Soon and Baliunas

As Willie Soon and Sally Baliunas have again come in for some high octane criticism from the doomsaying community as alarmist quarters scratch around waving their arms in all directions looking for conservatives under their beds – and for some reason to explain why their once unassailable position is repeatedly being challenged. The accusation against Soon and Baliunas is that they were partly funded by Big Oil – via their university. I thought it was about time I read up on what exactly caused the AGW people to go into an apoplectic fit after a certain paper was published in Climate Science in 2003. It seems to have upset a variety of NGOs and radical AGW doomsayers (see http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/29/the-log-in-the-eye-of-greenpeace/). The title, 'Proxy climatic and environmental changes of the past 1000 years' begins, much to my liking, by quoting HH Lamb (1965) on the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. It seems that Jones et al (1998) did not deny cooling had occurred in the LIA but said there was little evidence of medieval warming. The hockey stick which came out in 1998 was clearly part of a concerted attack on the MWP by the Team, the clique of climate scientists at the centre of a controversy over their use of data and the caveats added in order to create a warming trend in the manner they desire. Briffa (2000) in a tree ring composite did show anomalous warm weather coinciding with Lamb's findings (but in northern latitudes far from where the action was). Hence, it is fairly easy to see through their manoevres – and why they did not like another climate scientist, admittedly not one of the Team, from saying different to what the consensus claimed (and the consensus was of course created by them). The hockey stick was developed to make the MWP and LIA go away – too many sceptics were using Vikings in Greenland as a means to scoff at the consensus. The fact that it was so openly wide of the target, using one specific set of tree rings in a snow bound mountainous locale, to reverse the warming trend (and flattening the hockey stick handle) was enough to set alarm bells ringing among any independent thinker. What is so amazing is that so many people swallowed the bait. A similar trick is being tried out right now, using a delta situation in North Carolina as a proxy for global sea levels. If anyone believes a word of that they must be wholly biased in favour of the AGW belief system – and no doubt the green disciples will parrot the findings ad nauseum as if it was holy writ.