So, now Keith Olberman tells us that the fifteen-year long “global warming” campaign all along meant “climate change” and that this in turn means that places supposed to get hotter get hotter and that places that are supposed to get colder — under global warming, er, climate change — get colder. We got that.

And his contextual example of the places that are getting colder is the U.S. this winter, well they were supposed to be getting colder, because they are. That’s how we figure out what was supposed to happen under their  theory: by watching whatever happens. That was precisely what was predicted. Or, at least, now, in the new weasel-wording of journalists, “consistent with” what they and expected.

But a civilian has copied me on an email he sent to James Hansen of NASA, longtime advisor to Al Gore and the man who helped create the issue for political purposes in that June 1988 Senate hearing in which the press were made really hot to help their coverage by defeating the air conditioning in the hearing room. Because that helped prove their theory (that room was supposed to get warmer, so…). True story, according to the man who chaired the hearing. I wrote about  it in Red Hot Lies.

So this gentleman raised some specific about problematic claims by Hansen’s office at NASA with which I will not bore you, here. But he appends a few media stories that I just thought might interest you now that the establishment press, a wholly invested partner in the global warming industry, are telling you that warming doesn’t mean warming you fool it really means change which means cooling so there. Only the small-minded focus on warming as meaning warming. Remember that. (more…)

Please click for Part I and Part III.

PART II – The “hockey stick” graph inadvertently incites a new camp of “lukewarmer” skeptics. Climategate files make first appearance on the internet, but were in the hands of one person days before they were made public.

If history tells us anything, it shows us that inciting an audience is an extremely precarious undertaking. Inspiring one group of followers with a call-to-action can just as easily unleash the furor of another. Arousing a community to attack an indisputable villain can surprisingly lead to a circling of the wagons by the scoundrel’s close associates. Inciting is an unpredictable endeavor, best left for those with an innate ability to read a situation or an army on-the-ready to quickly take advantage of an opening.

So is the story of the hockey stick – just as quickly as it was used as a rallying call for warmists, it also inadvertently gave birth to a camp of skeptics.

Enter Steve McIntyre, stage right. A retired mineral explorer and math scholar from Toronto, McIntyre became interested in climate science and the hockey stick due to its seeming inconsistencies. A Medieval Warming Period (seen above) had been a well-documented event in which the earth’s temperature increased considerably sometime between 1000 and 1300 AD, followed by a cooling trend known as the Little Ice Age. A graph of this cycle was even included in the IPCC First Assessment Report in 1990. These events were, however, absent from the Mann et al hockey stick graph. McIntyre was curious about how the graph was made and as chance would have it, the discipline of temperature reconstructions, largely an exercise in statistics, fit right within his mathematics wheelhouse.

Steve McIntyre

On investigating the hockey stick, McIntyre happened upon what he viewed as some errors in the application of his field of expertise along with some misuses of data. He contacted Ross McKitrick, an environmental economist with a PhD in economics, and the two worked on a paper that would highlight the errors in the original hockey stick article. (more…)

Please click for Part II and Part III.

How a tiny blog and a collective of climate enthusiasts broke the biggest story in the history of global warming science – but not without a gatekeeper of the climate establishment trying to halt its proliferation.

It was triggered at the most unlikely of places. Not in the pages of a prominent science publication, or by an experienced muckraker. It was triggered at a tiny blog – a bit down the list of popular skeptic sites. With a small group of followers, a blog of this size could only start a media firestorm if seeded with just the right morsel of information, and found by just the right people. Yet it was at this location that the most lethal weapon against the global warming establishment was unleashed.

The blog was the Air Vent. The information was a link to a Russian server that contained 61 MB of files now known as Climategate. Within two weeks of the file’s introduction, the story appeared on 28,400,000 web pages.

Not entirely the “death of global warming” as many have claimed – what happened with Climategate is much more nuanced and exponentially more interesting than the headlines convey. What was triggered at this blog was the death of unconditional trust in the scientific peer review process, and the maturing of a new movement – that of peer-to-peer review. (more…)