The tale of the hockey stick

13 08 2008

Or as an alternate title: “Why we find it difficult to trust certain climate scientists.”

This posting by Bishop Hill, telling the tale of the nefarious temperature reconstruction known as the Michael Mann hockey stick, from start to present, is an excellent summation for the layman reader struggling to understand the entire affair and why it is such an amazing pox on the conduct of science and practice of peer review. This sums it up quite well:

That the statistical foundations on which they had built this paleoclimate castle were a swamp of misrepresentation, deceit and malfeasance was, to Wahl and Amman, an irrelevance.  

I highly recommend reading it, and Bishop Hill deserves thanks for condensing this affair into a readable story.


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Categories : Science, climate_change

Spotless days: 400 and counting

13 08 2008


The sun on 08/12/2008 just before midnight UTC – spotless

As many of you know, the sun has been very quiet, especially in the last month. In a NASA news release article titled What’s Wrong with the Sun? (Nothing) solar physicist David Hathaway goes on record as saying:

“It does seem like it’s taking a long time,” allows Hathaway, “but I think we’re just forgetting how long a solar minimum can last.”

No argument there. But it does seem to me that the purpose of Hathaway’s July 11th article was to smooth over the missed solar forecasts he’s made. Here is a comparison of early and more recent forecasts from Hathway:


Click for a larger image

He also seems intent on making sure that when compared to a grand minima, such as the Maunder Minimum, this current spotless spell is a mere blip.

The quiet of 2008 is not the second coming of the Maunder Minimum, believes Hathaway. “We have already observed a few sunspots from the next solar cycle,” he says. (See Solar Cycle 24 Begins.) “This suggests the solar cycle is progressing normally.”

What’s next? Hathaway anticipates more spotless days1, maybe even hundreds, followed by a return to Solar Max conditions in the years around 2012.

Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Science, solar