“Hockey Stick” DeBunkers Iced

University of Victoria climate scientist Andrew Weaver was on the CBC radio show “The Current” yesterday to discuss the inaccurate predictions in the most recent IPCC report about the rate of melting of the Himalayan glaciers.  Dr. Weaver has been involved in authoring 3 earlier IPCC reports.  He noted that none of the scientists involved in writing the report get any financial compensation for their time and effort.  This flies in the face of the wild accusations from the contrarians’ camp that scientists are profiting hand over fist from “advocating” global warming.  How many oil and gas executives can assert that they don’t profit – and pretty richly – from their activities?

To hear the discussion, click here , and go to “Listen to Part I”.

The contrarians and deniers have got a lot of mileage out of the errors in the IPCC report – which, Dr.Weaver points out in the discussion mentioned above, is one page of a 4,000 page report – yet some interesting things are starting to come out about the anti-climate science bias in the U.S.Congress and Senate.  Deniers particularly like to point out – over and over, as you will see if you check out the “comments” section on any on-line article on climate change  – that Dr. Micheal Mann’s “hockey stick” analysis of warming trends in the Northern Hemisphere over the last millenia is inaccurate (for a quick summary of the “hockey stick” controversy, click here). Canadians Steve McIntyre, a retired mining executive with ties to oil and gas companies, and Ross McKitrick , an economist linked to the right-wing Fraser Institute, have been particularly vocal and active in “debunking” Mann’s analysis.  As DeSmogBlog points out (“M & M” refers to McKitrick and McIntyre):

It becomes increasingly clear that while scientists have been building an undeniable case for the science of global warming, M&M have been working hand-in-hand with people like the denier PR guru Tom Harris to deny it all, anyway.

One of the things that has put wind in M & M’s hockey-stick-debunking sails is an “independent” investigation by the Republican-dominated U.S. Energy and Commerce Congressional Committee. The panel they assembled produced the Ad Hoc Committee Report on the ‘Hockey Stick’ Global Climate Reconstruction” (or “Wegman Report”). However,Canadian blogger Deep Climate has uncovered information that puts the independence and credibility of the Wegman panel, and the entire Energy and Commerce Committee, in doubt.  He sums it up this way:

In short, the Energy and Commerce Committee refused the offer of a proper scientific review from the National Academy of Sciences in favour of an investigative process that was ad hoc, biased and unscientific. And the report resulting from that process is tainted with highly questionable scholarship.

Click here to read Deep Climate’s full report.