How to Fix a Broken Hockey Stick

Crazy glue, duct tape, and tampering with the data.

Hide the decline, baby.

We wrote here about a recent effort by a group of climate alarmists headed by geologist Shaun Marcott to resurrect Michael Mann’s discredited hockey stick. The Marcott paper, as you would expect, received uncritical coverage in the liberal press. But it didn’t take long for climate scientists to begin taking it apart, as we noted in our post.

Now Steve McIntyre, who was principally responsible for showing that Mann’s original hockey stick was a fraud, has gone over Marcott’s data on the key proxies he uses for 20th century temperatures, ocean cores. McIntyre found that Marcott and his colleagues used previously published ocean core data, but have altered the dates represented by the cores, in some cases by as much as 1,000 years.

Obviously if you shift core samples showing cooler temperatures back in time and samples showing higher temperatures forward in time you're going to get a graph that shows... temperatures rising from cooler to warmer.

But... why would you change the f***ing dates? This is supposed to be science, not screenwriting. You are not allowed to compress events and change dates in a science, even if it leads to the more dramatic narrative arc you were hoping for.

posted by Ace at 04:00 PM

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