The Hockey Stick Graph - Do the Math

I just finished "State of Fear" by Michael Chrichton again. It was an excellent book. The lessons that I got from it remind of when I'm helping my daughter do her math homework. She always has questions about what to do next or how to check her work. My answer is always, "Do the math". Along those lines, the science behind global warming seems to get a pass when it comes to peer review.

One of those passes is the famous hockey stick graph of global temperatures. Kim du Toit has a post about this research that was published in 1998 by Mann, Bradley and Hughes in Nature (vol. 392: 779-787) or MBH98. This work was important because it attempted to proved that the increase in global temperature was manmade. The hockey stick graph represented flat global temperatures until the 1990's when there was a sharp increase. Hence the hockey stick.

In the post, Kim quotes from a National Business Review article. Michael Mann would not allow peer review of his work by putting obstacles in the path of McIntyre and McKitrick and not allowing the release of his computer code. When McIntyre and McKitrick were able to use his algorithm, they found that the hockey stick can be re-produced with random data. Not excactly re-producible or good science. This is a good reason to "do the math" yourself.

Here is a further quote that ties into the message of "State of Fear" from the article:

The reason why the Hockey Stick is so important is the fact that it tries to do away with the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age (and further back with the Dark Ages Cold Period and the Roman Warm Period). Those natural climate fluctuations are an embarrassment to the hypothesis that mankind is mainly to blame for the present warming. In its first Scientific Assessment Report (1990), the IPCC still had a temperature graph showing the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. It is now clear in the 2001 report that the IPCC has deliberately eliminated these natural climate fluctuations with sleight of hand.

This paragraph frames the fundemental problem that I see with the Global Warming crowd. They have a political bent to their view and ignore contrary evidence that does not blame the United States. They ignore the heat island effect, fudge past temperature data, from the citations in "State of Fear", they ignore real sea level data. If they are working from a suspect hypothesis, that warming is man made, is any of the other work presented worth anything? I suspect that some of it is, in context. If we could take some of the leftward political leaning out of the science, we might get better science and understanding of what our real problems and possible solutions are. It would be nice if we could all "do the math".

Field and Stream Gun Blogger

Field and Stream Magazine has a blogger that I found through The Ten Ring. After looking through a few articles, it looks pretty good. The guys name is David E. Petzal and although I haven't read Field and Stream in a long time, it may be time for a look again. Anyway check out the blog. It's called The Gun Nut.

$5 back from Flash-Memory-Store.com

By posting this, www.Flash-Memory-Store.com will give me $5 back on my 1 G mini-SD memory order. Well guys, here it is. I'll post about my experience after I receive my product too. They sell flash memory products and the prices were better than any other place that saw on the web.

Want to See Something Really Scary?

Gates of Vienna has a post about Jamaat ul-Fuqra, a radical muslim organization based in the United States. The interim investigative report, undertaken by the Northeast Intelligence Network, can be found here in the Politics of CP. If this organization was made up white rednecks from the sticks, they would have been wrapped up long ago. As it is, these guys have camps in many states and undergo military training with explosives and automatic heavy weapons. There has been nothing in the MSM either. Go Bloggers! Where is Janet Reno when we need her?

Col McMaster Briefing from Tall Afar: Operation Restoring Rights

Hat tip to Powerline for the link. This briefing by Army Col. H. R. McMaster, commander of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. Since the MSM does not see this as news, it's here for you. Tall Afar is a territory on the Syrian border being used by islamists to infiltrate Iraq. Here is a small snippet where Col. McMaster describes our enemy:

I'd like just to briefly characterize the enemy, describe who we're fighting here. This is an enemy, who when they came in, they removed all the imams from the mosques, and they replaced them with Islamic extremist laymen. They removed all the teachers from the schools and replaced them with people who had a fifth-grade education and who preached hatred and intolerance. They murdered people. In each of their cells that they have within the city has a direct action cell of about 100 or so fighters. They have a kidnapping and murder cell; they have a propaganda cell, a mortar cell, a sniper cell -- a very high degree of organization here. And what the enemy did is to keep the population from performing other activities. To keep the population afraid, they kidnapped and murdered large numbers of the people here, and it was across the spectrum. A Sunni Turkmen imam was kidnapped and murdered. A very fine man, a city councilman, Councilman Suliman (sp), was pulled out of his car in front of his children and his wife and gunned down with about 30 gunshot wounds to his head. The enemy conducted indiscriminate mortar attacks against populated areas and wounded scores of children and killed many others. The enemy here did just the most horrible things you can imagine, in one case murdering a child, placing a booby trap within the child's body and waiting for the parent to come recover the body of their child and exploding it to kill the parents. Beheadings and so forth.