Free Republic

A group of Republican senior statesmen is pushing for a carbon tax to combat the effects of climate change, and hoping to sell their plan to the White House. Former Secretary of State Jim Baker is leading the effort, which also includes former Secretary of State George Shultz. In an opinion piece published Tuesday night in The Wall Street Journal, they argued “there is mounting evidence of problems with the atmosphere that are growing too compelling to ignore.” […] Carbon taxes are designed to raise the cost of fossil fuels to bring down consumption. Baker and Shultz detailed in the...

Global Warming: Russian analysts accuse Britain's Meteorological Office of cherry-picking Russian temperature data to "hide the decline" in global temperatures. Is Copenhagen rooted in a single tree in Siberia? Michael Mann, a Penn State meteorologist, wrote in Friday's Washington Post that "stolen" e-mails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit still don't alter the evidence for climate change. Mann, a creator of the discredited hockey-stick graph used in reports from the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to show man-made warming, attacks climate skeptics, including former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, saying they "confuse the public." Chutzpah has been...

Steve McIntyre, 62, is a Toronto retiree. He plays squash, dabbles with numbers and insists he never set out to stir up any trouble. So why does his name appear again and again - in the most unflattering ways - in hundreds of e-mails written by the world's most influential climate change scientists[?]...McIntyre is called everything from a "bozo" and a "moron" to a "playground bully." [snip] McIntyre contacted Ross McKitrick, a University of Guelph statistical economist who was also analyzing the science behind the IPCC reports. Together they unearthed evidence that Mann's calculations were predisposed to producing a hockey...

Beginning in 2003, I worked with Stephen McIntyre to replicate a famous result in paleoclimatology known as the Hockey Stick graph. Developed by a U.S. climatologist named Michael Mann... ...Steve and I showed that the mathematics behind the Mann Hockey Stick were badly flawed, such that its shape was determined by suspect bristlecone tree ring data. ...a series of other studies published since 1998 had similar shapes, thus providing support for the view that the late 20th century is unusually warm. The IPCC also made this argument in its 2007 report. But the second expert panel, led by statistician Edward...

Media Advisory: The Hockey Stick Controversy New Analysis Reproduces Graph of Late 20th Century Temperature RiseMay 11, 2005 BOULDER—Caspar Ammann, a paleoclimatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), is available to comment on the so-called hockey stick controversy discussed by Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick today at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. The hockey stick refers to the shape of a frequently cited graph of global mean temperature that shows a rapid rise between 1900 and 2000 after 900 years of relative stability. The graph first appeared in a research paper by Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley,...

Global Warming Bombshell: A prime piece of evidence linking human activity to climate change turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics. by Richard Muller (prof physics - University of California, Berkeley) Progress in science is sometimes made by great discoveries. But science also advances when we learn that something we believed to be true isn’t. When solving a jigsaw puzzle, the solution can sometimes be stymied by the fact that a wrong piece has been wedged in a key place. In the scientific and political debate over global warming, the latest wrong piece may be the “hockey stick,” the...