ClimateGames
By Mary Theroux • Friday December 4, 2009 4:35 PM PDT • 12 Comments
Remember that great Cold War movie, “WarGames“? It portrays a young computer nerd who makes his way into a government computer and sets it on a course convincing top government officials that the end of the world is imminent. Based on the computer simulation playing out on their screens, which they believe reflects reality, the top brass cranks up the danger alarm to DefCon1 and sets out to unleash deadly global countermeasures. Finally, at the 11th hour, a scientist who had turned his back on the whole concept of such computer gaming convinces the government not to act—to wait and see that the end of the world is not reality; it is a computer simulation—and all is saved.
The plot is eerily similar to that coming to light from the Climate Research Unit’s hacked emails: advocates of global warming fed data into computers to model catastrophic events unfolding right before our eyes that demand immediate and draconian countermeasures.
Except, they’re just computer models.
Here is one such example of how actual temperature readings have been “enhanced”:
“Before”—raw temperature data from New Zealand:
“After”—the same data, adjusted for undisclosed reasons:
The accompanying story explains:
About half the adjustments actually created a warming trend where none existed; the other half greatly exaggerated existing warming. All the adjustments increased or even created a warming trend, with only one (Dunedin) going the other way and slightly reducing the original trend.
The shocking truth is that the oldest readings have been cranked way down and later readings artificially lifted to give a false impression of warming, as documented below. There is nothing in the station histories to warrant these adjustments and to date Dr. Salinger [the lead scientist] and NIWA [New Zealand's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research] have not revealed why they did this.
Michael Mann’s famous “hockey stick,” used to great effect by well-known former politicians and other alarmists, employs similar “tricks,” as does the work of his colleagues—now all trying desperately to get us to believe that the term “trick” really means “scientific method.”
Now that it has been revealed that all of the raw data upon which all of these doomsaying models have been built have been thrown away, with our supposing to just “trust” that the manipulated data remaining has been manipulated correctly; and now that we’ve seen a dozen years of no warming that the scientists have admitted among themselves flies in the face of their models (“Hide the decline”), how about we finally stop playing ClimateGames, step down from DefCon1/Kyoto/Copenhagen, and play a nice game of chess?
Tags: Environment, Europe, Global Warming, Politics, Presidential Power, Propaganda, Science, Transparency, War 
Hide the Decline!
Carl | Dec 4, 2009 | Reply
But what would the climatology dorks do if they weren’t deceiving the public with their own tax dollars? Dare I suggest that they might want to rediscover legitimate scientific inquiry and leave the politics to the politicians.
Steve Hogan | Dec 4, 2009 | Reply
Now that’s how to cook the books.
Fallon | Dec 5, 2009 | Reply
Spun up again over nothing, aren’t you Theroux?
Moe Badderman | Dec 8, 2009 | Reply
I’m a libertarian free market anarchist and I feel ashamed at the corrupt reporting of some Independent Institute’s contributors, such is the case here.
Mary Theroux presents a biased, unscientific, political read on what should be preserved in the realm of scientific debate.
For science deals with facts and politics with values. You should not be distorting facts to suit your agenda where you see a threat to your political agenda.
I do not agree with cap and trade, carbon tax, state solutions to any problem, because the market can solve it better tan any government could, but to deny the absolute reality of man-made global warming from the second half of the 20th century onwards is an exercise of falsehood of which you should be ashamed.
Do not talk about those things you are not qualified to discuss, leave the science to the scientists. Let the peer review process work.
And if you want to imply a huge conspiracy involving thousands of scientists across fields of study, nationalities, etc, then submit your theory, publish it and get it peer reviewed as well.
Michael Mann’s chart was heavily scrutinized and was held as valid by the vast majority of climate scientists after such systematic inquiry.
Stop the lunacy of reality denial. Truth is more important than any politics.
Salazar | Dec 8, 2009 | Reply
How about a nice game of global thermo-nuclear war?
bob | Dec 9, 2009 | Reply
Salazar:
The entire reason that the leaking of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) emails is worthy of showcasing is that it displays precisely the behavior you are accusing me of: systematic “biased, unscientific, political read on what should be preserved in the realm of scientific debate,” a coordinated “distorting of facts to suit [their] agenda where [they] see a threat to [their] political agenda,” (see, for an example of this, “EPA May Have Suppressed Report Skeptical Of Global Warming”).
And, yes, a conspiracy to game the peer review process (email from Michael Mann: “Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board.”) For more on the fallibility of peer review, see also Bob Higgs’s “Peer Review, Publication in Top Journals, Scientific Consensus, and So Forth,” published by History News Network, and also excerpted in Nature magazine.
As for Michael Mann’s chart, once the raw data was dragged out of him, it was shown that any data plugged into his model would produce a hockey stick (ref. Climateaudit.org). But perhaps more reprehensible, he picked and chose what data he used: he used tree ring data as a proxy for historical temperature readings, and when tree ring patterns from 1980 forward failed to correlate to temperature as he had assumed in using it as a historical proxy, he simply used actual temperature readings instead.
By whose definition of the scientific method do you defend this?
Eduardo Zorita, Scientist at the Institute for Coastal Research in Germany, writes:
My “political agenda” consists of trying to prevent the massive, centralized command-and-control apparati that a blind acceptance of a theory of anthropomorphic global warming (which trend’s failure to continue over the past 10-12 years remains an unexplained mystery), and calling into question the preposterous claims of devastating effects, of biblical proportions, that only such totalitarian controls can prevent.
Scientists cited with equal certainty evidence of global cooling in the 1970s. Thankfully their calls for action in that era (including exploding nuclear devices to create a greenhouse effect) failed as Americans still retained a healthy skepticism of such extreme government “solutions.”
I would also encourage you to read the text and links in the Beacon posting: “The ‘Scientific’ Fraud of Climate Doomsday Mongering”
Best wishes,
Mary
Mary Theroux | Dec 9, 2009 | Reply
Thou doest protest too much, Salazar!
Miss D | Dec 9, 2009 | Reply
Mary,
Great comment to Salazaar. Little correction -it’s Zorita not Zarita. The poor man has probably already made the list to be excommunicated. One thing true believers hate more than nonbelievers is apostates.
For those not up to date, Andy Revkin (himself a believer) of the NYTs has already been chastised over his rather tame criticism of the more problematic e-mails. He had already been marked in one of those e-mails for not being ready at all times to write exactly what Jones and Co. wanted written.
The list of the excommunicated grows almost daily, Lindzen, Singer, and on and on. This behavior, this ostracizing, marginalizing and sometimes outright bullying of scientists who question aspects of AGW suggests something other than science is going on. So, you go on and question away Mary.
RickC | Dec 9, 2009 | Reply
Noted and corrected, Rick.
Thank you!
Mary
Mary Theroux | Dec 10, 2009 | Reply
Nice article and good reply to Salazaar. He apparently missed the all-to-obvious irony of his own criticism, i.e accusing you of what he is doing himself.
Dennis Lee Wilson | Feb 7, 2010 | Reply