Congrats to the Gazette in attracting a response from the poster boy of the worldwide Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) Movement. Having a truly big time academic like Mann, the creator of the infamous hockey stick, respond directly to what he would see as a “small town newspaper” nearly 4000 km away, is nothing less than incredible and demonstrates how powerful the print media remains to this day.
Gazette readers may wonder why this seemingly personal response was needed from such a global celebrity. There have been 10s, perhaps 100s of thousands of similar articles written worldwide by “denial scientists” and real people like Ken Allred. All ask the same question: If AGW is real, then where is it? As contested as NASA’s temperature “records” are, the warming hasn’t even shown up there for well over a decade. The latest hypothesis is that the warmth is being absorbed by the oceans. Hmmm, guess that’s never happened before, in the history of this Earth.
CO2 emissions have risen substantially and yet even a supposedly unbiased UN,
– with our cash, supporting thousands of researchers worldwide – can’t seem to find the warming. Temperature has remained statistically steady since 1998, defying virtually every predictive model. And there are dozens of them worldwide.
Could it be that the complexities of weather and climate are beyond the current capacity of academics and that their elitism is so profound that they simply “can’t handle the truth?” To a simple scientist like me, its pretty clear that “the forcings” used by virtually every climate modeller to drive their predictions, are simply not working. Let’s be honest, just how well do those mini models work, the ones they use for your daily and weekly weather forecasts? If current models can’t get the weather right, how can we ever expect them to predict climate change accurately?
I’ve read a dozen books (including Michael’s) on both sides of the AGW debate and I’m well aware of Mann’s “supporting cast” and their claim the hockey stick holds true for 1400, rather than 1000 years. Yet I struggle with those tree stumps and agricultural relics on the coast of Greenland. Then there’s Mann’s tree ring and other proxy data issues identified by Canadian statistical experts McIntyre & McIntric. And just why is it, that Mann’s data were not readily available for other scientists, to test for themselves?
I find it ironic that AGW has clearly won the day with Canadian politicians who insist on penalizing our citizens and producers of the most socially and environmentally responsible oil and gas sources on this Earth, while allowing importation of the world’s most notorious sources; OPEC, Venezuela and Russia, (where neither their industry, nor their citizens, pay any form of carbon tax.) Apparently that idea is only for the foolish. In my view, it’s time we rethink this whole thing and it should start right here, with Alberta politicians.
Bill Rugg, St. Albert
