Understanding the Decline

Marc Sheppard has an excellent article explaining in detail exactly what was at stake in the climategate emails at American Thinker entitled Understanding Climategate's Hidden Decline. A quote to give you a flavor of the report:

Remember, all of the temperatures prior to 1850 were estimated by computer algorithms and no actual readings exist to prove or disprove those figures. So a relatively short window of opportunity exists to test the programs against observations. Had 20th century measured temperatures continued to align with those recreated as smoothly after 1960 as they did previously, then the programmers could declare their code and hence their millennial temperatures sound. But the divergence, if allowed to stand, instead revealed serious design flaws in the proxy reconstructions. Which suggests that just as the decline was dealt with through trickery, so was the MWP.


And it seems that each time the trick was used, its involvement would be more deeply concealed.

So, this report is pretty technically oriented, telling us exactly what was done to what data to make the data say what was presupposed to have actually happened. In this case, the CRU "scientists" were trying to hide the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), and the Little Ice Age (LIA). But the more pressing problem was the MWP, because if this period in history was allowed to stand, the recent warming would be seen to be within normal limits. And it's hard to stampede the world into giving alarmists trillions of dollars for something that happens normally after all. That's what all this goofball wormening, cap and tax business is all about: transferring trillions of hard earned dollars from their rightful owners to cheats and liars, and kleptocrats at Goldman Sachs and other similar firms, and greedy third world kleptocrats.