30 November 2009
The Hockey Stick
(The Hockey Stick Graphic)
I was determined to take all of Sunday and simply do nothing. I didn’t get far on that front. I thought about going skating over at the Kettler Ice Arena, the training complex for the Washington Capitals perched on top of the Ballston parking structure.
The team allows the general skating public a couple hours a week of open skating as a public service in exchange for lucrative concessions by the County Government. It is finally cold enough to think about a decent slap shot, and another way to waste a few hours in front of the television watching people from the northern hemisphere skate around furiously generating heat.
I could not find my skates. Instead, I scanned the Times and the other electronic media for some sign that someone, somewhere, had noticed that the Climate Scientists had cooked the books on the data supporting global warming.
This is big deal, and most of us have bought into Uncle Al Gore’s slide show. I mean, it seems reasonable, right? Everyone agrees, even the UN.
You know how good those guys are.
I have been more than a little restless about what is going on though, since something big happened last week, and I haven’t heard much about it since.
If you missed the story last week, it was a brief account in The Times, mostly limited to the announcement of the data theft and denials of the implications of the disclosures by the scientists involved.
I’ll give you the short version. Person-or-persons-unknown hacked into the computer servers at the University of East Anglia in the UK and liberated thousands of propriety e-mails and algorithms. These were the basic tools that had been used to generate the alarming charts that show we are going to fry in our own juices if we don’t immediately take swift action to shut down industry.
These had been withheld for years after other scientists were unable to duplicate the alarming projections with the same data.
The whole thing is bogus, as it turns out. A couple quick data points that the people in East Anglia would prefer you did not know before the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen next month.
The warmest year of the last century was 1934. The famous “hockey stick” depiction of the earth’s temperature rise at the end of the 20th Century could as easily have been generated by feeding in, at random, the telephone numbers of the Washington DC phone book.
The ice is thicker in the Arctic, by the way, and has been for a couple years. There are more polar bears now than there were, that marvelous photo of the sad bear on the ice floe not withstanding. Only two of twenty observed populations have declined while the others have pulled up the slack.
Let me insert the obligatory disclaimer. I am not a “denier,” any more than I am a “Republican.” There is plenty wrong with the way we treat our planet, starting with the world’s oceans and continuing through uncontrolled urban sprawl. We should act quickly before the fish are all gone, and everything else is paved over.
But let’s be frank. If the “science” being used to justify restructuring what is left of the economy after we “fix” health care is wrong, we might want to think about things for a minute. If the science is erroneous, what is it that we are really fixing this time? Capitalism?
The people who are most vehement about carbon and warming are the same ones who injected the notion of “Nuclear Winter” into the policy debate, just when it looked like the Commies might lose the Cold War.
You will notice you have not heard much about that since the oil field fires in Kuwait that Saddam set in 1991.
The fires were bad, an ecologic catastrophe, without doubt. But when they were put out, the local ecology began to recover. There was no smoke-induced change in the atmosphere. The climate gurus and their bogus models were wrong then, and they had to find something else to yammer about.
They have been busy, and here we are again. Science as policy.
Bad science means bad policy.
The only thing I could hear this morning was a report about Kevin Rudd, the progressive PM from Australia. He is trying to jam a cap-and-trade carbon bill through Parliament before he goes to the big conference in Copenhagen. Five senior ministers have quit, based on the fact that there is an excellent possibility that human-generated carbon emissions do not play the role claimed by the Warmers.
I don’t quite know what to think, except that it is not what the experts tell me I am supposed to. Maybe I am more cautious than I used to be, or maybe I don’t suffer fools that well. There are certainly seem to be a lot of us around these days, you know?
Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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