(This is just a quick, short diary where I'll let climate-scientist Dr. Michael Mann do most of the talking.)
Dr. Michael Mann's patience with global-warming deniers is, shall we say, getting a bit thin.
Mann has just responded to a denier hit-piece that was published in the Vail Daily. Link here: http://www.vaildaily.com/...
Juicier bits excerpted here:
An individual named Martin Hertzberg did a grave disservice to your readers by making false and defamatory statements about me and my climate scientist colleagues in his recent commentary in your paper.
It's hard to imagine anyone packing more lies and distortions into a single commentary. Mr. Hertzberg uses libelous language in characterizing the so-called “hockey stick” -- work of my own published more than a decade ago showing that recent warming is unusual over at least the past 1,000 years -- as “fraudulent,” and claiming that it “it was fabricated from carefully selected tree-ring measurements with a phony computer program.”
These are just lies, regurgitation of dishonest smears that have been manufactured by fossil fuel industry-funded climate change deniers, and those who do their bidding by lying to the public about the science.
......
Mr. Hertzberg's lies are pernicious. Their intent appears to be to do convince you that there is no harm in our continued unfettered release of carbon into the atmosphere.
It is not only us, but our children and grandchildren who will suffer the consequences of devastating changes in our environment in the years and decades to come if we listen to charlatans like Mr. Hertzberg.
I'd like to ask readers here to follow the link to Mann's piece and click on the "recommend" button. Also, tweet it, reddit it, facebook it, or whatever, to help spread Mann's words far and wide.
I should also note that the Vail Daily has apparently removed the hit-piece to which Mann was responding. I can't help but wonder if maybe some lawyers are getting involved -- given that Mann is now using words like "libelous" and "defamatory", is it just a matter of time before Mann decides to haul at least one denier into a US court?
Note: Quick edit to fix an embarrassing typo in the title... the least I can do for Dr. Mann is spell his name right!
Another quick addition -- this is a bit of a diversion from the topic of Michael Mann, but I thought that it would be worth tossing in.
A few months ago, after hearing from denier acquaintances, co-workers, etc. all kinds of stories about how climate-scientists were hiding and/or manipulating the surface temperature data to fake/exaggerate the global-warming trend, making it impossible to for anyone else to verify/reproduce their results, etc..., I decided to roll up my sleeves and take a crack at crunching the temperature data myself.
I went out and downloaded the raw GHCN data, read up on the basic procedure used to compute global-average temperature anomalies, wrote up my own program (which implemented a simplified "stripped down" version of the CRU/Phil-Jones temperature anomaly procedure) and crunched the data myself.
Here is a plot of my results vs. NASA's official results:
Sorry about the small image size -- this was the only imageshack size option that would fit on the page (and I didn't want to spend time looking for another image hosting site).
The official NASA results (copied/pasted from the NASA/GISS web-site) are plotted in orange; my results are plotted in blue.
So basically, I was able to get results very similar to NASA's by applying a simplified "dumbed down" version of the CRU algorithm to the GHCN data that NASA uses. RAW GHCN data, btw.
BTW, I was able to get these results in just a few days of "spare time" programming/hacking.
The results above are what popped out of my first production run -- no data fiddling/tweaking of any sort required.
IOW, I was able to do in a few days what deniers haven't been able to figure out how to do in years.
12:27 PM PT: Cool --- made it to the rec list (first time). Michael Mann thanks you!
4:13 PM PT: Nice job, folks -- Mann's piece over at the Vail Daily web-site now has 100 recommendations (far more than any other op/ed piece there). So keep piling on!
