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Global Warming Bomshell: A Mathematical Error Dampens the Case for Panic
Some of the most convincing and dramatic evidence for global warming turns out to be entirely meaningless due to a serious mathematical error. This has been reported recently in several sources, including MIT's Technology Review. This is a terribly embarrassing moment for the crowd that wants us to panic over global warming, give up on capitalism, and turn the reigns global governance over to them to guide us into a pan-Gaian socialist utopia.
Specifically, the widely publicized temperature data for the past 1,000 years from University of Massachusetts geoscientist Michael Mann and colleagues, data that appears to show we are approaching the warmest period in a millennium, turns out to be bogus. The sharp rise at the end of the plot - sometimes described as a "hockey stick shape" - is not due to real increase in temperature, but due to a seriously flawed mathematical treatment. Mann's implementation of "Principal Component Analysis" was done in an errant way that can create the hockey stick shape out of random data with no actual trends. If you generate random date with a mean of zero and no trend and apply Mann's incorrect tool, out pops the same hockey-stick shape that is being used to stir panic in this nation and others.
Bad science and bad politics - that's what we have at the core of the global warming frenzy.
I just watched The Day After Tomorrow, the global warming mega-panic movie that was incredibly weak on science but strong on awesome special effects (kudos to the BYU-trained special effects experts that did much of the work). Sadly, a lot of people will take it seriously.