I don’t know how I missed this earlier. I love news like this. From Brit Hume’s Grapevine:
Thirty-five Greenpeace (search) protesters got more than they may have bargained for when they stormed the International Petroleum Exchange in London on Wednesday. According to “The Times” of London, they slipped into a closing door and then roared onto the trading floor, blowing whistles and sounding foghorns.They were hoping to paralyze oil trading at the exchange. But the traders, most of them under 25 years old, rushed the protesters, pushing filing cabinets on top of them and kicking and punching them until they retreated. Twenty-seven protesters were arrested. Two were hospitalized, one with a broken jaw and the other with a concussion. One protester says, “I have never seen anyone less amenable to listening our point of view.”
Boy, that really makes me laugh.
But that’s not the only thing I got a kick out of from Fox News. I haven’t said much about the Junk Science opinion pieces lately. I was expecting a Kyoto related entry, and I was not disappointed.
On a more serious note, we also installed two counters at JunkScience.com to estimate the costs and benefits of the Kyoto Protocol.Similar to the famed National Debt Clock (search) near Times Square in New York City, one counter racks up the immense compliance costs of the Kyoto Protocol, conservatively estimated for the counter’s purpose at $150 billion per year.
If the astronomical compliance costs don’t impress you, we’ve got another counter — one that shows an estimated running total of the potential “warming” avoided by the treaty’s restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions.
Both global warming skeptics and advocates agree that the potential amount of warming that hypothetically might be avoided through Kyoto Protocol implementation is roughly 0.07 degrees centigrade by the year 2050.
So to be able to show any activity on the clock, we had to go out nine places to the right of the decimal point — that would be potential temperature changes on the order of a billionth of one degree Centigrade.
Combined, the two counters indicate that the Kyoto Protocol costs roughly $100,000 to “prevent” just one-billionth of a degree of warming. So at the bargain price of just $100 trillion, the average global temperature could theoretically be lowered by 1 degree Centigrade.
Well that was entertaining enough. I think I’ll go out my way to pick up a copy of today’s campus newspaper. Surely there must be some reaction to the Kyoto thing. How many op-eds will state something like “if it costs every penny have, we must save the environment”? Actually, if that appears in the paper in any serious manner, look for me on the news tonight. I will snap.
Hold on, I’m not done bad-mouthing my employer yet.
Fortunately, the good news keeps going. Apparently there’s some graph of global temperatures over the last 1000 years. Because it stays pretty flat then spikes at the end, it’s known as the hockey stick. Not surprisingly, it’s often used as evidence of global warming.
It’s also not surprising then, that people in the general public want to examine the widely cited work.
Stephen McIntyre, a Canadian minerals consultant who has spent a great deal of time and (his own) money studying the graph says that, for one thing, the mathematical technique used to draw the graph is prone to generating hockey stick-like graphs even when applied to random data. So the hockey stick graph data proves nothing according to McIntyre.McIntyre would like to do more research on the hockey stick, but the graph’s author, Michael Mann of the University of Virginia, is blocking that effort.
This guy, or Mann I should say, is nearly my colleague. I actually hope I run into this guy so I can get his word on the situation.
McIntyre requested the raw data Mann used to construct the hockey stick. But after initially providing some information, Mann refused further cooperation, claiming he doesn’t have time to respond to “every frivolous note” from nonscientists, according to the Journal.While McIntyre thinks there are more errors in the method used to develop the hockey stick, Mann refuses to release the requested computer code claiming that, “Giving them the algorithm would be giving in to the intimidation tactics that these people are engaged in,” reported the Journal.
But asking for a scientist’s data and methods for purposes of evaluating scientific conclusions is part-and-parcel of the time-honored traditions known as the scientific method and peer review — it’s hardly “intimidation.”
Moreover, Mann’s research was funded by U.S. taxpayers through the National Science Foundation and the Department of Commerce’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
It’s simply unfathomable that Mann thinks he can secrete his publicly-financed data and methodology from independent review by interested members of the public — particularly when he and other global warming promoters are trying to use his results to change public policy.
Maybe we should add a third counter — one representing the number of days Mann hides his dubious data from the public that paid for it.
It’s quite well summed up in the opinion piece. If Mann was working for a private company, I would in no way expect him to release his algorithm. I would also not expect the work to be taken as seriously.
However, the point of being a publicly funded researcher is to provide knowledge for the public. Any published result should be published in a way that will allow for the reproducability of results. That’s how crackpots are removed from the field of science.
I wonder if UVA will put any pressure on him to fully disclose his work.
This post has gotten way to long. I’ve already lost interest in it. Oh well, I killed a lot of time.
UC still sucks.
Update: After rereading the post, I looked at Mann’s words [emphasis mine]: “giving in to the intimidation tactics that these people are engaged in”. Let’s see, he’s produced evidence loved by liberal politicians for supporting global warming. He won’t accept challenges to his work. A potential bias? What does fundrace say about this?
Michael Mann
Professor
University Of Virginia
John Kerry $650
That one degree centirgrad is actually pretty significant. Of course the effects of one meteor hitting in the gulf of Mexico was too, not to mention the natural cycles of the earth temperature creating ice ages and immense global flooding and the fact that god knows what the sun will do or spitout at us in the next few centuries. What thehell, let’s spend the cash anyway. The world can be our Bastard child welfare baby. Let’s all go hug a tree and hope we don’t crush its roots in the process.
USC sucks worse (I like this new theme)