Lying by omission. Hiding the decline.

Newspapers will rarely tell an outright lie. The primary way they lie is to tell selective “truth.” It’s what “editors” do and, at the Virginian Pilot, as it is in most papers, it’s their primary job.

Why do I focus on the Virginian Pilot? It’s the local paper, a major source of intellectual and physical pollution in this area, and the conveyor belt of both hagiography and of character assassination.

The Virginian Pilot’s motto is "True to the Democratic Party in victory or defeat." You can look it up.

They don’t like Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, and they have an unshakable faith in Global Warming™.

So today they printed a “twofer.” It appears that one of the “hide the decline” global warming conspirators is Michael Mann, who worked at the University of Virginia in the early 2000s. Mann was the creator if the infamous “hockey stick” graph which was designed to show that the world’s temperature was fairly stable until fairly recently and then suddenly rose. The “hockey stick” has been debunked and no one outside of the Virginina Pilot editorial offices pays it any attention once it was shown that a series of random numbers, when input into the mathematical formula that Mann created, would show the same hockey stick graph. It was also shown that Mann manipulated the data to eliminate the medieval warm period and earlier cold periods in earth’s history.

From the MIT Technology Review:

But now a shock: Canadian scientists Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick have uncovered a fundamental mathematical flaw in the computer program that was used to produce the hockey stick. In his original publications of the stick, Mann purported to use a standard method known as principal component analysis, or PCA, to find the dominant features in a set of more than 70 different climate records.

But it wasnt so. McIntyre and McKitrick obtained part of the program that Mann used, and they found serious problems. Not only does the program not do conventional PCA, but it handles data normalization in a way that can only be described as mistaken.

Now comes the real shocker. This improper normalization procedure tends to emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppress all data that do not. To demonstrate this effect, McIntyre and McKitrick created some meaningless test data that had, on average, no trends. This method of generating random data is called Monte Carlo analysis, after the famous casino, and it is widely used in statistical analysis to test procedures. When McIntyre and McKitrick fed these random data into the Mann procedure, out popped a hockey stick shape!

That discovery hit me like a bombshell, and I suspect it is having the same effect on many others. Suddenly the hockey stick, the poster-child of the global warming community, turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics.

Here's how to make your own "hockey stick."

Song parodies were written about Mann and his efforts to “Hide the Decline.” Cuccinelli has, according to Virginian Pilot writer Julian Walker, served papers on UVA to see if Mann violated state fraud laws. The article is written as if Cuccinelli were persecuting a scientist whose work has not been called into question by scientists throughout the world; a co-conspirator who was part of a cabal to deny scientist who disagree with the conspiracy access to peer reviewed scientific journals. In fact the article has not a hint that the infamous “hockey stick” graph is in any way controversial.

Pilot “reporter” Walker refers to “Climategate” but fails to identify any of the issues that have cause many reputable climate scientists to demand a thorough review of all the data that was used by Mann and other to stifle opposing theories and create a worldwide hysteria with predictions of apocalyptic doom if man did not immediately stop using fossil fuels.

Here’s the reference to the Mann’s major contribution to the hysteria:

Mann, who now is at Pennsylvania State University, also is known for his "hockey stick graph," which tracked increases in global temperatures.

And Walker adds a self-serving denial from Mann:

He said his conclusions have "been vetted and even strengthened by independent work," adding that the "various 'Climategate' allegations against me have been found without any basis at all."

Why is it that I knew about this and was able to find, at a moment's notice, facts that totally debunk what Walker wrote?  Perhaps it's because Walker is an uneducated flunky of the kind usually found in newspaper offices.  Perhaps the editors write the story for him.  There may be other reasons.

Anyone who depends on the Virginian Pilot for an informed opinion on anything is sadly misinformed and deluded. The jury is out whether the people writing this sort of stuff are liars or fools.