26 thoughts on “The Muir Russell Inquiry”

  1. I predict that Andrew will give us his completely delusional reading of this one, too. Despite his legions of “useful idiots” and willing tools, Mann is going to get eviscerated in court.

    1. I predict that Andrew will give us his completely delusional reading of this one, too. Despite his legions of “useful idiots” and willing tools, Mann is going to get eviscerated in court.

      That’ll be because you assume I’m as rabid and ideologically driven as you, in fact I had a look through the Muir Russel report (surprisingly McIntyre doesn’t seem to have provided a link) and it looks like McIntyre is right on this one, Mann wasn’t investigated and the scientists exonerated (if that’s the right word) were those working at the CRU.

      1. if CRU scientists were heavily involved in any of Mann’s papers or the IPCC,
        that’s still a pretty good thing.

        see, if 8 people work on a subject, and 7 are investigated and all found
        to be within the organizational norms, then, those 7 can testify
        about the 8th or the 8th’s work product can be compared to the 7
        for quality assurance.

        2. Or the seven were patsies, being led along by the nose by the Jerry Sandusky of science, lured into schemes and plots because scientists are famously easier to fool than children – or the CRU inquiry was a travesty that only bothered to interview the accused, who naturally protested their innocence to a panel that desperately wanted to exonerate them to preserve the institution of science – and its lavish funding.

          It’s like expecting truth to come out of a Gestapo investigation of a group of scientists who are accused of bending the rules and manipulating the numbers because they’re being too darn Aryan and blinded by their devotion to the Reich and the advancement of German socialism. They don’t even need to interview the accuser to get their point of view because obviously the accuser must have Jewish blood, be tainted by Jewish money, or be working against the state and the volk.

          Meanwhile, the Met office completely botched their winter forecast, using their global warming models to predict a very dry winter, having argued in 2012 that Arctic melting would make British winters warm and dry, as opposed to record braking floods throughout vast areas – which last week they blamed on Arctic melting, even though the Arctic ice mass is rebounding by staggering amounts. Now most of the climate scientists are trying to silence their alarmist peers before they beclown the entire climate science enterprise with their idiotic claim that warming causes cooling. That claim has been trumpeted for the last two weeks, but this week the word to the corrupt eco-Nazi morons is shut uip.

          To the deluded believers, each bitter cold snap proves the climate is getting warmer. The only thing I can compare that to is the collapse of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, where the people with more than three neurons to rub together noticed that their “overwhelming victories” kept getting closer and closer to their capital.

          Given the drop in the solar output, the warmists will be like the Axis idiot on the street who can’t figure out how they could lose the war when they won every battle so decisively and brilliantly.

          “Yo.” Quit listening to corrupt third rate hacks with no integrity who are pedaling a wacko theory, the scientific equivalent of Amway salesmen but without the unworkable business model. “Amway will make you rich if you just work hard enough and want it bad enough!”

          I really feel sorry for the fools who buy into such nonsense.

    2. If an ideology is driving me, it must be one that despises fraudulent math and science in pursuit of the power to impoverish millions of middle class people worldwide, while locking the rest into a grinding struggle for existence, all to sustain the wacko delusion that warming would be deadly, even as we sit barely 1 C above ice-age conditions yet 6 C below the Eocene optimum when life was booming everywhere.

        1. Hmm, AGW alarmists have been public in the need to sex up or sensationalize science for the cause. That isn’t something that is being imagined.

        2. Yep. They’ve even said that it’s important to lie to the public to gain support for their programs. That’s why Mann couldn’t find any statistics professors to endorse the horrifying things he was doing with numbers, or any plant biologists to support his computer model trees that didn’t lay down growth rings during colder years, as if they just skipped a whole year of leafing out.

        3. BTW Andrew, do you really think there were five or six official investigations into Mann’s mathematics if the statistical sleight of hand were only “imaginary”? How does he manage to take any commonly accepted dataset and turn it into a hockey stick? Anyone who did the same tricks with a graph of stock price history would be rotting in jail. If the Medieval Warm Period was entirely imaginary, why does everyone know about it?

          1. George, because we’ve covered this ground before, and you’ve failed to refute the arguments I’ve already made, you’re getting to be a waste of time.

            BTW Andrew, do you really think there were five or six official investigations into Mann’s mathematics if the statistical sleight of hand were only “imaginary”?

            Investigations are undertaken firstly to determine if a breach of the rules has occurred, the fact an investigation occurs doesn’t mean a breach has occurred.
            The campaign against Mann has long since moved from witch hunt to lynch mob

            How does he manage to take any commonly accepted dataset and turn it into a hockey stick? Anyone who did the same tricks with a graph of stock price history would be rotting in jail.

            Think back a few days to the discussion over the “CO2 Science” WMP project, I pointed out that even after cherry picking the data sets to include in their project they still had the MWP at different times around the globe, often with the MWP all hppening prior to 1000AD in one place and all after 1100AD in another, you combine all these data sets and what do you get? You get a longer and flatter MWP, which is what the hockey stick shows.

            If the Medieval Warm Period was entirely imaginary, why does everyone know about it?

            You keep claiming that Mann got rid of the MWP and that he says it didn’t happen, he did not, he does not, I provided links that show that, if you repeat a claim after it’s debunked it makes you a liar, so you’re a liar.

          2. Andrew, you haven’t refuted arguments, you’ve stuck your hands over your eyes whenever you see a graph that doesn’t resemble a hockey stick.

            Here is another one from the IPCC itself, prior to the hockey stick. In fact, the MWP showed up looking like that in all the peer-reviewed studies for a quarter of a century prior to “the team” e-mailing each other about how they had to eliminate the MWP, which at the time was not only settled science, but the overwhelming consensus. Unfortunately that consensus was extremely inconvenient to people who needed to scare the public into giving them more power and prestige.

            So here is a comparison of the IPCC 1990-2001 temperature record and the post-Mann IPCC curves.

            You might argue that the science was “embettered”, but don’t you find it highly suspicious that back when drudges were grinding away in an obscure and boring field, concerned only about doing good science and getting accurate results, the past had one shape, but after a bunch of them (whose integrity is constantly questioned) realized they could get Billions of dollars, along with fame, prestige, and power – if they drastically altered the past and overturned the consensus on the MWP (which is just what they said to each other), the MWP was conveniently disappeared.

            The MWP keeps trying to reassert itself in non-team reconstructions when a group of scientists tries to reconstruct their local climate history, such as in China, South America, or the Pacific, but among the scientists who have sold out to join the climate gravy train, such truths are to be suppressed at all costs, lest the team get them fired or cut off their access to further research grants and the ability to get a paper past peer-review in a major journal.

            But history recorded in sediments is a hard thing to hide, and mother nature doesn’t know to lie, so to make a major climate epoch disappear takes inventive statistical techniques that are unknown to math departments, along with lots of grafting, splicing, cherry picking, sample substitutions, and wholly invented criteria for deciding whether a proxy is acceptable to separate the good trees from the bad trees.

            So every time they publish one of these papers, everybody who is good at math and science has a field day with it, uncovering all sorts of clever and bizarre tricks, evasions, and omissions. We couldn’t do that with the papers published prior to the mid-1990’s because those were really simple – as in “here’s the data, fellas, raw and averaged using a four-function calculator and a felt-tip pen on an HP plotter.” As Ernest Rutherford said, “If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.”

            But in your world, where everyone is obsessed with a shape like they were seeing the Devil’s Tower in “Close Encounters”, anyone who isn’t getting millions of dollars in grant money and who holds up a different shape, one that shows the once unquestioned consensus of science, is a liar, an evil conspirator secretly paid under the table by the Koch brothers, BP, Exxon, or Shell.

            Yet we persist in pointing out that England used to have huge vineyards and Greenland used to be full of Viking farmers. You retort that Greenland is now growing crops again, and ignore the fact that they’re doing it in greenhouses that the Vikings couldn’t build, and issue a press release when they manage to produce a pint of strawberries. I’m sure when the Thames freezes over again you’ll take it as evidence that the planet is warming. That’s the problem with being in a cult. Reality has a very hard time intruding because there’s always an explanation for everything, ladled out by bald guys in robes who ride around in private with Jessica Alba and Matt Damon.

          3. Regarding the Lamb schematic:
            http://www.skepticalscience.com/IPCC-Medieval-Warm-Period.htm

            but after a bunch of them (whose integrity is constantly questioned) realized they could get Billions of dollars,

            Well I guess that explains Steyn’s counter suit, what with Mann having made billions of dollars.

            The MWP keeps trying to reassert itself in non-team reconstructions when a group of scientists tries to reconstruct their local climate history, such as in China, South America, or the Pacific, but among the scientists who have sold out to join the climate gravy train, such truths are to be suppressed at all costs, lest the team get them fired or cut off their access to further research grants and the ability to get a paper past peer-review in a major journal.

            Well that’s got conspiracy theory nutter written all over it.
            If you cherry pick local measurements you can show any trend you want to, if you don’t cherry pick your data sets and combine them for an overall NH or global paleoclimate graph you get the hockey stick, even CO2 science hasn’t been foolish enough to combine their cherry picked data to get a global graph to wave about, but the data is there, so you can be the brave one, stick your neck out George Turner and combine all that data yourself to get the global temperature graph you so desperately seek.

            So every time they publish one of these papers, everybody who is good at math and science has a field day with it, uncovering all sorts of clever and bizarre tricks, evasions, and omissions.

            That’s funny “everybody who is good at math and science” being limited to the people who write the stuff you want to read.

            Yet we persist in pointing out that England used to have huge vineyards

            Up to now the claim has just been vineyards, now they’re huge vineyards, bet you haven’t got a huge link to back up this growth in MPW vineyard size.
            and Greenland used to be full of Viking farmers. You retort that Greenland is now growing crops again, and ignore the fact that they’re doing it in greenhouses that the Vikings couldn’t build,
            There are 20,000 sheep in Greenland today, and hundreds of thousands of square kilometers are ice free, and it’s not hard to find lots of photos on Google images of crops growing in Greenland in the open, but hey, you carry on living in your special world.

            and issue a press release when they manage to produce a pint of strawberries.

            I guess that’s sarcasm, it’s just hard to tell your genuine nonsense from your make-believe nonsense.

          4. Regarding the Lamb schematic:
            http://www.skepticalscience.com/IPCC-Medieval-Warm-Period.htm

            Shorter version: I asked my high priest, and he said…

            Your link claims that the early IPCC MWP was merely based on the Central England temperature record, which happened to roughly match several dozen other long-accepted, peer-reviewed papers. In fact, of 54 peer-reviewed papers, the ones published prior to 2000 had the MWP temperature anomally twice as large as the post-Mann papers, most of which were generated by “the team”, which as we know, used improper statistical methods (as confirmed by every investigation), questionable proxies (tree rings are disputed by the plant scientists), and an extreme reluctance to share data or algorithms.

            Skeptical science forgot to mention any of that, implying instead that the earlier IPCC graph relied on a single data set, because they have to omit really important facts to maintain the loyalty and morale of their mindless flock.

            And the modern Greenlandic sheep spend about half their lives indoors because it’s still too darn cold there. That’s probably why those hundreds of thousands of ice-free square kilometers can only support 20,000 sheep on 55 farms, which would normally only take 16 square kilometers – so the overall ice-free sheep density is running at about 0.016 percent of a normal place, except that the majority of the farms are on the edge of one little village that sits in a coastal valley.

            So the vast almost-continent of Greenland is supporting only about forty times as many sheep as my housemate’s mom does on her little farm. Also note that the Greenland sheep were introduced in 1906, and ever since they’ve been cross-breeding with new arrivals to try and create a more cold tolerant breed. The Vikings just had regular old sheep – and no electricity, and no insulation. But their farms thrived during the warm summers and they lived there happily for about four centuries.

            Then the average temperature at their settlements dropped by about 7 degrees F, the summers got too short, and the Vikings disappeared. It would’ve been nice if they’d arrived during a previous interglacial when Greenland temperatures were about 9 F higher than present and Greenland supported thick forests and big monitor lizards, but they did pretty darn well with the MWP. It’s sad that the good times had to end.

          6. In response to the mentions of Norse Greenland lower down; I’m an amateur, but the Norse colony has been an interest of mine since childhood.

            Regarding sheep; they were raised in Greenland in Norse times. In order, the most common Norse Greenland livestock (based on miden analysis as well as estimates on the wintering byre capacity at several well preserved farms) were goats, sheep, and cattle. Domestic goats tend to be less cold hardy than sheep.

            The Greenland Norse also grew temperate crops such as barley. Today’s climate would not allow that, not without greenhouses that the Norse didn’t have. There are many other clues, and also some ice core measurements, but the record is clear; during the early centuries of the Greenland Norse, the temperature was warmer than today, and significantly so.

            I’m speaking of the first centuries of the Norse colony here in regard to livestock and food. (The colony lasted from 985 AD to around 1500AD, roughly equivalent to the time between Columbus’s first landing in the Western Hemisphere in 1492 and today). In its declining years as the climate cooled, things were increasingly different; agricultural yield declined, and they relied more and more on marine-mammals for food (though only certain types, primarily some seal species).

            The Greenland Norse are fascinating, and I highly encourage anyone unfamiliar with them to read up on them – you won’t be sorry.

          7. Having cows and goats on Greenland is one thing, but in the Eemian the place had forests and giant monitor lizards! Since the monitor lizards didn’t swim there from the Pacific, I assume Greenland was a pretty darn nice place for a long, long time prior to the current ice age period of Earth’s history.

            Yet isn’t it kind of funny that Greenlandic and Icelandic aren’t in any way related languages, but obviously used to be in the past? Greenlandic is an Eskimo-Aleut language whereas Icelandic is Nordic, but at some point you just know those Greenland Vikings were speaking a completely different “Greenlandic” language – unrelated to Aleut. It’s the only case I can think of where two unrelated languages would pick up the same name based on location.

            Common Icelandic phrases from an Icelandic babe who’s got the hot librarian look down quite well. Her learning series becomes kind of addictive. It’s taken me a while, but after some months I’m started to learn a bit of it.

            Hallo = Hello
            Hae = Hi
            Bae = Bye

            The last words spoken in the earlier Greenlandic language, based on ice voice print analysis in which snow acts as something like a linear phonograph (rare – but stay with me), were translated as “You mean we just had to drive around in an SUV listening to ABBA for three hours a day and the snow wouldn’t have buried us?” However, I caution that some people claim that ice voice print analysis is pseudo-science akin to dendrochronology, at least in the hands of the unscrupulous.

            So getting back to Andrew and the difficult task of deprogramming him. My approach is to keep making him view images that his brain says shouldn’t exist, but for which he can find ready but strained dismissals from his cult leaders, who spend their time hammering out explanations for any doubts a member of their flock might raise. Intermixed with that are logical arguments about what the past must’ve been like, along with narratives about why a warming cult would form. My goal is to increase the entropy in his mental model of climatology, massively increasing the complexity and number of “special explanations” until his brain hits a trip point and goes through a phase of destruction (due to the mismatch between the model and reality) and then a phase of construction as it builds a simpler, more accurate model of reality that doesn’t have to overburden his neurons with thousands of bizarre facts and rules and plots and schemes.

            The tipping point is felt as doubt, and almost everyone else here (except for DC guy) has stood on top of that fence, and looked side to side, and thought, and dug, and investigated out of burning curiosity. I ended up buying graduate level textbooks on coupled atmosphere and ocean dynamics and downloading GCM source code, and wading through climate papers for an hour or three a day for over a decade and a half.

            Perhaps the shortest route Andrew can take back to reality is to trust no one, and assume everyone is lying, and take it upon himself to figure out exactly which lies everyone is telling. They key thing that keeps cults and wacko save-humanity social movements going is blind trust, and faith in “experts” or “good hearts.” Trust no one and you can’t be betrayed.

            The beauty and power of science comes from just that lack of trust. The replication of experiments is basically the reaction of a people who were fed up with centuries of BS, and if something is true and universal then anyone can prove it to themselves, by repeating the experiment in the absence of the claimant, because more often than not at times, the claimant is a magician, con man, and liar working an angle.

            That’s a very common thing. It can show up in experts on “Antiques Roadshow” who certify the authenticity of fakes for a cut of the profits from a scam, and it can show up in science. Any scientist who tries to hide the data and methods from “doubters” should send up huge red flags, as much as anyone pushing their cold-fusion results while insisting that all tests must be performed under their direct supervision.

            Sadly, climatology fell prey to such con men, who may not even know they’re con men on some level. They might be true-believers who have convinced themselves of what the data should show, instead of what it actually shows. Unfortunately, that lined up with the belief that they’re trying to save all of humanity and the entire planet, which imparts a religious fervor akin to the Nazi faith that National Socialism was mankind’s salvation from the forces of greed, decay, and darkness. The noble cause corruption burns brains like acid, and trust and faith and the simple good-against-evil narrative ensnares otherwise intelligent, reasoning people like crack.

            So on that thought I ask Andrew this: Modern science rose at what is an essentially random point in the Earth’s climate history, and that climate history has huge swings (if you can break your brain free of the Hockey Stick for what alcoholics call “a moment of clarity”). The recent swings go from palm trees growing in Canada (outdoors!) to Chicago buried under a mile of ice. These swings are huge, dwarfing anything we’ve seen, and they are perfectly natural.

            So in these swings, we are at what must be a random point, because until we developed cars and jet aircraft, we were just naked monkeys along for the ride. What are the odds that we just happened to be at the absolute most perfect environment, and that the super-perfect environment just happened to be at the very tip-top of one of those swings (which somehow don’t include Canadian palm trees, and bikini-clad Canadians in their native environment), just as we developed things like the integrated circuit and computer?

            Doesn’t it seem more likely that we’d be somewhere in the middle of swing as we figured out Cartesian coordinates, thermometers, and invented airports?

            A scientific, reasoning organism, upon attaining consciousness on this planet, would probably scratch it’s chin and think the following.

            “I’m probably not in climactic utopia, because as far as geology is concerned I’m not special, the directed goal of genetic and social evolution. I probably arrived in the middle of a big, slow temperature swing because this planet’s temperature seems to be not entirely stable, alternating thousands of times between different bounded regimes, on a vast range of timescales. I have most probably arrived at a random place at a random time at a random temperature at a random state of technological development. Given that I’ve arrived at a random point in the planet’s space-time, the climate’s recent history must also be rather random.”

            Let’s just mark that down as a universal truth, applicable to all species who attain sentience on all planets. (This is a space blog, after all).

            The trouble with your current climactic world view is that it requires you to believe that you arrived at some magic moment, when the Earth was a utopia and couldn’t possibly improve, and that this utopia happened to coincide with the highest temperatures in recorded history, and that any increase or decrease would spell doom for the planet and all mankind.

            Well, just accept the fact that the planet wasn’t perfect before you arrived (well, maybe it was until you got here, but that’s another debate for another time). The past temperature record should essentially be random, and include much colder and much hotter temperatures. This is to be expected by any organism that has attained consciousness.

            The trouble is, that view brings a lot of clarity and peace but it doesn’t generate a lot of revenue and power, nor motivate legions of idiots to action at the hands of people who majored in possibly the most boring and useless subject offered by any university, certainly ahead of studies of the Andy Griffith Show and modern Central American lesbian dance, but way behind mapping the human genome or desktop fusion by having Ikea build the world’s largest desktop.

            The expected truth that we’ve started at a random climate point doesn’t stir up legions of righteous believers, and every religious movement needs righteous believers, but altering the past to make it look as if we’re magically at the apex of the planet’s perfection and that if deviate one jot right or left we’ll descend into hell, well, that will be a line that will fleece lots of morons, if they can sell it.

            But selling it requires hiding the truth that we’re at a random point on the roller coaster, and that’s why you can’t see the dozen or so curves I’ve posted that don’t show us being tossed into thermal hell and damnation of a fiery oven, but struggling to get out of the damned ice box so Canadians will move more than a hundred miles from the US border without being bribed by giant paychecks from big oil.

            I’m not here to attack you, or use you (except for cheap entertainment purposes, for which I should be ashamed, but I love these debates). I’m here to try and free your mind from a cult, which becomes like a burning hole in a person’s rational reasoning abilities.

            I’ve worked with a few otherwise bright engineers who fell for creationist dogma, at what I observed is that parts of their brains shut down that involved reasoning logically through a problem like a razor. They’d become dependent on having a comforting answer or explanation provided to them, and worse, they’d become comfortable about ignoring glaring contradictions between their plans and their numbers.

            Where other engineers would’ve used some mental math and reasoning to realize the plan couldn’t ever possibly work, they said “Have faith!” They got used to making up ad-hoc explanations for glaring gaps between theory and reality, or accepting those of others, and after their minds got comfortable making such leaps, they couldn’t be trusted to make remotely sound engineering judgments.

            This isn’t a dig against Christians, by any means, but it is a dig against young-Earth creationists who married into the faith, adopted it, and turned off big parts of their reasoning skills in the process. You can see the same effect at work in the highest levels of climate science, such as the UK climate expert who stupidly announced that the brutal winter floods in Britain were undoubtedly the effect of global warming, just a few months after all of Britain’s global warming experts had declared that global warming would produce a very dry 2013-2014 winter. At this point, climate scientists are the little more than witchdoctors, and maybe something less. At least witchdoctors learn from past experience.

          8. George, you’ve obviously got way more time for this debate than I have at the moment, so quickly:

            I’m not a CAGW worrier, I don’t claim that the climate today is the optimum, in fact few climate scientists would claim that it’s the optimum in any objective sense, the argument is that it’s the optimum for us here and now, and the worry isn’t a change from what we have now per se, it’s the rate of change from what our agriculture and infrastructure is designed for.

            I personally don’t get too excited about that rate of change either, as on the human scale a century is a long time, infrastructure typically gets rebuild several times over a century.

            I find your obvious confusion as to my position on these matters surprising on one level, after all I’ve stated my views often enough, but not surprising on another level – you evidently only ever “reply” to my points to preach your closely held beliefs, a genuine reply usually involves actually addressing what the person has said.

            I’ve noticed you’ve increasingly shifted away from trying to support your claims with facts, and links supporting those facts, to unsupported claims and personal attacks and attempts to label me as a religious adherent. I could easily go down the same path, your religiously driven fanaticism and demonization of those you see as evil and possessed is quaint, but that form of debate just doesn’t appeal to me, like I say, it just feels like religious advocacy, it’s the approach used by the religious firebrands of old, but I suppose if you feel it works for you, you go right ahead, I find it funny and a bit juvenile, and for that reason it’s just water off a ducks back to me, I don’t get excited about name calling by children.

          10. We plant crops in places that are suitable for those crops, build infrastructure, especially drainage systems, to cope with the expected weather ie the weather as it has been.

          11. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t. We’re not that systematic or rational about it, and I suspect that politics and malgovernment has a much bigger effect on the efficacy of that than climate does.

  3. Wodun, I don’t quite believe that claims in a complaint are admitted under oath as testimony of fact, and so I don’t quite agree that Mann has perjured himself, twice or any number of times.

    When and if Mann takes the witness stand and testifies, he does begin such a risk.

    As to the count of disputed claims, I’m up to at least three — the Nobel Prize, Muir, and Oxburg. The first has been amended in a revised complaint.

    Correct me if I am mistaken, but has the current judge, starting over with that amended complaint, thrown out six of seven of Mann’s complaints as protected “opinion” leaving only the question of “fraud”, for the jury to decide as perhaps an opinion or perhaps a statement of objective fact?

    1. “Wodun, I don’t quite believe that claims in a complaint are admitted under oath as testimony of fact”

      That could be. I am no lawyer and you are probably correct. However, lying to the court is probably not the best tactic when claiming criticism of your work on ethical grounds is out of bounds.

    1. I’ve realized that Steyn will possibly never see a dime. Mann will show the court his plan for paying the settlement, which will be decades of $5 or $10 monthly installments and then suddenly shoot up exponentially like a hockey stick. Hopefully the court will recognize the wildly debunked iconic shape from the trial and realize that Mann is trying to pull another fast one, but you never know.

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