Don's Tuesday Column

          THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson Red Bluff Daily News   8/27/2019

        Climate’s long arc and fraud

It’s often a long arc for an issue to go from initial reporting, follow-up, counter-narratives and fact checking to a revised report—all to ascertain something approximating “established fact.” It’s no surprise that “facts,”—after days, even years, of debate—may escape widespread acceptance. Democratic candidate Joe Biden: “We (meaning Democrats) choose truth over facts.” Says it all.

So goes the decades-long dispute over Human-Caused (Anthropogenic) Global Warming, or AGW, relabeled as scary “climate change.” That is distinct from the obvious, neutral version of “climate change”: climate has, is and always will be in a state of “change.” That should be a non-controversial statement of both “fact” and “truth.” Their use of “climate change” serves only phony “truth,” alarm and fear of disasters that have not, but might yet, come to pass.

That sets up the following: A court in Canada dismissed the libel lawsuit filed in 2011 by Penn State University professor Michael Mann against Dr. Timothy Ball who said that Mann “belongs in the state pen, not Penn State,” for the fraud that Ball claimed was Mann’s “hockey stick” (published in 1998). It showed some 500 years of stable temperatures on Earth followed by a dramatic upturn since about 1900.

This is not cherry-picking or “fine points” disputing. Mann’s “hockey stick” showed an alarming spike in temperatures during the industrialization of the 20^th century and suggested that such a trend would lead to “catastrophic warming,” weather disasters, crop failures and mass starvation. From Malthus’ theories of exploding birthrates, to Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb,” environmental crusaders have used the specter of mass starvation to demand action.

Professor Mann’s “hockey stick” graph was so seemingly beyond dispute, “scientifically sound,” that the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) prominently featured it in its 2001 Climate Report; Al Gore built his alarmist 2006 movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” around its veracity.

“The graph’s methodology and accuracy have been and continue to be hotly contested, but Mann has taken the tack of suing two of his most prominent critics for defamation or libel. One case, against Mark Steyn, is called by Steyn likely to end up in the Supreme Court. But another case, against Dr. Tim Ball, was decided by the Supreme Court of British Columbia, with Mann’s case thrown out, and Mann ordered to pay the defendant’s legal costs…

“Dr Mann lost his case because he refused to show in open court his R2 regression numbers (the ‘working out’) behind the world-famous ‘hockey stick’ graph. Real science, not the phony ‘consensus’ version, requires open access to data, so that skeptics (who play a key role in science) can see if results are reproducible. Of course, there are no falsifiable experimental data associated with the global warming predictions of doom, so it doesn’t really stand as science as Karl Popper defined it. This is an important victory in the process of debunking the warmist scare.” (Thomas Lifson)

The only statement of fact ever edited out of a “The Way I See It” column involved Mann’s “hockey stick,” last November 27: “Penn State Professor Mann, who created the graph, had to retract it for inaccuracies.” While not a retraction, Mann refused to provide his data as a judge demanded—based on the age old premise that a plaintiff in a libel suit cannot withhold evidence showing whether the plaintiff did, in fact, commit a fraud as the defendant publicly stated (that Mann belonged in “the state pen”).

Dr. Ball was awarded the dismissal and 8 years of court costs; Mann can appeal to higher courts and expect his spin on the dismissal to be parroted about the environmental left’s echo chamber. “But there is not a court in North America that will allow a libel case to proceed where the plaintiff refuses to produce the documents that may show whether the statements made about him were true or false.” (J. Hinderaker)

In Dr. Ball’s 2014 book, “The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science,” he “exposes the malicious misuse of climate science as it was distorted by dishonest brokers to advance the political aspirations of the progressive left.” I recall a French president letting the truth slip out, that the AGW issue was not about the environment but about income from rich nations going to poor nations. A current climate alarmist/activist has likewise said that it’s not about reducing carbon emissions, but about state control of the economy.

In “Fake Data—How the Hockey Stick Graph Was Contrived,” by scientist Gary Novak, he explains the disingenuous combining of tree ring data from hundreds of years ago (has never been shown to be an accurate proxy for temperatures) and modern thermometers (which have been proven to misrepresent ground-based readings due to “urban heat effect”). He also points out that if Mann’s relatively flat “hockey stick” doesn’t show the “Medieval Warm Period” of about 1000 years ago, as well as the Little Ice Age from about 500 years ago—such a graph is on its face grossly inaccurate.

There has been marginal warming over the last 40 years, as you can see at “Latest Global Temps” by Roy Spencer, PhD. Records from NOAA satellites show a modest approx. 0.4 degree (Celsius) increase from 1979 to 2019, or about one-tenth of a degree per decade, or about 1 degree per century. Funny thing, we are told we must keep the rise to less than 1.5 degrees this century—seems like that’s just what’s happening without the “Green New Deal.”

Finally, go to “Some Historical Perspective – Foresight Institute” to see how Greenland ice cores show not only the Medieval Warming Period, 1000 years ago, but also periods warmer than now 2,000, 3,000 and 4,000 years ago. Before all of that, there was the most recent Ice Age. There are your choices: warmth or ice ages. People, animals and crops all like warm periods best, as I see it.