Hockey Stick “Hokum” & “Consensus”

The “Hockey Stick” Drives Conservatives Crazy

The Wall Street Journey (my favorite newspaper) and its Editorial Page (my least favorite editorials) are showing their strange schism again. Friday’s (7.14.06) second editorial was headlined “Hockey Stick Hokum.” Whoo boy, what a piece o’weak thinking. What weak evidence. What strange rationalizations.

Basically, the Fox-ites in print denied the current state of paleoclimate research in favor of the old, anecdote-based thinking about what’s been happening with global temperature changes over the past thousand years. They attack the original analysis that created the “hockey stick” graph (showing things have been heating up fast in the last century) by excerpting a new report commissioned by the House Energy Committee. The work was done by statisticians, not – heaven forbid – climatologists. Here are the graphics the WSJ editors used:

The top graph is what we’ve had in our textbooks for decades, based on little more than historical tracts. The second graph is the original “hockey stick.”

Here’s the latest hockey stick from the June 30 Science Magazine and The National Research Council, based on state-of-the-art temperature proxy analysis:

The Journal editors seem unaware of this or the continuing critique and fine tuning of the original hockey stick data by the world’s top climatologists. IN FACT, they accept the statisticians' looney position in the new report that the “consensus” (their quotes) about the current warming is some form of “group think” among climate scientists who “passionately believe in their thesis.” Not really a consensus at all, they say, but some kind of high-schoolish “mutual admiration society” among 98% of all climatologists.

Well, WSJ editorialists, you never let the facts jostle the Journal Editorial Page lockstep with the hydrocarbon crowd on anything implying the need for less greenhouse gas emissions. Just another high-schoolish in-crowd thing?

[Read the Science Magazine piece yourself at http://www.sciencemag.org/]