He Blinded Me With “Science”
One of the unfortunate souls at the East Anglia Hadley CRU (motto: “No fact too inconvenient to bury”) tries to explain away the looming email scandal in today’s Times of London.
See, we’re all morons in thinking that Phil Jones’ (head of the Hadley CRU) order to “hide the decline” means something nefarious or underhanded. According to Professor Andrew Watson, Phil Jones didn’t mean anything of the sort in his email. You see, what Dr. Jones (“You no call him Indy, you call him Dr. Jones!”) meant was, well, see for yourself.
But it doesn’t mean that at all. Jones is talking about a line on a graph for the cover of a World Meteorological Organisation report, published in 2000, which shows the results of different attempts to reconstruct temperature over the past 1,000 years. The line represents one particular attempt, using tree-ring data for temperature. The method agrees with actual measurements before about 1960, but diverges from them after that — for reasons only partly understood, discussed in the literature.
The tree-ring measure declines, but the actual temperatures after 1960 go up. They draw the line to follow the tree-ring reconstruction up to 1960 and the measured temperature after that. The notes explain that the data are “reconstructions, along with historical and long instrumental records”. Not very clear perhaps, but not much of a “trick”.
Oh. That clears it up. The tree ring data agreed with recorded temperatures through about 1960. After that point, the ring data diverged sharply from the recorded temperature data, so you chucked the data out. To be more clear, the inconvenient truth didn’t match your hypothesis, so you ignored it.
‘Puter’s not certain what’s going on at East Anglia, but he knows two things: (1) it ain’t science and (2) whoever OKed Watson’s horrible “explanation” above should be fired.
Always right, unless he isn’t, the infallible Ghettoputer F. X. Gormogons claims to be an in-law of the Volgi, although no one really believes this.
’Puter carefully follows economic and financial trends, legal affairs, and serves as the Gormogons’ financial and legal advisor. He successfully defended us against a lawsuit from a liquor distributor worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid deliveries of bootleg shandies.
The Geep has an IQ so high it is untestable and attempts to measure it have resulted in dangerously unstable results as well as injuries to researchers. Coincidentally, he publishes intelligence tests as a side gig.
His sarcasm is so highly developed it borders on the psychic, and he is often able to insult a person even before meeting them. ’Puter enjoys hunting small game with 000 slugs and punt guns, correcting homilies in real time at Mass, and undermining unions. ’Puter likes to wear a hockey mask and carry an axe into public campgrounds, where he bursts into people’s tents and screams. As you might expect, he has been shot several times but remains completely undeterred.
He assures us that his obsessive fawning over news stories involving women teachers sleeping with young students is not Freudian in any way, although he admits something similar once happened to him. Uniquely, ’Puter is unable to speak, read, or write Russian, but he is able to sing it fluently.
Geep joined the order in the mid-1980s. He arrived at the Castle door with dozens of steamer trunks and an inarticulate hissing creature of astonishingly low intelligence he calls “Sleestak.” Ghettoputer appears to make his wishes known to Sleestak, although no one is sure whether this is the result of complex sign language, expert body posture reading, or simply beating Sleestak with a rubber mallet.
‘Puter suggests the Czar suck it.