Ten Things Everyone Should Know About the Global Warming Hockey Stick

Most of us have seen a ‘hockey stick’ graph like the one below indicating temperature. It and others like it have been repeatedly used to demonstrate the recent warming of the earth. But how was it created? Certainly there were no thermometers being recorded in 1000 AD.

Number 1 –

This data is considered the premier evidence of man made climate change. This graph clearly shows it is hotter now than in the past.

Number 2 –

The red line is measured data from thermometers back to 1850. The red temperature data has many corrections to account for various factors so its own accuracy is in doubt.

Number 3 –

The rest of the data comes from proxies. Proxies are stand in measurements for temperature employing things such as tree ring width, mollusk shells, various kinds of coral and ice cores.

Number 4 –

There has been no verification or expirament that tree ring widths, mollusks or coral etc. measure temperature. Instead the concept for each proxy started with a basic theory that the trees or other things might change width with temp. The only verification is when the measured data from tree rings “correlates” after “calibration” to temperature. There have been no laboratory verifications of the concept.

Number 5 –

The data from the proxies which match temperature trends are kept, and the remaining data are thrown away. About 60% of the data was thrown away in generating this graph above, the remaining 40 percent that did agree were from a variety of sources (one tree was used, the one next to it was not). Proxies are often very noisy data with little visible signal. See a typical proxy below, selected because it was the first data proxy of the series used to create the hockey stick.

Number 6 –

The kept (accepted) data is scaled (magnified) and offset (up and down) to provide the best fit to today’s temperature measurements. After the averaging, the red temperature line above is glued on the end to extend the tow of the hockey stick.

Number 7 –

The fact that 40% of the data, when statistically processed, matches temperature is the sole rational for saying that tree ring width, and mollusk isotopes are actually temperature. If less than 10 to 30% passed, there would be no scientific method for acceptance of this data as temperature.

Number 8 –

Math techniques called CPS and EIV were used to generate the correlation and magnification of the temperature data.

Number 9 –

Statisticians and scientists have repeatedly discredited the calculations involved saying that they select too many of the proxies by overstating the correlation. Still the main government branch for global warming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has refused to relinquish this point. This continues despite repeated demonstrations that the statistics seem to be specifically designed to pick out hockey stick shaped proxies from even fake random red noise data.

Number 10 –

Continued acceptance by the premier global warming scientists demonstrates a clear political bias at the top of the global warming community, leaving the world at the mercy of the conclusions of a large power hungry government organization.

What we can understand now.

This graph, except for the red line at the end, is not temperature, it is not science either but rather it is the output of a cleverly assembled statistical software designed to create hockey sticks. This method and others like it have been used to generate hundreds of hockey stick graphs.

Proxy based temperatures cannot be trusted to reasonably define temperature history. Basing economic and energy policy on this curve and others like it are the height of irresponsibility.

But it will continue.