The Hockey Stick, Broken Again

John Hinderaker at Powerline discussed the latest attempt to resurrect Michael Mann's "hockey stick" with what appears to be fraulent data.

He asks:

One more thought: the publicly available evidence suggests that alarmist scientists have repeatedly committed fraud in research conducted and papers published that were paid for by United States taxpayers. It seems inconceivable that felonies have not been committed in connection with those frauds. Are there not criminal statutes that prohibit the publication of fraudulent data in taxpayer-supported research? Eric Holder, obviously, will not pursue any such line of inquiry, but there must be state law enforcement authorities who could look into this question. Fraudsters like Bernie Madoff, for instance, have tried to hide the decline in the value of funds invested with them. But that is nothing compared to the fraud that the global warming alarmists have perpetrated.

Actually John, one tried. Virginia’s Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli tried to open an investigation into the research conducted by Michael Mann while he was at the University of Virginia. His efforts were roundly denounced by the media, he was pilloried as an anti-science zealot opposed to academic freedom, stonewalled by the UVA administration and his investigation was stopped by the state Supreme Court. I suspect than anyone who attempts to do what you suggest would get the same treatment.

 

Here's another interesting fact from John's article. 

 

We are reminded of the NOAA/NCDC weather data on the U.S., which are routinely relied on by alarmists who claim that the last few years have been the warmest ever. In order to justify this assertion, NOAA has gone back and revised the data for prior decades. Instead of reporting temperatures for prior decades, like the 1930s, as it did at the time and for many years thereafter, NOAA has now changed those temperatures downward to support the politically-motivated claim that the last years of the 20th century were the warmest ever. If you look at NOAA data today for the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, etc., you will have no idea that the numbers NOAA now reports are not the ones that were measured by thermometers at the time.