Auditing Climate Audit

Steve McIntyre is a former mining executive who has, over the past several years, taken up the role of prominent AGW denier and amateur scientist. His main claim to fame is that he, along with another amateur scientist, Ross MicKitrick, managed to discover some trivial methodological short-comings in Michael Mann's work on the "hockey stick graph" (minor, in that, once these short-comings were corrected, Mann's number crunching still produced nothing but hockey sticks).

One of Mr. McIntyre's projects is the Climate Audit blog, where he and other climate science deniers, some with rudimentary math skills, gather together and keep one anothers spirits up by engaging in pointless silliness like running around the country taking pictures of the weather stations. Think of Churchill's WWII aluminum appeals, which were essentially pointless but raised civilian morale. However, in this case, digital cameras are involved. And it is all in an attempt to prove (as far as I can gather from the website) that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by an international group of communist climatologists (or, as I like to call them, Commietologists).

So I was over at Climate Audit yesterday, reading one of Mr. McIntyre's open threads, and I came across the following comment by one Carl Smith:

For those interested in solar cycles material, I have written a post called “New Little Ice Age Instead of Global Warming?”http://landscheidt.auditblogs.com/archives/24

This examines Dr Landscheidt’s 2003 paper of the same name - here is the the abstract of the paper:

Abstract: Analysis of the sun’s varying activity in the last two millennia indicates that contrary to the IPCC’s speculation about man-made global warming as high as 5.8° C within the next hundred years, a long period of cool climate with its coldest phase around 2030 is to be expected. It is shown that minima in the 80 to 90-year Gleissberg cycle of solar activity, coinciding with periods of cool climate on Earth, are consistently linked to an 83-year cycle in the change of the rotary force driving the sun’s oscillatory motion about the centre of mass of the solar system. As the future course of this cycle and its amplitudes can be computed, it can be seen that the Gleissberg minimum around 2030 and another one around 2200 will be of the Maunder minimum type accompanied by severe cooling on Earth. This forecast should prove skillful as other long-range forecasts of climate phenomena, based on cycles in the sun’s orbital motion, have turned out correct as for instance the prediction of the last three El Niños years before the respective event.


As Steve M wishes to keep his blog focused mostly on his current areas of interest this is simply a shameless plug and any discussion of this material should be done over on my blog rather than here.

Curious, I did a quick wiki search for Theodore Landscheidt. As it turns out he, like Mr. McIntyre, was (for he died in 2004) an amateur climatologist and global warming skeptic. For his day job the man was a judge, and in addition to kibitzing in the climate science field as a kind of sun worshipper, the man practised...wait for it...astrology. Yes, Landscheidt told fortunes when he wasn't connecting the rising temperatures here on Earth to "solar cycles".

A good example of how all this "research" comes together can be found, for example, in "Sun-Earth-Man, A Mesh of Cosmic Oscillations", where he wrote:

The years that followed 1789, 1823, 1867, 1933, and 1968 were periods of radical change and revolution, a break-down of old structures and the emergence of new forms and ideas ... The next major instability event will start about 2002 and last till 2011.

This is an exceptionally long period. It is impossible to predict the details of its historic effects. But the basic quality of all boundary functions will be evident: the years past 2002 will prove to be another turning point, a period of instability, upheaval, agitation, and revolution, that ruins traditional structures, but favours the emergence of new patterns in society, economy, art, and science.

So I read this and I was shocked, shocked! And I left a brief comment on Climate Audit pointing out that Mr. Landscheidt's was an Astrologer. However, you can't see it in the comments section because Mr. McIntyre hit the delete button (although Mr. Smith's comment linking to material re. our German fortune teller is still there). Apparently, one is not allowed to utter the term "Astrologer" on Climate Audit, even when the purpose of one's utterance is to show that a fellow traveller in denial was, to put it another way, a "reader of the stars". In fact, I got alot of crap from some of McIntyre's other readers to the effect that, in pointing out how Solar Boy was some kind of "peerer into the Heart of the Cosmos", I was engaged in "name calling". So I left another brief comment:

It frankly astounds me that Mr. McIntyre would delete my post critizing the notion that a blog like this should be paying ANY kind of attention to a climate change “skeptic” who told fortunes in his spare time, but keep a link to a site propounding [Landscheidt's] theories. It seems to me that the onus is on Mr.McIntyre to keep his blog fruit-loop free, given its larger purpose.

I then left another comment noting that Mr. Smith's comment concerning Star Man's theories was still up and that this seemed unfair and, guess what? Another deletion, and more grief from Mr. McIntyre about how using the "A" word was forbidden on Climate Audit, although linking to sites concerning GW-denying wielders-of-Celestial-Wisdom was apparently OK.

So, let me just repeat myself, Mr. McIntyre: given that the End of Climate Audit site is to show that the vast majority of Climate Scientists are Socialists engaged in hoaxing All Of Mankind, do you not think it impacts your credibility when you are associated in this way with "research" of this caliber? I mean, I hear Kreskin accepts the IPCC consensus, but you don't see
this guy linking to his stuff.