Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Explaining the Hockey Stick simply

As regular readers to this blog will know, the Climate Audit website has been instrumental in deconstructing and exposing the scientific fraud known as the Hockey Stick. Much of the discussion can be nuanced and technical. Some understand, some grasp the gist of it but I suspect many check out the discussions and leave, intimidated and unconvinced -- the great strength of Gore's message was to simplify things for the non-scientist.

Now a Bishop Hill has posted an easily understood explanation of the hockey stick story and his version of events is enabling many non-experts to appreciate have devastating the work done over at Climate Audit has been to the claims of scientific veracity in support of AGW.

In 2007 Climate Audit was recognized with an award as the best science blog. In 2008, it has continued to provide high quality discussion, exposure of errors and a perspective on excellence in scientific practice.

Update:

The Hockey Stick controversy also can be seen as systemic of a wider problem within the climate debate and, by extension, the whole area of environmentalism: an over-reliance upon peer review as a metric.

Which, in turn, reflects an even wider trend: reliance upon authority as indicated by credentials of their education, rather than the substance of their intellect.

There also is this very useful posting on Prometheus that puts the debate into the context of scince and policy.