Friday, January 30, 2009

Anthropogenic Global Warming

The greatest fraud in history?

"In AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) bad data has been very widespread, and judging by past performance, it may still be endemic. Thermometers are placed in hot areas in the cities, and the data is shamelessly generalized to the whole world. The infamous “hockey stick” temperature diagram has been exposed. James Hansen has brought NASA to its lowest point ever by repeatedly endorsing false data.

In any healthy field of science, that disastrous empirical record would have discredited the hypothesis. But while the data seems to crash periodically, the models don’t change in their catastrophism.

Read the headlines in SCIENCE magazine any week, and you can see that grinding process of doubt, clarification, and constant revision going on. In real science researchers can be forgiven for making a few errors, but not many known or suspected frauds are denied tenure or fired. They are essentially blacklisted for the rest of their careers. The process is utterly Darwinian, and it works.

Except for the global warming hype. Here, we’re supposed to accept the word of media types who know nothing about science, and care only about the next big headline."

Here are seven more fundamental violations of scientific integrity in the AGW game: