Climate Change on Trial. My Reflections, My Part 4

I’ve received a text message from Ann McElhinney, Unreported Story Society, it reads:

Hello Old Friend, we’re here in [Washington] DC, you’ve been mentioned fondly by Mark [Steyn] in the court and I was remembering your kindness to us …

Ann is in DC, with her partner Phelim McAleer, covering Michael Mann’s defamation trial against Mark Steyn; because Mark Steyn called the unfortunate hockey stick chart, that has become the cross of climate change delusion, a fraud.  Yes. A fraud.

It may have been difficult for Conservative politicians, and others, to call it out as such (as fraud) at the time this nonsense historical temperature reconstruction was first published – in the journal Nature back in 1998.  There was, however, opportunity to do exactly this after the publication of emails between leading climate scientists as part of the ClimateGate saga.  Most importantly there is opportunity right now to call it out, with all the evidence that is being presented at the defamation trial of Mark Steyn and also Rand Simberg.

FOIA is a recognised shorthand for Freedom of Information Act. Legislation by this name has existed in the USA since 1966, Australia since 1982 and the UK legislation was introduced in 2000. It was climate scientists at the Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, conspiring to evade the UK FOIA that inspired Climategate, with Mr FOIA, as the ‘whistle blower’ likes to calls himself, releasing over 220,000 documents and emails beginning in November 2009.

In an email sometime later he explained:

The circus was about to arrive in Copenhagen. Later on it could be too late.

By circus he is referring to a get together of governments from around the world, under the direction of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Mr FOIA  wanted to let it be known that leading climate scientists at that very meeting, that they knew key supporting evidence was unreliable; that the famous hockey stick chart had been created by using 'Mike’s trick'.

Indeed, by providing public access to emails and documents from leading climate scientists, Mr FOIA exposed how tricks, adjustments, and corrections, were routinely applied to climate data to support the propaganda of the largely government-funded (with your taxes) global warming industry.

An interpretation of the hockey stick chart, and how different the temperature data looked before, and after, 'Michael Mann’s trick' was shown in court, in Washington DC last week.  This was as part of the defence for Mark Steyn’s co-accused, Rand Simberg.

The short Youtube video stars Prof. Richard Muller from UC Berkely explaining to his students why Michael Mann used the ‘apple and banana’ combination and how deceitful it is.

Muller does not show, or refer to, apples and bananas.  But Mark Steyn does quote from my blog in his 2015 book using this analogy of sticking an apple on the end of a banana with reference to this hockey stick chart.  The important point is that the stick is not made of the same stuff as the shaft, in this famous historical temperature reconstruction.   And most people don't seem to realise or care.  Yet how often, might these very same people claim it not appropriate to be comparing 'apples with oranges'?

Ann and Phelim are in DC to support Mark Steyn, specifically they have started a new podcast series, entitled ‘Climate Change on Trial’ – all about this trial, which is very much focused on the hockey stick of climate science and its veracity, or lack of.

Their podcast is working its way up the charts in the science category, at #2 in the UK.

This is rather an achievement, especially given it questions so much that the English King believes so hard in, that it suggests he would do well to be less ‘certain’ about the veracity of the hockey stick.

I’m paraphrasing the first witness for the defence, Abraham Wyner, a statistician who spent some time in court explaining the concept of ‘uncertainty’ along with ‘p hacking’.   He also commented that it was important to understand that the shaft and stick are of different components.

As Ann says in their most recent podcast episode, they do more than feed us popcorn, at this circus, we even get to learn something about statistics.

Given most of my readers are interested in politics and science, consider clicking across, subscribe, and leave a review, after you have listened to some episodes.  They are all good, and different.

I always like the last episode that I listened to best, which is Episode 11, Mann & [Judith] Curry.  And I look forward to the next one, including to hear the banter between Ann and Phelim.

There is lot of nastiness in each episode not between my friends, but from the climate scientists and I’m finding it cathartic.

The extent to which mainstream climate scientists block the work of those they disagree with, and then ridicule them.   That is something that needs to be publicly acknowledged, least this sad situation continues forever, or more likely until everyone shuts up and bows down to the authority of Michael Mann and the IPCC or at least, on the conservative side, those who only marginally disagree with them, including Judith Curry.  Yes.  Curry.  While a witness for Simberg, and a good one at that, in the end Curry is part of the problem, Curry and her electric car.   You will hear about the car, heat pump and all her batteries if you listen to Episode #11 of the podcast, click here.

We know from the ClimateGate emails that there was terrible abuse of the climate science process through the 1990s.  I have firsthand experience of it still happening twenty years later, especially the difficulty of getting research that does not accord with 'the consensus' published.

Getting my research with John Abbot, on a new technique using artificial intelligence for better rainfall forecasts, published was not easy.  But John Abbot and I persisted, and now this research is part of the official record in so much as it has been published in some of the best peer-reviewed journals in climate science.

Every time we tried to publish on rainfall and also temperatures, it was an ordeal.  While mostly successful with the rainfall work, we have mostly failed when it comes to the temperature work.  We got two minor publications through.  I am going to try again, maybe later this year with Rutherglen, Darwin, and Mildura historical temperature reconstructions.   The unpublished Mildura manuscript includes lots and lots of temperature data that the Bureau, well they now claim none of this data exists.

Anyone would think it unbelievable, that the Australian Bureau of Meteorology could obfuscate for so long on the existence of the parallel data sets that would enable some comparison of the temperature measurements from electronic probes versus mercury thermometers.  This data needs to be analysed if we are to have confidence in the instrumental record going forward.  And it needs to be analysed for more than the one location of Mildura.

The importance of this analysis has so far been ignored by mainstream climate scientists and sceptics alike.  It has not been mentioned in this trial, with the impression given that the instrumental temperature record for the last 30 years is reliable, when it is not.

I discuss some of the associated issues in Part 2, of this series at my weblog, the post is entitled ‘Climate Scientists More Generally, and Boris Kelly Gerreyn More Specifically’.

 

My feeling is, that you will be much more sympathetic to what I have had to endure, and what I plan to begin explaining going forward, after you hear the extent of the shenanigans by way of the evidence in the Mark Steyn versus Michael Mann trial.

When I eventually get the Mildura data published, and when I eventually get to tell my story, you might actually believe me!  Because it is all just an extension of the continuing malfeasance within mainstream climate science.  As unbelievable as it often seems, even still to me.

After John Abbot and I did get our second research paper concerning temperatures and artificial intelligence (AI) – demonstrating how AI can be used to distinguish natural versus human-caused climate change – published by the Elsevier journal, GeoResJ back in 2017 (vol 14), Gavin Schmidt (a mate of Michael Mann’s) launched an attack including to get this paper retracted.

Schmidt worked hard, including at Twitter to destroy our reputation and to have the paper retracted by the journal.  Of course, in the first instance, the campaign was focused on the editor of the journal.  And so the editor wrote to us wanting clarification on various aspects of our method.

Those few years ago Gavin Schmidt was claiming that artificial intelligence could not be used for weather or climate forecasting.   It is now recognised, the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to forecast weather – exemplified by Google’s experimental GraphCast AI and the Huawei Pangu-Weather model – to the point where the MIT Technology Review has declared ‘Weather Forecasting is having an AI moment’ and Nature reported that ‘DeepMind AI accurately forecasts weather – on a desktop computer’.

And, these few years later our paper is still standing, so to speak, which is more than Mark Steyn can do at the moment, and the journal that published us has since been closed down.

I am so sorry that Mark Steyn has had three heart attacks this last year and is now defending himself from a wheel chair.  I am sorry that the journal GeoResJ no longer publishes real science, because it can no longer publish anything.

There should be much more acknowledgment of the toll all the unnecessary nastiness can take on individuals, and organisations and of course, eventually on our institutions.

There is a war, Mark Steyn is centre stage in just one of the battles.

It is a war against what Mr FOIA referred to as the ‘hole digging and filling in’.   More specifically he wrote that:

[The] wealth of the surrounding society tends to draw the major brushstrokes of a newborn’s future life. It makes a huge difference whether humanity uses its assets to achieve progress, or whether it strives to stop and reverse it, essentially sacrificing the less fortunate to the climate gods.

We can’t pour trillions in this massive hole-digging-and-filling-up endeavor and pretend it’s not away from something and someone else.

If the economy of a region, a country, a city, etc. deteriorates, what happens among the poorest? Does that usually improve their prospects? No, they will take the hardest hit. No amount of magical climate thinking can turn this one upside-down.

I have explained the significance of my very technical research on rainfall forecasting using AI, as published in volume 14 of GeoResJ, in an article for The Spectator Australia online.

The late Christian Kerr, another foot soldier in this war, told me at the time it was their most viewed article at Flat White that year – in 2017.

You can still read the piece at The Spectator Australia online, entitled ‘Big Data Finds the Medieval Warm Period – No Denial Here’.   The Spectator Australia still exists as a publication, that is something I am also grateful for.   Rowan Dean, its editor, continues as another important foot soldier in this war.

As I listen along to the new podcast series produced by Ann and Phelim entitled ‘Climate Change on Trial’, I know that this information is being broadcast, that it is being made public: that the ‘whole world’ is hearing how brazen and nasty mainstream climate scientists can be.  And I’m feeling an ugly burden lifted.   Sharing the ugly can somehow make it less personal, any good therapist will affirm that as truth.  Thank you Ann and Phelim, for lightening my load in a very practical way.

I have often been told, by those who could better support my work in very practical ways, I'm referring to  my work with John Abbot forecasting temperatures and rainfall using AI, that it is all very technical and difficult to understand.  Even that I am not a very good communicator, and so they promote the work of Judith Curry instead, even though she is just rehashing the problems we already known about with General Circulation Models (GCMs). Curry and them, including the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship along with Jordon Peterson and John Anderson, they just rehash what we already know to be hopeless, rather than attempting to understand the solution by way of a new tool, that John Abbot and I are offering.

It was in 2015 that Mark Steyn published ‘A Disgrace to the Profession’ that sets out in very plain English – Mark is not a scientist but rather a radio and television presenter, and expert on the history of musical theatre – how absurd a centre piece of one of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) assessment reports really is.  Of course, I’m back referring to the 'hockey stick'.

It is so obvious that we need to abandon this absurd historical reconstruction, along with General Circulation Models and those who want to keep talking about them and publishing on them as though they have some practical utility.  If we are to ever begin to unpick the nature of climate change and move to better systems for forecasting droughts and floods we need to abandon electric cars along with GCMs.  They are not useful.

Steyn quotes me on page 55 of his 2015 book, and a witness in the trial has made the very same observation.  Dr Abraham Wyner a statistician from the University of Pennsylvania explains that the shaft of the ‘hockey stick’ is not of the same stuff as the handle of this infamous temperature reconstruction.

Mark Steyn thought my explanation very clear.  Quoting from my blog, he wrote back in 2015, she found Mann’s famous graph an ‘unlikely proposition’.  In 2013, I suggested it was analogous to ‘sticking an apple on the end of a banana’.   We should be laughing at it, rather than buying electric cars.

We should be remembering that it is not always useful to treat apples and oranges as the same.  They are very different things.

I began these scribbles with mention of a text I got from Ann, and the word 'kindness'.

You can right now show your kindness in a very practical way by clicking across to their donation page.  Send them some money, as a show of appreciation for all their efforts so far.

Show your kindness to Mark Steyn and also Ann and Phelim by making a donation to help them keep reporting on this trial, and the next battle, in this difficult war, LINK HERE.

This blog post was edited for clarity, with more detail added, on Monday morning, Australian Eastern Standard Time.   A version will be sent to my MailChimp subscribers, you can subscribe by clicking here.

POSTSCRIPT

It was a long time ago, 2006, that I travelled with Ann and Phelim, helping to promote their first documentary film, ‘Mine Your Own Business’.  That was after I raised a good amount of money to bring them to Australia, and successfully booked their film into theatres in Hobart, Perth, Sydney and Melbourne.   I really wanted them to be well supported, that is the kindness Ann remembers.

And as Phelim McAleer explained during that tour:

The film [Mine Your Own Business], in its essence, is not really at all a story about mining, but rather, it is a story about human rights. The human right to a job, the human right to have your children educated, the human right to see your child reach their first birthday.

It is my very favourite film of all times – about the human experience, and totally politically incorrect.   In that regard, it is much like this Mark Steyn defamation trial.

At the time I was covering a trial in Indonesia, that I wrote about for the IPA Review, it was about Richard Ness.

Against the odds, Ness won in what was the longest running criminal trial in Indonesia.   Here’s hoping that Mark Steyn wins.  This battle could be all over very soon.

To read Part 3, Part 2, Part 1, of this blog series, click on the respective links.