06 December 2009
Danegeld
(Coming from Copenhagen in the Medieval Warm Period)
Thank God for the New York Times. Without their editorial page I would not know what I was supposed to think, and hence, what I ought to take with a hefty leavening of sea-salt, or just shoot on sight.
I will get to what chorus we are supposed to sing in a minute, but I did make it back to Arlington safely, ins’hallah. The roads were still warm enough that the white stuff turned to gray slush on contact, though there were a couple colorful moments, courtesy of my fellow Virginians and Marylanders who cannot adjust their vehicular behavior to conditions.
It is quite remarkable, and my defensive antennae were on full alert for a couple hours. Not a white-knuckle drive as some are, but certainly winter has arrived.
It would be foolish to draw any conclusions from that. Here is sultry Washington we have had twenty inches of snow in two blows in the month of November, which I could call The Little Ice Age of 1987, if the memory of a single person was relevant to the global weather pattern.
Of course it is not. Still, there is going to be a huge international conference starting tomorrow in the land of the Gentle Danes.
Of course, in written memory, the gentle Danes produced some of the most savage of the Vikings, who pillaged Europe and made all before them pay dearly for their lives. The payment to the Vikings was called the Danegeld in some places, and is related to the modern term for gelding, or the emasculation of stallions to make them more docile.
That all happened when things were a lot warmer than they are now. You may recall the accounts of the bold explorers who first came from Europe to the Americas, and whose farming communities were frozen out when the warm period ended. “Vinland the Good” is what they called that part of Canada then, before the growing seasons grew short, and the crops failed, and the hardy explorers died.
I have been reading the accounts of the thousands of e-mails that were purloined form the Climate Research Institute at East Anglia University.
I have thoughtful friends who dismiss the possibility that a small research unit could have such a vast impact on an international baseline for historical meteorological information.
The conventional wisdom holds that the evidence of global warming appears to be interlocking, peer reviewed and indisputable. Now, at long last, the land of the Gentle Danes will host the conference that will, once and for all, set us on the path of addressing human-induced global warming.
I wouldn’t be beating this drum again, were the Conference not to start tomorrow, and if not for the troubling fact that the books have been cooked, and that the historical climate data on which these momentous decisions will be made has been manipulated.
In the most charitable of interpretations, the very basis of the historical temperature data has been proven by the CRU scientists themselves to be unreliable.
Actual recorded temperature information goes back only to 1850, when the Little Ice Age was ending. Information before that is interpreted from the size of tree-rings, for example, which can reflect both temperature and moisture. This is known as “proxie” information, and is subject to much interpretation.
So much so that the data is discarded altogether once we get to 1960- this is known in the trade as the “divergence problem,” since the rings do not reflect a correlation with observed temperatures. This should stand as a warning flag indicating that the entire reconstruction is largely subjective and unreliable.
It should have been enough to junk the whole reconstruction, which also eliminated the warming and cooling periods that killed the Vikings in North America.
The baseline temperature reconstruction data goes a long way to demonstrate how a single institution in the UK could have had such astonishing global impact. The manipulated data is used to correlate information derived for satellites, for example.
It is a pity. If the partisans of climate are actually right about CO2, and there is some connection between man's economic activity and the climate, they have really got this so hopelessly wrong that it has to be redone from the ground up.
Predictably, both the President's people, and the New York Times have settled on their approach. First, the disclosure of the CRU e-mail trove is a violation of privacy, and the scientists have been wronged. They really are victims in this. While some of the notes expressed frustration, it is perfectly understandable given the circumstances and the block-headed obduracy of those who question their construction of the data sets.
Put aside for the moment that all this information was put together at government expense, and there is no inherent expectation of privacy any more than there is at the office.
Clearly the damage control effort is to get people to focus on the things that can be readily understood, and to steer the conversation away from the only thing that matters in this discussion, which is that the climate data is an unreliable hodge-podge of junk assumptions.
We are going to be told that we are going to pay a Danegeld to the UN for the sin of our carbon footprint. There is not a doubt in my mind that it will occur, and every despot in the third world will line up for reparations due to our profligate corruption of the climate.
But suppose for a moment, that it isn’t happening. Is it worth subjecting the information to independent investigation, away from the small group who manufactured the hockey stick graphics?
Before we are gelded?
Here is a prediction: Copenhagen will ignore the whole data issue. The US delegation will "commit" to a goal of 17% reduction in CO2 emissions. The New York Times is completely behind it.
By the time the matter gets back here to be considered by the Senate, there may have been a desperate rear-guard defense of the Scientific Method against the revealed truth from Copenhagen.
I know the Administration and the Times will oppose it, but who knows. If the climate really is warming at an unprecedented level we should do something about it.
The science has been cooked to make it seem that way, but I cannot confirm it with the evidence of my senses, and there is enough material out there to make at least a case that the current projections are as much political as scientific.
If there is to be a Danegeld paid, I prefer to start with the people who cooked the books.
Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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