Al Gore in Deadly Peril of Nasty Splinters from Riding His Magic Hockey Stick

Anyone who watched "An Inconvenient Truth" may recall Al Gore's death-defying stunt on the hydraulic lift, where he rides up into the sky tracing the curve of Michael Mann's famous hockey stick. This same hockey stick had been proven wrong years before Gore's film was released, but Al Gore has never allowed inconvenient truths to stand in the way of a good stunt.

Here is a fascinating addendum to the "magic hockey stick" tale: Steve McIntyre, one of the Canadians who demolished Michael Mann's CAGW hockey stick, has gone into the field to collect tree ring samples from some of the same bristlecone pines that Mann and others based their hockey stick research on--the wood that Michael Mann used to build his hockey stick. Michael Mann and his friends claim that updating their proxies of bristlecones to compare with 1980--2006 temperatures would be too expensive--prohibitively expensive! But is that the truth?

If you care about sorting out the huge mess that Michael Mann and his unscrupulous climate modeling friends have made, that Al Gore has unscrupulously ridden to sainthood, check out McIntyre's posting describing his "massively expensive" field trip.

To make a long story short, last summer, when my wife and I visited my sister in Colorado Springs and I thought that it would be rather fun to test the Starbucks Hypothesis and I gave a bit of a teaser report in late July, promising some further reports in a few weeks, but I got distracted by the Hansen stuff. At the time, I mentioned that, together with CA reader Pete Holzmann and his wife Leslie, we visited some bristlecones in the Mt Almagre area west of Colorado Springs.

But I have a little secret which I’ll share with you as long as you promise not to tell anyone: our objective was to locate the precise site sampled by Graybill. Not just that. Prior to the trip, I obtained a permit from the U.S. Forest Service to take dendrochronological samples from bristlecones on Mount Almagre and we did more than look at pretty views; we obtained up-to-date bristlecone samples. I only went up Almagre on the first day. Our permit lasted a month and Pete and Leslie spent two more days on Almagre, finally locating and sampling tagged Graybill trees on the third day.

Altogether (and primarily through the efforts of Pete and Leslie), our project collected 64 cores from 45 different trees at 5 different locations on Mount Almagre. 17 Graybill trees were identified, of which 9 were resampled.

Climate Audit

Please read the entire posting above, if you are at all interested in how climate science should be done, rather than the sleazy, high priced way it is actually done. Michael Mann, James Hansen, and others have a great deal to answer for. No doubt they wish that all the skeptics, heretics, and court jesters would simply go away. That is not going to happen.

For those of you who think global warming alarmism is the best way to clean up the environment--regardless of truth or falsity of its claims, regardless of the soundness of its methodology--shame on you. Bad science helps no one. The backlash will be far worse than simply trying to find the truth in the first place.