Back to Kola

Pierre Gosselin, on his blog http://pgosselin.wordpress.com August 7th … discusses a series of tree ring proxies near the Arctic shores of Euroasia which includes the Kola peninusular proxy mentioned on a post last week. Only one of these proxies actually showed any evidence of a hockey stick – but it’s inclusion in the series gave shape to the multiplication of proxies (some four or five). The odd one out was the Yamal proxy which was the focus of a huge furore in 2009 (see the Climate Audit archive) – even the Russian authorities claimed it was taking the Michael. However, as will their wont, the media (print and visual) grossly misrepresented the paper quoting these proxies. They quoted one small sentence within the whole paper – namely that temperatures rose in the 1990s. They of course assumed this was because of global warming and this is what their headlines screamed. However, if they had bothered to actually read the paper, what the authors were saying had nothing whatsoever to do with AGW. The paper said the the rises in temperature that they had found in the near Arctic proxies, between 1600 and the present day, were due to solar activity as they had correlated sun spot activity with the rise and falls shown in that 400 year period. It was unequivocal. So why did the media misrepresent it in such a way? It is not just distortion, the normal practise used by AGW advocacy, or cherry picking – it is a blatant lie.