Science Is About Evidence, Not Consensus -- Matt Ridley, WSJ
Link here.
And that is where the problem lies with climate change. A decade ago,
I was persuaded by two pieces of data to drop my skepticism and accept
that dangerous climate change was likely. The first, based on the Vostok
ice core, was a graph showing carbon dioxide and temperature varying in
lock step over the last half million years. The second, the famous
"hockey stick" graph, showed recent temperatures shooting up faster and
higher than at any time in the past millennium.
Within a few years, however, I
discovered that the first of these graphs told the opposite story from
what I had inferred. In the ice cores, it is now clear that temperature
drives changes in the level of carbon dioxide, not vice versa.
As for the "hockey stick" graph, it
was effectively critiqued by Steven McIntyre, a Canadian businessman
with a mathematical interest in climatology. He showed that the graph
depended heavily on unreliable data, especially samples of tree rings
from bristlecone pine trees, the growth patterns of which were often not
responding to temperature at all. It also depended on a type of
statistical filter that overweighted any samples showing sharp rises in
the 20th century.
I followed the story after that and
was not persuaded by those defending the various hockey-stick graphs.
They brought in a lake-sediment sample from Finland, which had to be
turned upside down to show a temperature spike in the 20th century; they
added a sample of larch trees from Siberia that turned out to be
affected by one tree that had grown faster in recent decades, perhaps
because its neighbor had died. Just last week, the Siberian larch data
were finally corrected by the University of East Anglia to remove all
signs of hockey-stick upticks, quietly conceding that Mr. McIntyre was
right about that, too.
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