Dr. Jim Mitroy-Senior Lecturer in Physics, Charles Darwin University
The disturbing thing about this is the way good old fashioned scientific rectitude has been thrown overboard, and the touchstone is of course the now (in)famous hockey stick. This is just one aspect of the entire climate issue, but if the quality of evidence presented here is representative here of the quality of research in other areas of climate science, then the state of the science is very shaky indeed. Storch has recently stated that what Mann did has an inherent tendency to produce Hockey sticks even when fed random numbers. Go to a library, find look at books published prior to the whole greenhouse thing and you will find little ice-ages and medieval warm periods galore. You might even find a Global climate optimum where the temperature was warmer than at present!
Now the Hockey Stick was the result of feeding data into computer. Due to various reasons, the Hockey Stick code had recently been made available. For some amusement, I ran it through a fortran syntax checker, and got screens and screens of warning messages. Now, I personally would not like such a poor example of coding to be a significant driver of what is an essentially major change to the world economy. If the care that is placed into the Mann code, is indicative of the care that other aspects of their research is done, and further an indicator of the quality of other greenhouse research, well then I am simply going to disbelieve it. I like my science to be done much more carefully with much greater attention to detail.
So one of the major issues in the entire debate is the way garbage research, is given uncritical acceptance depending on ones political persuasion, and that this is corrupting the scientific process itself. There are other examples out there where clearly utter garbage is given widespread prominence and not given the good head-kicking it deserves.
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Now the Hockey Stick was the result of feeding data into computer. Due to various reasons, the Hockey Stick code had recently been made available. For some amusement, I ran it through a fortran syntax checker, and got screens and screens of warning messages. Now, I personally would not like such a poor example of coding to be a significant driver of what is an essentially major change to the world economy. If the care that is placed into the Mann code, is indicative of the care that other aspects of their research is done, and further an indicator of the quality of other greenhouse research, well then I am simply going to disbelieve it. I like my science to be done much more carefully with much greater attention to detail.
So one of the major issues in the entire debate is the way garbage research, is given uncritical acceptance depending on ones political persuasion, and that this is corrupting the scientific process itself. There are other examples out there where clearly utter garbage is given widespread prominence and not given the good head-kicking it deserves.
More...
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