Charles and AGW

Charles and his merry band of groupies are at it again. No, thi isn't a particularly notable thread, but just one I bothered to browse.

The LGF community has been a good one only for a brief period of time, but these days it's just dreadful. Suffocating, abusive and intellectually shallow enforced uniformity of views is the best description I can give.

There, anyone dissenting from the Charles' position on AGW is labelled denier, troll, bigot and automatically, even preemtpively, associated with intelligent designers, anti vaccination folks and the like. Even if the commenter has never touched those subjects.

All skeptical arguments are dismissed as canards and talking points, if not outright lies. Then denigrated as not being real science - without any real explanation of why, for example, the data butchery of Mann's Hockey Stick is more scientific than rebuttals to it.

The global level of discussion is generally abysmal, with only a few commenters reaching nothing better than a good level. Critics to the unending support for AGW are generally so bad to look like cartoonish, caricatural versions of what a knowledgeable skeptic would say.

But enough with the Little Green Groupies. It's nice to pile scorn on them, however there's a much bigger world out there.

It's been all around the blogs from some time, Steve McIntyre has found yet another serious flaw in another of the main ingredients of hockey sticks - the famous Yamal series by Briffa. Other people have exposed the whole story better, so go there if you please.

Charles instead thinks that McIntyre's point is disproven by the fact that he had all the data but took a few years to discover the problem. An intellectual giant that man is.

What I want to add is that falsifying the hockey stick has far-reaching implications. It is not just the most famous piece of evidence of AGW, neither a personal obsession.

To exist, the AGW hypothesis requires a rather stable global temperature followed by a sharp increase with rising concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere during the 20th century. A more variable temperature before that time, and even more so no sharp rise mean the death of the AGW hypothesis.

And not just that. No hockey stick temperature pattern also means that CO2 emissions are not the main temperature driver and that there is little need to worry about catastrophic or runaway global warming. No need to happily submit to carbon rationing, either.

The impact of Yamal's implosion on IPCC's own hypothesis is explained in more detail in this other blog post.

I'd like to close my piece with the quote from Lucia, another climate blogger:

One of the issues that gets lost in the whole “should we trust peer review” articles is this: Peer review is a first pass. In the full peer review process, people read articles. Then the ones who can think for themselves form their own opinions about the articles. They, they tell other people what they think.