From AP via Yahoo! News:

Hunters Off the Hook for Bison Declines

Sat Nov 27, 5:05 AM ET

By DIEDTRA HENDERSON, AP Science Writer

WASHINGTON – Big game hunters may be off the hook in the latest twist of a prehistoric whodunit that tries to explain why bison populations sharply crashed thousands of years ago.

Proponents of the overkill theory blamed the first Americans to cross an ice-free corridor — connecting what’s now Alaska and Siberia — for hunting bison within a whisper of disappearance. Those super hunters are also faulted for pushing massive mammals, like woolly mammoths, short-faced bears and North American lions into extinction.

A team of 27 scientists used ancient DNA to track the hulking herbivore’s boom-and-bust population patterns, adding to growing evidence that climate change was to blame….

So evil, greedy humans are off the hook for the demise of those huggable bison, mammoths, bears, and lions. (It’s not “fair game” to feed and clothe a human, you know.) But that’s okay, because climate change was to blame. Oh, but that was thousands of years ago, before evil, greedy humans messed up the climate. What’s going on here?

What’s going on here is that the forces of the universe have immensely more influence on the fate of Earth and its creatures than does human endeavor. Global-warming worriers, for example, don’t like to hear that the Sun’s energy output is at an 8,000 year peak and that large-scale climate changes in the past 1,000 years coincide with sunspot activity.

Humans are to blame for everything. Especially if they’re Judeo-Christian, white, male, Western humans.

I wrote recently about a report by Richard Muller that took a chunk out of the hockey-stick theory of global warming:

This [hockey-stick] plot purports to show that we are now experiencing the warmest climate in a millennium, and that the earth, after remaining cool for centuries during the medieval era, suddenly began to heat up about 100 years ago — just at the time that the burning of coal and oil led to an increase in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide….

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….

This improper normalization procedure [used in the computer program] tends to emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppress all data that do not….

Muller was, in the end, rather restrained in his criticism of the authors of the hockey-stick theory, namely, University of Massachusetts geoscientist Michael Mann and colleagues. Not so restrained is a research paper published recently in the journal Science by Professor Hans von Storch and colleagues at the Institute of Coastal Research at Geesthacht, Germany. Scientists Willie Soon and David R. Legates, writing at Tech Central Station, report:

In short, the new paper…confirms what several other climate researchers have long stipulated. The hockey stick curve — which is a mathematical construct, as opposed to actual temperature information recorded at individual locations — is problematic because it yields air temperature changes on timescales of a few decades to a century that are simply too muted to fit the phenomena of the Medieval Warm Period (ca. 800-1300) and Little Ice Age (ca. 1300-1900), which are well recorded in historical documents and recognized in indirect climate data from growths of tree-rings and corals or isotopic content in ice cores and stalagmites collected around the world.

This is traditional science, with results from one group tested by others. What makes this case important, though, was explained by Von Storch in Der Spiegel:

“The Mann graph [i.e., the hockey stick of IPCC TAR] indicates that it was never warmer during the last ten thousand years than it is today. … In recent years it [the hockey stick] has been elevated to the status of truth by the UN appointed science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This handicapped all that research which strives to make a realistic distinction between human influences and climate and natural variability.”

According to Soon and Legates, Von Storch calls the hockey stick “junk” or “rubbish.”

…by killing some trees? That might be the implication of this post by FuturePundit:

A number of factors have combined to increase volatile organic compounds (VOCs) air pollution from trees faster than VOC pollution from humans has declined….

The three major contributing factors are the natural reversion of abandoned farm land to forested land, the invasion of sweetgum trees, and the growth of large forests of pine trees for lumber….

What to do? Technology can provide the answer: plants used for biomass and trees grown for lumber need to be genetically reengineered to be less polluting. If better engineering designs can make cars less polluting then why can’t better engineering clean up trees and other natural polluters as well?…

There’s lots more, with links to the scientific sources.

REVISED

Richard Muller, writes at MIT’s Technology Review about developments in the pseudo-science of climatology:

Global Warming Bombshell
A prime piece of evidence linking human activity to climate change turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics.

…In the scientific and political debate over global warming, the latest wrong piece may be the “hockey stick,” the famous plot (shown below), published by University of Massachusetts geoscientist Michael Mann and colleagues. This plot purports to show that we are now experiencing the warmest climate in a millennium, and that the earth, after remaining cool for centuries during the medieval era, suddenly began to heat up about 100 years ago–just at the time that the burning of coal and oil led to an increase in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide….

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….

This improper normalization procedure [used in the computer program] tends to emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppress all data that do not….

Some people may complain that McIntyre and McKitrick did not publish their results in a refereed journal. That is true–but not for lack of trying. Moreover, the paper was refereed–and even better, the referee reports are there for us to read. McIntyre and McKitrick’s only failure was in not convincing Nature that the paper was important enough to publish….

Then there’s the down-to-earth threat posed by “environmental tobacco smoke” (ETS). Mick Hume at London’s Times Online has this:

You’ve got to stub out that irritating fact

…Yes, of course it is true that smoking tobacco can cause cancer and terrible illnesses. But the scientific case against passive smoking is far cloudier. Just about the only thing we know for certain is that inhaling other people’s second-hand smoke can cause some irritation and the odd argument.

If you are wondering why the well-founded doubts about passive smoking are rarely aired, look at the extraordinary episode reported in The Times this week. The Royal Institution in London, a famous centre for scientific research and debate, has hired out its rooms to the Tobacco Manufacturers’ Association, for a one-day event entitled “The Science of Environmental Tobacco Smoke”. As a result, the Royal Institution finds itself under heavy fire from anti-smoking crusaders and senior medics for whom any debate about the effects of passive smoking must be stubbed out before it starts….

Not content with demanding a ban on smoking in public, it seems that the anti-ETS lobby wants a ban on talking about smoking in public too. Stub that fact out and extinguish that opinion immediately, my lad! This affair is a symptom of the spreading epidemic of tobacco intolerance — not a medical condition, but a new moral orthodoxy. It may soon be easier to smoke a joint than a cigarette on the street….

Worst of all, I cannot stand the way that passive smoking has been turned into a metaphor for that mantra of modern miserabilism: “Other people are ruining my life!” This was the spirit of morbid self-pity that Tessa Jowell, the Culture Secretary, tried to tap into, arguing that restrictions on public smoking would ensure that “nobody will be bullied into a lifestyle they do not wish to join.”…

The unhealthy assumption behind all this is that smokers are helpless addicts in need of drugs and psychotherapy to save them from themselves, while the rest of us are hapless victims in need of state protection from other people’s putrid lifestyles. Never mind about passive smoking, how about launching a war against the cancer of passive living?

The more I learn about the misuses of science by those with a leftish political agenda, the more admiration I have for Bush’s refusal to be cowed by those who claim that he’s anti-scientific. I think he’s got a good B.S. detector, and he’s not afraid to use it.

Then there’s this, from William Kininmonth at Tech Central Station:

The Chimera of Carbon Dioxide Increase

It never fails to amaze how the media gullibly makes every piece of greenhouse gas trivia into a feeding frenzy about global warming. A claim currently making the international media rounds is that for the past two years carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have been increasing at an annual rate greater than two parts per million (ppm). This is to be compared with previous rates of about 1.5 ppm, and described as a cause of concern….

The sad fact of the matter is that…[s]ome relevant numbers have been collated and interpreted for the media as something alarming. The truth is much more prosaic….

[T]here are six well-distributed sites extending from the Arctic to the Antarctic with long and nearly complete records of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration…..

[T]he increase in concentration from 2001 to 2002 exceeded 2.0 ppm at only two of the six stations. The average of all stations exceeded 2.0 ppm but only because of an unexplained large increase at the South Pole site, far from centres of industrialisation.

It is widely acknowledged, and borne out by data, that the year-to-year increase in concentration is greater during El Niño events, when tropical Pacific Ocean surface temperatures are unusually warm. This factor explains the larger than normal increase from 2002 to 2003. However, it should also be recognised that the annual increase to 2003 was significantly less than during the major El Niño event of 1997-98, a point lost in the media hype….

For more about pseudo-science and the misuses of science, read this and follow the links.

FuturePundit (again) points to an article at NewScientist.com:

Cosmic ray link to global warming boosted

10:27 17 August 04

The controversial idea that cosmic rays could be driving global warming by influencing cloud cover will get a boost at a conference next week. But some scientists dismiss the idea and are worried that it will detract from efforts to curb rising levels of greenhouse gases.

At issue is whether cosmic rays, the high-energy particles spat out by exploding stars elsewhere in the galaxy, can affect the temperature on Earth. The suggestion is that cosmic rays crashing into the atmosphere ionise the molecules they collide with, triggering cloud formation.

If the flux of cosmic rays drops, fewer clouds will form and the planet will warm up. No one yet understands the mechanism, which was first described in the late 1990s. But what makes it controversial is that climate models used to predict the consequences of rising levels of greenhouse gases do not allow for the effect, and may be inaccurate [emphasis added].

Some proponents of the theory argue that changes in the number of cosmic rays reaching Earth can explain past climate change as well as global warming today [emphasis added]. Nir Shaviv of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel, and Jan Veizer of the University of Ottawa in Ontario, Canada, claimed in 2003 that changes in cosmic-ray flux are the major reason for temperature changes over the past 500 million years [emphasis added]….

You want more examples of research that suggests global warming may have little to do with human activity? FuturePundit has them.

From “More sorry than safe” (Spiked-online.com), by Brendan O’Neill:

Professor Sir Colin Berry is not a big fan of the ‘precautionary principle’, the idea that scientists, medical researchers, technologists and just about everybody else these days should err on the side of caution lest they cause harm to human health or the environment. Berry is one of Britain’s leading scientists; he has held some of the most prestigious posts in British medicine, including head of the Department of Morbid Anatomy at the Royal London Hospital from 1976 to 2002. Now he watches as his ‘good profession’ threatens to be undermined by what he says is an ‘unscientific demand’ to put precaution first.

One of the most common definitions of the precautionary principle is that put forward by Soren Holm and John Harris in their critique of it in Nature magazine in 1999: ‘When an activity raises threats of serious or irreversible harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures that prevent the possibility of harm shall be taken even if the causal link between the activity and the possible harm has not been proven or the causal link is weak and the harm is unlikely to occur.’ For Berry, this is one of the biggest problems with the precautionary principle – the notion that we could ever fully predict the outcome of an experiment or piece of research before it is complete, and that if we can’t then we should play it safe. ‘It doesn’t allow for the unknown’, he says. ‘Or for taking a risk in order to do something potentially useful.’

Berry says it is in the nature of scientific and medical research that you start out before you have all the information to hand – indeed, almost all of the great scientific advancements of the past 200 years have been a process of ‘learning as we went along’. ‘Consider blood transfusions’, he says. ‘When we started doing them, we knew about some blood groups but there were others we didn’t know about. We only came to know of these other blood groups when patients started to have transfusion reactions. There was an unknown, but we were able to learn from it and refine the process.’

He wonders whether, if the precautionary principle had been about for the past 200 years rather than the past 20, breakthroughs such as blood transfusions would ever have been made. ‘I certainly don’t think we would have radiotherapy or the various applications of x-rays if Marie Curie had been under pressure to comply with the precautionary principle’, he says. In the early twentieth century, Polish-born physicist and chemist Curie devoted her working life to the study of radium, paving the way for nuclear physics and the treatment of cancer. It cost her her life – she died from leukaemia in 1934, almost blind, her fingers burned by radium. ‘Curie’s work caused her “irreversible harm”‘, says Berry. ‘The precautionary principle would not have permitted her to take such risks, and the world would have been a worse place for it.’…

Berry points to the restrictions imposed on DDT – the pesticide used to get rid of malaria-carrying mosquitoes – as another example of how the ‘application of precaution’ can cause death and disease. In some third world countries where malaria had been all but eradicated over the past 20 years, there have been epidemics of the disease since DDT was restricted. Currently malaria is on the rise in all the tropical regions of the planet; in 2000, it killed more than one million and made 300million seriously ill. ‘Campaigners claimed that DDT was bad for the environment; they said that it caused harm to American birds of prey. I’m sorry, but why should people in the third world at risk from malaria care about American birds of prey? Decisions about these things should be based on local needs and on empirical evidence.’

The same should go for genetically modified crops, reckons Berry. ‘If we want to miss out on this new technology, that’s our lookout. But we should not be in a position to restrict the use of GM in the third world. As an African said recently, “You go ahead and ban GM crops, but can we eat first?”‘ Berry says the restriction of the use of potentially life-saving technologies in the third world is ‘a kind of environmental imperialism – if something is perceived to be bad for some American bird, then no one else in the world can use it either. That is absurd; we really cannot go on like this.’…

‘Almost no new technology can be assured to be risk-free. If your position is that you don’t accept any incremental risk, you are in effect saying no to all new technologies, whether it be a better anaesthetic, a better car, a better aeroplane, a safer environment for children – in fact anything worth having.’

I’ve said a lot here, here, here, here, here, here, and here about economics, the social sciences in general, and a certain pseudo-science (climatology).

What I’ve really been talking about is a phenomenon known as “physics envy” — a term used by Stephen Jay Gould. He describes it thus in The Mismeasure of Man (1981):

the allure of numbers, the faith that rigorous measurement could guarantee irrefutable precision, and might mark the transition between subjective speculation and a true science as worthy as Newtonian physics.

But there’s more to science than mere numbers (quoting, again, from The Mismeasure of Man):

Science is rooted in creative interpretation. Numbers suggest, constrain, and refute; they do not, by themselves, specify the content of scientific theories. Theories are built upon the interpretation of numbers, and interpreters are often trapped by their own rhetoric. They believe in their own objectivity, and fail to discern the prejudice that leads them to one interpretation among many consistent with their numbers.

Enough said? Probably not.

Climatology isn’t social science but it’s in the same league when it comes to quantification. (See previous post.) There’s a lot of uncertainty about the events that determine climactic conditions, about the relative importance of those events, and about the appropriate numerical values to assign to them. In spite of protests to the contrary, its likely that climatologists haven’t adequately accounted for sunspot activity, which is reaching a 1,000-year high, the effects of activity in Earth’s molten core, and the apparent reversal of Earth’s magnetic field.