment Report in 2007, the proxies had seemingly still made no further progress, with the record apparently remaining stuck at 1980”
So let's see. Incomplete data. Compromised data sets. Irrelevant proxies. Cherry picking of the data. Results using the 'models' of these quackademics which show the opposite of what the UN IPCC and the warming fascists claim. And as Montford goes to pains to show; no data sharing, code sharing, algorithmic sharing or data model-data sets transparency whatsoever. Add to this the fact that every major 'scientific' magazine did not comply with requests for the above; nor would they print objections to the Mann-study in any detail whatsoever, and you have a media-quackademic-political gang; intent on deception and fraud.
Montford ably summarizes the nexus of lies centered around a handful of 'scientists' and their UN/Political paymasters.
“The debate about the hockey stick is most significant when it comes to the culture of our science. Posting the hockey stick as key evidence in the [Summary for Policymakers] and Synthesis Report of the IPCC was simply stupid and evidence for what [biologist Dennis] Bray calls post-sensible science – as science which is encroached [upon] by moral entrepreneurship. Or post-normal science. We have more cases of this type of claim-making, which is usually a mix of ‘good’ political intentions and personal drive for the limelight. Have we, as a community, become better in rejecting such claims? I am afraid we have not.”
Personally I believe that anyone who believes in globaloneywarming as induced by man and Co2 should not be allowed to vote. This cult is as removed from science, as Islam is from peace. Cult adherents will not be persuaded by Montford's book of course. Reality and facts for these kool-aid drinkers and human-haters were always optional. But for anyone who is an independent thinker who wants to know the truth about the Hockey Stick Fraud, you need to read this book, and observe just how deep the rabbit hole goes within the world of paleo-climate 'science'.