“Competent scientists do not doubt the hockey stick because it does not have enough publications… They doubt it because it has been shown to be based on incorrect math and inadequate data.”
DR DONALD RAPP, PHD Former research professor at the University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering and former Professor of Physics and Environmental Engineering at the University of Texas. Former Senior Research Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and Senior Staff Scientist at the Lockheed Palo Alto Research Laboratory. Contributor to The Encyclopedia of Snow, Ice And Glaciers. Mann’s cheerleaders among the climate activists continue to
insist that his hockey stick has been replicated in dozens of “independent” studies. On page 136 of his book Assessing Climate Change: Temperature, Solar Radiation and Heat Balance, Dr Rapp considered their claims216:
To support their position, they mention: “nearly a dozen model-based and proxy-based reconstructions… by different groups all suggest that late 20th century warmth is anomalous in a long-term (multi-century to millennial) context”. However, the other publications typically utilized PCA with the mean chosen only for the calibration period, leading inevitably to some form of hockey stick if some of the proxies had an upward trend in the 20th century. It is not the number of papers that counts here. In other words, if you use Mann’s methods, it leads to Mann’s madness. Aside from any statistical bias, they’re mostly reprocessing the same very limited proxy data. As Professor North’s report for the National Academy of Sciences concluded217:
Because the data are so limited, different large-scale reconstructions are sometimes based on the same datasets and thus cannot be considered as completely independent. Dr Rapp continued: As Bob Foster emphasized, truth in science is not a matter of voting. The issue here is whether the reconstruction is correct, independently of whether the reconstruction was done in two, 20 or 200 papers… Competent scientists do not doubt the hockey stick because it does not have enough publications to back it up. They doubt it because it has been shown to be based on incorrect math and inadequate data.
The above-mentioned Bob Foster is the late Australian geologist, who in a paper for Energy & Environment put it very bluntly218: This infamous ‘hockey-stick’ graph is anathema to palaeo-climatologists like me.
Steyn, Mark (2015-09-01). "A Disgrace to the Profession" (Kindle Locations 2626-2651). Stockade Books. Kindle Edition.