DesertFox
05-29-2008, 03:01 PM
An anti-nuclear, Toronto-based, urban-loving, 1970s peace activist who opposes subsidies to the oil industry might be the last person expected to detail cracks in the science of global warming.
But Lawrence Solomon has done just that in a short book with a long subtitle: The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud (and those who are too fearful to do so).
The spark for the book came after an American TV reporter compared those who question the Kyoto Protocol to Holocaust deniers. But Solomon wondered about that so he sought out the experts in specific fields to garner their views.
Consider Edward Wegman, asked by the U.S. Congress to assess the famous "hockey stick" graph from Michael Mann, published by the UN's International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and which purported to show temperatures as mostly constant over the last 1,000 years -- except for a spike in the last century.
The IPCC claimed the hockey stick "proved" unique 20th century global warming.
But it didn't. Wegman, who drew on the initial skepticism of two Canadians who questioned Mann's statistical handling, found that Mann's "hockey stick" was the result of a statistical error -- the statistical model actually mined data to produce the hockey stick and excluded contrary data. That mistake occurred not because Mann was deceptive or a poor scientist -- he's an expert in the paleoclimate community as were those who reviewed his paper. But that was the problem: the paleoclimate scientists were trapped in their own disciplinary ghetto and not up to speed on the latest, most appropriate statistical methods. ...
No one who reads The Deniers will be able to claim a scientific consensus exists on global warming. (Some scientists even argue the planet's climate is about to cool.)
More (http://www.canada.com/calgaryherald/news/story.html?id=3b7119d5-2c9f-4790-8bda-2ca164620613)
But Lawrence Solomon has done just that in a short book with a long subtitle: The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud (and those who are too fearful to do so).
The spark for the book came after an American TV reporter compared those who question the Kyoto Protocol to Holocaust deniers. But Solomon wondered about that so he sought out the experts in specific fields to garner their views.
Consider Edward Wegman, asked by the U.S. Congress to assess the famous "hockey stick" graph from Michael Mann, published by the UN's International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and which purported to show temperatures as mostly constant over the last 1,000 years -- except for a spike in the last century.
The IPCC claimed the hockey stick "proved" unique 20th century global warming.
But it didn't. Wegman, who drew on the initial skepticism of two Canadians who questioned Mann's statistical handling, found that Mann's "hockey stick" was the result of a statistical error -- the statistical model actually mined data to produce the hockey stick and excluded contrary data. That mistake occurred not because Mann was deceptive or a poor scientist -- he's an expert in the paleoclimate community as were those who reviewed his paper. But that was the problem: the paleoclimate scientists were trapped in their own disciplinary ghetto and not up to speed on the latest, most appropriate statistical methods. ...
No one who reads The Deniers will be able to claim a scientific consensus exists on global warming. (Some scientists even argue the planet's climate is about to cool.)
More (http://www.canada.com/calgaryherald/news/story.html?id=3b7119d5-2c9f-4790-8bda-2ca164620613)