You manage to quote two people (two - out of a couple of thousand people who actually study this stuff), yet completely fail to acknowledge the subsequent discussion of McIntyre and McKitrick's critique.
As both the NAS Panel and the Wegman report noted, none of that subsequent discussion had any relevance as to whether Mann's study was a scientific crock of shit, which it was.
Furthermore, you present these as independent, when they are actually working for fields with a very heavy interest in presenting Global Warming as a farce (I'm sure you know which one's they are right? You'd never just take somebody's word for it).
Really? Ross McKitrick is an associate professor of economics at the University of Guelph - he had no financial interest in Kyoto. Steve McIntyre is semi-retired after working in the mining industry - he has no financial interest in Kyoto either. On the other hand, the originators of the Hockey Stick all have huge professional and personal interests in Global Warming and the politics thereof.
M&M are independent and the Hockey Team are certainly not. Wegman et al are independent as well.
Steve Mcintyre has made it clear repeatedly that debunking the Hockey Stick does not mean that Global Warming is not happening. But those with clear vested interests are those who have found fame and fortune promoting fraud, like Michael Mann.
And I don't know where you get the idea that they're world-class statisticians. I can't find any papers they have written on statistics before this one. Care to point to some? Or did you just make that part up?
Finally, Mann isn't the only one who found a significant global warming that occurred in the past couple of decades. I won't bother with relinking the papers here, since I already posted them in reply to another one of your posts. But to claim that a) no one has talked about McIntyre's and McKitrick's critique, and b) Mann is the only one to have found a significant warming is ignorant at best.
Mann isn't the only one to have discovered significant warming. He didn't discover anything at all because his pride and joy doesn't mean anything at all. Discovering warming isn't hard. Discovering whether the warming is a) significant b) deleterious and c) man-made would be, and nobody's produced anything remotely close to a "smoking gun" that is worth anything.
I didn't claim that no one has talked about M&M's critique - where did you get that from?
Considering the effort you expended in tracking down any and all critiques of one specific paper, but didn't bother continuing to find out whether the critiques were right, I can only assume that you are guilty of what you are accusing the rest of the world of: willfull ignorance. Oh, and nice personal insults, too. Idiot.
I spent much more time considering the relevant papers than you'll spend looking at Wegman's CV. I suspect that I won't be hearing any challenge to that claim.
You don't believe that the (Republican) House Energy and Commerce Committee produced an "independent" study. These are the people attacking science everywhere that serves their corporate political agenda. And you are helping them.
The House Committee asked these expert statisticians to look at the Hockey Stick, and the statisticians refused to be paid by the Committee and are not politically republican.
You're helping scientific fraudsters get away with an extremely expensive poltically inspired panic. "The 1990s were the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year of the millenium" - how many times did you hear that? And all as fake as a three dollar bill.
It's interesting you say that - could you provide me a reference for where the IPCC TAR concludes that the changes are "entirely explicable" as natural forcings? When I read through the conclusion of the attribution chapter I don't see anything about natural forcings providing adequate explanations.
The attributions and the assumption of the unnaturalness of 20th Century warming was made because of the Mann Hockey Stick, a known scientific fabrication, recently condemned by an independent study by statisticians as simply "bad mathematics"
Yep, another Hockey Stick denialist. This is going to be fun:
Which is to say, you didn't read it. Honestly, have a look at chapter 12 (Attribution) of the IPCC Third Assessment Report. You'll find just a single mention, buried in the qualitative section, of Mann's study, listed amongst 5 other different palaeological climate reconstructions by different authors, and only to note that "the 20th century warming is highly unusual."
You said the SUMMARY not the chapter. The centerpiece of the SUMMARY was the thoroughly discredited "Mann Hockey Stick" a piece of shit so bad that not even Mann bothered to defend it when he testified in Congress recently. It was Mann's study that was touted as the "Smoking Gun" of man-made climate change and it was Mann's study that was reproduced five or six times in the Summary for Policymakers.
You can see those reconstructions (plus several others) charted together if you're curious. Mann's studies, let alone the "Hockey Stick", far from being "the centerpiece", get scant mention.
Actually the Mann Hockey Stick gets scant attention now because it's been revealed to be a fraud, which was shoved down the throats of scientists, politicians and the public. The other studies in that spaghetti graph are siblings of the Hockey Stick, using the same flawed proxies over and over again, as the Wegman report made clear. Steve McIntyre has shown that ALL of those studies fail statistical verification tests just like the Hockey Stick.
Hockey Stick Denialism means rewriting history, and Wikipedia is the perfect medium to do it.
Of course calling Mann's work a "scientific fraud" is rather unfounded too. You may note, in the chart linked above, that there are many other historical temperature reconstructions, done indepdently by different people, that arrive at a similar result to Mann.
As Wegman noted, all of those studies used the same flawed proxies, and some used Mann's flawed PC1 as a proxy in itself, even though it had already been shown to be a product of bad data in 2003 and bad statistics in 2005. There's even a nice table in Wegman showing how they are all related. Wegman testified that Mann's study was a piece of "bad mathematics" and was meaningless.
The Mann Hockey Stick was a deliberate fabrication of the climatic record. It removed the Little ice Age and Medieval Warm Period as global phenomena and even last year Mann confirmed that the Hockey Stick did not have those events. It should be obvious that writing "Medieval Warm Period" and "Little Ice Age" across the top of a set of graphs that doesn't show them is not exactly evidence, but we're dealing with Denialism here.
There is also the recent National Academy of Sciences report on the subject which concluded, with high confidence, that the earth was the warmest it had been in 400 years, and that while there was less confidence in reconstructions going further back, they still point to the earth undergoing unusual recent warming.
What they effectively was re-establish the Little Ice Age, which Mann had said didn't exist and downgraded the rest of his crap to "plausible" which my dictionary defines as
1. having an appearance of truth or reason; seemingly worthy of approval or acceptance; credible; believable: a plausible excuse; a plausible plot. 2. well-spoken and apparently, but often deceptively, worthy of confidence or trust: a plausible commentator.
That the Mann Hockey Stick was deliberately fabricated and knowingly false was the discovery of
The real difference between climate change on Mars and climate change on Earth is that the degree of change currently observed on Mars is entirely explainable in terms of observed natural effects, while the climate change on Earth is not. Anthropogenic effects, to the very bestof our knowledge, are required to explain the currently observed warming on Earth.
Simply not true. The climate changes on Earth are entirely explicable as natural variation as the IPCC TAR made clear in 2001. The man-made hypothesis is based upon the attribution studies based on climate models.
Make that "augmented stupidity" and you'd be more accurate. Can you imagine the "text book that anyone can edit" being used in any school, college, hospital, or anywhere else where accurate information is important? If you can then Wikipedia is at your level....since the Wikipedia is created by so many, it may be considered a primitive product of the "meta intelligence" described.
No such thing. This is Web 2.0 babble. You may think that giving credence to mob rule and groupthink is a good idea, but due to the magnificence of evolution through natural selection, you won't be passing on your genes very far.
Isn't it germaine that Nature refused to let Britannica see those reports?
Perhaps the next time you're arrested, the police don't bother showing the evidence that you've committed a crime. After all you're just a vested interest.
But the report wasn't peer reviewed. In fact it was a con. Britannica protested that the report did not compare mistakes with mistakes nor even full articles with full articles.
But it is now the second-largest to Wikipedia as measured by number of words and number of articles, among other standards.
Standards like accuracy not being one of them.
They've managed to list some 60 errors in Britannica. Jeebus knows how many factual errors are in Wikipedia - and no it isn't my responsibility to fix them.
Why would I trust it as a starting point if I can't trust it as a source?
because it is convenient and mostly correct.
But any propaganda from any extremist group is "mostly correct". It's the bits that aren't correct that bother me.
Very few sources are 100% accurate. Especially something as large and comprehensive and open as Wikipedia.
Maybe you should lookup the word "open" in a dictionary. It doesn't mean what you think it means. Also while you're looking, look up "scholarship". You won't find that on Wikipedia - just a million monkeys.
Wikipedia is a useful starting point as it will contain pointers (or at least useful search terms) to begin looking for other items to reference. It's no different to any other encyclopedia in that respect.
Surely you don't use a single soruce for information for an important project?
How do I know its a useful starting point if I don't know whether anything its telling me is correct AND the publisher disavows all errors, vandalism, falsehoods and any responsibility?
Whoever wrote that its a "faith-based" encyclopedia is right.
Wikipedia: the humans generalised (and hopefully averaged) interpretation of the world with all the wonderful lateral cross-links that humans do so well but all the same mistakes (and opinions) that humans are known for.
Hopefully averaged? You hope that history tends towards the mediocre? How appropriate.
Let me quote Richard Dawkins:
"When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly half way between. It is possible for one side simply to be wrong."
Point of course being, USE WIKIPEDIA AS A STARTING POINT. It's amazing if you want to learn basic facts about things - who the fuck Jethro Tull really was, etc., but always check references. Wikipedia is quite thorough in its referencing, but a proper researcher should be more thorough. Of course, it's better than most political non-fiction out there now, anyway.
Wikipedia's referencing go from poor to non-existent. It's a starting point only in the same sense that if you want to go somewhere, then any road will do and any signpost will take you there.
I could point you to articles referencing Holocaust deniers on Wikipedia, but why should I tell you which ones are lies? After all, its only a starting point....
The question which isn't being asked is "why the bitter and sustained attacks on Wikipedia from the mass media?". What we have here is a free resource, a collaborative community effort which would be lauded as a benefit by any sane society, even if it isn't perfect. Instead it's being vilified. Why is this happening?
Why is this happening? Because properly researched scholarly history is not written by a mass of semi-literate unscholarly non-experts except by complete accident (the million monkey phenomenon)
Successful community efforts terrify centralised mass media. Wikipedia, Wikinews et al, and even Youtube and Google Video are in their infancy now, and experiencing all the teething troubles you'd expect from a newborn. Anyone with a little vision though, can see the potential for these fledglings to replace todays big media organisations.
They're not terrified. They're laughing. Anyone with vision would see wikipedia as an attempt to rewrite history according to a majority viewpoint, whatever the mob decides happened, happened. That's not history, it's communal prejudice.
This "Digital Maoism" article is an attempt at poisoning by association. The linking of Wikipedia and Maoist collectivism doesn't stand up to even minimal scrutiny. It's sole premise, once the verbiage has been stripped from the text, is that people take the information in Wikipedia too seriously.
Maoism is a very good desciption. An even better one would be "anarchism" with its touching and completely wrongheaded belief in the wisdom of the masses (or the mob)
We get to the real nitty-gritty of wikipedophiles: that Wikipedia is inaccurate but fool you for believing that its a real encyclopedia, whose statements can be trusted.
Wikipedia is a disgrace to scholarship and a danger to democracy by elevating mob-prejudice over scholarship and responsibility.
And for some reason, because people are involved in Wikipedia, and have sacrificed some effort to improving a few articles, they somehow feel that its all worth it. Well, I'm here to tell you that its a waste. You won't like it, but there it is.
A incomplete and imperfect article beats NO article any time of day. Usually, once you've read what Wikipedia has to say on a subject, you also know enough to have some idea where to search for more detail.
So an article that is inaccurate, false or misleading is better than no article at all? Jeebus. Get out from under that rock and smell the clean air.
I recently went through the list of detractors and read what their opinions are (there are articles on some of those people on Wikipedia). As it turns out, the people who don't support global warming still claim that the earth is getting hotter: they only debate the percentage of human influence involved.
The problem is that global warming (a fairly global tendancy of the Earth's temp to have risen, more or less since about 1600CE) has been deliberately conflated with anthropogenic global warming (the hypothesis that warming has been all or mostly due to human influence).
Slashdot Mirror
Dear Hockey Stick Denialist,
You manage to quote two people (two - out of a couple of thousand people who actually study this stuff), yet completely fail to acknowledge the subsequent discussion of McIntyre and McKitrick's critique.
As both the NAS Panel and the Wegman report noted, none of that subsequent discussion had any relevance as to whether Mann's study was a scientific crock of shit, which it was.
Furthermore, you present these as independent, when they are actually working for fields with a very heavy interest in presenting Global Warming as a farce (I'm sure you know which one's they are right? You'd never just take somebody's word for it).
Really? Ross McKitrick is an associate professor of economics at the University of Guelph - he had no financial interest in Kyoto. Steve McIntyre is semi-retired after working in the mining industry - he has no financial interest in Kyoto either. On the other hand, the originators of the Hockey Stick all have huge professional and personal interests in Global Warming and the politics thereof.
M&M are independent and the Hockey Team are certainly not. Wegman et al are independent as well.
Steve Mcintyre has made it clear repeatedly that debunking the Hockey Stick does not mean that Global Warming is not happening. But those with clear vested interests are those who have found fame and fortune promoting fraud, like Michael Mann.
And I don't know where you get the idea that they're world-class statisticians. I can't find any papers they have written on statistics before this one. Care to point to some? Or did you just make that part up?
Why certainly HS Denier. Try this and let me know when you reviewed them all. As I said "world-class" and I meant it.
Finally, Mann isn't the only one who found a significant global warming that occurred in the past couple of decades. I won't bother with relinking the papers here, since I already posted them in reply to another one of your posts. But to claim that a) no one has talked about McIntyre's and McKitrick's critique, and b) Mann is the only one to have found a significant warming is ignorant at best.
Mann isn't the only one to have discovered significant warming. He didn't discover anything at all because his pride and joy doesn't mean anything at all. Discovering warming isn't hard. Discovering whether the warming is a) significant b) deleterious and c) man-made would be, and nobody's produced anything remotely close to a "smoking gun" that is worth anything.
I didn't claim that no one has talked about M&M's critique - where did you get that from?
Considering the effort you expended in tracking down any and all critiques of one specific paper, but didn't bother continuing to find out whether the critiques were right, I can only assume that you are guilty of what you are accusing the rest of the world of: willfull ignorance. Oh, and nice personal insults, too. Idiot.
I spent much more time considering the relevant papers than you'll spend looking at Wegman's CV. I suspect that I won't be hearing any challenge to that claim.
Bye bye and Happy Denying!
You don't believe that the (Republican) House Energy and Commerce Committee produced an "independent" study. These are the people attacking science everywhere that serves their corporate political agenda. And you are helping them.
The House Committee asked these expert statisticians to look at the Hockey Stick, and the statisticians refused to be paid by the Committee and are not politically republican.
You're helping scientific fraudsters get away with an extremely expensive poltically inspired panic. "The 1990s were the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year of the millenium" - how many times did you hear that? And all as fake as a three dollar bill.
Dear Anonymous Coward:
Nowhere did I write that "there is no global warming".
You said the SUMMARY not the chapter. The centerpiece of the SUMMARY was the thoroughly discredited "Mann Hockey Stick" a piece of shit so bad that not even Mann bothered to defend it when he testified in Congress recently. It was Mann's study that was touted as the "Smoking Gun" of man-made climate change and it was Mann's study that was reproduced five or six times in the Summary for Policymakers.
Actually the Mann Hockey Stick gets scant attention now because it's been revealed to be a fraud, which was shoved down the throats of scientists, politicians and the public. The other studies in that spaghetti graph are siblings of the Hockey Stick, using the same flawed proxies over and over again, as the Wegman report made clear. Steve McIntyre has shown that ALL of those studies fail statistical verification tests just like the Hockey Stick.
Hockey Stick Denialism means rewriting history, and Wikipedia is the perfect medium to do it.
As Wegman noted, all of those studies used the same flawed proxies, and some used Mann's flawed PC1 as a proxy in itself, even though it had already been shown to be a product of bad data in 2003 and bad statistics in 2005. There's even a nice table in Wegman showing how they are all related. Wegman testified that Mann's study was a piece of "bad mathematics" and was meaningless.
The Mann Hockey Stick was a deliberate fabrication of the climatic record. It removed the Little ice Age and Medieval Warm Period as global phenomena and even last year Mann confirmed that the Hockey Stick did not have those events. It should be obvious that writing "Medieval Warm Period" and "Little Ice Age" across the top of a set of graphs that doesn't show them is not exactly evidence, but we're dealing with Denialism here.
What they effectively was re-establish the Little Ice Age, which Mann had said didn't exist and downgraded the rest of his crap to "plausible" which my dictionary defines as
1. having an appearance of truth or reason; seemingly worthy of approval or acceptance; credible; believable: a plausible excuse; a plausible plot.
2. well-spoken and apparently, but often deceptively, worthy of confidence or trust: a plausible commentator.
That the Mann Hockey Stick was deliberately fabricated and knowingly false was the discovery of
The real difference between climate change on Mars and climate change on Earth is that the degree of change currently observed on Mars is entirely explainable in terms of observed natural effects, while the climate change on Earth is not. Anthropogenic effects, to the very bestof our knowledge, are required to explain the currently observed warming on Earth.
Simply not true. The climate changes on Earth are entirely explicable as natural variation as the IPCC TAR made clear in 2001. The man-made hypothesis is based upon the attribution studies based on climate models.
Take some time and read through the IPCC summary of climate attribution studies and bear in mind that this was as of 2001 - we know even more now
Yes. Now we know that the centerpiece of that summary, the "Mann Hockey Stick", turned out to be a scientific fraud.
The Internet and BSD are both maintained by experts who are known and whose work is audited. In other words, completely unlike Wikipedia.
For me Wikipedia is "augmented intelligence"...
...since the Wikipedia is created by so many, it may be considered a primitive product of the "meta intelligence" described.
Make that "augmented stupidity" and you'd be more accurate. Can you imagine the "text book that anyone can edit" being used in any school, college, hospital, or anywhere else where accurate information is important? If you can then Wikipedia is at your level.
No such thing. This is Web 2.0 babble. You may think that giving credence to mob rule and groupthink is a good idea, but due to the magnificence of evolution through natural selection, you won't be passing on your genes very far.
Isn't it germaine that Nature refused to let Britannica see those reports?
Perhaps the next time you're arrested, the police don't bother showing the evidence that you've committed a crime. After all you're just a vested interest.
But the report wasn't peer reviewed. In fact it was a con. Britannica protested that the report did not compare mistakes with mistakes nor even full articles with full articles.
Read all about it.
Not all of us are as gullible as you.
But it is now the second-largest to Wikipedia as measured by number of words and number of articles, among other standards.
Standards like accuracy not being one of them.
They've managed to list some 60 errors in Britannica. Jeebus knows how many factual errors are in Wikipedia - and no it isn't my responsibility to fix them.
Except that you didn't read Britannica's reply. You should.
It won't make you smart, but it will make you less ignorant.
Yes. Did you know that Britannica replied with a devastating complaint against the Nature "study" showing that it was utterly false?
You should.
No I don't. But if I did, I'd still want an answer from someone who made a series of allegations against Britannica without proof.
One error doesn't mean the end of the World.
It will only take one last error.
Why would I trust it as a starting point if I can't trust it as a source?
because it is convenient and mostly correct.
But any propaganda from any extremist group is "mostly correct". It's the bits that aren't correct that bother me.
Very few sources are 100% accurate. Especially something as large and comprehensive and open as Wikipedia.
Maybe you should lookup the word "open" in a dictionary. It doesn't mean what you think it means. Also while you're looking, look up "scholarship". You won't find that on Wikipedia - just a million monkeys.
Wikipedia is a useful starting point as it will contain pointers (or at least useful search terms) to begin looking for other items to reference. It's no different to any other encyclopedia in that respect.
Surely you don't use a single soruce for information for an important project?
How do I know its a useful starting point if I don't know whether anything its telling me is correct AND the publisher disavows all errors, vandalism, falsehoods and any responsibility?
Whoever wrote that its a "faith-based" encyclopedia is right.
Care to prove any of those statements or is it just another Wikideadhead justifying the unjustifiable?
I understand the dangers from using wikipedia (and like so many slashdotters have said, for serious work, use it as a starting point, not a source.)
Why would I trust it as a starting point if I can't trust it as a source?
Wikipedia: the humans generalised (and hopefully averaged) interpretation of the world with all the wonderful lateral cross-links that humans do so well but all the same mistakes (and opinions) that humans are known for.
Hopefully averaged? You hope that history tends towards the mediocre? How appropriate.
Let me quote Richard Dawkins:
"When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly half way between. It is possible for one side simply to be wrong."
Man, is Wikipedia bashing in vouge!
Yes, especially by people who can spell "vogue"
[SNIP CRAP]
Point of course being, USE WIKIPEDIA AS A STARTING POINT. It's amazing if you want to learn basic facts about things - who the fuck Jethro Tull really was, etc., but always check references. Wikipedia is quite thorough in its referencing, but a proper researcher should be more thorough. Of course, it's better than most political non-fiction out there now, anyway.
Wikipedia's referencing go from poor to non-existent. It's a starting point only in the same sense that if you want to go somewhere, then any road will do and any signpost will take you there.
I could point you to articles referencing Holocaust deniers on Wikipedia, but why should I tell you which ones are lies? After all, its only a starting point....
The question which isn't being asked is "why the bitter and sustained attacks on Wikipedia from the mass media?". What we have here is a free resource, a collaborative community effort which would be lauded as a benefit by any sane society, even if it isn't perfect. Instead it's being vilified. Why is this happening?
Why is this happening? Because properly researched scholarly history is not written by a mass of semi-literate unscholarly non-experts except by complete accident (the million monkey phenomenon)
Successful community efforts terrify centralised mass media. Wikipedia, Wikinews et al, and even Youtube and Google Video are in their infancy now, and experiencing all the teething troubles you'd expect from a newborn. Anyone with a little vision though, can see the potential for these fledglings to replace todays big media organisations.
They're not terrified. They're laughing. Anyone with vision would see wikipedia as an attempt to rewrite history according to a majority viewpoint, whatever the mob decides happened, happened. That's not history, it's communal prejudice.
This "Digital Maoism" article is an attempt at poisoning by association. The linking of Wikipedia and Maoist collectivism doesn't stand up to even minimal scrutiny. It's sole premise, once the verbiage has been stripped from the text, is that people take the information in Wikipedia too seriously.
Maoism is a very good desciption. An even better one would be "anarchism" with its touching and completely wrongheaded belief in the wisdom of the masses (or the mob)
We get to the real nitty-gritty of wikipedophiles: that Wikipedia is inaccurate but fool you for believing that its a real encyclopedia, whose statements can be trusted.
Wikipedia is a disgrace to scholarship and a danger to democracy by elevating mob-prejudice over scholarship and responsibility.
And for some reason, because people are involved in Wikipedia, and have sacrificed some effort to improving a few articles, they somehow feel that its all worth it. Well, I'm here to tell you that its a waste. You won't like it, but there it is.
A incomplete and imperfect article beats NO article any time of day. Usually, once you've read what Wikipedia has to say on a subject, you also know enough to have some idea where to search for more detail.
So an article that is inaccurate, false or misleading is better than no article at all? Jeebus. Get out from under that rock and smell the clean air.
I recently went through the list of detractors and read what their opinions are (there are articles on some of those people on Wikipedia). As it turns out, the people who don't support global warming still claim that the earth is getting hotter: they only debate the percentage of human influence involved.
The problem is that global warming (a fairly global tendancy of the Earth's temp to have risen, more or less since about 1600CE) has been deliberately conflated with anthropogenic global warming (the hypothesis that warming has been all or mostly due to human influence).