It's the deniers that cheat. They routinely misrepresent the data as flawed, because that's all they have. This is a purely political exercise on their part as evidenced by their bringing Gore into the conversation, as if his talking about changed anything, except that they hate him for it.
Yeah right konrad,
Have you been under a rock for the last two years? Climategate exposed 10,000 emails of lies form the AGW crowd, you claim that Mann was exonerated and yet the truth is he was not as is shown below I put the most important part in bold not that you'll pay any attention as you are a mindless worshiper at the altar of AGW. Congrats, you have sold your soul to people who want your money and think you a moron, and they are correct.
With their reputations thus disappearing faster than the snows of Kilimanjaro, the zealots have become hysterical. Mann attacks a prominent sceptic, Lawrence Solomon, for citing the scientists criticisms of the Antarctica study, and is in turn answered by Solomon -- an exchange reproduced in Canadas Financial Post, for which Solomon writes, here and here. Mann repeatedly accuses Solomon of lying. In doing so, he has left himself dramatically exposed. Claiming that Solomon
repeatedly lies about my work
he cites as evidence of this that his hockey stick study was
vindicated in a report by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences
and seeks to back up this assertion by citing the way the media reported this study as
Science Panel Backs Study on Warming Climate (New York Times), Backing for Hockey Stick Graph (BBC), and so on.
This is, to put it mildly, disingenuous. While it is certainly true that the media reported it in this sheep-like way -- thanks in part to the manner in which the NAS chose circumspectly to spin its own conclusions -- it is nevertheless the case that in every important particular the NAS actually agreed with the McIntyre/McKitrick criticisms. Far from vindicating the hockey stick graph, the NAS said that although it found some of Manns work plausible, there were so many scientific uncertainties attached to it that it did not have great confidence in it. Thus it said that
Mann et al. used a type of principal component analysis that tends to bias the shape of the reconstructions
and that they had downplayed the
uncertainties of the published reconstructions...Even less confidence can be placed in the original conclusions by Mann et al. (1999) that the 1990s are likely the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, in at least a millennium.
What Mann also does not say in his diatribe is that a subsequent House Energy and Commerce Committee report chaired by Edward Wegman totally destroyed the credibility of the hockey stick study and devastatingly ripped apart Manns methodology as bad mathematics. Furthermore, when Gerald North, the chairman of the NAS panel -- which Mann claims vindicated him and panel member Peter Bloomfield were asked at the House Committee hearings whether or not they agreed with Wegmans harsh criticisms, they said they did:
CHAIRMAN BARTON. Dr. North, do you dispute the conclusions or the methodology of Dr. Wegmans report?
DR. NORTH. No, we dont. We dont disagree with their criticism. In fact, pretty much the same thing is said in our report.
DR. BLOOMFIELD. Our committee reviewed the methodology used by Dr. Mann and his co-workers and we felt that some of the choices they made were inappropriate. We had much the same misgivings about his work that was documented at much greater length by Dr. Wegman.
WALLACE: the two reports were complementary, and to the extent that they overlapped, the conclusions were quite consistent. (Am Stat Assoc.)
As Mark Twain might have put it, there are three kinds of lies -- lies, damned lies and global warming science.
