I watched your pbs climate of doubt show. Regarding conspiracies, tis fair to say people are conspiring on both sides. I was not surprised but still dismayed that PBS whitewashed Climategate. The emails contained proof that Jones, Mann et all conspired to violate FOIA laws and tamper with journals. Beyond doubt. But do such facts perturb your confidence and trust in Jones et al in the least bit? If not, why not?
cordially,
ferd
You have NO IDEA of which you are speaking re “climategate.” “Hide the decline” was about the decline in the tree ring proxy data (which denialists hate so much anyway) – for which I think I might have an answer* – which did not jive with the more accurate instrumental data, which showed an increase in temps. The “trick” referred to the
method used to splice those two data sets (proxy and instrumental) together – not at all to some trick to deceive the public, for heaven’s sake.
You people are totally clueless re the evil deceit of the oil-funded denialist industry.
The Bible says to be as shrewd as serpents and as gentle as doves, NOT as clueless as babes in the woods and as rough as vultures.
The way I look at things is if scientists are telling me everything is fine and dandy, I have suspicions and look at their funding source, etc. (There are some industry scientists who even falsify their science to the point of getting sent to prison).
If scientists tell me things are bad, I take them more seriously and do some investigation myself – not “blog science,” but in scientific journals, and even contact the scientists myself… Which is what I did when I first got into AGW more seriously in 1989 (I had some vague knowledge of it since the 60s).
*In my research re crop harm from AGW I found out that the minimum diurnal or night temps were warming faster than the maximum diurnal or day temps (sort of a nighttime “blanket effect” of hot, humid nights), which was having a negative impact on crops, while the increasing day temps were at this point still having a positive impact (the countervailing effects cancelling each other out).
This is unlike earlier heat spells not under the GH effect in which the cooler night temps allow plants to rest or recuperate from the high day temps, not having a negative effect. So it is possible that the tree ring proxies in recent decades were affected by this blanket effect and failed to be good proxies the last few decades of the 20th century.
I did contact some scientists, including Mike Mann, about this but they didn’t really know why tree rings started failing to be good proxies in recent decades, but were interested in the research I had dug up.
See: Welch, J., J. R. Vincent, M. Auffhammer, P. F. Moya, A. Dobermann, and D. Dawe. 2010. “Rice Yields in Tropical/Subtropical Asia Exhibit Large but Opposing Sensitivities to Minimum and Maximum Temperatures.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107(33): 14562-14567.
pnas.org/content/107/33/14562.full.pdf
