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Friday 1 June 2012

Hard not to be angry


Please accept my apologies if you are already familiar with this, but for those who are not, I'd like to explain briefly and in simple words what Bishop Hill and Steve McIntyre are covering in the two important climate posts I've linked to.

When global temperature records are reconstructed from data such as ancient tree rings, many paleoclimatologists (as they are called) say they may select those trees which seem to show warming and ignore those that don't. They say this is legitimate.

That's it in a nutshell - that's where a fair bit of climate alarmism comes from. Absurd, stupid, dishonest amateurish and hopelessly unscientific it may be, but that's what is going on even now. As Bishop Hill says, it's hard not to be angry about these games.

However as we mentioned earlier on the subject of biological growth populations, this does not mean that one could not improve a chronology by reducing the number of series used if the purpose of removing samples is to enhance a desired signal. The ability to pick and choose which samples to use is an advantage unique to dendroclimatology.

Esper et al 2003

2 comments:

James Higham said...

Out and out dishonesty.

A K Haart said...

James - yes and the infuriating thing is - it's so obvious and blatant.