I notice no one cares to defend the bad science practiced by McIntyre and McKitrick - which is hardly suprising given its indefensible.

You criticise one reference for being from a comp sci faculty - yet this article we are commenting on was written by an IT guy with no background in climate science - are you saying we should ignore him too (I'd agree with that at least).

RealClimate is information provided by actual climate scientists to try and clear the waters muddied by this disinformation campaign - if you'd like to argue with their debunking of the "broken hockey stick" foolishness go ahead.

It would be good to have some consensus on this issue before billions of tax funded dollars go down the tube in building unsustainable windfarms in rural residential areas and ruining the lives of the people who have to live next to them!!
Pippin

"Eco-McCarthyism" hey ? What a great line - newspeak at its best.

How about I quote some more commie eco-fascists then - first Republican party bigwig and oil industry heavy James Baker speaking last week at a conference in Houston :

U.S. Must Address Global Warming, Bush Ally Says - http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=scienceNews&storyID=7803787

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Former Secretary of State James Baker, a close ally of the Bush family, broke ranks with the Bush administration on Thursday and called for the United States to get serious about global warming.
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Or if he is too much of a new-money leftie wiener for you, how about Lord Oxburgh who is chairman of Shell :

Shell boss's 'confession' shocks industry -
http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,12374,1240566,00.html

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Ron Oxburgh, chairman of Shell, says we urgently need to capture emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, which scientists think contribute to global warming, and store them underground - a technique called carbon sequestration.

"Sequestration is difficult, but if we don't have sequestration then I see very little hope for the world," said Lord Oxburgh.

His words follow those of the government's chief science adviser, David King, who said in January that climate change posed a bigger threat to the world than terrorism.
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The global warming deniers are simply following a time worn path that was previously travelled by the tobacco industry, the asbestos industry and the chemical industry.

Coal and oil companies wish to preserve their profits and avoid restructuring their industries for as long as possible - externalising the costs associated with global gas emissions is one way for the management of these companies to keep profits up for as long as possible.

There is a great book called "The Corporation" by Joel Bakan which discusses this particular problem of corporate capitalism as it is currently practiced (highly recommended by the pinkos at The Economist and The Financial Review).

I think biggav does an injustice to the scientific method, when he asserts that:
* McIntyre and Mckitrick know little or nothing about climate science.
That is shooting the messenger.
* The "journals" they publish their "research" in are simply publications that are funded by US energy industry lobby groups.
That is poisoning the well.
* Global warming ... is no longer the subject of any meaningful debate.
That is closing the mind.

Mann et al find a stable pre-industrial climate - disturbed only now by humans burning fossil fuels. The inference is that those halcyon days can be regained. But hundreds of peer-reviewed papers find the contrary, with a prominent Mediaeval Warm Period and a well-developed subsequent sequence of Little Ice Age minima. IPCC chose a single aberrant paper which has never been independently replicated. Abusing those who question pre-industrial stability, does not serve to advance scientific understanding. Science should be a ferment of ideas.

Mann's statistical analysis was largely based on other scientists' records of high-latitude or high-altitude tree rings in the Northern Hemisphere, principally North America. But we know these trees grow only in the growing season - less than two months in June/July. We also know that most of the variability in temperate Northern Hemisphere climate is in winter. The Little Ice Age minima are an intermittent series of very cold winters. Climate would be ill-recorded by tree-rings.

Mann and IPCC compare a little-varying Northern Hemisphere tree-ring record for 1000-1900AD with a steeply-climbing 20th century thermometer record. But most 20th century warming was in Siberia and Alaska/Yukon in winter - right when trees in those areas don't grow. They have jointly committed a schoolboy howler - by comparing 900 years of summer-only apples with a 100 years of mostly-winter oranges.

IPCC's hockeystick is brain-dead. Surely, it would be better for both science and for human well-being, if the debate now moved on to the crucial question:
What drives our ever-changing climate?

Biggav,

The original article was purely a report of the current state of issues in the global warming debate. There is nothing of the writer's opinions save parts of the final paragraph.

One significant point about Michael Mann was that he was a Lead Author for the chapter of the IPCC TAR in which his "hockey sick" figured most prominently. Given his continued failure to fully disclose data and methods it is easy to see its prominence in the IPCC TAR as self-promotion.

Of course if temperatures were warmer than today - as critics of the "hockey stick" maintain - it would seem that the world can naturally warm and, more importantly, can naturally cool. Human involvement in recent warming would look very uncertain.

By the way, I see you are yet to refute the opening statements in the article, that despite an increase of CO2 equal to 10% to the total increase since 1750 global temperatures are no warmer than they were in 1998. Would you like to explain why the warming has failed to materialise?

cheers

I'll not going to enter this "debate" simply because the people trying to spread misinformation about global warming will not let facts or ignorance get in the way of their views.

However I will make these observations snowman is also the author of this two bit article.
He makes light of the field of climate research by believing that years of training and working in the field does not make someone anymore qualified to comment on climate change then a part time travel writer!

Lastly 75% would constitute a wide spread agreement which last time I looked in a dictionary is the definition of “Consensus”.

Ps Pippin if you don’t like wind farms which type of power station would you like or are you a “not in my backyarder” ?