ClimateGate and Hockey Sticks

Have you heard about the hockey stick shaped graph that people keep talking about when it comes to climate change? I've had it shoved down my throat for the last couple weeks. I did not hear about it until recently when the ClimateGate scandal came to light.

There is nothing like a graph and a bunch of numbers to make people shut up and let you talk. It is like religion where it says "It is written ..." So what? Show me the data. I can't understand it, but I can post it and bitch and maybe someone who can wrap their head around that data will stick their head above the wall and fire a volley of sense at it.

It looks like someone is doing just that.

So let’s look at some ice. I’m looking at the temperature record as read from this central Greenland ice core. It gives us about as close as we can come to a direct, experimental measurement of temperature at that one spot for the past 50,000 years.  As far as I know, the data are not adjusted according to any fancy computer climate model or anything else like that. ... In other words, we’re pretty lucky to be here during this rare, warm period in climate history.  But the broader lesson is, climate doesn’t stand still.  It doesn’t even stay on the relatively constrained range of the last 10,000 years for more than about 10,000 years at a time. ... For climate science it means that the Hockey Team climatologists’ insistence that human-emitted CO2 is the only thing that could account for the recent warming trend is probably poppycock. What's up with that?

It is very worth going and looking at the graphs. When you pick your favorite hockey stick shaped graph, you get an alarming trend. When you look at the data over a much broader length of time, you get something much more scary. The Earth's climate is all over the frigging place and has been since, forever. It is not humans who did anything about any of it. It is just good old mother nature. We did not have the power then and do not have the power now to do anything but attempt to survive.

I think I've seen these graphs before. I vaguely remember watching a NOVA or something talking about past ice ages. Their point was that our current trend of relative nice weather is the exception and far from the rule of history. Someone had an argument of the accuracy of ice core temperature measurement 

There is a group of elites who run out world who are trying to siphon off a huge chunk of the world's wealth and indeed ability to generate wealth in order to do something. I have no idea what that is. This reminds me of several movies where it turns out there was a huge island in the south Pacific, for example, where this enormous complex mechanism had been built for some reason, something that sounds ridiculous like changing the Earth's orbit or constructing a global shield. The amount of resources required were so high that a global catastrophe had to be faked in order to fund such a juggernaut. After all, something like that would take focusing the effort and abilities of the entire world under one direction.

My science fiction example is a bit crazy sounding, but so is destroying the economy of the U. S. and indeed entire planet for the same of a few degrees in temprature change over the next couple of generations. It is starting to sound like it would be cheaper to react and adapt as the shit very slowly hits the fan over this time period.