Hockey stick has become a boomerang

Update: The M&M paper has appeared in Geophysical Research Letters. Newspapers explain that climate science is much like Bre-X, and you don't want to invest in it. See also Wall Street Journal.

First of all, Steve McIntyre - the mineral exploration analyst who has made the audit of the temperature reconstructions together with the economist Ross McKitrick - has a new blog

• http://climateaudit.org/

The tomorrow's (February 11th, 2005) issue of Science has an article by Richard Kerr that discusses two topics related to the "hockey stick graph":

• The paper by McIntyre and McKitrick, soon to appear in Geophysical Research Letters, that shows that the reconstruction by Mann et al. is based on a flawed approach to statistics, and the results only reflect bristlecone pines
• Another paper form today (February 10th, 2005) issue of Nature by the Swedish-Russian group led by Anders Moberg.

The paper of Moberg et al. leads to roughly 5 times bigger natural temperature fluctuations than the "consensus of the hockey team" - and roughly 2 times bigger than the biggest previous estimate. The shape does not look as a hockey stick at all. It shows a very warm period around 1100 and a cold period around 1600. Steve McIntyre says, among other things, that while Moberg et al. has been "a kick in the teeth of MBH, they have just made another spaghetti graph". ;-)

At any rate, the "scientific consensus" about the dominant role of "anthropogenic" global warming is definitely gone.

Previous articles about the hockey stick:

• Breaking hockey stick
• A phony hockey stick

I suppose that the hardcore alarmists - those with a very strong stomach - will reply "It does not matter at all that all of our science is rubbish, we can still scare people". I predict that the toughest ones - those who don't feel any moral restrictions - will tell you once again that there will be 50 degrees Celsius heat in your city in the summer.

Well, that's unlikely unless you live somewhere in Sahara. The most likely way this could happen is that the ecoterrorists would do the same things like in Crichton's "State of Fear", and I hope that the U.S. army will be able to deal with them before they realize their plans.

The alarmists will tell you that even though all quantitative predictions, postdictions, and reconstructions have been proved flawed, there is still some effect of CO2 on the climate, and you should be scared. Yes, there is always some effect of any event on all events in its future light cone. But this, non-quantitative and proto-scientific fact cannot lead a rational person to any big conclusions.

A rational, scientifically oriented person or society needs to quantify the effects, determine its likely consequences, and quantitatively - and economically - calculate the best possible response. These "details" have been done incorrectly and must be re-done.

See also a recent article in The Economist:

• The debate over global warming is getting rancorous