Back in the 90’s Paleo Climate Science was a harmless, niche research area with a broad range of scientific and mathematical skill represented. Face it, the big scientific money in those days was not in dating ice cores, tree rings, dead animals or lake bottom mud. Top minds tended to gravitate elsewhere where there was money, fame or a “cool factor” .

Even on NASA projects and programs, the pay is pretty mediocre and you won’t become a Bill Gates or Sir Richard Branson. Astronauts get all the glory, scientists and engineers get the gold watches. You have to love the field to spend decades of your life pursuing the final frontier for middle class wages. If NASA has trouble attracting top talent, imaging what fun it is to get top notch minds to ponder mollusks and mud!

It is clear now the rigor of Climate Science – especially related to the ‘ol boy peer review screening process for paleoclimaye – was not up to normal scientific and engineering standards. In fact is was sub par in many ways. How else could someone like Phil Jones become a leading scientist and still be totally flummoxed by Excel-based statistics.

The “hide the decline” debacle – where the last few decades of tree ring data were covered up by the Hockey Team to hide the fact trees signaled cooling in the last decades of the previous century while thermometers showed warmth – was bad enough. This shell game by ‘scientists’ covered up the fact that the preselected tree rings the Hockey Team cherry-picked to represent the last 1000 years of climate, failed to represent that last 60. The rings immediately diverged from reality once the data was outside the calibration range (after 1940 or so). Which means tree rings are not thermometers (duh) and any historic  climate record derived from them has ENORMOUS error bars. Error bars that would swamp the fraction of a degree increase supposedly identified by these less then stellar scientists, which in turn is the basis for all their Chicken-Little alarm bells.

Recently, another paper came out with even dodgier mathematical shenanigans. The ‘scientists’  moved data around by 100’s of years, so measurements taken 600 years off were used to represent the wrong century! Undo all their games and the data indicates recent cooling. Pathetic.

So does all this shoddy math and alarmism really mean much of anything? Yes it does. Something very serious.

The false alarms pulled by the Hockey Team caused politicians to set the exact wrong priorities. And those wrong-headed priorities have left people in the UK dying in the cold:

The reaction to the 2003 heatwave was extraordinary. It was blamed for 2,000 deaths, and taken as a warning that Britain was horribly unprepared for the coming era of snowless winters and barbecue summers. The government’s chief scientific officer, Sir David King, later declared that climate change was “more serious even than the threat of terrorism” in terms of the number of lives that could be lost. Such language is never used about the cold, which kills at least 10 times as many people every winter. Before long, every political party had signed up to the green agenda.

Since Sir David’s exhortations, some 250,000 Brits have died from the cold, and 10,000 from the heat. It is horribly clear that we have been focusing on the wrong enemy. Instead of making sure energy was affordable, ministers have been trying to make it more expensive, with carbon price floors and emissions trading schemes.

10,000 deaths in a fluke heat wave, 25 times that number because of the fact the IPCC got it wrong on global warming.

And all those ‘skeptics’ who tried to bring out contrary scientific results – and who were barred by the Hockey Team from participating in a real scientific debate by their control over who was published for peer-review – are now looking pretty damn smart. They are looking smart because the warming has stopped for 20 years now.

And they probably ARE smart because most skeptics don’t come from niche scientific and engineering fields, but hail from mainstream professional areas that would weed out crap like we have seen in the above mentioned papers.

A recent article in The Economist pretty much hammers the IPCC and its now defunct predictions and alarms:

OVER the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar. The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010.

…

The mismatch between rising greenhouse-gas emissions and not-rising temperatures is among the biggest puzzles in climate science just now. It does not mean global warming is a delusion. Flat though they are, temperatures in the first decade of the 21st century remain almost 1°C above their level in the first decade of the 20th. But the puzzle does need explaining.

Actually, the explanation is obvious. Today’s climate is the same as in the Medieval and Roman Periods. What is different is what happened between then and now.

The Earth is warming from one of the coldest periods the Earth has seen in 11,000 years. Known as The Little Ice Age, it represents a record cold snap for the Halocene Period, the current interglacial period that as been running for 11,400 years.

So is it really a big surprise the Earth is still warming back to the Medieval Climate levels after this record cold snap? Not really. But apparently it is a surprise to many who only dabble in science.

The IPCC and Hockey Team have made a grave mistake. Their models are falling apart as are their theories – underscoring just how little they truly know with confidence about present and past climate. And in their arrogant pronunciations, they prescribed a deadly concoction of remedies which included high energy prices and restricting the modernization of the poorest areas of the world. Because modern society is built on energy, and energy is the supposed evil force behind the mythical global warming, we clearly can’t have that!

That is the harsh truth about all the shoddy science produced by this one time niche area of academic thinking. Deadly mistakes spawned out of dodgy and questionable science.