It's interesting that over the years the skeptics who didn't believe "the science was settled" on man-made global warming were raked over the coals. They were called heretics and compared to 9/11 twoofers. But now they don't seem so crazy.
OVER the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar. The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. ...The mismatch between rising greenhouse-gas emissions and not-rising temperatures is among the biggest puzzles in climate science just now. It does not mean global warming is a delusion. Flat though they are, temperatures in the first decade of the 21st century remain almost 1°C above their level in the first decade of the 20th. But the puzzle does need explaining.The above article hammers the IPCC and their alarmist predictions from years ago. Predictions of rising oceans, melting ice, and cities destroyed. Predictions that were wrong, have always been wrong, and when called out on it the alarmists went into survival mode.
How did they try to survive and stay relevant?
By hiding information that directly refutes their theories. No one knew about their smudging of fact until the ClimateGate emails came out and specifically in the "trick...hide the decline" email. First some history prior to that email:
The trick email had its roots in the 1998 Mann and Briffa temperature reconstructions. Both were submitted independently in 1997 within only a few days of one another and published in 1998 within only a couple of months of one another. Both drew on very large tree ring networks, but their later 20th century results were diametrically opposite. Mann’s went sharply up, while Briffa’s went down. Disguising this inconsistency rather than explaining it led to much of the strange history in this field. The Briffa reconstruction was based on densities from an extremely large network collected in the early 1990s by Fritz Schweingruber from over 400 sites in northern Canada, Siberia etc selected beforehand as being temperature-limited due to altitude or latitude. To this day, it remains by far the largest sample of this type. Despite relatively little centennial variability, Briffa’s reconstruction had a noticeable decline in the late 20th century, despite warmer temperatures. In these early articles, the decline was not hidden.(excerpt) Read more at floppingaces.net...
For most analysts, the seemingly unavoidable question at this point would be – if tree rings didn’t respond to late 20th century warmth, how would one know that they didn’t do the same thing in response to possible medieval warmth – a question that remains unaddressed years later.
The famous Mann reconstruction was published in April 1998, a month before Mann received his PhD. Mann also used a tree ring network of over 400 sites. But instead of limiting the network to temperature-limited sites, Mann included everything, even precipitation limited sites in the US southwest. Mann even included Graybill’s bristlecone pines, which had a pronounced 20th century growth pulse that the authors argued was due to CO2 fertilization rather temperature. Instead of using averages like Briffa, Mann used principal components – or rather his own adaptation of the method – a method that enhanced the contribution of bristlecones. In its first muddy version as shown here, it gave little hint of its later iconic status.
Contact between Jones and Mann commenced around this time. The first letters are polite. In the fall, Jones, Mann, Briffa and Overpeck correspond about the merits of paleoclimate proxies and how to attract attention to the field.
September 1998 brought very different fortunes to Mann and Briffa. Despite his very junior status – only a few months from his PhD - Mann got a big boost by being appointed one of only eight Lead Authors of the important chapter 2 of the forthcoming IPCC Assessment Report. Briffa, on the other hand, despite practicing in the field for many years, was facing the bleak prospect of unemployment at the start of the new year:
