Climatedepot is run by a former Imhofe staffer and funded by Exxon and Scaife. I know Tman takes them hook, line, and sinker, but I'm surprised you do.CID1990 wrote:kalm wrote:
What's wrong with McKibben? Is he trying to get rich off this as well?
He doesn't seem to be trying to defend the hockey stick, though!
Wonder what happened to THAT settled science?
Debunking of the Hockey Sticks has been debunked.
Next, we'll be discussing the "Pause"..."The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1,000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on ice caps and the retreat of glaciers around the world."
It didn't change the minds of the deniers, though--and soon Mann and his colleagues were drawn into the 2009 "Climategate" pseudo-scandal, which purported to reveal internal emails that (among other things) seemingly undermined the hockey stick. Only, they didn't.
In the meantime, those wacky scientists kept doing what they do best--finding out what's true. As Mann relates, over the years other researchers were able to test his work using "more extensive datasets, and more sophisticated methods. And the bottom line conclusion doesn't change." Thus the single hockey stick gradually became what Mann calls a "hockey team." "If you look at all the different groups, there are literally about two dozen" hockey sticks now, he says.
Indeed, two just-published studies support the hockey stick more powerfully than ever. One, just out in Nature Geoscience, featuring more than 80 authors, showed with extensive global data on past temperatures that the hockey stick's shaft seems to extend back reliably for at least 1,400 years. Recently in Science, meanwhile, Shaun Marcott of Oregon State University and his colleagues extended the original hockey stick shaft back 11,000 years. "There's now at least tentative evidence that the warming is unprecedented over the entire period of the Holocene, the entire period since the last ice age," says
So what does it all mean? Well, here's the millennial scale irony: Climate deniers threw everything they had at the hockey stick. They focused immense resources on what they thought was the Achilles Heel of global warming research--and even then, they couldn't hobble it. (Though they certainly sowed plenty of doubt in the mind of the public.)
What's more, even if they'd succeeded, in a scientific sense it wouldn't have even mattered.
"Climate deniers like to make it seem like the entire weight of evidence for climate change rests on the hockey stick," explains Mann. "And that's not the case. We could get rid of all these reconstructions, and we could still know that climate change is a threat, and that we're causing it." The basic case for global warming caused by humans rests on basic physics--and, basic thermometer readings from around the globe. The hockey stick, in contrast, is the result of a field of research called paleoclimatology (the study of past climates) that, while fascinating, only provides one thread of evidence among many for what we're doing to the planet.
