Africa's Future is in Rooftop Solar Power

Two weeks ago (9/14) the Wall Street Journal had a special supplement section on energy. One of their Africa correspondents, Drew Hinshaw, wrote from Ghana about his family's problems getting electricity from the grid there, especially now that he has an infant son -- the power is unreliable, with frequent daylong outages.

600 million Africas, he wrote, more than half the continent's population, are not connected to a power line. Those that are often have intermittent and unreliable service.

So Hinshaw put in rooftop solar where he lives, spending $3000 for two solar panels and lead-acid batteries that meet his family's basic requirements -- a refrigerator, fans, laptop, and modem.

His article. titled "So Much Sun, So Little Electricity," was accompanied with some data, which I've converted to the graphical form below. It shows, it seems to me, that the future prosperity of African societies will not come only from a vast fossil fuel infrastructure like the developed countries have, but will instead include a large amount from active individual and local efforts to utilize the the continent's most easily accessible resource.

The Upcoming Supermoon Lunar Eclipse

This will be good, especially if you're on the west coast of the U.S.: a rare supermoon lunar eclipse next Sunday evening, followed by a bright supermoon the next night.

"Supermoon" means the moon is full and at its closest approach (perigee) to the Earth, meaning it will look larger than usual (and 14% larger than at apogee). There have only been 5 of these since 1900; the last was in 1982, and the next won't happen until 2033.


It will be especially convenient on the U.S. west coast, because the moon rises early in the evening, so kids will be able to see it without staying up late. This site has details for many of the major cities that will be able to view at least part of the eclipse -- western Europe will be able to see the ending of the eclipse Monday morning, and New York City can view the maximum at 10:47 pm Sunday evening.

The Oregonian has details for this part of the world:

For viewing in Portland and northern Oregon, the eclipse begins at 5:11 p.m., Sunday, Sept., 27, 2015. That's before it gets dark and before the moon rises, but it only gets better.

The maximum eclipse is at 7:47 p.m. next Sunday evening and continues until 10:22 p.m., for a duration of five hours and 11 minutes. For 72 of those minutes, the only light hitting the full moon will be a reddish glow from sunrises and sunsets around the globe. The full moon takes place at 7:50 p.m. PDT next Sunday.

The moonrise that evening is at 6:58 p.m., at 88 degrees (or almost due east). The sunset is at 6:59 p.m., so the sky should be getting dark as the moon goes into its full eclipse at 7:11 p.m. next Sunday. The moon will be just 8 degrees above the eastern horizon at the instant of the greatest eclipse, making the event more spectacular than during an eclipse occurs with the moon high overhead.

Another Turd from Tony Heller (AKA "Steve Goddard")

Tony Heller -- the real name of the blogger Steve Goddard -- is so angry no one takes him seriously anymore that every other post of his (literally) is covered with spittle as he rants and raves that all climate scientistgs are criminals and frauds who have Satan over for tea.

Problem is, Heller has thoroughly earned his disreputation, with boneheaded errors like this [retraction] and this, for which even Judith Curry called his analysis "bogus."

Heller produces turds like clockwork. Here's yet another:

This is another lie, as only Steve Goddard could produce.

The Hadley Center's HadCRUT4 data series for the Southern Hemisphere is here. Here's the explanation of their file format. Notice what it says about columns 11 and 12 (click to enlarge):

If you can't read that, the last bullet item is:

Columns 11 and 12 are the lower and upper bounds of the 95% confidence interval of the combined effects of all the uncertainties described in the HadCRUT4 error model (measurement and sampling, bias and coverage uncertainties).

Thus, the 5-95% confidence limits for the HadCRUT4 SH global temperature anomaly for January 1850 are -1.055°C and -0.058°C (top line, far right) -- a huge range in accuracy, with error bars ~ 90%, and definitely not the 0.001°C Goddard claims. (Without knowing the instruments involved -- which Goddard does not -- we can't say if the precision is warranted or not. In any case, the number comes from a model, not from raw measurements.)

The effect on long-term trends: zilch.

There's a reason everyone but the Heartland Institute has dismissed Goddard as a crackpot....

Heisenberg, Schrödinger and Ohm are in a car....

Heisenberg, Schrödinger and Ohm are in a car.

They get pulled over. Heisenberg is driving and the cop asks him "Do you know how fast you were going?"

"No, but I know exactly where I am" Heisenberg replies.

The cop says "You were doing 55 in a 35." Heisenberg throws up his hands and shouts "Great! Now I'm lost!"

The cop thinks this is suspicious and orders him to pop open the trunk. He checks it out and says "Do you know you have a dead cat back here?"

"We do now, asshole!" shouts Schrödinger.

The cop moves to arrest them. Ohm resists

(Thanks Jim.)

Cyclonic Energy at Record High

August had the highest global ACE value -- Accumulated Cyclone Energy -- of any August since records began in 1970. [data]

It's not a perfect metric of cyclonic energy -- it doesn't include a storm's size, for example, as I wrote about here and here-- but it does seem the most popular and the most published.

Of course, August also saw the highest sea-surface temperatures according to HadSST3 data (since 1850) and NOAA data (since 1880). Just a coincidence I'm sure.

An Even Easier Way to Get a Hockey Stick: Mere Exponential CO2 Growth

When I was gone last week, someone pointed out to me an excellent (and obvious) point: Superexponential growth in CO2 isn't needed to give a hockey stick -- mere exponential growth suffices. 

That is, by the exact same reasoning I gave before, exponential CO2 growth gives a linear increase in temperature -- i.e. a hockey stick.

Since, all else being equal, temperature change is proportional to the logarithm of CO2 concentration, CO2 increasing exponentially leads to a linear increase in temperature.

So a constant atmospheric CO2 concentration from, say, 1000 AD to the year 1850, results in no temperature change.

After that, an exponential change in CO2 results in a linearly increasing temperature.

That is, a hockey stick.

So, for Steyn's book to be at all true, basic physics must be violated. Whose side would you take in that fight -- a music reviewer, or the fundamental laws of the universe?

Satellite-Era Sea Level Rise Starting to Accelerate

The latest data on sea level rise from AVISO is now starting to show a positive acceleration.

I'll dice the data in two ways; both show an acceleration:

1. fitting it to a 2nd-order polynomial
2. calculating the change in the slope of the most recent 20 years.

First, here are the sea level data from AVISO:

The second-order polynomial fit shows an acceleration of 0.005 ± 0.009 mm/yr², where the uncertainty is calculated assuming no autocorrelation.

That's still small, but it's been increasing steadily since the 2010-11 La Nina that took a lot of water from the ocean and dumped it on land -- which Josh Willis called correctly and Bjorn Lomborg called wrong:

This fit finds that the current rate of sea-level rise is 3.83 mm/yr.

The second method, calculating the change in the linear slope of the last 20-year's worth of data (20 being picked arbitrarily) finds an acceleration of 0.021 mm/yr². (Sorry, I haven't calculated its uncertainty.)

Even a little bit of acceleration sends the projection up fast: here is the change in the projection to the year 2100, relative to 1993:

In other words, in late 2014 the projection for the year 2100, relative to 1993, was 30 cm; now, just 2/3rds of a year later, it's up to 38 cm.

(The AVISO data record now spans 22.5 years.)

One last number, since it gives me the opportunity to use my favorite unit, the Sverdrup (Sv), which equals one million cubic meters per second: the change in the volume of the ocean from land ice melting + water thermal expansion is 0.04 Sv, or almost 21 times the flow of water over Niagara Falls.

That's more than twice the average discharge of the Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico (= 0.017 Sv).

The Remarkable Decline in Sea Ice

The turnaround in sea ice extent, both in Antarctica and globally, is remarkable. Yesterday's global sea ice extent was the lowest in the satellite record for Sept 14th:

with a current anomaly of -2.1 million km2.

Of course, this all may turn around at some point -- the Antarctic seems especially fickle.

Data sources:
daily Arctic sea ice extent [latest] [1978-2014]
daily Antarctic sea ice extent [latest] [1978-2014]
daily Global = Arctic + Antarctic SIE

Arctic Sea Ice Extent, in Standard Deviations

For the entire year, 2012's record low minimum was -3.66 standard deviations from the mean.

2015's low (at least so far) was -3.10 sd's from the mean, on March 9th.

The linear fit to the data, which is pretty good, has the ice extent losing 0.09 standard deviations a year.

Guess What I Found? Another Hockey Stick

Sami Hanhijarvi et al 2013: "Pairwise comparisons to reconstruct mean temperature in the Arctic Atlantic Region over the last 2,000 years," Clim Dyn 2013  DOI 10.1007/s00382-013-1701-4.

I'll add it to The List.

Hockey Sticks Galore

From "The Myth of Sustainability and the Quadrillion Dollar Economy: Why Must the Economy Grow?" Richard H. Robbins, Department of Anthropology, State University of New York at Plattsburgh, paper prepared for the Montreal International Conference on De-Growth in the Americas," Montreal, Quebec, May 13-19, 2012.

(Thanks Dano.)

Added 9/5: Here's a prettier version of the above (click to enlarge). Thanks again, Dano.

About TonyHellerExposed

Turns out Tonyhellerexposed is some guy named Michael LaFlamme.

Or, at least, that's what his email to me says (922.paul@gmail.com). Who knows with this guy -- he isn't known for his accuracy.

Or his decency. Like this dirty and very personal insult against Judith Curry. Inexcusable

If you don't have the courage to post opinions under your real name and you use that anonymity to cowardly insult and degrade people, your opinions aren't worth much. That goes for both the real fake Steve Goddard, and this doubly fake Steve Goddard.

Added 10:30 pm: In a second email, this guy says "Michael LaFlamme" also isn't his real name. So you can see he's nothing but deception all the way down....

Another Hockey Stick Just Showed Up

Lo and behold:

"Heterogeneous warming of Northern Hemisphere surface temperatures over the last 1200 years," Martin P. Tingley and Peter Huybers, Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, Volume 120, Issue 9, Article first published online: 14 May 2015.

That's over three dozen now. I'll keep a list here. Send suggestions and additions.

LBJ on Carbon Dioxide, 50 Years Ago

President Lyndon B. Johnson's
Special Message to the Congress on Conservation and Restoration of Natural Beauty
February 8, 1965

Johnson's remarks arose from a 1965 report to his Administration, “Restoring the Quality of Our Environment,” by the Environmental Pollution Panel of the President’s Science Advisory Committee, which had a chapter on CO2’s potential to cause warming.

A 1963 report by the Conservation Foundation, "Implications of Rising Carbon Dioxide Content of the Atmosphere," had warned that the doubling of CO2 projected for the next century could raise the world's temperature by 4°C. [Weart, p. 44].

My Feature in the September Issue of "Physics World"

I have the cover story in this month's Physics World magazine, about Advanced LIGO, upgrades to the U.S. gravitational wave observatory in Washington state and Louisiana that are coming online soon. These enhancements will expand by a thousand-fold the volume of space the detectors be able to search for gravitational wave sources; hopefully, it will directly and finally confirm Einstein's prediction of gravitational waves from his general theory of relativity.


You can read it here.

Ohioans Could Always Change Their Own Highest Mountain to "McKinley"

Highest spot in Alaska:

Highest spot in Ohio:

This Year's El Niño, Surging Ahead

36 Hockey Sticks (And Counting)

Thanks to commenter Jack Dale at Roy Spencer's blog, who gave this long and useful list of studies that find a hockey stick from reconstructions of paleoclimate data, compiled by Jim Milks of Seeing the Environmental Forest.

Milks has links to three dozen studies that find a hockey stick, as of 2013. Three dozen. (For links to each specific study, see Milks' post.)

Crowley 2000: Used both his own and Mann et al. (1999)’s hockey sticks to examine the cause of temperature changes over the past 1,000 years. Found that natural forcings could not explain twentieth century warming without the effect of greenhouse gases.

Huang, et al. 2000: Reconstructed global average temperatures since AD 1500 using temperature data from 616 boreholes from around the globe.

Bertrand et al. 2002: Reconstructed solar output, volcanic activity, land use changes, and greenhouse gas concentrations since AD 1000, then computed the expected temperature changes due to those forcings. Compared the computed temperature changes with two independent temperature reconstructions.

Esper et al. 2002: Reconstructed Northern Hemisphere temperatures between AD 800 and AD 2000 using tree ring chronologies.

Cronin et al. 2003: Reconstructed temperatures between 200 BC and AD 2000 around Chesapeake Bay, USA, using sediment core records.

Pollack and Smerdon 2004: Reconstructed global average temperatures since AD 1500 using temperature data from 695 boreholes from around the globe.

Esper et al. 2005: Compared and averaged five independent reconstructions of Northern Hemisphere temperatures from AD 1000 to AD 2000.

Moberg et al. 2005: Combined tree ring proxies with glacial ice cores, stalagmite, and lake sediment proxies to reconstruct Northern Hemisphere temperatures from AD 1 to AD 2000.

Oerlemans 2005: Reconstructed global temperatures from AD 1500 to AD 2000 using 169 glacial ice proxies from around the globe.
Rutherford, et al. 2005: Compared two multi-proxy temperature reconstructions and tested the results of each reconstruction for sensitivity to type of statistics used, proxy characteristics, seasonal variation, and geographic location. Concluded that the reconstructions were robust to various sources of error.

D’Arrigo et al. 2006: Reconstructed Northern Hemisphere temperatures between AD 700 and AD 2000 from multiple tree ring proxies using a new statistical technique called Regional Curve Standardization. Concluded that their new technique was superior to the older technique used by previous reconstructions.

Osborn and Briffa 2006: Used 14 regional temperature reconstructions between AD 800 and AD 2000 to compare spatial extent of changes in Northern Hemisphere temperatures. Found that twentieth century warming was more widespread than any other temperature change of the past 1,200 years.

Hegerl et al. 2007: Combined borehole temperatures and tree ring proxies to reconstruct Northern Hemisphere temperatures over the past 1,450 years. Introduced a new calibration technique between proxy temperatures and instrumental temperatures.

Juckes et al. 2007: Combined multiple older reconstructions into a meta-analysis. Also used existing proxies to calculate a new Northern Hemisphere temperature reconstruction.

Wahl and Ammann 2007: Used the tree ring proxies, glacial proxies, and borehole proxies used by Mann et al. (1998, 1999) to recalculate Northern Hemisphere temperatures since AD 800. Refuted the McIntyre and McKitrick criticisms and showed that those criticisms were based on flawed statistical techniques.

Wilson, et al. 2007: Reconstructed Northern Hemisphere temperatures from AD 1750 to AD 2000 using tree ring proxies that did not show a divergence problem after AD 1960.

Mann et al. 2008: Reconstructed global temperatures between AD 200 and AD 2000 using 1,209 independent proxies ranging from tree rings to boreholes to sediment cores to stalagmite cores to Greenland and Antarctic ice cores.

Kaufman, et al. 2009: Used tree rings, lake sediment cores, and glacial ice cores to reconstruct Arctic temperatures between 1 BC and 2000 AD.

von Storch et al. 2009: Tested three different temperature reconstruction techniques to show that the Composite plus Scaling method was better than the other two methods.

Frank et al. 2010: A brief history of proxy temperature reconstructions, as well as analysis of the main questions remaining in temperature reconstructions.

Kellerhals et al. 2010: Used ammonium concentration in a glacial ice core to reconstruct tropical South American temperatures over the past 1,600 years.

Ljungqvist 2010: Reconstructed extra-tropical Northern Hemisphere temperatures from AD 1 to AD 2000 using historical records, sediment cores, tree rings, and stalagmites.

Thibodeau et al. 2010: Reconstructed temperatures at the bottom of the Gulf of St. Lawrence since AD 1000 via sediment cores.

Tingley and Huybers 2010a, 2010b: Used a Bayesian approach to reconstruct North American temperatures.

Büntgen et al. 2011: Used tree ring proxies to reconstruct Central European temperatures between 500 BC and AD 2000.

Kemp et al. 2011: Reconstructed sea levels off North Carolina, USA from 100 BC to AD 2000 using sediment cores. They also showed that sea levels changed with global temperature for at least the past millennium.

Kinnard et al. 2011: Used multiple proxies to reconstruct late summer Arctic sea ice between AD 561 and AD 1995, using instrumental data to extend their record to AD 2000.

Martin-Chivelet et al. 2011: Reconstructed temperatures in the Iberian Peninsula from 2000 BC to AD 2000 using stalagmites.
Spielhagen et al. 2011: Reconstructed marine temperatures in the Fram Strait from 100 BC to AD 2000 using sediment cores.

Esper et al. 2012: Used tree ring proxies to reconstruct Northern Scandinavian temperatures 100 BC to AD 2000. May have solved the post-AD 1960 tree ring divergence problem.

Ljungqvist et al. 2012: Used a network of 120 tree ring proxies, ice core proxies, pollen records, sediment cores, and historical documents to reconstruct Northern Hemisphere temperatures between AD 800 and AD 2000, with emphasis on proxies recording the Medieval Warm Period.

Melvin et al. 2012: Reanalyzed tree ring data for the Torneträsk region of northern Sweden.

Abram et al. 2013: Reconstructed snow melt records and temperatures in the Antarctic Peninsula since AD 1000 using ice core records.

Marcott, et al. 2013: Reconstructed global temperatures over the past 11,000 years using sediment cores. Data ended at AD 1940.

PAGES 2k Consortium 2013: Used multiple proxies (tree rings, sediment cores, ice cores, stalagmites, pollen, etc) to reconstruct regional and global temperatures since AD 1.

Rhodes et al. 2013: Used proxy and instrumental records to reconstruct global temperatures from AD 1753 to AD 2011.

Again, this is hardly surprising. What would be surprising is if any studies found something other than a hockey stick.

As Jim wrote,

The proper response to someone who asserts that the Hockey Stick has been falsified is to ask "Which one?" 

Thanks Jim.

--
Added -- and more:

Y Zhang et al. 2014: "Millennial minimum temperature variations in the Qilian Mountains, China: evidence from tree rings," Climate of the Past, 10, 1763–1778, 2014.

Shi et al. 2015: "A multi-proxy reconstruction of spatial and temporal variations in Asian summer temperatures over the last millennium," Climate Change, August 2015, Volume 131, Issue 4, pp 663-676. [PDF]

US Gun Violence: So Bad, All That's Left Is a Joke

Via the Washington Post. Economist link here.

At least someone is trying to keep track. It looks like a full-time job.

Mark Steyn's Expert Comes Up Short

Mark Steyn is back, looking for money to pay a lawyer. And pushing opinions instead of science.

Awhile back Steyn quoted a Jonathan Jones, Lecturer in Physics at Oxford University, about Mann's work. So I wrote to Dr. Jones asking for more details. Despite Jones' bluster, what I found wasn't very convincing.

Steyn quoted Jones:

The Hockey Stick is obviously wrong. Everybody knows it is obviously wrong. Climategate 2011 shows that even many of its most outspoken public defenders know it is obviously wrong. And yet it goes on being published and defended year after year.

Do I expect you to publicly denounce the Hockey Stick as obvious drivel? Well yes, that's what you should do. It is the job of scientists of integrity to expose pathological science... It is a litmus test of whether climate scientists are prepared to stand up against the bullying defenders of pathology in their midst.

As I showed here, the hockey stick is, in fact, an elementary result of basic scientific reasoning. So I was curious about the surety of Jones' conclusions, given that I couldn't recall any papers by him on the subject.

On August 11th, I wrote to Jones:

Why do [you] hold this view? Why is it "obviously wrong?" The hockey stick has been reproduced several times now, some using independent mathematical techniques

and I gave him links to Tingley and Huybers, Marcott et al, and PAGES 2k.

Jones replied:

The quotation Mr Steyn is using can be found in context at http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2011/12/2/tim-barnett-on-the-hockey-stick.html#comment16080991.

I’m afraid that I am somewhat confused by your question, as your suggested conclusion does not follow from your premises.  However I will do my best to answer.

First please note that my comments which you quote apply specifically to the Mann hockey sticks, MBH98 and MBH99.  The methods underlying these reconstructions have been comprehensively debunked, most famously by Steve McIntyre; if you are unfamiliar with the story then I suggest “The Hockey Stick Illusion” by Andrew Montford as an excellent primer.  Even if one accepts the underlying method of multiproxy reconstruction with effective selection of individual proxies by correlation (and like most people outside the small world of people doing such reconstructions I don't) the inclusion of "proxies" known not to be reliable temperature proxies (e.g. bristlecone pines and contaminated lake sediment series) and the use of inappropriate mathematical techniques (mostly famously decentred PCA in MBH98) renders the reconstructions useless.

These papers are methodologically bogus, and would remain methodologically bogus even if other papers were to reach similar conclusions.  In so far as such papers rely on the same bogus methods then their conclusions are equally invalid; conversely papers which reach similar conclusions by different means have nothing to say in support of the bogus methods of MBH.

You mention three particular reconstructions, none of which provide any support for the methods in the MBH papers.

The Marcott 2013 multi-proxy reconstruction is most famous for the dramatic uptick which occurs at the end of the reconstruction.  However it is now well known that this uptick is not robust, and is almost certainly an artefact.  It is notable that this uptick does not occur in Marcott’s thesis, and I understand that the authors no longer defend this portion of the reconstruction.  Once this uptick is removed there is nothing much to see unless you are advocating splicing temperature data onto proxy data.

The Pages2K 2013 reconstruction suffers from many of the same problems as the MBH reconstructions, with many datasets in common, including contaminated lake sediments and bristlecone tree ring series known to be unsuitable.  Famously some of the series are used "upside down": this is a common error in papers which use selection by correlation, and a clear indication of why the method shouldn't be used.  The paper adds little or nothing to the debate on MBH.

The Tingley and Huybers story is a long and complex one, and I am not sure quite which paper you are referring to, but many of their papers have used notorious “proxies” such as Mann’s PC1, the Yamal lone tree, and the most famous of the upside down contaminated lake sediment series, Tiljander's data as used by Mann.  The mathematical techniques used are not as different as you suggest, and any similarities in outcome largely reflect the inclusion of the same inappropriate proxies.  Once again it adds little or nothing to the debate.

I apologise that this reply is not particularly detailed, but I am currently very busy with the fallout from admissions and examining.  If you want to read more about the deficiencies of the reconstructions above I suggest you take a look at McIntyre’s site, climateaudit.org, although you may find that the posts there swiftly become rather technical unless you have a strong mathematical background.

This is clearly just a lot of hand-waving -- not sure if Steyn and his readers are familar with that scientific slang -- so I followed up to Jones:

Of course I know about McIntyre & McKitrick, but I haven't seen many experts take it very seriously, especially after Wahl and Amman (2007):

"Robustness of the Mann, Bradley, Hughes reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere surface temperatures: Examination of criticisms based on the nature and processing of proxy climate evidence, Eugene R. Wahl and Caspar M. Ammann, Climatic Change, November 2007, Volume 85, Issue 1-2, pp 33-69
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10584-006-9105-7

My point about the other reconstructions -- Marcott et al, PAGES 2k, and Tingley and Huybers -- is that, if independent analyses find essentially the same result at MBH, using different mathematical techniques, how can Mann et al be so badly wrong?

Jones' reply:

I'm afraid that I don't share your take on Wahl and Amman. In fact this paper largely establishes the correctness of the McIntyre and McKitrick criticisms. In particular I draw your attention to table 1S on page 63.

If you would like to read more about this it is explored in some detail in Montford's book.  Or, if you don't want to read the whole book, see "Caspar and the Jesus Paper" which you can find at http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2008/8/11/caspar-and-the-jesus-paper.html

Your final question was answered in detail in my previous reply, so I am confused as to why you are asking it again.

I found it odd that a scientist would cite a blog. The difference between peer reviewed papers published in major journals and blog posts is -- or should be -- very obvious. (Yes, that holds for this blog as much as any other. Blog posts aren't science.) They simply aren't in the same league, and it is very rare, if ever, you will ever see a scientist cite a blog post.

So I asked Jones about his own work on the hockey stick.

Your criticisms of all these papers -- Marcott et al, PAGES 2k, Tingley & Huybers -- strike me as shallow. They are hand-waving.

Where are the peer reviewed papers showing them wrong?

Have you published any papers showing them wrong?

I'm a science journalist. I'm well aware that blogs can, and do, say anything, with few, if any, consequences for being wrong. So I prefer to work from the peer reviewed literature.

I never heard back from Dr. Jones.

Maybe asking about his own publications was a touchy subject for him. But blog-level thinking isn't good enough for professional scientists -- I can get that anywhere. The point of being a professional is to offer professional critiques. Jones did not do that. I don't see much, if any, merit in his replies.

I'm sure Steyn's readers will be impressed by whatever he writes and whomever he quotes. And Judith Curry will repeat them without question.

But as Jonathon Jones showed, at least, his criticism quoted by Steyn wasn't scientific, and wasn't impressive or convincing.

Steyn's readers got all hot and bothered by this post, but completely ignored the posts that showed how the hockey stick is an unsurprising consequence of basic physics.

I suspect most of them don't understand basic physics. Science simply isn't their interest. Instead, they are thrilled by rhetorical fluorishes and debate scoring, whether it's been the Second Iraq War or writing that sates their Islamophobia.

But as Neil deGrasse Tyson said, “The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.”