A Disgrace to the Profession by Mark Steyn

I finished another Steyn book. Always a treat. I read A Disgrace to the Profession. It's about the infamous "hockey stick" temperature graph from Michael Mann in 1998. The graph showed constant temperature from the year 1000 to 1800, then a spectacular rise in temperature coincidental to the start of the Industrial Revolution.

The graph made the cover of the 2001 IPCC report, as well as Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. Mann along with his graph shot to international celebrity. Today Mann hangs out with James Cameron and Jessica Alba, quite the career for a university professor.

Over the years I'd kind of heard stuff damaging to the hockey stick, especially in the climategate email scandal. Something about some Canadian researchers McIntyre and McKitrick had discredited the hockey stick.

Steyn pulls together the data around the hockey stick from scientists around the world. The book is organized into 120 chapters of about 2 pages each. Steyn lets the scientists to the talking, and what they have to say about Mann and his hockey stick is devastating. Impressive and thorough. Still despite all the science Steyn organizes it into easy, enjoyable to read chunks.

This is an excellent book and anyone interested in the full story around the earlier years of global warming (since rebranded climate change), and it's infamous hockey stick would find this an enjoyable and very enlightening read.

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Ok so what of it

The thing is, it seems to hardly matter today that the hockey stick has been discredited. Mann and the hockey stick had their moment, they served a purpose at the time. Since then everyone has just moved on. It doesn't matter if the hockey stick is good science or junk science.

global warming has been renamed to climate change, and suddenly per Gavin Schmidt, nobody cares what the weather was 1000 years ago. In fact nobody cares what the weather was like 10 years ago. There's been no warming since 1998, but no matter.

The magic of "climate change" is that environment activists no longer have to rely on something that can be measured like temperature. The problem with measurements is that you may not get the numbers you want. In fact they don't have to rely on those scientists at all with their "natural variance", "confidence levels" and "uncertainties". ain't nobody got time for that.

Yellow journalism, Yellow science

During the global warming years science and activism were perceived to have become blurred. Hence the Climategate scandal and "hide the decline". When science produced the numbers and hockey stick graphs that activists, the UN/IPCC and the government bureaucracy that funded them wanted, everything was good. Anyway Ayn Rand warned about "government science" in Altas Shrugged and Climategate was pretty close to what Rand was warning about.

And so it continues. In the last Canadian federal election, shockingly, tenured scientists on the federal payroll, the "neutral" bureaucracy, shamefully came out openly campaigning against Stephen Harper and for Justin Trudeau. Right after Trudeau won the election, the scientists got their political payback, Trudeau has announced hundreds of new federal government jobs for scientists will be created. Everyone knows where Harper and Trudeau stand on climate change, so the scientists know what the expected result of their research will be. anyway nice work if you can get it.

What exactly is climate change anyway? How do we measure it? How can we possibly know if the "problem", if it exists, is getting better or getting worse. blah blah blah, the downfall of global warming is that temperature could be measured. With Golsteinism climate change, there's just perpetual crisis, indistinguishable from the course of human events or natural climate variability that were going to happen anyway.

Keeping it Going

After the hockey stick Al Gore got an Oscar and $500 million dollars. The IPCC got a Nobel Prize. Goldman Sachs can high frequency trade some carbon "market." There's so much invested in the current setup and so it has to be kept going.

In 2014 it came out in Australia a weather station was moved to a warmer place in order to produce higher recorded temperatures, and change the temperature number fed into the UN from a decline to an increase. Doing your part Australia science.

In the United States in 2015 NASA/NOAA magically changed stable temperatures into warming temperatures years after they were reported link link. You thought Mann's bristlecone pines were unreliable? So now even the modern temperature record can be altered after it was published in an Orwellian way to produce a desired political result.

Well what do you expect from The State Science Institute NASA, an agency of the federal government. Perhaps President Obama just stopped by one day, just happened to be casually holding his tire iron, and the just offand "suggested" to the head of NASA that they "review" their published temperature records from 1998 to the present to make sure the published numbers are "right".