The paper might have been scientifically invalid, but it was a box-office success.The blogosphere - doing the jobs that scientists wont ...
The headlines were everywhere
“1000 years of climate data confirms Australia’s warming” said the press release from University of Melbourne. It was picked up by The Guardian: “Australasia has hottest 60 years in a millennium, scientists find”; The Age and The Australian led with “Warming since 1950 ‘unprecedented’. The story was on ABC 24 and ABC news where Gergis proclaimed:” there are no other warm periods in the last 1000 years that match the warming experienced in Australasia since 1950.” It was all over the ABC including ABC Radio National, and they were “95% certain“! On ABC AM, “the last five decades years in Australia have been the warmest. ” Plus there were pages in Science Alert, Campus Daily Eco news, The Conversation, Real Climate* and Think Progress.
Blog review is where the real science gets tested
Skeptics have been looking through the paper, and three weeks after it was published a team at Climate Audit (kudos to Jean S and Nick Stokes) uncovered a problem so significant that the authors announced that this paper is “on hold”. It has been withdrawn from the American Meteorological Society website. Bishop Hill has probably the best summary of what this means, and how it unfolded.
So the government funded a study to the tune of $300,000, and the study was so shabby that bloggers shot it to pieces in two weeks. But all you Deniers need to just shut up because the Scienciness is Settled™
I want to know who was running the weather station in Austrailia 1000 years ago.
ReplyDeleteThe ironclad assumption that every weather event is a direct result of human activity is an irritant. Because even if you somehow could prove that a particular century/decade/year/day was the warmest one ever, it wold still be part of a cycle, wouldn't it? That great big nuclear furnace in the sky still seems to be a measurable factor in how warm the days are.
ReplyDeleteBut it HAS to be Catastrophic Anthropogenic Greenhouse Induced Climate Change and a Hockey Stick graph. It just HAS to.
ReplyDeleteI have the perfect prescription to that ill. It's called Socialism. It's comes in 500mg caplets or liqui-gels.
And the caplets only cost 87% of your income to support the vunnables that refuse to work.
ReplyDeleteBring on the Army of Davids! Next thing you know, we'll be vetting the President and stuff :)
ReplyDeleteA study for which the result was pre-determined, leading to shoddy science.
ReplyDeleteI see an interesting trend: lots of climate "scientists" seem to make a habit out of hiding the raw data they used.
ReplyDeleteI propose that we stop calling these people "scientists", and instead call them what they are - frauds and charlatans.