Joanne Nova:
In May it was all over the newspapers, in June it was shown to be badly flawed. By October, it quietly gets withdrawn. The apology and press release are coming soon…right?
Thanks to help from the Australian Research Council it only took 300,000 dollars and three years to produce a paper that lasted all of three weeks. But it scored the scary headlines! It was “confirmation”, it was “unprecedented warming”, and it was a scientific certainty that was based on “27 natural climate records” and “over the last 1000 years”. What could possibly go wrong? They had 2 whole proxies that went right back a thousand years, and they’d used computers (!) to rehash the data 3000 ways! Frankly, I’m surprised it lasted three weeks. Let’s remember that if one single journalist had simply asked “how much colder was it in 1200AD?” Gergis, Karoly and the rest would have had to say “0.09 of a degree”. No one asked. But Gergis et al, had a proxy in Tasmania, and another in New Zealand, and they were “confident” they could calculate the whole grand continental collective temperature to nine one hundredths of a degree? Seriously.
As Mike E then pointed out in comments, the error margin was larger than the result:
As a result of poor general science education in high school and in college for non-science majors, most of the world’s population is ignorant of scientific principles. There are several people who post here that I believe are part of that category. If there were more people knowledgeable about scientific processes, when the media publishes “astounding” new discoveries based on a paper that has not been peer reviewed and data that has been computer generated, knowledgeable people will smile and look for the process used to discover these findings. This paper was viewed by scientists from the beginning as an exercise, not a discovery. The discovery of global warming was found to be half of the degree of error. So, the paper was relegated to the trash within 3 weeks, but not untill after ignorant prople were made to believe that another source has proved global warming!