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Ross McKitrick on the Hockey Stick Do you have seven and a half minutes to spare out of your crowded, creative, busy life? I recommend that you find it, and watch this bit of video, now conveniently viewable at Bishop Hill, this video being … well, see the title of this posting.
Of it, the good Bishop says:
This was posted in the comments on WUWT. I’m not sure if it’s recent or not, but it hasn’t been on YouTube for long. I’ve never seen it before.
Me neither. It’s as good a short summary of the whole Hockey Stick furore (Bishop Hill’s book about it all being a much longer version of the same story), what it is, why it matters, and so on, as you could hope to find.
The content of this snatch of video is impressive, of course. But I especially love McKitrick’s calm tone of voice and measured manner.
How those climate warmists must hate the internet. They’re still at it, by the way.
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Prof McKitrick wrote a book about this, in 2008: Taken by Storm, with Prof Essex.
Cheers
Of course, when the warmists’ predictive models were unable to predict ANY recent temperatures (using the same historical data), we — okay, I — was told I was “unqualified” to comment on the data because I wasn’t a climatologist.
But I WAS a statistician, and my specific area of expertise was in creating parameters for excluding data in predictive models. (In brief, deciding which data points were either extraneous or outliers.)
The interesting thing about the warmists’ data, as McKitrick points out, is that ALL of it is suspect: not just a bit here or there, but ALL of it — and therefore, their models were hopelessly flawed. TO THIS DAY, no climatological model has been able to predict (accurately) any temperature point in the recent past.
The only way that can be done is to make the models so forgiving that they generate the same answer regardless of the data fed into them.
If I, back in the day when I did this for a living, had had the temerity to produce output like these respected scientists have done with climate data, not only would I have been fired, but I would have had to leave the field altogether. But almost all of them are still in place, drawing salaries and (gawd help us) teaching students.
THAT’S the real travesty in all this.