Canadian Court Limits Effort of Climate Alarmists to Silence Critics by Demanding Alarmist Climate Data

The infamous "hockey stick" alarmist Prof. Michael Mann, condoned by Pennsylvania State University, tried to shut down the criticism of Dr. Tim Ball, a Canadian climatologist, by claiming that Dr. Ball had defamed him.  Dr. Ball had backed up his criticism with publicly available science and challenged Dr. Mann to make his government-funded research data available for public examination.

Many of you will remember that the ClimateGate e-mails had given rational readers good reason to suspect that Dr. Mann had cherry-picked data to create his hockey stick chart of historic temperatures. He had ignored such well-known warm periods as the Medieval Warm Period in order to claim that temperatures were flat and stable prior to the most recent decades and switched his method of determining temperatures to "hide the decline" that method yielded for more recent times.  This was referred to in the ClimateGate e-mails as Mann's Nature Trick.  For a long time, the climate alarmists used the fiction of a 1000 years of temperature stability to point a finger of guilt at mankind for the temperature increase post 1979.

This same Mann hockey stick temperature plot had played a prominent role in the UN IPCC AR3 report of 2001.  The latest UN IPCC AR5 report no longer dares to wipe out the entire Medieval Warm Period in its bloated, alarmist claims.  Even the catastrophic man-made global warming alarmists have had to back away from the Mann hockey stick temperature plot. One wonders that the data, used in such a highly touted UN IPCC report as AR3 was, has been sequestered from general examination by scientists.

Dr. Mann was required to make his climate data on which the "hockey stick" temperature plot was based available to the Canadian court.  Now Mann, despite his initiating a legal challenge against Dr. Ball, has not only not succeeded in the British Columbia courts, but is in contempt of a court order to provide the court with his publicly-funded data and research results.  Apparently, there are limits on the usefulness to CAGW alarmists in using the courts as a tool to silence challenges from other scientists.

In the U.S., the Trump administration is acting to make scientific data and research funded by the government more available for examination by other scientists.  As this data comes to be examined, we are going to find that much more scientific fraud has been committed than we now know about and that many government policies have been based on this fraudulent science.

For more on the outcome of the Dr. Mann vs. Dr. Ball court case, see this article.

Thank you Merlin for drawing my attention to this article.

Was the Warming of the Late 20th Century Unprecedented?

Those who claim that the effects of man's emissions of carbon dioxide on climate are catastrophic, have commonly said the high temperatures of the late 20th Century and the rate of their rise was unprecedented.  All of the extensive evidence of warm periods in Europe and around its periphery is often said to be only due to local effects, without a worldwide analog.  Over the last 10 years more evidence that these warm events existed in places such as China and South America has been found, but the non-European evidence is not so voluminous that those who make the claim of unprecedented warming recently have been quieted.  A new study of sea surface temperatures in the East China Sea over the last 2700 years adds to that evidence that the recent history has precedents.


Weichao Wu of Peking University and 4 other colleagues of various universities in China collected a sediment core from the sea floor in the Southern Okinawa Trough over which the warm Kuroshio current flows.  "The researchers analyzed the top 10 meters of the sediment core, corresponding to 2,700 years of sedimentation and from it were able to resolve 25-yr averages. To determine the SST, they used the “relative number of cyclopentane isoprenoid GDGTs in marine crenarchaeota (Thaumarchaeota)” which “increases with increasing growth temperature.”""  "...they identified a tracer in the sediment layers that is a measure of the relative abundance of a tiny marine organism whose number is sensitive to the sea surface temperature. The more crenarchaeota that are evident in the sediment layer, the higher the ocean temperature."

The temperature history from this proxy reconstruction is shown in the graph below with data points for each 25-year average and a running three-point mean line. 



Their sea surface temperature reconstruction clearly shows the Roman Warm period (RWP), the Dark Age Cool Period (DACP),  the Sui-Tang dynasty Warm Period (STWP),  the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), the Little Ice Age (LIA), and the Current Warm Period (CWP). The warm period from 500 to 350 BC was when Persian and Greek civilizations arose.  The highest temperature data point for this period is higher than any for the recent CWP.  The rate of rise at its start is also faster.  The highest temperature in the RWP is also higher, as is the rate of initial rise in temperature for the RWP, compared to the CWP.  The STWP seems to have displaced a longer Dark Ages Cool Period in Europe.  The highest temperature in the MWP in the East China Sea is higher than the recent warming also, though the MWP in Europe was more substantial than that in the East China Sea.

The important thing is that higher temperatures and higher rates of temperature increase, as well as higher rates of temperature decrease, have occurred in the past in other areas of the world with a significant correlation to the events of Europe and its surroundings.  The temperature proxy data used to construct the hockey stick temperature record of the last IPCC assessment report was very limited.  As pointed out by Ian Plimer in Heaven and Earth global warming the missing science, there actually is much information from around the world that indicates how misleading that hockey stick temperature plot really was.

Lies and More Lies

Steve Schneider of Stanford, a catastrophic man-made global warming alarmist, has just claimed that the hockey stick data was never used by the UN IPCC reports as evidence for that hypothesis!  If you lie and lie and just stick with the Big Lie, some people will believe you.  Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Castro, and Chavez all believe in this.  So do many other socialists and rabid, anti-man environmentalists.

Just to be clear, the hockey stick data of both Mann and Briffa was central to the main argument of the UN IPCC reports of both 2001 and 2007 for catastrophic anthropogenic global warming.  The basic argument took the form of a very dubious claim:  The temperature rise in the late 20th Century was extraordinary since nothing like it had been seen since 1400, natural forces could not explain it, so it must have been caused by man's CO2 emissions, which had risen steadily since 1850, but more rapidly since 1960.  Wow.

As you saw in the my last post, there was a sudden temperature rise from 1840 to 1880, at least in Greenland, which CO2 emissions were not likely to have caused.  There was also a rapid rise in temperature leading into the Medieval Warm Period, following the Dark Ages.  Perhaps the late 20th Century rapid rise was partly due to not really understanding the natural forces which were at work at earlier times and were perhaps at work again in the late 20th Century?  And, perhaps a part of the late 20th Century rise was due to heat island effects and data manipulations anyway?

Our understanding of climate science is not so advanced that any scientist should feel comfortable with an argument that claims that a climate change cannot be due to natural causes, therefore it must be due to man.  But, if you are a socialist or a man-hating environmentalist, you will never feel any constraints due to lack of knowledge.  Actually, ignorance is good.  If ignorant, you can claim anything.