The Global Warming Debate is Over

Isn't odd that you constantly hear the AGW alarmists claim that there is complete scientific consensus about AGW. But it seems that whenever you go and look for the scientific supporters of AGW you constantly come up with the same handful of leading suspects. When any government comittee is interveiwing people in order to get everyone on the AGW bandwagon, they always come up with the same few people, like Michael Mann, James Hansen, and Gavin Schmidt. These agencies try to convince us that these people represent reality, and that everyone else is a hack. But a closer look will show us that Mann, Hansen and Gavin are in fact the hacks, and that most of the scientific community does not agree with them. Let's begin with Mann.
Mann is the author of the famous hockey stick temperature reconstruction graph. This is the graph that Al Gore, chest puffed out, proudly displays in his movie "An Inconvenient Truth". The graph and the paper it came from was supposedly peer reviewed and the work had supposedly been reproduced. But in looking at the reviewers and reproducers, they all turned out to be friends and associates of Mann. This group is now collectively called "The Hockey Team".
But when a couple of hard nosed Canadians named Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick reviewed Mann's data, it fell apart like so much dried manure. At first, Mann refused to provide them with his data and methodology. Mann never wanted anyone to look closely at his results. We were just suppose to accept them. But eventually he was forced to turn the stuff over.
When McIntyre and McKitrick began to look at Mann's work they found a veritable laundry list of errors, inaccuracies, and what sometimes looked like purposeful omissions and selections and weightings designed to get a specific result. M & M generated temperature test data that was essentially white noise and they ran it through Mann's analysis methodology; and behold they produced a hockey stick result.
They found that Mann relied heavily on tree ring data from the brissel cone pine. And he weighted this data much more heavily that his other proxy data sets. These tree ring data sets were the only ones that were capable of making the Medieval Warming Period and the Little Ice Age virtually disappear. A result Mann wanted in order to make contemporary climate look unique. But as everyone knows, pine tree growth is dependent on far more than temperature - like nutrients, CO2, rain, etc.
Mann should either have discarded the tree ring data or weighed it very lightly. Mann also used data that was badly time correlated. Data that was used more than once, and he did selective truncation of some data sets. Some of the proxy data sets had results data Mann didn't like over certain periods of time, so he used the portion of the proxy data sets that he did like and threw away what he didn't like. Mann is a person that ReduceGHGs considers to be a "credible" source.
McIntyre and McKitrick published their findings about Mann's work. Their paper was heavily peer reveiwed, and because of it, the IPCC was forced to pull Mann's hockey stick from their own publications.
Then we have AGW suspect number 2, James Hansen, head of the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies. Hansen is often considered the high priest of the AGW cult. His pronouncements make him sound more like a comedian in a panick than a serious scientist. This makes him perfect for Algore, a man for whom no exaggeration is too great. By the way, Algore is still using the hockey stick that the IPCC has discarded. Let's look at one of Hansen's testimonies before a government comittee.
From Hansen:"If additional human-made global warming (above that in 2000 is so larg, say 2-3deg C. that the expected equilibrium (long-term) sea level rise is of the order of 25 meters, there would be the potential for a continually unfolding disaster of monstrous proportions." 25 meters of sea rise is about 82 feet. If the entire Greenland ice shelf melted it would only contribute 25 feet.
But unlike sea ice, which is only a few feet thick, the Greenland ice shelf is a couple of miles thick. The odds of it all melting in the next century, even using some of the IPCCs more shocking scenarios, is almost nill. And where would Hansen get the rest of his 82 feet of sea rise. It could only come from Antartica. But the temperature in Antartica is so cold that the worlds temperature would have to go up 8 to 10 deg C to get any significant melting there.
And again, even the exaggeration prone IPCC has no models that produce anything close to a 8 to 10 deg. C temp rise. So James Hansen's treat of a possible 25 meter sea rise is almost non existent. Yet he advertises this kind of crap because he is more of a politician than a scientist. Next we need to look at the temperature record of which James Hansen is in charge, the GISS surface temp record.
And again, even the exaggeration prone IPCC has no models that produce anything close to a 8 to 10 deg. C temp rise. So James Hansen's treat of a possible 25 meter sea rise is almost non existent. Yet he advertises this kind of crap because he is more of a politician than a scientist. Next we need to look at the temperature record of which James Hansen is in charge, the GISS surface temp record.
But before we go to Hansen's temp record, let me say that compared to his 82 feet of estimated sea rise, the exaggeration prone IPCC estimates 19 inches; and the world's top sea level scientist estimates 4 inches.Now, there are four primary, corrected, global temperature records. RSS (Satellite), UAH (Satellite), HadCrut (surface thermometer) GISS (surface thermometer). GISS is the record that Hansen runs. And, of course, it shows by far the highest temperatures.
The two satellite records are extremely well correlated. The HadCrut surface temp record is reasonably well correlated with the satellite records. Hansen's record is by far the outlyer. It is about .3 deg C higher than the satellite records and .2 deg C higher than HadCrut. Whenever you see someone quoting this or that recent year as being the 2nd or 3rd hottest on record, they are always using Hansen's records. The others disagree.
In addition, the disparity between Hansen's records and the others is growing all of the time. Hansen uses about 2000 thermometers around the world. You can find some of them sitting above blacktop or concrete, you can find some of them sitting near to where air conditioners are exhausting hot air. Recently Hansen found that 1939 was a hotter year than his prefered hottest year of 1998. Hansen didn't like that. So what did he do?
He found a temperature data set that he owned that showed 1939 to be statistically equal to 1998. Without informing the world, or even the scientific community, he switched his data set in mid stream to the data set that showed 1998 to be equal to 1939. So now he can say that 1998 is the hottest year on record without appearing to be a liar. Of course, "hottest year on record only means - since we have been keeping thermometer records.
Of course when Hansen speaks about "hottest year on record", he is speaking for the time that we have had thermometers to record. And that has only been since coming out of the Little Ice Age.
Let me just add that when Steve McIntyre tried to get a copy of Hansen's raw data set and a copy of his method of analysis, Hansen fought against it for a long time. Obviously he has no desire for transparency. Hansen is also the scientist that was crying about the government stiffling his freedom of speech. But he is still employed and still shooting off his mouth. Meanwhile, the lead climatologists of Washington State and Oregon have been fired for disagreeing with AGW.
The next in our set of "usual suspects" is Gavin Schmidt. Gavin is a light weight scientist serving as a front man for the AGW movement through his web site "RealClimate". His function is to attack anyone who disagrees with the AGW orthodoxy and to defend any AGW alarmists whose science is being questioned. He also serves to spread the word with government committes and debate groups.
Gavin has made little in the way of his own scientific contribution, but he wants to give the impression that RealClimate is a place open for public debate on the AGW issues. Unfortunately, the impession he wishes to give is an entirely false one. I went to discuss AGW on his site, taking care never to be abrassive and never to retaliate for any personal attacks.
I was allowed to ask questions and make comments as long as they were easily answered and were not a threat to the accepted way of thinking at Gavin's site. But when I asked the difficult questions, or when I supplied links to scientific papers that challenged AGW, my posts were always moderated out. I found that if you agreed with AGW you could say anything you wanted, no matter how controversial, absurd, or one sided. But if you disagreed with AGW you needed to walk on egg shells.